Pastor Elwin Ahu was turned down flat the first few times he asked his son to help him get a new church off the ground at Aloha Tower Marketplace.
“He said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to work for a “Chinese restaurant,”‘” Ahu said, laughing. “You know, where the son has to do everything: You wait tables, you mop the floors, you wash dishes.
“I said, ‘Brandon, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.'”
New Hope Metro opened in January 2012. Six months later Brandon Ahu, a youth minister at New Hope Leeward for several years, teamed up with his dad despite his reservations.
Then in December, Elwin Ahu was debilitated by leukemia, and his son suddenly found himself having to do everything for the church.
“It was like they were putting the second-string quarterback in,” said Brandon Ahu, 31. The moment the doctor said that 95 percent of his father’s blood was leukemic, “I knew everything was going to change,” he said.
New Hope Metro is an offshoot of the ever-growing New Hope Oahu, the core of a network of evangelical churches and schools founded by Wayne Cordeiro in 1995.
Elwin Ahu, a former state Circuit Court judge, was preaching before thousands each week at the Farrington High School campus before opening New Hope Metro. His testimony about finding God was taped by The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network before he was diagnosed with cancer. The segment was shown in February.
Ahu asked his son in December to take over running the church in anticipation of being hospitalized for 30 days.
Brandon Ahu, stunned, said his immediate reaction was, “‘What do you mean? Couldn’t you pick a more convenient time? December is Christmas, New Year’s, the church’s anniversary is in January.’ And I still wasn’t totally confident in my ability to lead adults.”
He said he wasn’t used to speaking before some 500 people every Sunday on subjects relevant to people the age of his parents and grandparents.
“But it was one of the most amazing 30 days of my life with Jamie (his wife) and I doing this together,” Brandon Ahu said. “God gave us so much grace. Things that should have gone wrong went right.”
His father was actually away for five months, undergoing four chemotherapy treatments and hospitalizations. But church attendance grew by more than 100 on Sundays, which Brandon Ahu credits to his father keeping people connected with an “honest, authentic” blog through his ordeal.
“The hardest part was holding onto hope that God was going to gets us through this part of our lives, that God was going to use this for good, whether Dad made it or not,” Brandon Ahu said.
In a lighter moment, he and stepbrother Jared shaved their heads when their father lost his hair from chemotherapy, and some of the other men at church followed suit as a sign of solidarity. Another time, he and his wife gave Elwin Ahu a pair of boxing gloves as a symbol to keep fighting after his third chemotherapy treatment made him want to give up.
“It was a very, very dark time,” said Elwin Ahu, who was hospitalized for a high fever, a dangerously low immunity level, severe weakness and 20-pound weight loss in March.
“Every single pastor should go through this” so they can truly empathize with others as they journey through dark valleys, he said. “Mine was hell.” He recalled his wife, Joy, saying, “Maybe (God) just trusts us to have enough faith to walk through the seasons of suffering like this.”
Whatever the challenge, Elwin Ahu said, “God will always walk by our side no matter how dark things may seem. We all have to learn these lessons on our own … and they will learn if they just keep trusting. I think we mis-define the blessings of God as what we want them to be, (that) which answers our prayers, but we can’t fully comprehend the blessings God may have for you. It may be a cure. Sometimes it’s not.”
In his case the blessing was not so much about being cancer-free six weeks after being diagnosed — “I look at it as a miracle,” he said — but about other people becoming closer to Christ, he said, citing emails he’s gotten from people who have followed his blog from as far away as Russia.
“My son Brandon has grown tremendously into a person I don’t think he thought he had in him,” he said. “It took me having this illness for him to step in and begin to grow. He was thrown into the water, and he learned how to swim. … He’s done an excellent job, a fabulous job.
“What God has told me is I still have a lot of work to do: to teach, to disciple, to spread his word in a greater way.”
He envisions New Hope Metro to be “a place of refreshment,” where professionals from nearby office buildings “can come to feel renewed before going back out into the real world.” He chose its location because Aloha Tower once stood out as an icon of safety to ships that came in, marking a place they could refuel before going back to sea.
Brandon Ahu said becoming part of a father-son pastoral team was one of the best decisions he’s made because “our relationship has actually deepened” in a work setting. The tipping point of this decision was realizing “one day my dad’s going to die, and am I going to regret not going and helping him?” he said.
Although they are alike in their outgoing, down-to-earth manner and speaking style, Brandon Ahu said their main difference is his father is task-oriented in his ability to get things accomplished, and “my personality is more towards people, relationships.” But they balance each other out because “he’s learned how to be more concerned about how people are doing in getting tasks done, and I’ve learned to care about getting stuff done and how people are doing.
“I know even when I fail, he’s got my back because he has my best interests in mind. It hasn’t been easy. At times we’ve butted heads, but I’ve learned to submit and am willing to trust his leadership as my overseer. It’s been a good experience.”
