Thanksgiving, Christmas and new church law

Throwing a Thanksgiving party is a great way to reach Hungarian kids for 3 reasons:

It’s a holiday that we don’t have and students are interested in learning something new from a different culture.
It’s easy to bring in the Gospel in a meaningful way.
The food is good and kids are hungry!

This event was a good opportunity to team up with the Christian students of the local International School, who took care of the program and did an excellent job. We had fun games, Gospel-presentation, and –again- good Thanksgiving food. I was happy to see those coming who are not committed to our youth, but still have a desperate need for Chirst.

Christmas outreach

The Christmas outreach was huge, a whole lot greater than I expected. We had over 350 people there, most of whom were the non-believer parents of the kids that come to our Bible clubs in the local secular school. About 90 kids took part in the program and there were 13 performances. Despite the great number, the programme was very exciting, for us especially as Esy sang a solo in a song that was performed by part of our worship team.

Updates on the new church law

We’d been praying for the Constitutional Court to cancel the church law, which it actually did just before Christmas.
However, a few days later, on December 30th the Parliament passed the very same law, with some minor changes.
As the law did come into effect the government allowed those churches that had already sent in their request to stay like they were to keep their status until the Parliament makes a decision on them, but February 29th the latest. This includes us and 80 more - from the 380.

So here we are with 2 more months and still not sure what’s gonna happen.

We don’t meet the requirements of the law (1000 members, 20 years of existence in

Hungary or 100 years internationally) but we’re in discussion with other churches.