My wife and I were taken in by the warm and compassionate Kauai Filipino community at the West Kauai United Methodist Church. Little did I know when they took us in with their aloha, that, through a bizarre turn of events, I would one day stand up in the middle of a sermon and bring an end to a ministry gone wrong.
Father's Day 2004 at Kaumakani United Methodist Church, Kauai
(I'm in the back row close to the cross.)
The West Kauai United Methodist Church is in good hands now. The small diverse multiracial congregation has a caring pastor and hardworking lay leadership. Gay members of the church are an integral part of the ministry in music, dance and community relations. The church community is bound by the spirit of aloha.
Our hearts, minds, doors and, most of all, our arms are open to receive you. We make no judgments as to race, ethnic background, color, sex or sexual orientation. We are all children of God and all of God's children are welcome here!
If you are local and looking for a church home....we are here. If you are just passing through....you are welcome to worship with us. E komo Mai...you are welcome here.
However, it wasn't always this welcoming.
Before Pastor Jim arrived we had a crisis. The crisis grew from a ministry that started with promise but took a wrong turn.
It is an old mission church that was built to serve Filipino field workers at the turn of the twentieth century. One pastor serves the community now at two church facilities. Because the community is working and middle class the pastor's pay is very low and the job has few perquisites.
Until Pastor Jim came, the pay was too low to attract men. It's a well known secret of the church that men are in higher demand than women as pastors so they demand a higher salary. However, on a small island in a tight community of mostly married adults, our female pastor found herself very lonely. She had escaped an abusive marriage and was making a new start on Kauai.
Her ministry started well. She developed and after school program that helped neighborhood kids whose parents were both working. Her sermons reflected a struggle to grow in spirit which everyone could relate to. The church community was growing.
However, everything changed when her relationship with an on island man fell apart and she started writing to a recovered alcoholic fundamentalist man she knew from her youth in Washington State.
After a brief period of correspondence they got married and he moved in to the pastor's house. One day, to everyone's surprise, he walked to the lectern to give the sermon. He shouted through the angry sermon which was filled with fundamentalist interpretations of scripture, but everyone listened politely. We were taken by surprise.
Over a period of a few months she gave fewer sermons and he gave more. He became increasingly angry, apparently because there were openly gay members of the congregation. He screamed about hell fire and brimstone and how we were damned.
It reached the point where I couldn't take listening to his sermons any more. I would stay until we finished the choir performance. When he got up to give the sermon, I walked out and drove off to watch the waves until it was over.
I thought about leaving the church, but it was our church, not his church. My wife and I decided that we would not let him drive us out of our church community. We would work to resolve the situation through church channels.
The leaders of the church had tried to talk with the pastor about the situation but it didn't seem to help. They communicated with higher church levels on Oahu, but nothing happened.
The funeral of a humble Filipino field worker was the final straw for me. I was there to sing with the choir for the funeral. The music went well. Then Daniel went up to give the sermon.
He began ranting about Hell. He implied that the dead man had probably gone to Hell. He said that most of us were going to Hell, but he was saved. I walked out the back of the chapel at the funeral hall, but heard him yelling abusively through the loudspeakers outside. The banshee ranting went on for half an hour while I waited out on the grass. The family was held hostage. There was nothing anyone could do but wait him out. It was a nightmare.
A few Sundays later at the Kaumakani church, where the first service was held, I came back from watching Shark Bay after walking out of the sermon. Women were crying and my wife was upset. The pastor said she was turning all duties over to Daniel because she had decided that women should be dutiful to their husbands and women should not be pastors. And, according to reports, Daniel had given another abusive sermon.
My wife convinced me to stay at Kekaha after the choral performance at the second service. We didn't have any plan except to listen to the sermon and find some way of making things better.
I don't know exactly what he said or what got into me but he started ranting more abuse.
I stood up.
I cut him off in a commanding voice.
I said he was acting in hate not in love.
I cited the Great Commandment. Matthew 22:36-40
36"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. [a] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.'[b] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
He stepped down.
The reign of terror was over.
Monday morning, my wife called the district office and talked to the district superintendent about the situation. The pastor was relieved of her duties and her husband was forbidden from taking control of a church he didn't belong to. A retired pastor filled in while we searched for a new pastor.
The healing began.
Senator Obama has my deepest respect for working quietly within his church to resolve problems with an aging pastor who had lost his way. No one should ask him why he didn't leave his church. The church is the community of members. The pastor serves the church. When the pastor no longer serves the best interests of the church, the pastor is the person who should be asked to leave.
I regret that Senator Obama had to stand up today to say that Pastor Wright today isn't the man he has known for 20 years. It must have hurt.
Sometimes a man has to stand up and say what must be said.