What does Christ Memorial Church mean to me? When asked this I go off into many areas of my life it has touched. I started doing genealogy in 2006, about 5 years after I started attending the stone church in Kilauea. As part of my interest in family history I began to do all the family trees of the church window dedications and those buried in the graveyard around the church. I began to piece together a founding history of our church as it related to the plantation days on Kaua`i with the Kilauea Sugar Company and its workers. 

I could see right off we are a local immigrant church. We were built on the foundation of the Hawaiian Congregational Church that moved its congregation to Hanalei when the wooden structure was torn down and our rock church was built in its place for The Episcopal Diocese of Hawaii. There are roots from native Hawaiian, European Americans from Scotland, England, and Germany who were brought in to be overseers on the plantation, and immigrants coming in the 1880's on, representing Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean, and Spanish workers, all with roots interconnected and now buried around our church.

The islands were an oligarchy not a democracy during the early plantation days and in 1853 the islands population was 97% indigenous Hawaiian. By 1923 that population was down to 16% and the largest population were Japanese. A Buddhist temple was housed across the street in what is now the Parish Hall until WWII when it became used by the US Army. It was at the beginning of the war in 1939-40 when the stone church was built and dedicated as Christ Memorial Episcopal Church, our stained glass windows from England installed, and so our more recent history began. 

I love the multi-cultural nature of our church roots here at the entrance to Kilauea town. I love being a minority on island and no longer being part of an overseer class with the plantation closed in 1970. I love worshipping in a traditional way to bring the sacred into real time and space, yet rooted in just as real a past. I love our English/Hawaiian garden planted around our sanctuary for over 80 years and sustained for the pleasure of all who enter. I love that Jesus the Christ is alive and well in the hearts and minds and souls of those who visit and attend our church. You can feel the years of prayer and worship penetrating in and around our sanctuary. It is truly a sanctuary for the spirit to live and breathe and heal all those who enter into this sacred space. 

Building the Vicarage next door will be an honor and blessing for us this next year so that a half or full time priest can be called someday to live and be inspired by this sacred space for years to come. I know this will insure that the church will be here 100 years from now when all new people will be on this earth and the history of our days will be left for them to honor and be inspired by, just as I have been by those who came before me. Not many things in life are so consistent, but the love of Jesus the Christ is just one of those things, and that love sustains me and sustains His church at the entrance to Kilauea town on the island of Kaua`i.   

Until we meet again.

Maggie Lea