About the Project
For more than a century, the Hawaiian Evangelical Association (HEA), also known as the ʻAhahui ʻEuanelio Hawaiʻi, oversaw the activities of all affiliated Congregationalist churches in the Hawaiian Islands and Hawaiʻi-based foreign mission efforts in the Pacific between 1854 and 1959. The roots of the HEA trace back to 1819, when the Boston-based American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) formed the Sandwich Islands Mission, a group of Congregational missionaries from various occupations and walks in life who would bring the gospel to Hawaiʻi. Members of the Mission spent three decades “building up the house of the Lord in the islands of the Sea” by working intimately with native Hawaiian communities and congregations. When Hawaiʻi was deemed a Christian nation by the ABCFM in 1848, the Sandwich Islands Mission was praised as a successful endeavor that no longer required the support of the ABCFM. The disbanding of the Sandwich Islands Mission compelled the missionaries who remained in Hawaiʻi to establish a self-sustaining organization that would be locally funded and administered.
The Hawaiian Evangelical Association (HEA) was formed to reflect this new independence from the ABCFM and to continue “toward the construction of a well-ordered Christian community in the islands.” Central to their efforts was the development of a native Hawaiian-led pastorate and the promoting of the “spirit of foreign missions.” While expanding educational opportunities to cultivate Hawaiian church leadership within Hawaiʻi’s borders, the HEA imagined its work as stretching beyond Hawaiʻi, writing that “our thoughts and labors are to assume a wider range; and we are called upon to bless other realms now slumbering in the shadows of death.” That included planning and supporting HEA missionary efforts abroad in the Marquesas and Micronesia. The HEA continued to support church leadership and their congregations for more than a century; in 1959, they merged with the United Church of Christ (UCC) to form the Hawai’i Conference of the United Church of Christ (HCUCC).
Scope of the HEA Name Files Collection
Reflecting the HEA’s mission to develop a native Hawaiian-led pastorate supported by native Hawaiian congregations, the vast majority of letters in the HEA Names File Collection are written in Hawaiian. These communications are filed by each correspondent's name thereby - giving this group of records the label “names file.”
The names file make up only a fraction of the broader HEA collection, which includes HEA business correspondence, minutes from annual meetings, school reports, pastor’s reports from HEA affiliate churches, and issues of The Friend newspaper.
Letter from J. Ii to Dr. Dwight Baldwin
This bilingual body of correspondence bound clergy, missionaries, congregants, the Board of the HEA, and their associates together, producing an incredible record of their efforts to maintain Hawaiian churches and spread the Gospel throughout the Pacific. Through their letters, writers describe events, concerns, successes, and challenges that shaped their world.
Studied together, the letters highlight the contours of social networks through which this information flowed. Letters circulated between HEA churches across the Hawaiian archipelago, to HEA Pacific missions in Micronesia, the Marquesas, and Pohnpei, to Congregational churches throughout the continental United States, and from HEA members and their colleagues on their global travels. The letters demonstrate that HEA membership and HEA affiliates extended across the United States, while home mission efforts sought to bring the Gospel message to Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino, Russian and Japanese communities in Hawaii.
Follow this link to the HEA Archives Finding Aid to learn more about what sources are available in this archive.
Photo N-1677 - Annual Meeting, 1918, in front of Mission Memorial building. Photograph.
Photo N-0948 - Hawaiian Board - Hawaiian Evangelical Association. 1901? Photograph.
Ke Kahua Maoli: Ethical Practices Arise from Relationships
Project Mission Statement
Project Mission Statement
This project places indigenous knowledge, intellectual and spiritual structures, and epistemologies at the center of its work. It also respectfully approaches the writers who wrote the documents and recognizes the place and people who continue to hold these documents in their care. We are motivated by the conviction that the work we do is relational, dependent upon the maintenance of proper conduct and behavior. This ethos includes care for the place we work from, for ourselves, members of the project team, and the ʻike (knowledge) that is held within the documents that we work with.
As can be seen in this letter to the left from John Broad to Reverend O. P. Emerson, sometimes handwriting can be a bit hard to decipher.
Improving Accessibility
Transcription enhances the readability for audiences not familiar with reading nineteenth-century handwriting. Transcribed text will be machine-readable, affording users access to enhanced search capabilities for subjects in the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society online catalog.
In this project, transcription requires someone to read the original letters, most of which are handwritten, and type them into word processing software, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Digitization involves making images of the original paper documents available in a digital format. For this project, it means taking the images of the letters and the typed transcription files and making them available on the Hawaiian Mission House's Digital Archive.
Our Team
Visit the HEA Project Team page to learn more about the crew committed to bringing this project to fruition.
Dive Deeper
Head to the Resources for Further Research page to find more sources relating to the HEA at the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society (HCMS) Archives, a link to the HCMS Digital Archives, and for information on how to make an on-site research appointment.
Contact Us
We want to hear from you! E-mail us at archives@missionhouses.org with questions, concerns, or thoughts about this project. Want to help? Visit the Support Our Project page to find out how.
Funding Partners
The HEA Name Files Project was first funded in 2018 by an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Grant with the sole intent of digitizing the name files. This process involved scanning the files and uploading them to the Hawaiian Mission Houses’ digital collections website, where it is currently found. The HMH received a second two-year ILMS grant in September 2020, allowing the digitization efforts to serve as the foundation for the work currently in progress.
Heading Image from Photo N-1151 - Adobe School House. Photograph. from the HMCS Film Negatives Collection.