Bethlen Naptár, 1945 (Ligonier)
Paál Gyula: A lelkipásztor és a gyülekezet
BETHLEN NAPTAR AZ 1945-IK ESZTENDŐRE 93. OLDAL Christian education also “new occasions teach new duties.’’ "Christ is like a mountain peak which has one meaning in storm and another in sunlight, one word by day and another by night, one constraint on youth and another on age. He dominates the plains of the earth and no generation can more than glimpse his full-orbed truth. As ages change, fresh solaces brood and unsuspected challenges flash from the eternal mountain. Consider the momentous novelties of courage. Never before has the planet been a whispering gallery, never have men lived in so small a world neighborhood, never was there such knowledge of mind and skill of hand in such dearth of wisdom, never before the spectacle of a great nation making a cult of godlessness, and, with it all, never before such acute sense of justice and injustice, such stoical compassion, such wanton and wholesale destruction, or perchance, such hidden and inarticulate longing for God. The gospel abides: Christ wrote it once for all in the ink of his blood. But its aspects, stresses and applications are new.” Christian education must grasp these new aspects, stressess and applications. In our Hungarian churches it is especially true that the younger generation”, we call it “second generation”, lived on the momentum of the faith of their fathers. But we realize it now, that we cannot live any longer on the left-overs and crumbs of an older generation because we see the mountain from a different angle; the aspects, needs and applications of our faith are different from those of our fathers and mothers. OUR SUNDAY SCHOOLS, YOUTH FELLOWSHIPS WILL BE THE VANGUARD MILITIA IN OUR CRUSADE FOR CHRIST AMONG THE YOUNG PEOPLE. Yes, the church must propagate or die. Our churches are increasingly becoming aged, senile and anemic. In our Crusade for Christ we must concentrate on young people. We must see the eternal Mountain through their eyes. Yes, young people need the protecting and stimulating fellowship of their own kind; they must be treated as “belonging” to the church. The defensive and offensive weapons against juvenile delinquency which speads havoc and incendiaries among our teen-aged boys and girls in THE REVITALIZED SUNDAY SCHOOL AND YOUTH FELLOWSHIP WITH EVANGELISTIC STRIKING POWER. But for all these vital aims we need the “educational evangelist,” the “new” Sunday school teacher and the “new” youth leader. Living and teaching “by rote” became the stale device of our educational institutions. Ministers and teachers sat on the authority of the “balcony.” WE have to learn the glamor and the perilous adventure of the “road..’ The church became on institution of the “loyalty to loyalty”
