Our Story
we’re all connected
Here on O’ahu, everyone is someone’s auntie, uncle, cousin— everything happens in the context of relationship. Wellspring Covenant Church was formed out of a desire to create a church community that reflected this, centered around building meaningful impactful friendships without being hindered by the kinds of differences that can so often divide.
Wellspring is a diverse community where we might use different words for our faith journeys and our experience of God, but we have this in common: we wrestle with God through the hard things, and we believe hope is not something we carry alone. It’s something we hold for one another.
our beginnings
In January 2001, four pastor friends (Dale Vallejo-Sanderson, Randy Furushima, Mary Ellen Azada, & Gerald Chinen) began meeting in Dale and Beverly Vallejo-Sanderson’s home on Sunday to prayerfully study and reflect on what it meant to be God’s people in community. Each of them was hungering for genuine, real relationships with God and with each other, hoping to cultivate a space that invited all of who they were to come into the light of God’s grace. They were more interested in cultivating this than they were in reaching a specific group of people. Others began showing up to their informal Sunday gatherings, including those who had been wounded or frustrated by other churches. By September 2001 they were ready for their first official worship gathering— and grew so quickly that they were soon able to lease out space on Iwaena street in Halawa.
learning to mend
Our community isn’t perfect. Although we value healthy relationships, we haven’t always had them— we’ve had internal disagreements, hurt people and been hurt along the way. After experiencing a painful church rupture in 2010, a desire to become emotionally healthy disciples of Jesus put the wind back in our sails. In the last 10 years, much of our community has been through Pete Scazzero’s discipleship training in emotionally healthy spirituality as we seek to let the light of God’s healing and empowering into every aspect of our lives as well as our life together— how we care for and about our neighbor.
a place to belong
A couple of facts about Wellspring— we have always had at least one woman pastor on the team, sometimes more than one.
And we invite you to care more about your character and formation than your productivity and service. Although we need both, your be-ing precedes and influences all your do-ing.
Whether you come and visit Wellspring once or twice, or become part of our family of friends who are pursuing the way of Jesus and the mission of God together, we pray that you grow in God’s grace, truth, and kindness as people who are growing whole.