The Church That Was Sent To, and Then Sent

The first missionaries reached Hawaii in 1820, on a ship called the Thaddeus, after a voyage of about five months.

That is the arrival everybody knows about, and it is the point where most retellings stop. Hawaii is filed under places that were sent to.

Thirty two years later, in 1852, the Hawaiian church formed its own missionary society and started sending people out.

That is the fact this article is about.

The first Hawaiian missionaries went to the Marquesas in 1853. Later, Hawaiian workers went into Micronesia, to the Gilbert Islands, to the Marshalls, to Kosrae and Pohnpei, alongside and sometimes ahead of American workers. They went in small ships, on long voyages, to places where they did not speak the language, and a good number of them died there.

They had been Christians, as a people, for about a generation.

And it is worth pausing on the money, because a missionary society is not a feeling. It is subscriptions, and a treasurer, and passages booked, and salaries, and somebody at home writing letters and keeping accounts for people they will not see again for years. A church that had been a mission field within living memory took on that whole apparatus, in a place with no great wealth, and paid for it out of its own congregations.

A letter from a president

One of the men who went to the Marquesas in 1853 was named James Kekela, and there is a documented episode from his life that I want to put in front of you.

In 1864, an American sailor named Jonathan Whalon was taken captive in the Marquesas, in circumstances arising out of a dispute with a foreign ship. Kekela and others intervened and secured his release, giving up their own possessions to do it.

When the story reached the United States, President Abraham Lincoln sent gifts and a letter of thanks. The letter is dated 1866 and it survives. Lincoln wrote to a Hawaiian missionary in the South Pacific to thank him for rescuing an American.

Think about the direction of that.

A church that had been on the receiving end of a mission within living memory produced a man whose courage on a distant island required a letter from a head of state.

And Kekela had been in the Marquesas for eleven years by then. He was not passing through. He had learned the language, buried people, and stayed, and the rescue happened because he was somebody local enough to be able to intervene at all.

You are not only a person things are done for. Acts 20:35 says it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason that sentence lands on somebody who has only ever been on one side of it.

Here is the verse.

I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.Acts 20:35, King James Version

Notice that Paul is quoting Jesus, and that this saying appears nowhere in the four Gospels. It survived orally and Paul wrote it down, which means it reached us because somebody bothered to record what he had heard.

You have been handed a saying that only survives because one man wrote down what he had received. Acts 20:35 is Paul passing along something given to him, and the same Spirit who preserved that chain is the reason receiving and giving are the same motion in this verse.

Now the honest part, and this category is held to it.

The wider missionary story in the Pacific carries real harm alongside real courage. Cultural loss, disease brought in, land and power that moved in directions that were not asked for, and consequences that are still being worked out. Historians assess all of that differently, and the relationship between the Hawaiian society and the American board that preceded it has been read in more than one way.

This site does not score that, and I am not going to. What is documented is that a church which had recently been on the receiving end organized, funded and sent, and that the people it sent went a very long way.

You have a record with real cost and real harm in it, and neither is being tidied away here. The written histories of that period disagree with each other, and it is His Spirit who is the reason this can be told without being settled.

There is one more thing, and it is about the timing.

Thirty two years. That is the gap between the Thaddeus arriving and the society being formed. Not three hundred. Not a century of being ministered to before anybody was considered ready.

About a generation, and then they were the ones sending.

You have been on the receiving end for less time than you think, and the gap in that record is thirty two years. Acts 20:35 puts the giving and the receiving in one sentence, and the same Spirit who joined them is the reason nobody has to graduate before they hand something on.