Central Union Church to expand facilities
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
A church that began saving souls of rowdy seamen in old Honolulu is spending $8 million to expand its historic facilities today to serve a growing but quieter congregation.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Central Union Church traces its lineage to the Seamen's Bethel built on the waterfront in 1833. It is razing eight buildings in the mauka-diamondhead corner of its 8.3-acre campus at the corner of Beretania and Punahou streets.
Jack Simpson, administrator of Central Union Church, shows the site of the $8 million expansion.
The old 11,000-square-foot parish hall and other structures will be replaced with a two-story parish hall and a three-story family life center.
With about 2,200 members, Central Union is the largest church of the 19,000-member United Church of Christ denomination in Hawai'i.
The new facilities will include everything from Sunday school to a 30-person senior daycare center, as well as room for a virtual theological seminary being run from more than 4,000 miles away in Chicago.
The parish hall will also serve as sanctuary for the church's contemporary style services, offered as an alternative to traditional worship in the landmark New England-style building with the soaring steeple.
Central Union came from the waterfront to Punahou by way of a Richards and Beretania streets site.
The stained glass windows from the Richards Street church, in storage at Bishop Museum for decades, will return to Central Union as key features of the new parish hall.
A parishioner of the time, Helen P. Hoyt, described the windows as "geometrical figures in opalescent cathedral and Venetian glass," windows, purchased in Chicago.
Jack Simpson, co-administrator of the church, said the work should be completed by February or March of next year.
What was then known as the Congregational Church was the first to send missionaries to Hawai'i.
After ministering to the Hawaiians, missionaries soon saw a need to pray for sailors from whaling ships who made Honolulu and Lahaina notorious centers of sin.
As accounted in the a history of the church:
"For what purpose are so many females seen among the crew?" asked an early arrival, Abigail Smith, about another ship in harbor she saw upon her arrival in May of 1833.
"Ah me!" Smith said upon a closer look. "Their bold and indelicate figures indicate their characters."
The Seamen's Bethel, for which the street is named, became the Oahu Bethel Church in 1837, when seven townspeople were attracted to the sailors' English language services.
Later called Bethel Union Church, the congregation split in 1852, leaving the chaplain behind to minister to the sailors, and creating the new Second Foreign Church, later known as Fort Street Church.
Bethel Union and Fort Street churches reunited as Central Union Church in 1887 after a waterfront fire destroyed old Bethel church.
