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Overall, I like the design. You mention the client wanted a grunge look and I think you nailed that aspect. I think if you wanted a little bit of a Hawaiian influence in the site you could use the header area where the people are. If you could incorporate some images of the church, Hawaiian elements, etc. in the header background I think it would come across as more of a church website. (large cross, etc.)
Besides the word "god" in the banner this site doesn't really tell me what it is quickly. In addition, the red star looks good to me but it needs different language..."I am new here", doesn't really encourage me to do anything, you have my attention, now what do you want me to do?, I hope that makes sense? Finally, one person mentioned that the site is really busy and if your client is anything like mine they want to include everything under the sun so getting everything in can be a challenge. The site is busy, but to me it looks ok. If you forced me the "blogs" section under the welcome message is the item that really bothers me because it breaks up the flow of the site content. I hope my comments were helpful, I think you did a good job, just needs some tweeks :)
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Thanks for your feedback!
I know it's kind of odd, I myself didn't want to design a church website in such a "messy" and grungy way, but that was the main request from the client so I had to follow. In fact, there were some palm trees popping in the header background before and for my mistake, they were gone when I applied the family picture. That was already fixed.
The word "God" was also requested by the client. Apparently their slogan is: "Loving God, loving people, loving life". That doesn't make me think of church at all, but I'm not gonna suggest that now. I wanted to put some picture from the church but they don't have it (all they sent was a bunch of not-related pictures, some with terrible quality). They did say that they wanted to add some text from the Bible over there, so I'm waiting for that.
I totally agree with you regarding the red start. That was my idea actually, they never asked for anything like that. I just put that in there after researching the web for church's websites and I found out that it was a very common element. But most of them are just like that, they don't self-explain themselves and I created that more because it would look cool than for usability reasons (my mistake again!). For now, I'm thinking of replacing that star with some sort of player where users can listen to the sermons (a quick link to the podcast section).
The site still looks a little too busy but trust me, it was worse before, this is the lighter version :)
Thanks a lot for your feedback, it was very constructive!