Our Southern Baptist Heritage

Hawaii Baptist Academy began because a pair of Baptist missionaries, supported and joined by many other Baptist missionaries, accepted God’s call to build a Christian school in Hawaii. The ties HBA has with the Southern Baptist denomination stretch back to even before the school began, giving us our heritage and reminding us of our common purpose—to reach future generations for Christ and equipping young people to do the same.

H.P. and Mary McCormick, the founders of HBA, were sent to Hawaii from Nigeria on assignment by the Foreign Mission Board (FMB), an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention. Originally assigned to Asia, many of the Baptist missionaries in Hawaii were forced out from China because of World War II and were reassigned to the U.S. territory of Hawaii. This surge of Baptist missionaries in Hawaii in the 1940s was instrumental to HBA’s humble beginnings. These missionaries shared the Gospel in Hawaii through establishing the Hawaii Baptist Convention (HPC), various churches and missions, and yes, a private school.

But early on, this private school needed a lot of help. The FMB (now known as the International Mission Board) and the Hawaii Baptist Convention (now known as the Hawaii Pacific Baptist Convention) all came to the rescue. Here’s how:

The FMB funded much of the early physical construction of the school and the hiring of personnel and staff, as well as sending missionaries to Hawaii who became a large part of the school’s first crop of teachers.
The Woman’s Missionary Union of Virginia pledged $125,000 over a five-year period in 1946 to help get HBA started.
From 1951 to 1955, the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, a Southern Baptist international missions offering, allocated to HBA $50,000 to build an adjacent elementary school building to the existing Makiki campus. An $8000 loan from the HBC also helped in this construction.
In the 1950s, guests and speakers from various Southern Baptist churches in the continental United States would visit HBA, become moved by what they saw, and feel compelled to tell the school’s story to their mainland churches, which eventually became important sources of support for the school for decades to come, both financially and spiritually. Faculty members, too, inspired their home churches to contribute.

Today, members of HBA’s Board of Directors are elected by the executive board of the HPBC, which maintains operational control of the school.

But in the end, HBA’s Southern Baptist heritage is but one aspect of the school’s overall mission—to equip students spiritually so that they bring honor to God. “Christ for every nation” is the motto. With our Christian commitment deeply rooted with strong ties that began the 1940s, Hawaii Baptist Academy looks ahead to the future with clarity and hope, carrying the heart and purpose that the Baptist missionaries had when they first built the school from the bottom up.