It's a GOD thang at the Hula Hotties Cafe

Even though we live in Ocean View near the southern tip of the Big Island, it's Kailua-Kona, about 50 miles north of us up the west coast, we go to when we "go into town".

West Hawaii has many small churches and congregations. Small churches, home churches and Bible study groups are the way Christianity started.

Kona is a regular stopover for cruise ships, a vacationers dream; and a dream for scuba divers, canoers, tri-atheletes, vulcanologists, and astronomers. Check out the Big Island on any search engine to see if you qualify.

Once upon a time, over 80% of the people of our island were Christian. What other state in this nation under God, America, has such a cool motto: "Ua mau ke ea o ka aina I ka pono" which means "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness."

The answer:
Arizona - "Ditat Deus" or "God Enriches"
Colorado - "Nil sine numine" or "Nothing without Providence"
Florida - "In God We Trust"
Maryland - Scuto Bonae Voluntatis Tuae Coronasti Nos" or
"With Favor Wilt Thou Compass Us As With a Shield"
We in Hawaii are honored to be among the most blessed states.

This is our church, the KCC. We meet out on the grass by the sea wall behind Uncle Billy's Kona Inn in Kailua-Kona off of Alii Drive every Sunday morning at 10am. We think it's the most beautiful church in the world...and the place where we meet is beautiful, too. We have Kona Bay for our stained-glass window, the sky for our vaulted ceiling and the grass under foot for our carpet.

This is our pastor, Chuck Antone, in formal Hawaiian attire. He and his wife, Doni, are missionaries to Taiwan twice a year for about a month and a half at a time. We think God measures a fellowship's success, not by its size, but by its heart.

This is Doni Antone. She dances the Christian Hula which is American Sign Language
influenced by the Hawaiian Hula Dance. She often dances to Chuck's original Christian music. He has a bunch of CDs out and won a 1st Place Award in the Hawaii's People's Choice Awards in the "Inspirational" Category.

Roger gets to do the special music the first Sunday of every month, but our church is blessed by many other Christian performers that drop by often and Chuck and Doni are always glad to provide a venue for these God-gifted people.

We occasionally have Beach Party Baptisms. This is sometimes the only work of the Holy Spirit most people ever see in Kona.

On Mondays, Doni leads Chuck and our Worship Team at the local Lifecare Center in a sing-along and Christian Outreach. On Tuesday nights at 6pm, Chuck and Doni open their home for our weekly Bible Study.

Susan Keene, our bookkeeper, with the support of the KCC, supports our Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan by sending gifts and cards. Thousands of cards and hundreds of gift packages have been sent to those soldiers who never get anything from Home. She's in constant email communication with our troops and gets a totally opposite story from them than the American public gets from TV and newspapers. We constantly hear of schools, hospitals, parks, libraries, roads and bridges, and stores being built as well as thousands of policemen and border guards being trained and graduated to service in spite of their putting their lives and their families in harms way to re-build their country after Sadam. Only a few areas of Iraq are still fighting the Islamic fascists. Most of the country is at peace.

Kona Coast Chaplaincy has about 20 year-around members and about a dozen more members that join us in the winter. Every Sunday at 8:45am, we gather at the venue and carry out and set up easy-up tents, chairs and a PA system that Uncle Billy, who owns the Kona Inn, lets us store in one of his upstairs offices for free on a space on his ocean side lawn that he provides. Most of the fifty to a hundred in our weekly congregation are tourists that see our sandwich sign on Alii Drive or walk down from the University of the Nations less than a mile up the road. This ministry has been going on for about fourteen years. Our chaplaincy seems to remain small, but Chuck gives an alter-call every week and we see many people brought to the LORD through faith in Jesus Christ. They usually go back to their own communities or start attending other 'full-service' churches in the Kona area. The LORD has put exactly the people He wants in this ministry and we're glad we're here on the front lines in a country where we can worship our LORD and King, Jesus without being thrown in prison or executed. (Chuck was charged with proselytizing in Indonesia and faced a year in jail there but was escorted out of the country instead at the last minute thanks to the prayers of thousands of his friends and those prayers being answered...but you can read that in his book "Lord, Send Me".)

Remember:
Jesus plus anything equals nothing.
Jesus plus nothing equals everything.

In 2001, the LORD cut me loose from all of my night time club gigs and I went from playing six nights a week to zero for different reasons. We ended up renting a shack on Alii Drive in Kona, on the main drag right out in front of one of the restaurants I had formerly played for 12 years.

I sat in that booth 10 hours a day, six days a week selling my wife's delicious Hula Girl Shortbread Cookies. I also learned to play ukulele and wrote about 40 or 50 new Christian songs. I programmed the midi backing tracks for a CD's worth of tunes with a laptop, a synth module, and a set of headphones and bought a Roland VS1880 to record the tracks on. Every track is either programmed, played or sung by me.

Paradoxically, when 9/11 happened, our island went into instant economic depression because all tourist travel stopped. Nearly every muso (musician) in town lost their jobs as well as a large part of the tourist industry service employees. But the LORD had already sheltered me and my wife. "Back in the Black" is a Mahalo (Thank You) note to Abba Father.

"Psalm 23" has special meaning for me because our island is within missile range of North Korea and the times are perilous for every American.

I had already written the music for "Wish I'd Known" before my mother died in 1997 but wrote the lyrics in the Cookie Shack. It turned into a witness song.

"The Slave" is also a witness song and I think it's my wife, Jill's, favorite on the CD.

The lyrics for "Rejoice", "Psalm 23", and "Anyone Who Calls" are adapted from Scripture.

"Rejoice" is the Beatitudes from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. "Anyone Who Calls" is from Peter's first sermon in 2nd Luke...the Book we know as "Acts of the Apostles".

Speaking of sermons, my father, Rev. Robert H. Simpson who just celebrated his 90th birthday in Sun City, Arizona, sent me a book and a taped sermon from Casey Treat. Casey's ministry is helping each Christian find his God given destiny. Anyway, the sermon on the tape had such a natural rhythm to it, that I put it to music in "God Made the Earth".

"Mary Wept" I wrote for Resurrection Sunday, the Christian Holiday we Christians somehow have renamed after Asteroth, the fertility goddess which God abhors. Never have figured out how that happened.

"The Writer" is a joke.

"Jesus Street" asks the question: If we honor just about every person of any note in human history by naming a street or a town after them, why is there no Jesus Street? I mean there's even a Muhammad Alley.

"Mars" I wrote around 1980 as a sort of Sci-Fi parody and then put it away. One day in 2001, I was surfing on the net and ran into a website that linked the face and pyramid on Mars to the Luciferian rebellion. They reckoned that the angels had a worship center there in Cydonia on Mars and when they rebelled, Yahavayha (Jehovah) obliterated the whole planet with an asteroid bombardment from the breakup of the planet that used to exist between Mars and Jupiter. It sounds a lot more plausible when they explain it. Anyway, I remembered my song "Mars" and pulled it out and it was only a couple of words away from being a summary of that website's story.

In 2002, this CD won 2nd place in the Inspirational Music category at the annual Hawaii Music Awards.

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