Fraternity-Testvériség, 1961 (39. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1961-09-01 / 9. szám

14

FRATERNITY

and laywomen were encouraged to undertake personal evangelistic and social work, and to train as Sunday School teachers. In 1905 the Association founded a Deaconess Home, to the financing of which people from every stratum in the Church willingly contributed.

In 1892 the Budapest Reformed Youth Association was created as only the first of several Christian youth organizations, and it was followed by associations to foster various specialized types of missionary activity. Each in turn produced its own literary organ and lit- terature. Ministers were now visiting their parishioners in their homes, and ecclesiastical discipline was being attended to by Kirk Sessions from a real sense of conviction. The prayer life of the people was renewed; Bible reading was begun again in private homes; in fact the Reformed Church of Hungary now knew what it was to have the Spirit moving in its midst, so that once again the churches were filled with worshippers.

This new life spread, moreover, to the universities. In 1904 the Student Christian Movement began to work in Hungary and was greatly stimulated by a visit paid by Dr. John R. Mott in 1909. At a meeting which he addressed in Budapest attended by some 600 students he found that he had to continue answering questions till as late as one in the moraine1. His

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influence, too, on that generation of theological students was profound, and when he left Hungary his “camp-conference” idea was taken up as a valuable instrument and used for evangelism amongst the youth.

Thus it came about that over the space of some 30 years the Home Missionary work of the Church completely transformed the Church’s life, so that it would be true to say that by the end of the first decade of the present century the Reformed Church of Hungary had taken her rightful place amongst the living Churches of Christendom.

(To be continued)