The Rev. John Engelcke, 72, Episcopal leader
By David Waite
Advertiser Staff Writer
The Rev. John P. Engelcke, who tended to the needs of Episcopalians in Hawai'i for more than 40 years and liked to engage in debate on some of the weightiest religious issues of his time, died Sept. 23 at The Queen's Medical Center. He was 72.
Engelcke arrived in Hawai'i in August 1963 to become the chaplain to Episcopalian faculty and students at the University of Hawai'i and the adjoining East-West Center after graduating from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.
Engelcke
Born in San Jose, Calif., Engelcke went to public schools in Palo Alto before receiving a bachelor's degree from Harvard and master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
In a 1966 newspaper story, Engelcke was described as an expert judge of wine, able to tell a wine's vintage and the region in which the grapes used to make the wine were grown.
It was a skill Engelcke said he developed while working as a wine taster at the Louis Martini Winery at St. Helena in California's Napa Valley.
During the 1970s, Engelcke was appointed the first non-Catholic faculty member to teach theology at Chaminade University.
It was during the same era that Engelcke described the God-is-dead discussion as "a craze — the theological equivalent to the Hula-Hoop."
He went on to call the church sanctuary sought by a U.S. Marine who had been declared absent without leave seven times as "just plain stupid."
Engelcke would later become editor of the Hawaiian Church Chronicle of the Episcopal Church and in a 1979 newspaper article, fretted that the world had become "increasingly alien and evermore hostile to Christianity."
In the mid-1980s, Engelcke was one of more than a dozen plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union that ultimately led to the removal of a huge lighted cross from the grounds of Camp Smith, home to U.S. Pacific Command headquarters, in 'Aiea.
Engelcke said he believed the cross to be a symbol of Christianity, and said it was "nonsense" for those who wanted to save the cross to claim it was not necessarily a Christian symbol so much as a "beacon of hope for non-Christians and those with no religion."
One of Engelcke's last assignments was to serve as vicar of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross in Malaekahana.
Funeral services are scheduled for 5:30 p.m. tomorrow at St. Peter's Episcopal Church at 1317 Queen Emma St.
