For most Americans, and even for world travelers, Hawaii is the ultimate exotic tourist destination. After all, it’s paradise.
But for Southern Baptist missionaries Chris and Monica Woodall, Hawaii is not just a paradise, but islands inhabited by the lost and hurting. While tourists crowd Waikiki Beach in Honolulu for sunning and shopping and surfers invade Oahu’s North Shore for some of the world’s most daring surfing, the Woodalls see Hawaii’s underbelly.
"When you get behind the glitz of Waikiki, you find a lot of needs," said Chris, director of prayer and evangelism since 2005 for the Hawaii Pacific Baptist Convention, headquartered in Honolulu. "When you get away from there and get back into the communities, it’s just like anywhere else in the world. There are real people who have real problems, hurts and needs. They just happen to live in a place that others like to come to on vacation."
Chris met Monica while they both served on the International Mission Board in East Asia. After they returned from overseas, they married and, a year later, had their first child, Moriah, now almost 2 years old. They’re currently expecting their second child.
Monica, who first served in Hawaii as a semester missionary after college, says her experience in Hawaii has taught her that its people are spiritually searching, and to get them to talk about spiritual things is fairly easy. "But then when you start talking about Jesus and Jesus being the only way, that’s when it gets a little bit more complicated."
As if the spiritual challenges were not enough, Chris said Hawaii is very much a closed society among the state’s indigenous residents. "This community is a tight local Hawaiian community," he said. "We just don’t ease our way in after a few short years, or even 10, 15 or 20 years. This is a hard culture to get into. It’s tough. I’m a minority and so is everybody else who comes from the mainland."
Despite these cultural challenges, Southern Baptists have used the state’s natural disasters and disaster relief as a way to demonstrate the love of Christ to the local population. Chris described Hawaii as "just a little speck of dirt in the middle of a big ocean." All of the state’s six inhabited islands are constantly ripe for hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis or volcano eruptions.
"The next earthquake here is not if, but when," said Karl Ragan, a close friend of the Woodalls and senior pastor of First Baptist Church, Waimea, Hawaii.
On Oct. 15, 2006, a magnitude 6.8 quake hit Hawi and Kapaau, small towns on the north Kohala Coast of the Big Island. All of the 3,000 homes in the area suffered damage. Most of the homes were jolted off their post-and-pier foundations.
"Since last January, we have been working alongside our partners in California to assist families whose homes were either heavily damaged or destroyed by the earthquake," Chris said. "This has provided many opportunities to minister to families who have never set foot into a church."
Ragan said the work was done by Baptist Builders, who rushed in from California and Utah. Southern Baptists also have the only feeding unit on the island for assisting volunteers and victims of disasters.
"People were just amazed that Baptists would come over from the mainland, at their own expense, and help," Ragan said. "It’s opened the doors wide open to share the gospel." (NAMB)
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