His Highest Praise Honolulu

The pastor here, Mr. Yuen, is an extremely gifted person and is living proof of the enormous power of the Christian religion. He is a very hard-core, extremely conservative, fundamentalist Christian. He works hard and tries to do a good job. He's deeply committed to his work as a pastor. Unfortunately, he has some serious personal problems. He has a very ugly bad temper. He gets upset easily and lashes out at people without justification. My main objection to this church as a whole is that there was, at the time I was attending, absolutely no one at the church (aside from Mr. Yuen himself) available for any type of conversation about anything. When you join a church, you expect to be able to talk to a pastor at least once in a while about theological or personal issues. Mr. Yuen himself was almost completely unavailable. He would have a meeting once a week where you could ask him things, but it was a group meeting, so that you'd never want to ask him anything personal or anything that was private and of importance. His opinion was that only people involved in an extremely severe crisis were worthy of his private attention. Thus, the only thing available at this church for me was to passively sit through services. Sometimes they did have meals for us. Mr. Yuen was very overextended due to his numerous Christian activities in addition to running the church. He didn't have time to properly prepare sermons. Usually you could tell he was just showing up and talking without having prepared anything. Also, there was a lot of repetition. You could easily hear essentially the exact same sermon two weeks in a row. He did have a good sense of humor, and sometimes he could be really funny. The quality of his sermons varied a great deal. Also, Mr. Yuen liked to talk about his own personal problems in his sermons. Although these discussions were sometimes interesting and instructive, this focus on his own problems sometimes tended to create a depressing, rather than uplifting, atmosphere. Notwithstanding these defects, I think you could get a lot out of this church if you are fortunate enough to happen to be present at the right time. My remarks about Pastor Yuen are all concerned with his behavior a number of years ago. For all I know, he may have improved dramatically over the years.