Magyar Egyház, 1972 (51. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1972-11-01 / 11. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 7 as I say but don’t do as I do”—such things will no longer work! The second thing we must undertake is, that we must obtain for ourselves the services of the best qualified Sunday School teachers we can find, if we cannot find them, then we must train them. It is true, when you take a 5 or 4 year old child, maybe coloring religious picture-books is sufficient, hut then, as the child progresses, and if coloring is the only thing being done, he will soon lose interest and he will balk at coming and pretty soon he will come no longer. The Sunday School program, by virtue of the fact that there is no moral teaching left in the public schools, must take over where the public schools have stopped! I believe, though it may mean work for a great many and selfless sacrifices, that the Sunday School programs must be extended beyond the 15-20-30 minutes that are now devoted to it on a Sunday. I believe, that it would behoove us to have a full fledged Sunday School program, possibly occupying the children — not necessarily on Sunday, maybe Saturday afternoon — for 2 or 3 hours a week. We should teach them the important things in and about the Bible, the important things about life, correlating the biblical truths with the facts of today. Platitudes here again will not work! If we do this, if we can challenge our youth, we will not lose them! Last but not least, we must undertake a massive effort to educate our parents and our parents-to-be. We must educate them to the importance of love, which they must bestow upon their offsprings. It is a well known and well accepted fact, that physical care is important to the development of the body, but it is less well known that many bodily disfunctions, emotional problems and disturbances and later on improper life styles can definitely be deduced from a lack of parental love in the early years of a childs’ life. The proper education of a child does not at all depend upon the family being well off or rich, nor does it depend, as some think, upon a lengthy, formal, educational process. I am sure there is no one here who upon looking at a babe, rocking in a cradle, would not from time to time think about: I wonder what he is going to be when he grows up; where is he going to go to school; what is he going to do with his life? How, in fact, is he going to finish his life? Such questions are complex and in my opinion, only God knows the answer! In taking present conditions into proper perspective, the rearing of a child is extremely difficult, and in many cases our parents are utterly incapable of dealing with the satanic traps which are set to ensnare our children. Whether we view the street, the school or society as a whole, almost anything we see, almost every method is being employed including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines to ruin the morality of our youth. This is so, even if we do not mention the hawkers of hallucigens and other drugs. The crime against the child can be committed, almost everywhere on the street, in the store, in an apartment or even in a private home, and certainly, we all know that it is being committed in the public schools! Most parents approach this problem completely dumbfounded and are completely unable to cope with it. Sometimes they seek help only when the question lias become totally academic. There is no substitute for a proper moral upbringing for a child, and certainly he cannot get it anywhere else except in a church and in the home. In our day, in the Old Country, a child was supplied with two crutches, one from his home and one from the school. In this country, he only has one crutch at bis disposal, and sometimes not even that! What then are we expecting of these unfortunates? In our time, we had to go out and seek sin; today, it is being offered to every child on a silver platter! They used to say, there are no bad children, only bad parents. Well, that may be so, but in our own defense we must mention that todays’ parents have problems which we, when we grew up could not even imagine, because we could not even fathom the idea of the depth of degradation now rampant in our society! In conclusion then, I think we can state, that we must form a very strong bond between the clergy, the Sunday School teachers and the parents, to guarantee, that our youth do not go astray, that they stay and remain active members of our church, because in fact, the youth of the church is the future of the church! Without the youth there will be no church! God grant us success! Hugo Pfahler IDEAL CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR YOUR PARENTS The new translation of the NEW TESTAMENT in Hungarian by Bishop László Ravasz. Price; $5.00 — Leather Binding $8.00
