Bethlen Naptár, 1981 (Ligonier)
Egyesült Államok - Kálvin Egyházkerület
1981 BETHLEN NAPTAR 97 A portion of the Congregation. of worshipers following an organizational meeting on March 19, 1919. For a time this community worshipped at a local German Lutheran Church building, finally purchasing this church and dedicating it on the 10th of August, 1919. This same church building remains our house of worship today. While the Hungarian Reformed Church was in the main comprised of Hungarian nationals who immigrated to the United States, it was not exclusively Hungarians who made up the congregation. From early on a portion of the congregation was Slovak, both in culture and in mother tongue, but because of their Reformed faith they elected to worship with their Hungarian Reformed brether rather than with another denomination. In 1934, in the heart of the Depression, the Whiting congregation undertook a major renovation of the building, raising the entire structure four feet, adding a basement, and enclosing the building in brick. Since that time the church building has undergone extensive renovations in modernizing the church hall in the basement, including but but not limited to making one of the washrooms accessible for the handicapped. The Sixtieth Anniversary Celebration was both a celebration of joy and an opportunity of thanks giving for our community and for the sister churches of the Western Classis of the Calvin Synod. Beset by the problems common to all urban churches, the Whiting Congregation also must face loss of membership caused by the movement of young people to the “suburbs”, intermarriage with other faiths, and the consistant decline of our “Hungarian” membership. However, we continue to be very active in our church life, with over fifty percent of our membership being totally active in the church, the less active members being the elderly and infirm. In addition, we find that several
