The first event was held in November at our O`ahu Association campsite, where we moved out of our familiar routines and places to experience fresh and new ways of being church. We spent time getting to know each other and building community through study, prayer, worship and play. 

During the second event in January, we began to envision our Conference as a Sign, Foretaste and Instrument of the Reign of God. Dr. Paul Hanson, Professor of Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School, facilitated the discussion by providing us with the biblical foundation for our reflection and visioning. He reminded us that if church is simply a human construct, we are in danger of introducing something idolatrous and self-serving.

All of these activities were done against the backdrop of the emerging strategic issues of the Hawai`i Conference, which were discerned over the previous year. Now a task force is taking the input from the three Ho'olokahi events and crafting a missional strategy document for us to review at the fourth Ho'olokahi, which will take place at our `Aha Pae`aina (annual conference) in June. We will be asked to adopt it on a provisional basis, and recommend that all congregations of the Hawai`i Conference take time during the next year to prayerfully study it.

It is taking us a long time. Sometimes we get frustrated; often we rejoice in our new and renewed friendships and fellowship. If we take our faith seriously and care about our Community of Communities which we call the Hawai`i Conference UCC, discerning God’s will for us will be a lifelong process.

Many of you know that I have held a number of leadership positions in the Hawaii Conference including president/Moderator and Chair of the Aha Planning Committee. So I've had a fair amount of experience with the kind of agendas and experiences that people bring to Conference meetings.

My over-all impression coming out of the experience at St. Stephens had to do with the quality of relationships. For the first time in my experience of the Conference I felt that we were communicating one-to-one, listening, sharing...and that no one was pushing a particular point of view. This was not only refreshing, but enormously exciting. It is the kind of mutual respect and communicating that I covet for our Conference in the future.

I have made a lot of new friends through these NCI meetings. Folks from churches I only knew from a list are now people I know by name and look forward to seeing again. And we don't compare our churches; we have begun to look ahead to envisioning new ways of being the church in today's world.

So this is my hope. That we will continue the genuine caring and relating that I have been feeling through these meetings and that this will enable us to work together toward a new vision, new ways of doing things, a better way of being a foretaste and a sign of God in our midst.

The process has been demanding, yet rewarding. It is difficult, but also exciting. It is slow, but has brought about a much deeper kind of questioning...of the Bible, of our lives, of our church. As we have come to see Scripture and our church in new ways, we have been changed. The change is not outwardly dramatic; it is not so much a growth in numbers--though we have been receiving new members into the life of our church. It is not so much that we are doing entirely new things--though what we are learning does often strike us as something we've never thought of before, or seen in quite that way.

Perhaps what is happening through our Bible studies and deliberate attempts to get people to think as a congregation rather than simply as congregationalists is simply that we are making more significant connections with one another. People who have come to church for years but who couldn't name the people they sat with regularly in our pews now know the names of a growing list of brothers and sisters. And they know more than their names—they are beginning to know them. Perhaps God is beginning to do for our congregation what the Spirit did for Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones.

How did this begin? An energetic core of leaders in this church have always "carried the torch" for small-group ministry and Bible study. They played a key role in the process that brought our church into the "Pilot Wave" of the United Church of Christ Hawaii Conference's New Creation Initiative, a missional transformation process. Along with 11 other churches, Makiki Christian Church is now halfway through the three-year training process to guide our congregation in developing and living into a missional vision for our church. Even before we began formally, preaching series and Bible studies attempted to prepare the way for this process.