Calvin Synod Herald, 2016 (117. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2016-07-01 / 7-8. szám
CALVIN SYNOD HERALD 5 Calvin Synod Conference of the United Church of Christ. Meditation was based on the Scripture from Paul’s letter from the Ephesians 1:11.12. Closing hymn was led by Zoltán Báthory “Nagy Vagy Te Isten”. Pastors and delegates bid farewell to one another after a fruitful meeting promising to work hard on behalf of our Lord to build His Kingdom. Rev. Stefan M. Torok, General Secretary Í Thoughts about the State and the Future of the Calvin Synod The seventy-eight Annual Meeting of the Calvin Synod of the United Church of Christ was held in Ligonier, PA a few weeks ago. It was an exciting meeting, and probably the last one called “annual” since the Bylaws was changed, and now on we will have “biennial” meetings. There were other necessary changes. The reasons? Mostly financial. We had to bring about these changes in order to survive fiscally. We bought time (in a very literal sense), and we have the resources to go further for now. But, in spite of our actions, the question remains: how much further? My answer to this: it depends on how we will be able to utilize the coming years. We already faced with some of the problems, and even found temporary solutions. We addressed some other problems. However, we are all sure that our biggest problem, and the root of all of the others, is the declining membership of our churches. This is not news of course. But now we know that we have only a few more years (maybe a decade) to actually do something about it. This article is aiming to address what can be done. Or, to put in other words, what are the possible futures for the churches of the Calvin Synod. To be able to deal with this issue, first, we will look at the past and the present of our churches, and then, the possible alternatives for the future. As I am writing this article I have a picture before me. This picture was taken in 1939 when our Synod was formed. The title of the pictures is “The Organization of the Hungarian Reformed Synod at the West Side Hungarian Reformed Church, Cleveland, OH, March 14-16,1939.” The people on the picture are our founding mothers and fathers (they are 73 of them). Who were they? I do not know them personally (they probably died before I was even bom), but I am sure most of them are ethnic Hungarians, and all of them are Reformed Christians. The Hungarian Reformed mission in the US started even a generation before them, at the end of the 1800s. At that time hundreds of thousands of Hungarians emigrated to the US for the hope of a better life. We all familiar with their heroic stories, and how the first thing they did was to establish a church for themselves. They had two initiatives. First, they wanted to worship God, and second, they wanted to do it in their mother tongue. Many of them only spoke in Magyar. As the years went by, another initiative was added to the first two: they wanted to keep their ethnic roots alive, and also pass it on to the coming generation. These churches also became the biggest supporters for the Hungarian newcomers. The twentieth century saw three more waves of Hungarian immigration. In these circumstances it seemed to be practical to name their
