Just wanted to let you know we will be holding our usual Sunday service in the park this Easter at 10am.

If you have never visited our church before I wanted to give you a little heads up about how we do church.

It won’t be like your usual church service, it will seem more like a family barbecue!

And this Sunday there will be a lot of good food (instead of the usual donuts & coffee!)

We start off by hanging out and talking story.  Then the pastor will share a short message and then depending on the size of the group we will have a discussion about the teaching.  After that we pray and then we eat!

We would love to have you visit us this Sunday and look forward to meeting you!

To get to the church head towards Diamond Head on Kalakaua.  When you pass Kapahulu Ave the road will fork, go left and take the first entrance to the parking lot for Kapiolani Park.  We meet right by the duck pond.

See you soon!

Pastor RK

We started New Life City Waikiki in June of 2011.  For the first few months it was just the Castillo Family meeting at Kapiolani Park.  Some Sundays there can be around 10 people or could be just the Castillo family.

Come join us!

We start off with Prayer for God to transform our city and then have a teaching from the Bible and a discussion about what we have heard.

We pray for the sick every service and if you come on a good day we might have donuts or malasadas!

We’re doing a series on the 5 essential mind set shifts that need to happen for the church to become everything she was created to be.

We originally started the church in Waikiki because a number of years ago I felt like God told me that one day people would come to Waikiki, not because it’s Waikiki, but because Jesus was there! They heard that Jesus was there, that he was doing things, so they wanted to go see what God was doing.

I think in order for that to happen we need to see 5 essential, what I call MindSkin shifts.

We have to change our mindskin.

There’s a parable where Jesus says “you don’t take new wine and put it in old wineskins.”

So I’m saying we can’t see God do the next big thing unless he changes our mindskin.

The first essential MindSkin shift that I believe we need to see happen is…

We need to change our mindset from planting churches to planting the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Now this is what I mean by that.

No where in the Bible do you ever see it commanded to plant a church.

Yet every where the apostles and the disciples went you would see churches grow up. It was there main way of reaching a city but no where ever does it say to plant a church.

But Jesus says over and over and over again “you need to go and preach the Gospel of the Kingdom.” So here’s what happens; you preach the Gospel of the Kingdom and a church will grow up out of it.

It doesn’t seem like that big of a mindset shift but here’s the difference…

We can go and try to grow a big church or we can go and find the places that are the darkest and bring the light of the Gospel of the Kingdom in there and let God birth something out of that dark place.

I once heard it said that if you want to get a seed to grow big and strong and fast you need to plant it in the best manure.

So the great thing about the Gospel of the Kingdom is that it flourishes and grows in the best manure.

So where is the darkest place you could think of?

That is a perfect place to plant the Gospel of the Kingdom because when you plant/preach the Gospel of the Kingdom a church will grow up out of it and a movement will happen that will transform an entire city.

So that’s the first essential MindSkin shift.

We need to change our mind from planting a church to planting the Gospel of the Kingdom.

I recently read that there are as many as 127,000 people in Waikiki on any given day.  This number is made up of approximately 20,000 residents, 32,000 workers and 75,000 visitors.  What is more amazing about this number is that when you search for a church in Waikiki, only a handful can be found.  There aren’t even enough to churches to cover the people who live in Waikiki!  In contrast, the area of Ewa Beach has been called the Bible Belt of Hawaii and has only  approximately 16,000 residents and over a two dozen churches.  This is staggering.  This seems to support what we had often heard which is that local people avoid Waikiki like the plague.

When people think of Waikiki, the world class beaches and hotels come to mind.  Most people don’t think about going to church in Waikiki.  Church isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Waikiki.  When we decided to start a church in Waikiki, we did so with a word from God.  Like all the other big decisions we’ve ever made, we prayed and asked God where we should go.  When God told us that we should go to Waikiki we assumed that He was sending us to the least and the lost.  There is a large group of homeless people, prostitutes, drug addicts and drunkards that call Waikiki home.  Additionally, there are many tourists who need a place to go to where they will be loved and cared for during their vacation.

For RK, the church started with a thought: Wouldn’t it be great if people came to Waikiki because they heard that Jesus was there?  Waikiki was once a place where healing magic was performed.  There is a rock monument in the middle of Waikiki that was erected by the ancient Hawaiians to commemorate this fact.  We want to make Waikiki a place of healing again.  We want to make Jesus, the Healer of the Nations, famous in the place where nations gather together.

We are learning that there is so much more to Waikiki than tourism.  We have found ourselves among some of the poorest people in the islands living amongst all the decadence in Waikiki.  The homeless here in Waikiki have become our church.  We talk story about Jesus on Tuesday nights and eat a meal together.  On Sundays we meet behind the Waikiki Band Stand, under the Banyan trees.  We see them as mighty men and women.  They are the nameless and faceless ones who will change Waikiki.  Right now, they don’t know that they are mighty men of valour but they will.  We will be there when they realize who they are and recognize Jesus for who he is.  We will be there when they bring healing to Waikiki.