Congregating cultures
• How many are there?
• Church welcomes Hawai'i immigrants
By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Religion & Ethics Writer
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| David Heimuli, of La'ie, left, studies in a group during Sunday School at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hau'ula. |
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| A hymn from the Hau'ula church.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser |
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| Kanter Shed, right, with wife Yesleen and year-old daughter Tia, attend a service in their Pohnpeian language at Atherton Chapel, Central Union Church.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser |
Who caters to whom? While no one has calculated how many of O'ahu's nearly 800 churches have ethnic services or how big their numbers are, some of the larger Christian denominations were able to help piece together this list.* Roman Catholics: Filipino, Hispanic, Samoan, Korean, Tongan, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese ethnic ministry programs. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Tongan and Samoan language services. (Korean used to be among them, said LDS spokesperson Jack Hoag, but Koreans have since assimilated.) United Church of Christ: Marshallese, Chuukese, Kosraean, Pohnpeian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Tongan, Filipino, Hawaiian. Episcopalian: Filipino, Chinese, Hawaiian. Methodist: Tongan, Samoan, Filipino, Japanese, Korean. International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (includes Hope Chapel and New Hope Christian Fellowship): Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Filipino. *Note: The list may not be complete because some denominations do not keep track of all ethnic ministries within all their churches. Not all churches within each denomination offer these ministries. |
David sings a Protestant standard, "Standing on the Promises," by R. Kelso Carter (1849-1926). However, he's singing it in his native language, Pohnpeian: "Uda Pon Inouen Krais."
It is almost the end of a one-hour service for the congregants from Pohnpei, who started their Bible-study service just four months ago. But in a sense, it represents the beginning of a journey that other ethnic groups have taken in Hawai'i.
Want a glimpse into immigrant life in Hawai'i? Church can be a good place to sneak a peek.
"In a pluralistic society like ours, one of the places which traditional ethnic societies remain is the churches," said George Tanabe, a professor of religion at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. "Churches are very conservative in retaining ethnic culture. If you want to learn about Japanese culture, one of the places you'd go is a Buddhist temple."
Established churches that reach out to ethnic groups do so in various ways: providing services in a congregation's native tongue,
hiring clergy who understand the issues particular to a culture and creating programs that help immigrants understand their new church and new homeland.
While Central Union other established churches seek to serve as refuge for the newly planted, they face inevitable challenges, including power struggles that often ensue as immigrants gain a foothold, and competition with other churches for member allegiance.
Earlier this year, a group of South Koreans upset with their representation on a parish council took their protest to the streets, bringing news crews to the steps of their Roman Catholic church.
And there have been ripplings of disturbance within the Episcopal Church over the migration of Polynesian parishioners to other denominations in Hawai'i.
Those who work in ethnic ministry programs also face what could be called the Assimilation Dilemma: Done correctly, they'll eventually work themselves out of a job if they indeed help the group amalgamate into the larger society.
Still, this Pohnpeian group — and a Tongan-language service at a Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints — also help illustrate why churches reach out for them. There are lots of families here. Plenty of upwardly mobile people. More young ones than seniors.
The history
Mainstream churches with large ethnic ministries get a boost from immigration patterns — for example, an influx of Latin Americans brought the need for Spanish-language Catholic Masses on Maui, O'ahu and the Big Island — as well as from missionary outreach.
The beginnings of ethnic ministering go back nearly as far as Hawai'i's own missionary days. When the first Congregationalists (now United Church of Christ) arrived in 1820 to bring Christianity to Hawaiians, the next stop was other new shores in the Pacific.
"The mission to Micronesia grew out of the mission here," explained Terpstra, whose husband, Chester, established a Pastors and Teachers Training School in Pohnpei in 1954, serving students from across the vast expanse of Micronesia.
After Hawai'i's indigenous church began, it joined in sending some of its own to Micronesia in 1852, she said.
"(It was) a mission within a mission," Terpstra said.
Four Hawaiian missionaries from Kaumakapili Church were among that 10-member first company: One Hawaiian couple went to Kosrae; the other to Pohnpei, the largest island of what is now the Federated States of Micronesia.
Peterson Santos, 55, a member of the Pohnpeian Bible study, remembers hearing about Central Union long before he left Pohnpei in 1989. After he arrived in Hawai'i for a better education for his children, better health care and better work opportunities, he went looking for others like himself.
"When I came, I found most of them (here)," said Santos, indicating Central Union Church. "I feel secure to be in this church."
What started in Micronesia has grown throughout the Central Pacific, Terpstra added.
"We have language services for Chuukese," said Terpstra, pastor emeritus of First Chinese Church of Christ. "The Marshall Islands has a large contingent. Kosrae has a language service. ... The immigration is just astounding."
In her day, she added, no one came or left without "a very good reason and a good deal of paperwork. It was a very closed part of the world."
Success begat success
In April, the UCC dedicated the newly renovated Kukui Building, paid for with $1 million from the conference's foundation. The three-story, 15,000-square-foot building, home to the Marshallese and Kosraean UCC churches, draws hundreds every Sunday.
Strong outreach brings in big numbers, as the Latter-day Saints' missions to Samoa and Tonga also illustrate.
Kalo Mataele Soukop, who in 1991 became the first woman on the board of directors of the Polynesian Cultural Center, remembers her father pressing her to go to Hawai'i to study in 1957. She was one of the first Tongans to attend what was then Church College of Hawaii (now BYU-Hawaii), but she wouldn't be the last. She ended up bringing nearly her entire family — 72 at last count — to Hawai'i with her earnings as a Polynesian dancer and through her souvenir crafts business at the International Market Place in Waikiki.
"I make lots of money, dancing at night, teaching and working all day long," Soukop recalled. "I bring my family one by one: five sisters, seven brothers, with all their children."
Once they arrived, in the 1960s, she'd walk around Waikiki, offering her relatives' services to clean restaurants at night. Once that family saved some money, they'd buy a home.
A lifelong member of LDS when she arrived — her grandfather started one of the first Tongan LDS churches in his home — Soukop didn't twist arms to get people into her church. However, she did evangelize.
"Some from my village go to Methodist church," said Soukop, now 65. "I talked to them. Some became Mormon. Some have their own ideas. I don't force them. (I'd say,) 'Many churches here. Up to you.' "
Competition for congregants does exist. The Episcopal bishop of Polynesia has complained that villagers may be Anglican in Tonga, but in Hawai'i, they attend LDS churches.
In some cases, religious teaching or theology is secondary to the new immigrant, said Tanabe: "The immediate attraction is that they retain ethnic cultures and customs."
Yes, Anglicans in Polynesia attend LDS services here, because that's where their new friends are, said the Rev. Canon Bob Fitzpatrick, who oversees the multicultural ministries for the Episcopal Church in Hawai'i. They expect the church here to do more, something he's struggling to provide.
Churches have to rethink their approaches, he said: The reasons people come to Hawai'i now are different than in the past and immigrants are coming from different countries. Their expectations are different. The church must change to meet their changing needs, he said.
"Historically, we saw the world in terms of plantations," Fitzpatrick said. "In the post-plantation era, can we minister to the new folks coming in? They're far more entrepreneurial, with much different values."
Culture clash
Every minister can relate to the issue of getting new people through the door. What to do with them once they're here takes on a whole new meaning when cultures and languages clash, even if services and sacred text are the same.
This month, Barbara Grace Ripple used her column in her Methodist newsletter to admonish groups squabbling over having to share a church with someone of a different language and religious tradition.
"A disproportionate amount of the superintendent's time is spent trying to find ways to bring reconciliation and healing as well as justice and equity to (shared-ministry) congregations," she wrote in her column, which goes out to several hundred people in Hawai'i and on Guam and Saipan. She answered the question "Whose church is it, anyway?" with a quote from another pastor: "This is God's church!"
At Central Union, David smiles when he remembers going to the church to ask about setting up the Pohnpeian Bible study.
One of the first questions: "Will you need space for the children?"
No, thank you. In his culture, families stay together during services.
Then there was the little matter of membership, said David. Here, there's a procedure, meeting with a minister, etc., but "back home, if you show up, you're a member," he said.
Or how about culture gridlock?
Ripple, Hawai'i's district superintendent for the Methodists, remembers when she was on Saipan, her English-language service came after the Filipino service but before the Korean one. As she learned later, during a visit to Seoul, South Korea, people park wherever they want.
"We'd be locked in," she recalled, adding that they learned to park far away and walk in.
"It's a lesson in patience. There isn't just one right way of doing things," she said. "We just need to learn to accept one another and grow with that."
With the many cultures that coexist in Hawai'i, "we have the opportunity to be a model for unity and diversity," she said. However, Ripple also points out that while residents may enjoy one another's food and music, conflicts can arise over resources and finances — a sentiment echoed by other denominations.
Professor Tanabe adds that some have come to a church for the missionary tie, and some because they're looking to re-create the faith organization they had in their home country. However, once here, immigrants learn there can be differences within the denominations. How they cope with those differences of governance, interpretation of doctrine, ethnicity and culture will affect how easily they assimilate.
Fitzpatrick recalls reading about a problem in another Protestant church on the Mainland, a problem dubbed the "kim-chee effect": An established group accepted an incoming Korean population just fine — until it outnumbered the host group and was perceived as a threat to its identity.
"The presenting issue is the smell of the food," said Fitzpatrick. "... The smell of kim chee wasn't a big deal when there was 10 people meeting."
Fitzpatrick said problems can be exacerbated by the style of those who make the decisions. Those in charge need to change, he said.
"People can dig in their heels. Just the fact there's another group coming in, you all have to grow together," he said.
"... Church is cultural and sociological. We're experiencing faith and we have to translate it into the language of each new generation and people. (Immigrants) keep part of their heritage, but at the same time, the average 14-year-old, wherever his or her parents were born, is going to speak the language of school better than the language of home."
Resistance is futile
Professor Tanabe agrees with church leaders who say that despite the fairly intense preservation of church culture, assimilation is sure to occur. He calls the teaching of citizenship classes and American ways "a kind of committing suicide."
"We see this happening now," he said. "One reason why attendance is dropping (in Japanese Buddhist temples) is because their own efforts of integrating into the larger American society were so successful. Now, the fourth- and fifth-generations are Americanized and therefore not interested in ethnic religion. But who helped them move out?"
The double edge of the sword: Immigrant groups go to the church for the recognition of their cultural ways, but also knowing the church will show the way toward integration, he said.
Sister Grace Dorothy Lim, a retired Maryknoll nun who led the first Roman Catholic diocesan ethnic ministries program, said the aim is to have transition into the larger society. She cited the church's Filipino outreach as an example. Now, the diocese has more than a dozen priests from the Philippines — but they don't just preach to other Filipinos. Because of the shortage of priests, all are now serving in parishes, which are multi-ethnic.
Filipinos lead the state in immigration figures (see chart).
"I was surprised at St. Michael's, a Filipino priest would do Mass in English," said the Rev. Jack Ryan, one of about a dozen or so diocesan ethnic-ministry priests who as a group meet regularly in Honolulu with the bishop and vicar of clergy. "English becomes a common denominator. The interesting thing is, their one language in common is English."
Assimilation accomplished?
Fitzpatrick says he believes it should be that way: "Ethnic ministries today becomes church tomorrow. The point isn't to last forever. It's going to evolve and change."
• • •
It can be hard to get a handle on something as slippery as the ethnicity of people in the pews, since no one has to fill out a census form to get into a church. Even at services in non-English languages, the numbers are hard to gauge.
The Rev. Jack Ryan, pastor of St. Benedict's in Honaunau on the Big Island, said the count of how many Mexican parishioners attend the nearby church's Spanish-language Mass fluctuates with the crops.
"It used to be a big influx between August and Christmas, when people came in to pick coffee," he said. "You'd go over and almost the whole church was single guys. Gradually (came) single girls, now families."
The overall numbers seem to have grown, said Ryan, a member of a diocesan ethnic-ministry group of priests who meet regularly throughout the year. There's still an influx in picking season, he said, with "anywhere from 200 to 350" attending the Spanish-language Mass, but "some come once a month, so the community is much larger than that."
Are all Mexican immigrants Catholic? Do they attend other churches?
"I think they'd be overwhelmingly Catholic, especially coming from Mexico. It's a very Catholic country," he said, but added that evangelical Protestant groups do outreach, too.
Ryan coordinates the Hispanic ministry for the Big Island, but notes that if you go looking for the Hispanic label, you'll be covering about 20 countries. Most of the recent immigrants here, however, are from Mexico, he said.
• • •
Church welcomes Hawai'i immigrants
At the Tongan-language service at the Hau'ula 6th Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the pews are filled with women with hair perfectly coiffed, and men wearing freshly ironed white shirts and suits.
Some younger guys wear a gray lavalava with a crisp white shirt and tie. The women are even shinier. As a young lady sits down to share her Tongan songbook, the scent of freshly spritzed perfume rises around her.
They look pretty good for people who have been fasting all day. In Mormon tradition, money that would have been spent on food the first Sunday of the month is donated to the needy, either in or out of their ward.
At the monthly sacrament meeting, they'll break bread — literally, white bread in this case — and sip from tiny plastic cups of water. That symbolizes the body and blood of Jesus Christ in sacrifice, re-enacting the Last Supper and crucifixion. (It's water instead of wine, because Mormons avoid alcoholic drinks.)
The box of tissue paper next to the podium will not go unused as people rise to give their testimonials, or public thanks and a sharing of stories proclaiming the good of God, in English and in Tongan.
This is the smallest of the Hau'ula wards, with about 300 people, including children, but not the least devout.
Simione Melino Vaka of Hau'ula is one of those who rose to give his testimony during the service. He's spent a decade in Hawai'i, but has a hard time explaining his story without the help of fellow churchgoer Temaleti Kava, who's been here since 1979.
"Problem to me," he said after the service, "I cannot use English."
That's kept him from getting an office job so, instead, he works as a laborer. When Vaka first came to Hawai'i, he and his oldest son, who wanted to study here, had to leave their family back in Tonga. He wasn't reunited with his wife and other children for about three years.
Kava's story is less heartbreaking. She came to Hawai'i when she was 50, with her husband and two of her daughters. She studied in Hawai'i and also taught preschool.
"Even though I left friends and home, I still have brothers and sisters in the gospel, good friends to take care of in need," said Kava.
Indeed, their church does a strong ministry in Tonga and Samoa, said Jack Hoag, the director of public affairs for the church in Hawai'i. And once immigrants arrive, they're brought into the church family.
"Throughout all our wards and stakes, we have people who are well acculturated, so they can easily explain any cultural problems that need to be ironed out," he said.
It doesn't hurt, either, that ceremonies are easy to follow.
"Despite the fact that it's a worldwide church, I suspect practices are standard throughout the year," he said. "Any Samoans, Tongans, Filipinos won't find anything different except the language."
Kava agrees with Hoag that the church in Tonga was very much like the one here. However, there are some areas of cultural collision.
In her country, Kava said, "the father is the king of the family." During family night, the father sits on a chair, and everyone else sits on the floor, facing him. You'd never eat off his plate, or touch his clothes. And at mealtime, no one eats before Dad does.
America, Hoag deadpans, "may have a different pecking order, so to speak. ... Tonga, Samoa — I think they're all very patriarchially oriented."
This isn't just a service, it's a lifestyle.
Afterward, members of the congregation break into groups. They'll be here until dinnertime. Everyone heads off to hourlong Sunday school, after which women will have their own hourlong Women's Relief Society meeting. Men will go to their hourlong priesthood meeting. And the younger ones will have their own classes and meetings.
On Wednesday evenings, those 12 to 18 years old will also have activities, from Boy Scouts to civics lessons, and an occasional homemaking meeting that the Women's Relief Society holds, teaching girls about emergency preparedness, food storage, crafts, even hobbies and home skills, Hoag said.
All this makes for a social system that helps immigrants learn the ways of the new country in an unthreatening way, he said.
