Magyar Református Egyház

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

What is the history of the Calvin Synod, how did it emerge on the American scene? Former Bishop of the Synod, the Rt. Rev. John Butosi tells the story.

Calvin Synod – The Hidden History

Exhibition on persecution of churches under communism

An exhibition of photos and documents depicting persecution of priests and believers in Hungary’s Kadar era (1956-1988) opened in Budapest on Friday.

The display at the cultural centre of the Jesuit Order was organised by the Hungarian Catholic, Reformed and Lutheran churches, member of the organising team Gabor Tabajdi told reporters.The exhibition and its accompanying conference were designed to present the ways and mechanisms the one-time party-state applied to blackmail members of religious communities to spy on their fellow-believers, Tabajdi said.

From Caboodle.hu

The documentary “Dracula’s Shadow: The Real Story Behind the Romanian Revolution” is being screened at various sites in the U.S. and Canada during May 2010 on a fundraising tour for the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation.

The film tells the story of how one May 1989 clandestine interview by former Quebec Cabinet Minister Michel Clair and Radio-Canada reporter Réjean Roy with Hungarian Reformed (Romanian Reformed Church) minister the Rev. László Tokés in Timisoara, Romania, changed history and led to the secret police-defying demonstrations of 15 December 1989 where hundreds of people risked their lives to defend the dissident pastor.

The Christian Observer too, played a role in this pivotal period in Romanian history by spiriting a mimeograph machine into Romania to the Rev. László Tokés, a friend of the late Christian Observer Publisher [and minister with standing in the Calvin Synod of the Hungarian Reformed Church] the Rev. Dr. Edwin Elliott, who accomplished the mission with the invaluable assistance of a Dutch television crew on the ground in Romania. Tokés used the mimeograph to have news about his plight quietly distributed throughout Romania in the months leading up to the December 1989 revolution.

Reprinted from Presbyterians Week

The 2009 Calvin Synod Communicator is available for download.

2009 Kálvin Egyházkerület KÖZLÖNY

Sept 2009 Calvin Synod Communicator

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Reflections on Camp 2009 by Campers, Counselors and CIT’s

Youth Camp took place July 19-25, 2009. Spelling, grammatical errors, smiley faces and all – may you too share the joy of Youth Camp!

Camp was incredible this year and it was all because of God’s grace. He blessed the week mightily and I really believe many lives were radically changed, I know mine was. Thank you Jesus for a miraculous week! – Attila (Counselor)

This was my first year in this camp and it was incredible!!! I Had the chance to make new friends and I did!! I hope that I’ll go to this camp because it was a pleasure to be there People say that this was the best year ever I think so too.…. – Mate (Camper)

Many lives were changed and impacted for Jesus. There was a lot of good discussion and my prayer is that seeds continue to be sown and that the soil is tilled by many back at the campers home churches – that these campers can be BOLD. – Julie (Counselor)

…no matter what you’re like people will still be nice to you and talk to you. You can feel like you belong there thanks to all the amazing people that go to camp …and i really hope there will be more people next year to keep it so amazing…. -Julia (Camper)

If you want to meet God for the first time or reconnect with Him, come to camp. He does awesome works there, and lives are forever changed. Simple and true. J – Gretchen (Counselor)

The week that we go to camp is just about the best week of the year. the people there are so amazing i feel at home. Going to camp has helped me so much to grow closer to God. I am so thankful for what he has given me this year, all the new things i have learned about his works in our lives and all that he has done! J – Brandi ( Camper)

Camp…is always an amazing week, where everyone is there for the same reason. To have God touch your heart. And its amazing how each and every year you see kids grow in the right direction. – Shane (Counselor)

Camp is amazing. You come to this place, for this one amazing week, leaving changed forever. You grow throughout the week, getting closer to God and to friends you’ve made. When you’re there, you don’t have to worry about the outside world, it’s just you and God, and you can connect to Him on such a personal level that it’s one of the most wonderful experiences in the year. J – Anna (Camper)

I just love camp. It’s my favorite people, doing my favorite activities, talking about my favorite subjects, at my favorite place to be during the sweltering July/August weather. Each year I find something or someone new to love, and each year, I feel camp helps me with various problems I have in the rest of my life. Camp is special. – Ashlea (Counselor in Training)

Camp is one of the bests place to be because you have people that feel the same way about Christ. It brings everybody closer to him and develops a great relationship with him….we can take what we learned and use it for the rest of our lives. It truly is an amazing thing – Andrew (Camper)

A paper presented at the UCC General Synod at the Faithful and Welcoming Luncheon by Rev. Dr. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Senior Pastor of First Congregational Church, Ridgefield, CT. Used with Permission.

The preacher starts with a text, and I have a text. I’m here to talk about John Calvin and the possible relevance of his legacy for the church and for the church’s mission today. But I have a text. It’s a great text, a plumb-line – yes, the Word is that plumb-line God showed to the prophet Amos – a plumb-line and a powerful corrective for a church foolish enough to imagine, as social context changes, that the gospel must also change. It may indeed be true that, as the 19th century protest hymn puts it, “time makes ancient good uncouth,” but if the gospel is the gospel it’s the eternal gospel and it’s what brings hope and life as the context changes with time and culture. Here it is, from the book of the prophet Isaiah 51:1-2:

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;

For he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.

Abraham and Sarah . . . and their spiritual offspring, the faithful down through the generations being built into a living temple, in time with Jesus Christ revealed as the cornerstone, and, like Peter the rock, God keeps hewing stones from that quarry of faithfulness to build into that temple. We’re here to mark a significant anniversary of one of those living stones, one whose theology played a major role in the shaping of our history. But I must say . . .

How tantalizingly odd it feels for me to be invited to reflect on the legacy of John Calvin at the Grand Rapids General Synod luncheon of this important group in the United Church of Christ. Now . . . Before I tell you why this moment is so strange, let me introduce you briefly to John Calvin, in this, the 500th anniversary of his birth.

Thinking back to world history in high school or college (or church history at seminary if you’re a minister), you may remember the big names associated with the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century – Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin. While Luther and Zwingli were contemporaries (born in 1483 and 1484 respectively), Calvin was born a quarter-century later. So he was a second-generation Reformer, building on the principles set forth by Luther, Zwingli, and others: Salvation by faith alone through God’s grace in Jesus Christ (not by any goodness on our own part); bowing to the authority of Scripture (not papal hierarchy); the sovereignty of God over all of life, with reform of both church life and the civil order (replacing medieval Catholic hierarchies with more dynamic, fluid, participatory social structures under divine authority and biblical moral standards). Calvin implemented the Reformation so effectively by mid-century in the city of Geneva, Switzerland, that the Scottish Reformer John Knox called Geneva “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.” This influence gave rise to an international movement generally known as “Calvinism” – also and perhaps more properly called “the Reformed Tradition.” (Branches of the great family of the church in this tradition: Presbyterian, Congregational, all denominations with the word “Reformed” in their name, most Baptists.) While other names, like Zwingli, Bucer, or Heidelberg Catechism authors Ursinus and Olivianus, among others, played major roles in shaping the movement, Calvin’s theological influence is preeminent and persistent.

Calvin was born in northern France in 1509. Unlike almost every other Reformer he did not begin his career as a Roman Catholic priest or monk. Educated in the humanities in Paris, with a Master of Arts degree at age 18, he felt drawn to theology, but his father insisted that he study law. He received his law degree in 1532 but, when his father died, he immediately returned to the Greek and Latin classics, dreaming of a scholar’s career. Sometime during 1533 or 1534, however, Calvin’s life was re-directed by a conversion away from Roman Catholicism to the theological perspective of Luther and the Reformation. Years later he described his experience this way: “By an unexpected conversion [God] tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years” . . . such that within a year “anybody who longed for a purer doctrine kept on coming to learn from me, still a beginner, a raw recruit.” Elsewhere Calvin writes as a theologian of the heart – and that is how Charles Partee describes him in his new book The Theology of John Calvin (WJK Press, 2009) and the thrust of Herman J. Selderhuis’s portrait in John Calvin: A Pilgrim’s Life (IVP, 2009). Indeed, the crest Calvin designed for himself depicts a hand holding or offering a heart. But for Calvin the first step is the “taming” of the mind, by God’s grace receiving a “teachable mind.” All the spiritual gifts that have to do with feeling and behavior – heart and hand — flow from a sound, biblical understanding of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

Forced into exile with other French Protestants, in Basle Calvin wrote the first version of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 – this brief first edition (a theological handbook) bulked up over the years until the final edition which flexes its muscles at more than 1,500 pages, one of the greatest expositions of Christian theology ever written. Calvin still hoped for a quiet life of scholarship and in the summer of 1536 he was on his way to Strasbourg for that purpose. But hostile Imperial Catholic troop movements forced him to stop over in Geneva – and, as they say, the rest is history. William Farel, the leading Reformer of that Swiss city believed that Calvin was just the man to guide and shape the church’s future. Calvin said no. Farel answered Calvin’s refusal with the warning that, if he did not commit to Geneva, God would surely curse his scholarly endeavors. Calvin stayed in Geneva, becoming the leading preacher and theological teacher. He was 27 years old.

This first effort at leadership in Geneva did not go well – in two years Calvin and Farel were voted out. Calvin spent three happy years from 1538 to 1541 in Strasbourg teaching at the university, pastoring the church of French refugees, engaging in international and even Protestant/Catholic theological dialogue, and getting married. His writings in defense of Reformation theology were so impressive, and the political climate had changed such, that Geneva invited him back in 1541. And there he served, exercising authority in the church and great influence in the civil realm (though rarely without opposition and never with absolute power) until his death at age 55 in 1564.

In addition to the Institutes, Calvin wrote many volumes of commentaries on the books of the Bible – so that, in addition to being a theologian of the heart, he must be considered a biblical theologian, far more than a systematic theologian. Calvin’s Geneva became the refuge for Protestant exiles from many European countries, including English Puritans when the Catholic Queen Mary was on the throne. Congregationalists in England and New England in the 1600s looked back to Geneva in many ways as a model, although they sought to gather churches congregationally rather than with a Presbyterian polity. There are many good books on Calvin’s life and thought, including a number of new publications coinciding with his 500th birthday.

So why did I call this experience of speaking today “tantalizingly odd”?

To a few here at General Synod – all too few, I’m afraid – our topic today might not seem strange, but altogether appropriate. After all, during this 500th anniversary year, academic conferences, sermon series, publications, and adult education sessions devoted to Calvin are happening around the world. Calvin and the theological framework associated with his name are stunningly vital forces in today’s global church. Perhaps you’ve read about this resurgence – not only in publications like Christian Century and Christianity Today but in the secular media. At the end of last year in its “What’s Next in 2009” issue Time magazine listed “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” Number 3 on Time’s list is a movement called “The New Calvinism.” But most in the UCC (if aware) would be put off by these hard-core “young and restless” new Calvinists (Collin Hansen, Young, Restless, Reformed, CT 2006, book 2008). Indeed, most in the UCC are unaware, or have forgotten, that in our traditions we were ever any kind of Calvinists at all – or we blush with shame at the thought that we ever were. We may express pride that Jonathan Edwards, known as America’s greatest theologian, was one of “us” – but most in the UCC cringe at the thought of his Reformed theology, his evangelical Calvinism.

Okay . . . in the UCC, we did remind ourselves of our place in that family tree in the 1980s and 90s when we were required to demonstrate our right to be at the Lutheran-Reformed Dialog table and ultimately be included in the Formula of Agreement with the ELCA, RCA, and PCUSA. Our denomination may not have stood very firmly in the Reformed Tradition by that time but – in that venue – at least we could say that this was the primary (but not the only) historic Christian tradition from which we emerged. Our claim to that heritage often seemed like double-talk to our dialog partners twenty years ago but we got away with it.

And here we are in Grand Rapids, of all places – the Mecca of Calvinism in North America with its Dutch Reformed heritage, home of educational institutions and publishing firms that mediate Calvin’s influence in the twenty-first century. To come to this city to speak about John Calvin on the one hand is like carrying coals to Newcastle. But this is the national meeting of the UCC, a church with a pretty bad case of amnesia when it comes to history. And I’m a historian and a pastor . . . So: What else would I come here to talk about other than the legacy of John Calvin!

It’s so strange because: It’s been a long time since Calvin has been regarded as anything like a hero in our denomination. It’s been easy to forget Calvin for a number of reasons. Our UCC roots are overwhelmingly Calvinist (e.g., the insignia of the Reformed Church included Calvin’s crest, heart in hand, along with that of Zwingli and other symbols). But nobody ever said that John Calvin was the founder of the German Reformed Church or the Congregational movement within English Puritanism. In the United Church of Christ we lack the identity-bestowing advantage of a single founder that Methodists and Lutherans and newer movements like the Church of God in Christ or the Vineyard fellowship can point to. So we are not compelled as a namesake to regard Calvin as a touchstone like a Luther or a Wesley or a John Wimber or a C.H. Mason.

Multiple founders or, we might say, the polygenesis of UCC traditions have made it easy not to remember Calvin. In the German Reformed Church, for example – as a French-born theologian whose work as Reformer was carried out in Geneva, Switzerland – Calvin was always esteemed as one foundational influence among others. When John Williamson Nevin at the German Reformed seminary at Mercersburg in the 1840s argued persuasively that the Lord’s Supper was not just a memorial meal – arguing for Christ’s real spiritual presence (his “mystical presence”) in the sacrament of Holy Communion, he did so by demonstrating that this was the position of John Calvin. No wonder that Nevin’s theology has received a warm welcome in Dutch Reformed circles. Still, while the German and Dutch Reformed churches had very much in common, the German Reformed included Ulrich Zwingli in their creation narrative more prominently than did the Dutch. And the German Reformed Church always understood itself as “the church of the Heidelberg Catechism, so that 1563 document infused a certain irenic spirit in the German Reformed Church. Now, the Dutch Reformed also adopted Heidelberg as a theological standard and continues to employ it in worship to a far greater degree than anything we have seen in recent years in the UCC. But the Dutch also adhered to the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-19), a creedal statement that self-consciously sought to establish Calvinist orthodoxy over against the softer tenets of Arminius and Arminianism. Calvinism’s famous TULIP acronym (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints) traces to this Dutch Calvinist document. My point here is that Calvin was important, but only relatively so, in the GRC. As the life of the United Church of Christ developed in more activist and less theological directions after 1957 the influence of John Calvin diminished to the vanishing point.

Among Congregationalists Calvin’s prominence had waned long before 1957 – to a large extent, more like 1857. In fact, you could think of the 1800s in American Congregational history as a century-long process of de-Calvinization. We tend to forget that John Robinson and William Ames and other English Congregationalists were delegates at the Synod of Dort and New England readily adopted the strongly Calvinist Westminster Confession as its theological standard the Cambridge Synod. New England Congregationalists from the time of Plymouth in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay and the Connecticut colonies from the 1630s on, pretty much through the American Revolution, had understood themselves (and middle-colony Presbyterian cousins) as the leading New World outposts of the international Calvinist or Reformed movement. But by the period of the Revolution, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationalism, was making headway – the idea that human reason, science and technology, could solve the problems of the world. At the start of the nineteenth century, in the New Republic, a theological struggle was going on in New England – some moved away from the classic theology of seventeenth-century Puritanism and of eighteenth-century evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards – going so far as to reject as unreasonable such essential doctrines as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. As many churches were swept into Unitarianism, orthodox believers were forced to establish new congregations. Several theological schools of thought flourished among these more traditional Christians (our UCC forbears), but they all identified themselves as standing in the Calvinist or Reformed Tradition. As Harvard drifted toward and then embraced Unitarianism, New England’s institutions of higher learning – Yale College, Andover Seminary, Hartford Seminary, Bangor Theological Seminary – were all established as bastions of orthodoxy, to defend Calvinist theology as it was interpreted in successive generations. It was Congregationalism’s evangelical Calvinism that fueled the social reform movements of the decades leading up to the Civil War. You might think that that would settle the matter, that as the New England diaspora spread west Congregationalism would remain steadily within the Reformed theological family. But no – over the middle and later decades of the 1800s more theologically liberal ways of thinking emerged. We could chart this in a number of ways if we had time – e.g., the wording of faith statements from the Burial Hill Declaration (1865) to Kansas City Statement of Faith (1913). As John von Rohr puts it in The Shaping of American Congregationalism: While the Kansas City Statement gave lip service to “the faith which our fathers confessed,” its substance exhibited the “liberalization of theology that had occurred” in the denomination. “The older pattern of tracing a personal pilgrimage from sin to salvation was abandoned, and the theme of personal redemption was only briefly mentioned. . . . The statement instead . . . emphasized the churches’ striving to know God’s will, to walk in God’s ways, and to labor for justice, peace, and human ‘brotherhood.’” At the tercentenary of the Cambridge Platform, early New England’s affirmation of evangelical Calvinism, in 1947 the keynote speaker announced, “Calvinism as a whole is no gospel for today.” So quite some time ago John Calvin fell from hero status – becoming irrelevant and worse.

For many decades now in our denomination, Calvin has been seen – at best – as an embarrassment, the crusty old uncle that you wish would stop coming to family gatherings. If Presbyterians still wanted to engage in conversation with Calvin that was their business, we were too progressive-minded for that and it wasn’t too hard to ignore him as we adapted ourselves to modern, more supposedly relevant ways of thinking. No surprise then that, by the time the United Church of Christ got itself up and running in the 1960s, the idea of paying homage to John Calvin was the farthest thing from anybody’s list of action-items. If anything, Calvin became a pariah, symbol of patriarchal oppression, and Calvinism the bête noir of UCC progressivism – doctrines of original sin, atoning sacrifice, election, predestination, irresistible grace, the sovereign holiness of God – even the idea of doctrine itself! – are seen more as the problem than the solution to the human situation. Okay, the notion of covenant remains very important in UCC polity, but does anybody care what “covenantal theology” meant to the Puritans and to Calvin before them?

What, then, is the legacy of John Calvin for our churches and for our Christian witness today. Is there a legacy that we can embrace? If some of us will be reluctant to go as far as the younger generation of “New Calvinists” and older standard-bearers like John Piper, Tim Keller, Mark Dever, or (God forbid) R.C. Sproul, we should remember that the Reformed Tradition has always been a broad, multi-layered movement. I am suggesting at the very least that we rediscover our place in that branch of the Christian family. But let me be more specific now about where I think Calvin can connect with us directly and theologically.

John Calvin is known as a theologian but at the start of the Institutes he states that theology is impossible apart from piety, a devoted heart. (It is notable that John Thomas, in his farewell words here at Synod, identified “piety” is seriously lacking in the UCC today and called for its recovery.) Here for Calvin is the root of it all: “I call piety that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces” (I.2.1). He writes that “doctrine” is a matter “not of the tongue but of life. It is not apprehended by the understanding and memory alone . . . but it is received only when it possesses the whole soul and finds a seat and resting place in the inmost affection of the heart” (III.6.4). Here is where we see Calvin as a theologian of the heart and as a biblical theologian – and as a theologian of the Holy Spirit. It is by the work of the Holy Spirit in our mind, heart, and hands that we can begin to live the life that God intends for us. Here Calvin employs the biblical, Pauline term “sanctification.” And Charles Partee writes that, when it comes to sanctification, Calvin’s theology “glitters.” Calvin identifies the doctrines of justification and sanctification as the heart of the redemptive narrative of the gospel.

I think that today we need to rediscover, reclaim, learn how to preach again the twin doctrines of justification and sanctification. John Calvin can help us do that. This could be John Calvin’s gift to us. I learned first-hand at a Lutheran-Reformed consultation at New York back in 1987 – where Gabe Fackre, Louis Gunnemann, and I represented the UCC – just how distinctively Calvinist it is to insist on the link between justification and sanctification. In the Reformed tradition we share with Luther’s theology the bedrock belief that justification – being accepted as right with God – is solely by our trust in God’s gracious love in Jesus Christ. There is nothing we can do to merit salvation, we could never be good enough to earn a place in heaven, this is purely a gift from God, in no way a human achievement. Calvin calls this “the main hinge” on which the Christian religion turns (III.11.1). But God does not only accomplish this work of salvation for us – God also wants to accomplish his will in us. In his “Reply to Sadoleto” (written in Strasbourg in defense of the Reformation), Calvin states: “We deny that good works have any share in justification, but we claim full authority for them in the lives of the righteous. . . . If you would duly understand how inseparable faith and works are, look to Christ, who, as the Apostle teaches (1 Cor. 1:30) has been given to us for justification and for sanctification. . . . Where Christ is, there too is the Spirit of holiness, who regenerates the soul to newness of life. In his Commentary on 1 Corinthians 1:30 he writes: “We cannot be justified freely by faith alone, if we do not at the same time live in holiness. For those gifts of grace go together as if tied by an inseparable bond” (quoted in Partee). In the Institutes he writes: “Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify. . . . we are justified not without works, yet not through works, since in our sharing in Christ, which justifies us, sanctification is just as much included as righteousness” (III.16.1). What I learned in New York at that Lutheran-Reformed dialog is that Lutherans get more than nervous, they cringe, when the discussion turns to “living in holiness” and salvation being “not without works.” Deathly afraid of any emphasis on human action, the Lutheran tendency (the Lutheran gift to the church) is to keep the focus on what God does for us in Christ. Calvin, however, insists that when God does something for us by the work of Christ, God also does something in us by the work of the Holy Spirit.

By contrast, the tendency in the UCC since 1957 has been overwhelmingly toward human action, social action, social reform, living your faith in the public arena. Our activism – our gift – believing means doing – most certainly stems from our Calvinist heritage (whether UCC members know this or not). But – and this, it seems to me, is the spiritual problem of the United Church of Christ – our commitment to faithful living is no longer rooted in a theology of redemption. In many places and at many organizational levels of the church, the very concept of justification and sanctification are ignored or even rejected as obsolete, meaningless, or hurtful doctrines. Salvation is construed as getting in touch with your true self, perhaps especially your true gendered self, so if there is a theological emphasis at all it is on the doctrine of creation (“God doesn’t create junk”) and, with regard to Jesus, the doctrine of the Incarnation, God-with-us, validating us just as we are. But . . . the Fall? Atonement? Reconciliation of sinful humanity with the God of holiness? Word that Christ died for our sins? Who in our churches knows what any of this means anymore?

Calvin sums it up this way: There is “one sole means of recovering salvation. . . . Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life” (Institutes, III.11.1).

This is not dry doctrine, not mere dogma. It is a vital expression of the Christian narrative. Our story as believers. God’s story of human redemption. As preachers, when we get people into the biblical narrative, that gospel gets into the people. God’s story becomes our story. Throughout the world people are finding hope in this gospel and as that happens churches are thriving. That is the hope for our people and our churches, whatever the future of the United Church of Christ as a denomination.

The 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin should prompt us to think again about our theological and ecclesial roots. As God said through the prophet (Isaiah 51:1-2):

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;

For he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.

Leben Oct – Dec 2006: The Hungarian Galley Slaves

This back issue of the magazine Leben contains the story of the Hungarian Galley Slaves and the “Hymn of the Hungarian Galley Slaves”.

The following is quoted from the online journal Reformed Worship and the article Holding Fast To The Psalms – Stories From Hungary by Beth Lantinga

“The book of Psalms, embodied in the Genevan Psalter, has nourished Reformed Christians for centuries. This spiritual heritage has a special place in the hearts of Hungarian Reformed believers who have survived the harsh years of Communist repression and domination. Their stories testify to the influence of the psalms in the ordinary and extraordinary details of their lives. In a recent set of interviews with Reformed believers in Hungary, I asked what the psalms meant to them. Some of those interviewed were surprised that I would even ask whether the Psalter was important for them, because the answer was obvious–of course! They had been wrapped in the tapestry of faith into which the Genevan Psalter was woven–in some places obvious and clear, in others as a deep background color–but always present.”

The whole article is well worth reading and discusses how the Psalms are conveyed through the Family, Congregation, and Summer Music Camps.

The website GenevanPsalter.com has English versions of these Psalms.

Professor Grant Horner teaches at The Master’s University. His specialty is Renaissance and Reformation studies. But he has developed a following for reasons beyond his academic specialty. The reason? He challenges Christians to read 10 Chapters of Holy Scripture daily and provides them with a free plan to do so.

His story and plan can be seen below.

(You may click the link or use the tool bar on the document to enlarge the size.)

Professor Grant Horners Bible Reading System

By Rt. Rev. John Butosi

Reprinted from UCC.org

A Conference in the United Church of Christ is determined by its geographical boundaries—almost. The exception is the acting conference that is not even named a conference: the Calvin Synod. It is made up of Hungarian churches from Connecticut to Illinois, with most concentrated in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. These churches were originally part of the Hungarian Reformed Church. Later they joined the Reformed Church in the United States, and when the merged Evangelical and Reformed Church united with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ, these Hungarian churches became part of the Calvin Synod. The history of these churches in American life is unique.

Hungarian emigration patterns

The Reformed Church in Hungary had a glorious past. The Protestant Reformation swept the country rapidly and early. By the end of the sixteenth century, Hungary was 90 percent Protestant, mainly Calvinist in theology and forms of worship. The Counter-Reformation, led by Jesuits and enforced by the Habsburg monarchy and the Hungarian nobility, recovered control for the Roman Catholic Church. More than four hundred Protestant pastors and teachers were imprisoned and tortured until they recanted. Only forty-one refused. These were marched to the Adriatic Sea and sold as galley slaves. From this life of horror they were finally ransomed through the intervention of Holland and Switzerland and given political asylum in those countries. The heroic witness of these pastors and teachers is commemorated in the “Hymn of the Hungarian Galley Slaves,” found in all four hymnals currently in use in UCC congregations under the title “Lift Thy Head, O Zion, Weeping.” [1]

Political and religious repression continued for almost two hundred years more, until World War I, when Hungary was finally separated from the Hapsburg monarchy. Out of this historic struggle for religious freedom in Hungary the Hungarian Reformed faith came to the United States. Political, social, and religious struggles continued into the twentieth century.

There were five waves of Hungarian emigration to America:

1. The first wave started after the collapse of the Hungarian Revolution, in 1849. In terms of numbers, this emigration was insignificant. [2]

2. The second wave was different. Immediately after the abolition of serfdom, before the depression of the 1870s, the rural-agrarian, landless proletariat found easy employment in Hungary. However, after 1870 the number of emigrants rose quickly. From 1850 to 1920 it is estimated that between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 people left Hungary. Many came to the United States. [3]

3. After World War I, Hungary tightened its emigration policy. As the state was consolidated, without minorities of significant size, the goal was to increase the population, and therefore the number of taxpayers, and to augment the state?s military force. From this viewpoint, emigration was a loss, and every emigrant was regarded as a traitor to the fatherland.

Also of significance is the fact that after World War I the United States shut the open door before the immigrants. A quota of only 473 was allotted to Hungary in the first quota law, and 865 on the basis of national origin. As a result of these rigid laws, both in Hungary and in the United States, the upper class and the Jews were represented above their proportion after World War I among the Hungarian immigrants to the United States. Imre de Josika-Herczeg calls this third wave of emigration ?one of artists and professional people.? [4]

4. During and after World War II (1941-50) more than one million people were forced, in one way or another, to leave Hungary. [5] Not counting those who perished in concentration or forced labor camps, or who returned to Hungary, or who renounced their Hungarian ethnic affiliation, the total of Hungarian Displaced Persons could not be estimated as more than 120,000 persons. The United States received a fair share of those who constituted a new type of Hungarian immigrant. These people, in contrast to other immigrants, did not leave the old country of their own free will; they had not intended to emigrate. They were ?forced emigrants,? ?refugees in spite of themselves,? who were put on the move mostly by political forces. As a group, they were less homogeneous than the previous waves. They came from all walks of life, and many nationalities, creeds, political confessions, and social classes were represented among them.

5. After the revolt of 1956 the most recent wave of Hungarian emigration left the country and was dispersed all over the world. Their number is estimated at 193,973 persons, of whom 35,705 arrived in the United States before September 30, 1957. [6]

Thus the five waves of Hungarian emigration, which reached U.S. shores after the abolition of serfdom in Hungary (1848), were (a) the so-called Kossuth emigration, which was politically motivated (1850?75); (b) the emigration of peasants for economic and social reasons (1876?1920); (c) the emigration of Jews and professionals between the two wars (1921?41); (d) the immigration of the so-called Displaced Persons during and after World War II (1941?50); and (e) the refugees of the 1956 revolt.

Reformed church life in America

About one fourth of the population of Hungary and about one fourth of the Hungarian immigrants to the United States were adherents of the Reformed faith. Early attempts to organize Reformed churches, however, were unsuccessful.

The first Hungarian Reformed Church service in the United States was conducted on April 13, 1852, by Gedeon Acs, chaplain to Louis Kossuth, hero of Hungary?s War of Independence against Austria in 1848. When Kossuth was brought to the United States on a U.S. warship and addressed both Houses of Congress, he was welcomed as a great freedom fighter. Enthusiastic women, organized by Mary Day of New York City, provided enough money to pay for this early “international” ministry, but with Kossuth?s departure Acs was forced to discontinue his work, and in 1860 he himself returned to Hungary. [7]

In 1881 Francis Kecskemethy, with the aid of the New York Presbytery (Presbyterian Church in the United States of America), started Hungarian Reformed services in New York City, but his work gradually diminished to such an extent that he too returned to Hungary. Nevertheless, Kecskemethy?s undertaking showed that the Presbyterian Church in the USA was the first denomination in the New World to aid church work among Hungarian Reformed people. [8]

After such sporadic and futile beginnings, church life started among Hungarians only when the agrarian proletariat and small landholders reached U.S. shores in great numbers. At first, these immigrants met for worship in each others? homes, but when baptisms, weddings, or funeral services were needed, they had to turn to various American clergy, because there were no Hungarian pastors among them. Consequently, certain American ministers began to take special interest in these people, especially those ministers who spoke German. Many Hungarians also spoke German and thus communications could be established. Historians emphasize the fact that ?the earliest organization of Hungarian immigrants were the fraternal societies formed for mutual help, protection in case of death, injury or unemployment.” [9] To organize such a society was an exciting undertaking for these people: It bound them together by voluntary decisions, provided them “decent Christian burial,” and even met some of their religious needs, such as hymn singing and prayer. But one thing the society could not give—the sacrament of Holy Communion. For these Hungarians, taking communion at the six established occasions of the year was crucial. They had to go to the “sanctuary” or, if they had none, to the ones they considered “Reformed.”

German Reformed relationships

On several occasions a group of Hungarian Reformed people visited a German Reformed church to take communion. In February 1890, at the Seventh (German) Reformed Church of Cleveland, Ohio, where the Rev. J.H.C. R?ntgen was the pastor, a group of Hungarian immigrants arrived, saying, “Wir sind Ungarn und wolle zum Abendemahl geh?n. Wir, reformiert.” [10] (”We are Hungarians, and we want Holy Communion. We are Reformed.”) About the same time in historic Grace Reformed Church, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Dr. John H. Prough was the pastor, the same thing happened. These pastors reported their experiences to their classes. [The "classis" is a regional jurisdiction in some U.S. Reformed churches. The plural is "classes."]

Because the Board of Home Missions of the Reformed Church in the United States was also aware of the problem, when the General Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States met in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, in the late spring of 1890, three separate recommendations of the Westmoreland Classis, the Pittsburgh Synod, and the Board of Home Missions asked the General Synod “to take action toward supplying the Hungarians and Germans … with the Gospel.” [11]

Correspondence with Hungarian church authorities started immediately, and in the same year the Rev. Gustav Juranyi was secured as the first missionary to the Hungarian immigrants in the United States. On January 1, 1891, he was commissioned by the Board of Home Missions of the Reformed Church in the United States to organize the first Hungarian Reformed congregation in America. Soon a second missionary was secured in the person of the Rev. John Kovacs, who was commissioned on July 1, 1891, for Pittsburgh, where the first church building was erected, dedicating it on October 23, 1892.

In two years Kovacs organized seventeen congregations, with a total of 1,500 members, and a third missionary had to be called to be his assistant.. [12] Thus in 1896 there were six centers of missionary activities: Cleveland, with the Rev. Alexander Harsanyi; Pittsburgh, with the Rev. F. Ferenczy; South Norwalk, Connecticut, with the Rev. Gabriel Dokus; Trenton, New Jersey, with the Rev. Gustav Juranyi; New York City, with the Rev. B. Demeter; and Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, with the Rev. Alexander Kalassay. [13]

The Hungarian immigrants were glad to organize churches not only because they needed spiritual nourishment, but also because the church provided for them a ?little Hungary,? where they experienced a sense of security. Some of these churches in fact were organized explicitly on a social basis as church societies, including Jews and Roman Catholics as well as Calvinists and Lutherans. At Trenton, for example, the Sick Benefit Society pledged one half of its income to the support of the church, and in New York a Jew was elected to the first consistory. [14]

At first, these congregations had no legal status as a church group affiliated with either the Reformed Church in Hungary or the Reformed Church in the United States. But in 1896 initial steps were made to organize a Hungarian classis. The group did not want to break relations with either church. The church in Hungary was still their home church and the Reformed Church in the United States was their generous supporter. Caught between two loyalties, more than a decade of negotiations was necessary until a Hungarian classis was officially approved by the General Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States(1905). [15]

Presbyterian rivalry

Meanwhile, a new struggle flared up because of Presbyterian work among the Hungarian Reformed people. Until June 1899 work among the Hungarians was under the sole jurisdiction of the Reformed Church in the United States. But around this time the Rev. Julius Hamborsky, who served a Slav church under the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, organized a Hungarian Reformed Church at Kingston, Pennsylvania, also under the jurisdiction of the Presbyterians. [16] Thus the unity of the Hungarian work was broken, and when Dr. Geza Kaczian, as the traveling missionary of the Presbyterian Church among the Hungarians, established Hungarian Presbyterian churches at Youngstown, Ohio (1902), and New Brunswick, New Jersey (1903), open hostility began between the two groups. [17]

Pressures from home

During the first fifteen years of emigration from Hungary, church and government paid little attention. The consensus on this subject was that the departure of non-Hungarian-speaking minorities from Austria-Hungary only strengthened the position of the ethnic Hungarians in historic Hungary; they did not mind the emigration as long as it was the emigration of only non-Magyars. [18] But by 1903 it became clear that the government?s liberal emigration policy had backfired; many Hungarian-speaking Magyars had also left the country. After this discovery the Hungarian government?s new policy was to halt emigration, and the Reformed Church in Hungary joined the government in this effort. Pastors were encouraged to use the pulpit and, if necessary, the local and state authorities to block the exodus of these “selfish, unpatriotic, reckless, and irresponsible people.” Appeals to Hungarian patriotism were used to stop emigration and to encourage repatriation. Also, at this time the Hungarian pastors of the Reformed Church in the United States sent their memorandum to the home church in Hungary, asking for help to end the “Presbyterian schism.” This matter was considered of such great importance that the second-highest-ranking lay dignitary of the church, Count Jozsef Degenfeld—brother-in-law of the most influential Hungarian politician, Count Istvan Tisza—was sent to the United States in response. Undoubtedly, Count Degenfeld came to the United States not only to heal the wounds and end the schism but also to implement the new appeal to Hungarian patriotism among Hungarian Reformed people in the United States.

Degenfeld traveled to every Hungarian Reformed church with an invitation and proposal that an “American Classis” tied to the home church be organized as a way to solve the problems among U.S. Hungarian Reformed churches. The General Conventus of the Reformed Church in Hungary would pay the pastors? salaries. Lucrative offers were made to the pastors as well as to the congregations: teachers; free education of the pastors? children in Hungary; new positions in America; and better churches in Hungary, to which the people could return. [19]

Instead of a solution, however, the American Classis of the Reformed Church of Hungary, organized on October 7, 1904, simply created a third group in the Hungarian Reformed community—those who supported the Classis.

The expressed hope was that the original six congregations of this classis would sooner or later be joined by all the other churches. But this hope was never realized, although the new classis grew rapidly. By 1910 there were twenty-three congregations organized in two sections, namely the Eastern Classis and the Western Classis.

Reformed Church reactions

Of course, the first reaction to the establishment of an American Hungarian classis was a shock in the Reformed Church in the United States. Dr. Charles Schaeffer called it a “gross wrong done,” “a foreign church on American soil,” and declared:

Many Hungarians do not want a Hungarian church in this country, but they want to be part of the Reformed Church in the U.S. … All honor to the ministers and congregations whom the glitter of gold cannot bribe and who … did not … dishonor their vows and obligations to the church into which they have been incorporated. [20]

He just could not understand.

Many Hungarian people had good reasons for joining the new classis. The German churches seemed unable to respond to their needs. One man in Trenton put it this way:

The Mission Board was unable to give us a really qualified minister, but it did recommend two individuals.., who have never completed theological studies…. Our church received all communications and official letters from the Classis in German, a language none of us understands. At the meetings of the Classis only German is used and it has no sense for us to participate. [21]

In 1905 the Reformed Church in the United States finally and too late organized the “Hungarian Classis,” and David A. Souders became the Superintendent of the Board of Home Missions, “devoting almost all his time to the development of the Hungarian work.” [23] Through the new Hungarian Classis new attempts were made to mend the breach. In the fall of 1908 Dr. James Good and Dean Joseph Tomcsanyi were authorized by the General Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States to present new plans to the Foreign Affairs Board of the General Conventus of the Reformed Church in Hungary. The plan was completed. It suggested that the Reformed Church in the United States and the Reformed Church in Hungary should do the American work together. The presidium of the General Conventus rejected the plan, stating that “leadership in the work of the American Hungarian Reformed people belongs solely to the home church,” [24] Although the war between the opposing parties raged in the courts, through the newspapers, and from the pulpit, the Reformed Church in the United States exercised restraint, sobriety, and hopefulness. [25] It kept the doors open.

The Tiffin Agreement

World War I created crisis and ushered a new period into the life of the Hungarian Reformed churches in America. Loyalty to the old country was still evident in the sacrificial purchase of Hungarian war bonds and in the generous support of funds gathered for the aid of Hungarian war widows and orphans. [26] Because both immigration and repatriation had stopped, Hungarians in the United States were forced to decide to stay permanently. Salary supplements for the pastors still arrived from Hungary through the Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC for 1917 and 1918, but at the same time Hungarian Reformed clergy were accused of being political agents and spies of the central powers. [27] These and other factors were used by many to urge separation from the home church in Hungary. Some favored an autonomous and self-supporting U.S. church, whereas others suggested affiliation with some U.S. denomination.

Thus negotiations were opened with the Reformed Church in the United States to assimilate the American classes of the Reformed Church of Hungary. On October 7, 1921, the Conventus of the Reformed Church in Hungary reached an agreement with the representatives of the Reformed Church in the United States at Tiffin, Ohio. Through this contract—the Tiffin Agreement—the Eastern Classis and the Western Classis of the Hungarian Reformed Church in America were received into organic legal and ecclesiastical relation with the Eastern Synod and the Pittsburgh Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States, as Classes. Both Classes were assured of the rights, privileges, and sanctions of the Reformed Church in the United States, whose protective powers were offered to safeguard and foster their growth and future development. All property, whether real or personal, remained in the possession of the congregations. The Reformed Church in the United States assumed responsibility for the payment of $52,000 to the Classes as salaries in arrears. The congregations, which became part and parcel of the Reformed Church in the United States, declared to be no more a part of another national church. Therefore, it was expected that nothing would hinder or prevent them from assimilating through historical process with the Reformed Church in the United States. The use of the Magyar language was permitted in public worship, Sunday schools, and vacation Bible schools. A recommendation was made that pastors and elders of the Hungarian Reformed congregations meet in annual conferences to consider the needs of their congregations and to make suggestions to the Board of Home Missions and to their respective Synods. [28] Through this “excellent transaction” twenty-eight Hungarian Reformed congregations with more than a million dollars’ worth of church property joined the Reformed Church in the United States. [29]

Free Magyar Reformed Church in America

The Tiffin Agreement was by no means a magnet to draw all Hungarian Reformed churches in the United States together. Even if one understands the Americanization pressure of the postwar era, many American Hungarian persons could not swallow it. Laypeople especially, in opposition to their pastors, found that their dignity and right for self-determination was greatly distorted by the Tiffin Agreement.

Objections were made from three viewpoints: (a] On a religious basis, many people argued that Hungarian Reformed congregations could grow into a self-supporting, independent, explicitly Hungarian Reformed church body. (b) Others pointed to the deep nationalistic desire to preserve Magyar culture. (c) Still others noted how economic interests led toward an independent church.

As a result of these concerns a “free movement” gained momentum under the leadership of the Rev. Endre Sebestyan, pastor of the church in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, who was instrumental in organizing the Free Magyar Reformed Church in America on August 13, 1923, in Trenton. The new Hungarian Reformed denomination had its first Constitutional assembly on December 9, 1924 in Duquesne, with six churches answering the roll.[30]

Four more churches soon joined this group (Leechburg, Pennsylvania; New York, New York; Cliff Side, New York; and Youngstown, Ohio), so that in 1928 they organized themselves into a diocese with two classes, the Eastern Classis and the Western Classis. In doctrine and government the new church claimed to follow the Reformed Church in Hungary. Accordingly, the Classes were supervised by deans and the Diocese by an arch-dean, who was the Duquesne pastor. In 1958 the word free, or independent, was omitted from the name of the denomination and the name Arch-Dean was changed to Bishop. [31] The aim of this group too was “to unite all the Reformed Hungarians who were able to support themselves into one separate denomination.” [32] In reality the movement was dividing rather than uniting the existing congregations, because it capitalized on the nationalistic feeling of the first-generation Hungarian immigrants. Recently, the denomination was admitted into the membership of the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches as the Hungarian Reformed Church in America.

Implementing the Tiffin Agreement

The implementation of the Tiffin Agreement started with honesty and sincerity on both sides. Even before the respective synods legally ratified the agreement in 1923, three classes were formed for effective administration and growth. By accepting the terms of the Tiffin Agreement, the Hungarian Reformed people in these classes felt that they were the obedient children of the home church, whereas those who failed to join the Reformed Church in the United States were like spoiled children of the biblical parable. [33]

At first those who did not accept the Agreement resented the differences between the Reformed Church in Hungary and the Reformed Church in the United States, but soon they conscientiously confessed “from Hungarian and religious viewpoints, the new relation brought no harmful change in our churches; rather it improved the situation by adapting the life of our congregations to the post-war American conditions.” In addition, they admitted that the Reformed Church in the United States provided a more democratic system of church government to its Hungarian churches without demanding any sacrifice from a Hungarian or a religious viewpoint. The classes were even granted rights ?which are exercised only by the synods in Hungary, such as examining and ordaining theological students.? [34]

As the years went by, however, the Board of Missions of the Reformed Church in the United States became increasingly dissatisfied. In 1929 the Board reported:

There are just about one-hundred Protestant Churches among them, seventy of which belong to the Reformed Church. All of these, with the exception of six, are enrolled as Missions under the Board and every one of the six so-called self-supporting churches, with the exception of the First Church, Cleveland, Ohio, likewise receive aid from the Board for pastor?s assistants, teachers or Deaconesses…. The Hungarian congregations have not yet become fully acquainted with our methods of securing benevolent moneys and consequently they contribute comparatively small amounts on the apportionments, which serves to pull down the average giving in the Classes and makes them recipients of a proportionately large share of our Home Mission appropriations. [35]

The Board was beginning to admit the failure of the Tiffin Agreement. It failed because it did not pay. It cost too much, and the Hungarians were progressing at the expense of Americanization expectations.

The economic depression of the country only aggravated the situation. Subsidy to special Hungarian projects had to be curtailed. In the 1920s the Board employed one Hungarian pastor as a full-time editor of the Reformatusok Lapja, the magazine for the Hungarian constituency. His salary and the printing and administration of this weekly were paid by the Board as one of the “benefits and advantages of the union with a large and influential American denomination.” [36] “Under the depression we had to stop this subsidy as well as the financial assistance of other projects among our Hungarian brethren.” The Board had to reduce its subsidy to Hungarian Mission churches too, and thus many of these churches became self-supporting whether they wanted to or not.

As a consequence of these developments, by 1935 a new tendency could be detected among the Hungarian churches of the Reformed Church in the United States. The president of Lakeside Classis was quoted as saying, “The Hungarian Reformed tradition should become the backbone of the spiritual life of our churches. More attention should be paid to this genuine Hungarian Reformed heritage in the life of our Classes.” [37] The Reformatusok Lapja openly argued in 1936 that the summer schools and Sunday schools should emphasize the “Hungarian Reformed confessional heritage.” [38] “We need desperately more courage to apply our Hungarian Reformed principles in our American congregations.” [39] By 1938 opinions were expressed by groups in the various classes that the existential problems in their churches were identical.

We do not have Hungarian language tracts, no adequate Hungarian Reformed material for our Christian Education program. No good Hungarian Reformed Catechism books are available. There is no uniform Hungarian Reformed hymnal. . . We are too weak to face these problems as two separate groups. We need unity. [40]

This was the time of transition from Hungarian into bilingual church life. Although distinction could be made in the formal process between the Free, Presbyterian, and Reformed Church in the United States churches, [41] the fact remained that the language transition came about the same time for all three major groups, and they wanted to face this “natural process of Americanization” together. Differences existed between the Presbyterian and the Reformed groups.

In the Hungarian Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. the goal was set at a complete assimilation within one generation…. In the Reformed Church in the U.S., the Hungarian Classes had certain autonomy to preserve Hungarian traditions…. The Tiffin Agreement guaranteed their rights as Hungarian speaking churches…. The Hungarian congregations in the Reformed Church in the U.S. were encouraged to preserve their own unique Hungarian Reformed tradition by no-one else as Dr. Charles Schaeffer who was such an ardent supporter of the Americanization by evangelization in the past. In 1937, Dr. Schaeffer urged the conforming pastors to preserve their Hungarian Reformed denominational heritage in their second generation as well as in the first…. He expressed the hope that it was for the sake of American Protestantism that he asked Hungarian Reformed pastors to keep their unique traditions. [42]

This was the background and reason why the Hungarian classes of the Reformed Church in the United States requested a nongeographical synod when the Reformed Church in the United States and the Evangelical Synod of North America merged in 1934. At the General Synod of Fort Wayne, Indiana, held in June 1936, President George W. Richards declared that the Tiffin Agreement continued to be in force, and thus the General Synod in Columbus, Ohio, June 20-29, 1938, granted the request of the Hungarian classes to establish a nongeographical synod for the Hungarian congregations with the rights of the Tiffin Agreement. Thus on March 14, 1939, the Magyar Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church was organized in Cleveland, in the same church that witnessed the organization of the First Hungarian Reformed congregation fifty years earlier. [43]

Questions of reunion and union

The years from 1939 to 1957, with the formation of the United Church of Christ, were filled with change. The use of the English language made great strides in this period. In 1940 thirteen churches conducted services in English and in 1950 almost all did. The youth work was changed from ?learning Hungarian in summer school? to meeting the needs of the youth in the language they understood. [44] Great plans were made to change catechetical teaching from ?learning the questions? to an all-inclusive and meaningful Christian education for all, [45] but these plans never materialized. Hungarian departments were established at Elmhurst College, in Elmhurst, Illinois (1942-46); Franklin and Marshall, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had had a Hungarian professor in the person of Dr. William Toth since 1946; even Lancaster Theological Seminary considered resuming Hungarian instruction. Church discipline was exercised in several cases, but disciplined church life could not be established. All the ministers were enrolled in the Pension Fund Plan, with one exception.

The yearning for a unified Hungarian Reformed community continued to influence the Magyar Synod. In 1941 Hungarian representatives from Europe again tried to bring the three major factions into one church body. The outbreak of World War II ended that attempt. As the Evangelical and Reformed Church engaged in negotiations with the Congregational Christian Churches in the early 1940s, however, plans were formulated to unite the Free Magyar Reformed Church and the Magyar Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church in the proposed United Church of Christ. The proposal was fully endorsed by the Magyar Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, but it never came to a vote in the Free Magyar Reformed Church in America. At the same time the Magyar Synod registered its resistance to some of the sacrifices that seemed to be called for in the proposed United Church of Christ.

Ten years later, as the reality of the new denomination loomed on the horizon, efforts were made to guarantee the future of a Hungarian conference in the new church. When no promises could be made the Magyar Synod voted against the proposed Constitution of the United Church of Christ and began talking seriously with the Presbyterians and others inspired by the so-called Blake-Pike proposal on church union. Here was yet another plan to unite all Hungarian Reformed factions into a United Hungarian Reformed Church in America.

The United Church of Christ Constitution was ratified without the guarantees sought by the Magyar Synod. The larger union of Hungarian churches did not materialize and life went on. Under the name of the Calvin Synod, as an acting conference, the Hungarian churches continued as an exception to the geographically defined conferences in the rest of the United Church of Christ. They argued then, and continue to argue, that the Basis of Union gave them the right to “unite in the United Church of Christ without break in their respective historic continuities and traditions.” [46]

We honestly endeavor to be a color in the rainbow in the United Church of Christ within the framework of Magyar Synod rather than an unwilling material in an ecclesiastical melting pot without Magyar Synod. This is our ecumenical vision. [47]

Out of this ecumenical vision the Calvin Synod continues to live.

The Rt. Rev. John Butosi was Bishop of the Calvin Synod—Acting Conference of the United Church of Christ.

Notes

1. The four hymnals are The Hymnal, The Pilgrim Hymnal, The Hymnal of the United Church of Christ and The New Century Hymnal.

2. Imre de Josika-Herczeg, Hungary After a Thousand Years (New York: American Hungarian Daily, Inc., 1934), p. 293. Cf. Denes A. Janossy, The Kossuth Emigration in America [Budapest, 1940).

3. John Kosa, ?A Century of Hungarian Emigration, 1859-1950? in The American Slavic and East European Review, vol. 16 (1957), p. 505. Kosa admits, however, that it is almost impossible to reach the exact figure statistically for the following three reasons: (a) These figures do not include the returnees whose number is estimated between 15 and 33 percent of the gross emigration; (b) in these figures all those nationalities are included that inhabited the polyethnic state of Hungary: Jewish, German, Slovak, and Croat (actually the rate of Magyars in the emigrant mass was less than their rate in the total population; as late as the 1900s the Magyars made up only 33 to 40 percent of the emigrants); (c) illegal emigration is not included. Although illegal emigration was criminally prosecuted after 1881, it was a wide and common practice with the help of the secret agents. American business concerns gave up the labor contract practice only in 1910.

4. Josika-Herczeg, op. cit., pp. 297?98.

5. Kosa, op. cit., p. 512.

6. Alexander Daroczy, ed., Bethlen Almanac (Hungarian Reformed Federation of America, 1958), pp. 252?53.

7. A.M. Leffler, ?Louis Kossuth and the American Churches,? Lutheran Quarterly 6 (November 1954):27?28.

8. Louis A. Kalassay, ?The Educational and Religious History of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the United States? (Ph.D. diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1939), 19.

9. Aladar Komjathy, ?The Hungarian Reformed Church in America; An Effort to Preserve a Denominational Heritage? (Th.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1962), 5.

10. Ibid., 10.

11. Kalassay, op. cit., p. 22.

12. Charles E. Schaeffer, Glimpses into Hungarian Life (Philadelphia: Board of Home Missions of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1923), p. 16.

13. Kalassay, op. cit., pp. 28ff.

14. Ibid., p. 46.

15. Ibid., p. 63.

16. The Rev. F. von Krug, pastor of the Kingston Presbyterian Church, claimed that as far back as 1897 he gathered Hungarians into his church. (A. George, ?Magyar Congregations in the Presbyterian Church,? Reformatusok Lapja, 59, no. 13(July 1, 1959):14.

17. Kalassay, op. cit., pp. 65-68.

18. Julianna Puskas, From Hungary to the United States (1880-1914) (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1982), pp. 193-95.

19. Komjathy, op. cit., p. 75.

20. Acts and Proceedings, General Synod, Reformed Church in the United States, 1905, pp. 73, 56-57.

21. Komiathy, op. cit., p. 99.

22. Barna Dienes, 50 Ev (Pittsburgh, PA: Expert Printing Company. 1940), p. 11.

23. Ibid.

24: Geza Takaro et. al. Emlekk?ny az Amerikai Magyar Reformatus Egyhazmegye 25 eves evfordulojara (New York, 1929), p. 23.

25. Ibid., p. 26.

26. Ibid., p. 30.

27. Reformatusok Lapja 9 (March 23, 1918): 6-7.

28. The complete text of the Tiffin Agreement is included in Kalassay, op. cit.

29. According to Schaeffer, op. cit., pp. 19-20, in 1923 the Reformed Church in the United States had fifty-two Hungarian churches with 30,000 members, the largest single body of Hungarian Reformed people in America.

30. Komjathy, op. cit., pp. 190ff.

31. Alexander Daroczy, Bethlen Almanac (Hungarian Reformed Federation of America, 1959), p. 235.

32. Kalassay, op. cit., p. 79.

33. Takaro, op. cit., pp. 33-34; Matt. 11:17.

34. Ibid., p. 34.

35. Acts and Proceedings, General Synod, Reformed Church in the United States, 1929.

36. Quotation from Tiffin Agreement.

37. Koinjathy, op. cit., p. 288.

38. Reformatusok Lapja, July 10, 1936, p. 4.

39. Ibid., December 14, 1935, p. 2.

40. Ibid., April 15, 1938, p. 7

41. Komiathy, op. cit., pp. 290-91, notes that the Free churches decided to introduce English-language services, while in the Presbyterian churches, denominational executives stressed the same, and congregations in the Reformed Church in the United States were encouraged to use English as well as Hungarian.

42. Ibid., pp. 191-92.

43. Credit is due the Rev. Barna Dienes, Dr. George W. Richards, and Dr. Charles E. Shaeffer in disarming opposition that recommended the tabling of the issue at Columbus, Ohio, General Synod.

44. Minutes, Magyar Synod, 1949, p. 47.

45. Minutes, Magyar Synod, 1941, pp. 62-70.

46. Minutes, Magyar Synod, 1961, p. 65.

47. Minutes, Magyar Synod, 1960, p. 52.