Calvin Synod Herald, 2016 (117. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2016-01-01 / 1-2. szám
6 CALVIN SYNOD HERALD The First Hungarian Reformed Church of Walton Hills, OH Special Evangelism Service “For I know the plans / have for you, ” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. ” Jeremiah 29:11 On Sunday, December 6, 2015 at 10:30 a.m. our church hosted an Evangelism Service. Our special guest, Pastor Paul Endrei founder and senior pastor of the Church on the Rise, served at a combined worship service. This was an important and great event in the life of our congregation. We were honored to have Pastor Paul Endrei tojóin us for this special service. Beam Krasznai Back in the 1960s, when I was young, my family belonged to the JTungarian Reformed Church of Duquesne. Every Sunday morning we all dressed up in our Sunday clothes and went to church. Almost all of my friends in my neighborhood went to church somewhere. My best friend from across the street went to the Catholic Church. Secretly, I felt kind of sorry for him because 1 thought there was nothing out of the ordinary about the Catholic Church. Anyone could go there. My family went to the Elungarian church and that made us different from everyone else. We were special. Every Sunday afternoon we went to my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner. I thought that my grandmother was the best cook in the whole world. She made chicken soup, and homemade noodles, and stuffed cabbage, and breaded pork chops, and stuffed peppers, and chicken paprikas, and, for dessert, apricot cookies and nut rolls and poppy seed rolls. I felt sorry for my friends who had nothing to eat on Sunday but plain old American food. Hungarian food was the best food in the whole world. Back then many of the older people in the church spoke only Hungarian. The first worship service was in Hungarian and the second one, the one my family went to, was in English. Our pastor, Reverend Szőke, had come from Hungary and had a strong accent so sometimes it was hard to understand what he was saying. But from my early childhood the sound of Hungarian seemed normal to me even if, most of the time, I did not understand any of the words. When I took my family to Budapest sixteen years ago this was a great blessing because I learned to speak Hungarian with almost no accent at all. I went to Hungary because I thought that perhaps the Hungarian churches, and the pastors, could use my help. My wife, Cynthia, had grown up on the mission field and we always had a desire to serve the Lord overseas. I had already been a pastor and a teacher in a Bible college in Colorado, and I knew that after decades of communist rule many young Hungarians would be filled with a desire to know the Lord and serve him in the ministry. 1 felt called to help them, so we started a small Bible school in Budapest to teach young people how to study the Bible and how to minister in the church. During the ten years that I lived in Hungary I discovered that almost all of the adults in the church could not let go of their past even though their past was so unhappy. It seemed to me like they were turned around facing backwards and looking only at events that had happened long ago, thinking only about what they had lost.
