Hungarian Church Press, 1958 (10. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
1958-01-15 / 1-2. szám
HCHP 1,15,-11.1,1958, Vol.X/1-2 12 -12 he sh*uld not accept it to that degree - as we say of Hoses whom God had talked with as man used to talk to his friend. He was leading us by the hand and step by step showing the way as God's congregation had experienced the daily guidance in those days of wandering in the desert. The church received God's grace in this renewed Word - for due to the rule of revolutions the previous generations are swept away and only then the new ones come for service and leadership - the church by and large went on essentially unchanged in view of her outside framework and composition in the personnel because God looked for the chances to make the church apt for the conditions of the new life through the inside renewal rather than through condemnatory actions of the outside and personal replacements. It has been very arduous this way, among you I might knew' the best how difficult it has been. To bear a new era requires parturition. The whole population was in pains and we also were in hard labour with it. It was worth while. I am grateful for any moment I spent in the service of the Tiscian Church Distriót, I did not start with illusions.One who had watched me whenlbowed my head under the elders' blessings in the congregation of the Big Church, could have seen me trembling all over and perceived that I knew what this way meant. And when in this hall I delivered my inaugural address I did not begin with by thanking for confidence. Nay more I enpha£j.pd that I did not thank for it, I began, however, with apology, I was asking/a thousand pardons for the boldness I dared undertaking the extraordinary task waiting for the leader of a church district under the prevailing conditions. Indeed we were committing a lot of mistakes on this way. We were stammering very much. But the' mistakes were not where the reactxonwas hunting for. One of my greatest blunder was, fer instance, to invite the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches to Hungary, When having participated in India in the winter of 1952 in the Meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches I uttered an invitation without any authorization to what I' expected the consent of the official boards of the church at home later on. And then I was step by step trying to convince everybody of the rightness cf that step. The mistakes are not there where the counter-revolution wants to show up them. The faults are there where the chances of the counter-revolution fed on. What happened between the summer of 1955 and October the 23rd of the last year ? (1956) What happened to the people and the church ? Essentially two series of evaits of different nature ran their course nevertheless both in the outside symptoms and the historical connections they closely belonged to each other. After having ensued a certain appeasemait in the international situation, with us, in this country inside, the inexorable iron discipline which essentially could ' not be avoided on account of the tensed international circumstances, could have been relaxed. One could be tolerant on the way of building up socialism, it was possible not to pay such a great attention to the common affairs of the public and international life and concentrate upon our inside human problems,expend .a greater attention and paver to our inward human lives. Just before October the 23rd we were standing on the threshold through which,we could have entered the treating of our problems mare intensively of the previous months and could have begun building up a life more quiet, holding together better and paying attention to each other with greater delicacy.
