WHERE WE WORSHIP
Church unites diverse backgrounds

By Mary Kaye Ritz
Adveritser Staff Writer

• Name of church: Honolulu Chinese Alliance Church, when services are conducted in Cantonese. It's also known as Christian Alliance Fellowship, when services are in English.

Choir members sing during a Honolulu Chinese Alliance Church service at the Seventh-day Adventist chapel. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

• Where we are: Sunday services are held at 2313 Nu'uanu Ave., using the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

• Our numbers: About 150.

• Our pastor: Aaron Yeung.

• What we believe: That the Bible is the word of God; that man faces death because of sin.

Church members also believe that you can atone for your sins, Yeung said, "Jesus being the savior."

Theirs is a fourfold gospel, he said: Jesus is a savior who died for us; he's the sanctifier with the power to cleanse us; he has power to heal, and physical healing is possible; and he is coming back. The logo for the denomination has four symbols: the cross ( the savior), a pitcher (cleanser), a cup or laver (santifier), and a crown (the coming king).

They also believe that Christians need to be spiritually transformed to have a true new life.

• Our history: The church's missionary movement was started in 1887 by Albert B. Simpson to "take the whole Bible to the whole world," say church materials. Reluctant at first to establish churches, Simpson preferred to bring together missionaries who remained in their local churches, but friction arose within the other denominations, and these missionaries banded together. They called their groups "branches," not churches, but by the mid-1970s it became clear that the alliance was a denomination in all but name. With revised bylaws and constitution, the Christian & Missionary Alliance was formalized in 1974.

Missionary work takes alliance members to 66 countries and territories, and they number about 350,000 believers in nearly 2,000 churches. "One quarter of these congregations is intercultural in character, attracting immigrants and minority groups with strong cultural heritages," according to church materials, noting that services are conducted each Sunday in 19 languages. The denomination has four colleges, a seminary, a publishing house, four retirement centers and two development/investment organizations.

Before the Honolulu Christian Alliance was formally incorporated in 1975, a group of Chinese-speaking students, members of C&MA, began meeting for Bible study and fellowship at Kapahulu Bible Church.

The church was incorporated with its first pastor, the Rev. Chee Lam Chiu. He led worship services primarily in Cantonese. A decade later, it began an English-language group with another pastor, the Rev. Peter Wong.

However, the Chinese service still draws the largest crowd: About 100 people regularly attend the Cantonese service, and only about 25 attend the English, both now led by Yeung.

Still, if you can't make it to one service, you'll go to the other — "if you're bilingual," Yeung said with a laugh.

• What we're excited about: With the Chinese new year's day observed last Tuesday, one would think the congregation, with all its Chinese speakers, would be excited about lions and dragons and water horses. It's not.

"(Those in the) congregation who have been here long don't celebrate Chinese new year," Yeung said. "We're excited because of Jesus. We want to bring people to him, to have a personal relationship. ... Because we are so far away from our motherland, (Chinese new year's day) doesn't have that much meaning to us anymore. Some still celebrate and enjoy it. In Hong Kong, there used to be seven to 15 days of holidays, but now it's three to seven. ... The significance has kind of diminished."

Instead of focusing on the cultural holiday, the members of Honolulu Chinese Alliance Church are putting their focus on building their own church, he said. Last year the church purchased land in Mo'ili'ili and it's now working to raise money to build a sanctuary.

Though the land purchase drained their building fund, Yeung said he still hopes to embark building a structure "soon."

He's also hoping to start a new worship service for the younger immigrants.

"For the last 20 years, we've been concentrating on adults," he said, "but now we see that recently younger ones are coming."

• What's special about us: Besides the services in a different language, Honolulu Chinese Alliance is "just like any C&MA church," Yeung said, with its view of evangelism, following the gospel and annointing the sick with oil.

Yeung added that the Hawai'i church also has a special mission to reach out to second-generation Asians in a multicultural way, since children of immigrants can suffer from an identity crisis.

• Contact: 949-7431.

If you would like to recommend a faith organization for a Where We Worship profile, e-mail faith@honoluluadvertiser .com, call 525-8035 or write: Where We Worship, Faith Page, The Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802.