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Looking Backwards and Forward:
A Brief History of Mililani Community Church
And the Vision for a Building
By Corrine Watanabe

John Milton Moore once wrote a poem, The Church of My Dreams:

This is the church of my dreams:
The church of the warm heart,
Of the open mind,
Of the adventurous spirit;
The church that cares,
That heals hurt lives,
That comforts old people,
That challenges youth;
That knows no divisions of culture or class,
No frontiers, geographical or social;
The church that inquires as well as avers,
That looks forward as well as backward;
The church of the Master,
The church of the people,
High as the ideals of Jesus,
Low as the humblest human;
A working church,
A worshipping church,
A winsome church,
A church that interprets the truth in terms of truth,
That inspires courage for this life and hope for the life to come;
A church of courage
A church of all good men
A church of the living God.

In 1975, a group of women began meeting for a Bible study in Mililani, Hawaii, and they began dreaming of a church just like the church of John Moore's dreams. Many of these women were newly married, worshipped at Kalihi Union Church, and had recently bought their first homes in Mililani. They yearned for a church in the community where they could worship as a family, where they and their husbands could be spiritually nurtured and be held accountable to each other and to God, where they could raise their children to be upright and humble servants of God, where they could proclaim Christ's Love and his eternal hope to Mililani and the world.

At the time, Mililani was a new and developing community. Land for churches was not only scarce but also prohibitively expensive. And so the dream of a church seemed just that. But one day, Jay Jarman, the associate pastor of Kalihi Union Church, who had also moved to Mililani with his young family, had an "aha" moment.

As he was walking into the home of the Bible Study, which had by this time grown to include men, he saw, outside the door, many pairs of slippers and shoes, its owners gathered inside to worship God. Pastor Jarman recalled the book of Acts, which describes how the early believers

“… devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. . . . They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Acts 2:42, 46-47.

And so the Church at Our House was born. On October 5, 1980, after all the legal paperwork necessary to officially begin a church had been completed, with Jay Jarman and Gerald Chinen as our pastors, and with the helping hands, encouragement, and financial support of Kalihi Union Church in Honolulu, our church held its first service as a new body of believers. A cluster of house churches soon began meeting in Mililani, and eventually, Aiea and even Hawaii Kai.

After a number of years of worship in homes, the congregation was led to hold regular corporate worship services of all the House Church members one Sunday a month, thus continuing the New Testament model of church development. We found we needed to have a central space where we could drop off our children for Sunday School each week, and through God's grace, were able to rent the cafeteria at a public school cafeteria for this purpose. Each House Church took turns teaching Sunday School, and the members grew in the knowledge of Christ as we taught the little ones.

During the early 1980's, a Community Outreach Committee was established to develop a vision for our church that would allow us to serve our community and the world more effectively. The result of this committee's work was a report, entitled "Preliminary Program for the Development of Community Enrichment Facilities." The report described two primary visions for a church ministry facility:

First, to reach out to the older residents of Mililani -- those who are retired and alone, those starving for companionship or someone to talk with; those who craved to be productive by utilizing their many years of experience; and those who need to be cared for during the day.

Second, to reach out to help with the care, training, and nurturing of younger children.

When Pastor Jarman's father, who had been a United States Senator died, he left $25,000 to our church to begin a Building Fund to fuel this vision. Our church leaders opened discussions with Oceanic Properties, now Castle and Cooke, to purchase the 10-acre site where the roller blade hockey skating rink is now located. However, the YMCA had the first option on that property, the cost of the site was out of our reach, and we were informed that no sites would be available for churches in Mililani until the development of Mililani Mauka, a big "if" at the time, since the City and County of Honolulu had just rejected Oceanic's application for rezoning.

In the 1990's, Castle and Cooke asked that area churches get together to discuss a priority system for determining which churches should have the first option to purchase church-designated property in Mililani Mauka. It was agreed that first priority should go to churches that had been in the Mililani community the longest, and because our church had been in the Mililani community since 1975, we had one of the highest priorities under this system.

In 1993, we launched a pledge campaign to add to our Building Fund, praying that if God made property available to us in Mauka, we would be ready to seize the opportunity.

Castle and Cooke had designated two sites for churches in its master plan for Mililani Mauka. The 2-acre site was purchased by the Baptists for $1 million and is now Cornerstone Baptist Church. The other site was 4 acres, and no church was able to come up with the asking price.

In September 1999, Castle and Cooke invited churches that had expressed interest in church property in Mililani Mauka to submit proposals for that 4-acre site.

On November 30, 1999, our church submitted a proposal for 1.65 acres of the property, and on August 9, 2000, we submitted a non-binding letter of intent, offering to pay a down payment upon closing and the balance of our proposal price in 18 months. It took Castle and Cooke almost two years to respond to our letter of intent, apparently because of concerns about our offer from corporate headquarters.

However, God was clearly at work because in its counter-proposal, Castle and Cooke requested $50,000 more than what we had offered, agreed to finance our balance if we paid a down payment almost equivalent to what was in our Building Fund, and also stated that if we paid our total offered price by the end of 2002, we could get the property at our proposed price!

Although we didn't raise the total amount we needed to raise by the deadline, God was again in control because Castle and Cooke was not able to get the property subdivided by year's end. When Castle and Cooke was ready to close on the property, God had raised the funds we needed to purchase the property outright! God can truly do all things through those who believe and trust in Him!

As our small congregation looks ahead to building on the beautiful land that God has provided, we are humbled by the awesome responsibility He has entrusted us with. We pray that we may be good stewards of His land and resources.

NEW CHURCH PROPERTY CLEAN-UP DAY - July

In June 2003 Mililani Community Church purchased a beautiful piece of property in Mililani Mauka for our new church facility. The Lord made it possible for us to pay in full for this property at closing, through the generous and sacrificial giving of our church family and friends of this ministry.

In July a team of more than 40 enthusiastic members of the church spent a Saturday morning weed-whacking and cleaning up the property.