Magyar Egyház, 1965 (44. évfolyam, 2-12. szám)
1965-05-01 / 5. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 9 south Korea. If this keeps Peking out of the UN let it be their decision, not ours.” Both Dr. Bennett and Dr. Fairbank stressed that inducing China away from its policy of isolation would also help the U.S. to “get away from the strictly military level” of dealing with the Communist ideology. This can lead only to disaster, they agreed. The representatives of thirty American churches requested the United States government “to support the continuation of the U.N.’s action to peacekeeping” in Cyprus. The resolution also recognized “the continuing gravity of the situation in Cyprus” and the “need to secure justice for all people of Cyprus as well as to remove the threat to international peace.” This action came on the heels of a related resolution, in which the two hundred church leaders present urged the U.S. government to inform the Turkish government that limitations placed upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul constitutes “a most serious violation of religious liberty.” That resolution further stated that threats of the Turkish government to expel the Ecumenical Patriarchate from Istanbul are “an entirely inappropriate response to whatever provocation derives from the political and ethnic tensions with Cyprus and Greece.” Also during the three day conference, the churchmen were told that, in a world largely composed of non- Christians, believers cannot “deny the Gospel message to our fellow men because they are Communist or atheist.” “We Christians owe the Gospel witness to every creature for Jesus came and died no less for Communists than for ourselves,” said the Rev. Dr. Martin Niemoeller, Wiesbaden, Germany, one of the WCC’s six presidents. In areas where the church has begun to reach out to non-Christians, he said, “this renewal, which has begun or is beginning in Eastern Europe, is the decisive turning point for all church renewal.” Dr. Eugene L. Smith, executive secretary of the WCC’s U.S. Conference, told the churchmen that the ecumenical idea has had a half centurey of “terrible testing.” Dr. Smith referred to the half century since the historic Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 out of which came the organized movements which converged to form the World Council of Churches. Any prophet at the time of the Edinburgh Conference able to forsee the “terrors, turmoil and turning of the world upside down in the next fifty years” would have found it impossible to hope for the survival of “those tender vines of Christian unity” starting to “creep across the boundaries of churches and nations,” he said. “The miracle has not been in their survival, but in their growth.” In other matters the Rt. Rev. J. Brooke Mosley, Episcopal Bishop of Wilmington, Delaware, said, a wide spectrum of political, economic and social thought is expected to be reflected at “The World Conference on Church and Society — The Christians’s Response to the Technical and Social Revolutions of Our Time,” which will be held July 12-24, 1966, in Geneva, Switzerland. DR. ERNŐ OTTLYK, professor of church history at the Lutheran Thelogical Academy in Budapest, has become the general secretary of the Ecumenical Council of Churches in Hungary succeeding Dr. Ferenc Kenéz. (EPS) FIVE THOUSAND Hungarian Bibles have been given to Hungarian-speaking Christians living in Czechoslavakia. The project was sponsored by the Hungarian committee of the American Bible Society. (EPS) REV. ANDREW NAGY 1907-1965 It was after many months of suffering borne with patience and with faith that death came to end the earthly life of the Rev. Andrew Nagy, pastor of the Hungarian Reformed Church (United Church of Christ) in Flint, Michigan. And yet it was so sudden — death always seems to be sudden when it claims a good man. His parents had come from Tiszaszentmárton but Andrew Nagy was born in Carteret, N.J. Thus he was one of the not so many second generation men who stayed to serve in Hungarian Reformed congregations in America. A deeply Christian home and the Carteret Church gave him his initial religious training. During his years in seminary he often returned to his home church of which his family continued to be active members — his brother Béla was chief elder for several years. Andrew Nagy was graduated from Bloomfield College and Seminary and ordained to the gospel ministry by the Presbytery of Newark of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. For five years each he served Hungarian Presbyterian and Reformed Churches in Beaver Falls, Pa. and Buffalo, N.Y. before going to Flint. His church was his life. With death already in his body on Palm Sunday he confirmed his young people with the power of the Spirit — a week later he was buried from the same sanctuary. He was kind and yet firm, his faith knew no compromises yet he was beloved for his understanding: the tears of priests and nuns joined the tears of his mourning people. Eight pastors from four denominations officiated at the funeral services, among them the Rt. Rev. Árpád George, president of the Calvin Synod of the United Church of Christ, Dr. József Zsíros, professor at Hope College and the Rev. Tibor Tóth, Dean of the Western Classis of the Hungarian Reformed Church in America. We pray the Lord that he may comfort Andrew Nagy’s family and people with the assurance that as a good and faithful servant he has entered the joy of his Master. Andrew Harsanyi A COMPREHENSIVE LISTING of contemporary literature dealing with the ecumenical movement has been completed for the Faith and Order department of the National Council of Churches. The 80-page document called “The Ecumenical Movement in Bibliographical Outline”, presents books, monographs, and pamphlets in outline form, thereby both introducing the literature and presenting the diversity of the movement. (EPS)
