Bethlen Évkönyv, 1990-1991 (Ligonier)
Kálvin Egyházkerület
McKeesport, pa Pastor: Dr. Eva M. Fabian President: Mr. Harvey J. Bármim. By the grace of God, our church is still alive and well. This information, however, rests more on divine benevolence than on our human powers. It is more a statement of faith than an assertion of facts. Let me explain. The strikes against our existence and wellbeing are manifold. The collapse of the steel industry drained more than twenty thousand people from our community together with many of our members. Yet, for the remaining, approximately twenty-four thousand citizens, we still have seventy-nine local churches. Two of them seem to make our existence unnecessary. The Free Hungarian Reformed Church is another congregation of the Reformed tradition with a much stronger ethnic emphasis than our ministry has. The First United Church of Christ is also a sister church offering similar services to those of ours. Merger or consolidation with either of them is out of the picture. The location our forefathers chose for our Church was the best conceivable site for many decades. We are tugged in the triangle bordered by two powerful rivers, the Younghiogheny and the Monongahela. They must have been the American Danube and Tisza rivers for the first Hungarian immigrants, so they felt secure in their embrace. Security, unfortunately, has been long gone. Today, our neighborhood does not belong even to the relatively secure places of the city. Evening services and meetings had to be almost completely eliminated. Originally, our building was a bakery: a Bethlehem, a House of bread. We believe that it is still a House of Bread, the House of the Bread of Life. He has been shared in our Church together with bread for the body through our ministry along the years. Though the origin of our church building is greatly inspiring, the building itself is crumbling like stale bread. The wear and tear of its more than a hundred years of existence are both obvious and dangerous. The foundation is sandstone. The city’s redevelopment activities in our immediate vicinity shook our ancient walls. Cracks have been appearing at unexpected places long after the statute of liminations had expired for complaints. When the congregation elected the present pastor, fifty people attended the congregational meeting. They were and has been regarded as the active members of our church. In the course of the past fifteen years we have buried fifty-six of them. 119
