Bethlen Almanac 2000 (Ligonier)
Cikkek - Articles
evangelical concentration. To my knowledge, I was the third Hungarian decent student in the history of the school. Since then, there have been other students from Hungary or Hungarians from Transylvania (Romania). As for my practical “project” I had selected to build a model for the bilingual church. I felt that this would benefit my bilingual Cleveland church, and it would serve the American Hungarian church life in general. During the first year I had attended four intensive seminars, each one-week long, while living on the campus. The seminars dealt with biblical study, ecclesiology (study of the nature of the church), theology and research techniques. Prior to each session, we received a list of books to be read; then at the end of each session, we had to submit a term-paper within a month. In the second year, I took three elective courses; while we had monthly meetings with classmates to discuss and approve each other’s study projects. At the beginning of the third year, we introduced our projects to our congregations and implemented the plans (under the supervision of a professor and two advisors selected by the candidate); then finally, the project had to be written (dissertation). In my case, along with my workload at my local church, I could not keep this tight schedule. I fell back in my second year, and over all it took six years to complete everything. The first part of the dissertation deals with theoretical background of the issues. After a brief introduction of the theme, there is a long chapter on the role of ethnicity in the Bible. Almost all of the ethnic themes, such as the role of peoples and nationalities, languages, races, political power struggles are examined in the Old and New Testaments. An even longer chapter deals with ethnicity in church history. A whole library could have been written on this theme; we emphasized the age of Reformation, the history of the ethnic churches in America, especially the Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, but also the Russians, the blacks, and the latest, the Spanish speaking immigrants. Naturally, the history of the Reformed Church in Hungary, and the American-Hungarian Reformed history also received some emphasis. Following the historical section we find a sociological chapter that deals with our Cleveland church and its vicinity, the neighbors among whom we live, and even includes a brief history of the Cleveland Hungarians, and a sociological profile of our congregation. Following these theoretical background chapters, it is only on page 235
