On December 15, 1989, a small
crowd of parishioners of the Hungarian Reformed Church in Timisoara gathered in
front of the church flat where their pastor lived. The occasion was the
eviction orders to their pastor set for that day by a Romanian civil court. The
group formed a human chain around the flat. When the police arrived to remove
the pastor from the flat, the crowd had grown to several hundred strong; they were
singing hymns in the brutally cold weather and from their words the police
guards understood that the people were determined to stay and prevent the
eviction of their pastor. The police guards returned with agents of the dreaded
Communist secret police Securitate, but to no avail, the crowd refused
to let them pass. For the first time in the history of Communist Romania
someone was refusing to obey Securitate.
On the next day the mayor of
Timisoara—the second largest city in Romania—arrived and tried to persuade the
crowd to disperse. He arrived with the pastor’s family doctor to persuade the
pregnant wife of the pastor to come with them to the hospital. She refused. By
that time the crowd had grown beyond the numbers of the congregation, with
young ethnic Romanians joining the Hungarian Reformed believers in the vigil
and the human chain in the cold December day. The mayor then left, threatening
to return with police water cannons.
On December 17, instead of police
water cannons, Army troops took positions against the now significant
demonstrations that had grown from the humble crowd of Reformed parishioners.
They fired into the crowd. This did not stop the demonstrators. On December 18
tens of thousands of industrial workers in Timisoara left their jobs to join
the demonstrations. By December 20 the city was out of the control of the
Communist government. The insurrection spread to other cities in Romania, and
on December 22 the most brutal and maniacal Communist dictatorship in Eastern
Europe—that of Nicolae Ceausescu—fell.
The fall of the bloodiest and
most inhumane Communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe started there, in the
small humble church of the 37-year old Pastor László Tökés. Dr. Joseph Pungur
of the University of Alberta in Canada writes about him:
And in the midst of all this
arose that one person, Reverend László Tökés, a minister of the Hungarian
Reformed Church in Romania in charge of the church of Timişoara (Temesvár) who,
with his heroic resistance to the dictatorial Church and State authorities,
single-handedly triggered a popular revolution in Romania. Within days it
toppled the Ceausescu regime.
The kind of preacher we need
again today
Who was László Tökés? What made
him so terrifying to the regime to deserve such attention? Why did the
Communist government have to send agents of the Secret Police, and later the
army, to make sure he is evicted? What made those thousands of people keep
vigil in the cold December nights around his house to protect a humble, unimportant
religious minister? Why was it that even unbelievers were willing to lay down
their lives but not let the government troops pass to his house?
Was he a military organizer of
the resistance? Did he lead an opposition party? May be he was a skillful politician,
experienced in the art of bureaucratic machinations? Did he make explosives,
blow up bridges, start insurrections in the army?
No. He was only a preacher. No,
he wasn’t only a preacher. He was a preacher with a heart for God, a
preacher who believed that the pulpit was entrusted to him to preach against
principalities and powers, no matter what the consequences were. He
preached against the Communist regime, he preached against the oppressive
policies, against the nationalist crackdowns of the regime on the Hungarian
minority, and against the lack of freedom, religious and political, in his
country. László Tökés wasn’t there just to preach “believe and get saved.” He
was on the pulpit to speak for King Jesus in every area of life, and especially
in those areas where the government was oppressive against those politically
weak and poor. László Tökés was there to tell Caesar that “there is another
King, one Jesus.”
And that was enough to make him
so dangerous to the regime. Government institutions on all levels—police,
courts, the secret police—were employed to make him stop preaching. Members of
his congregation—fully supportive of their pastor—were “suicided” by the Securitate
agents. His pay was stopped and his ration-card was taken away, making it impossible
for him to buy even food (and his wife was pregnant at the time). One night a
group of thugs hired by Securitate broke into his apartment and Tökés
and members of the congregation had to fight them off with kitchen knives.
The Bishop of Transylvania,
László Papp, a puppet of the Communists and a collaborationist with the
government, ordered Tökés to stop preaching and officially closed his church.
Interestingly enough, he appealed to the “separation of church and state,” and
claimed that Tökés violated the laws of both the church and the state. The
congregation stood firm, and the young pastor kept preaching. A few weeks
before the events described above he wrote an open letter explaining the
situation he was in:
I speak out for I cannot do
otherwise, or else the stones themselves will speak, the stones of our
demolished towns and monuments…. I am not a courageous man but I have overcome
my fear. I am waiting for a trial at a Romanian civil court, indicted by my own
bishop in order to evict me from the manse of the church at Temesvar, and to
banish me in medieval style not only from this “closed” town but also from the
priesthood. . . The fight is no less bitter than it was in the past, though
this time the weapons are different. And the price of the siege is the same;
when the castle falls, a piece of our country goes with it . . . The
self-defence of the Reformed Church in Temesvár symbolizes a “pars pro toto,”
it displays the “particular” as a representative of the “universal.” We are
called in question, one by one, as Calvinists and as Hungarians living here. To
the challenge the congregation tries to answer like David . . . it takes its
stand only on a tiny foothold of the Spirit, from of the Word of God: “Fight
for your brethren, your sons, your wives and your homes” (Nehemiah 4:14). “A mighty fortress is our God”
sings the church congregation on Sundays, identifying themselves with its
strength; they rely on that strength throughout the week.
László Papp, the Bishop of
Nagyvárad, has been besieging the Church in Temesvár since April. He has banned
services in the church and the works of renovation. . .He has limited the
activity of the minister and the session; he has frozen a great deal of the
congregational finances . . . This was the introductory phase of the siege . .
. the phase of “starve them into surrender” . . . the mocking of Goliath.
But God’s plans trumped the
mocking of Goliath, and the giant fell within a week after the start of the
final showdown. And it all started with the humble sermons of a humble pastor
in a small parish church.
If you are a Christian, and if
you care about teaching your children in the way of our Lord, you should have a
gallery of Christian heroes for them to imitate and be inspired by. Add a name
there: László Tökés. He is part of your Christian history.
About a year ago I visited a
worldview conference organized in our town by Brannon Howse. Mr. Howse was
outstanding. He didn’t pull any punches. Nothing in this country was outside of
God’s Sovereignty, everything was a legitimate sphere for action for us
Christians. Government? Yes, government too. [For Howses’ rapid departure from
these views almost immediately after this event, see
our archives.]
On the way back a local pastor
was with me in my car. I was excited about the conference, and I naturally was
optimistic about what we as Christians could do to restore America to its Biblical
roots.
In the middle of the conversation
the pastor just said, “You know, this is all good, but I don’t think we can
accomplish too much in these last days. We may be able to save a few souls, but
we can’t stop the drift to darkness in this country. We should expect the times
to be worse and worse for us Christians.”
I thought of László Tökés. He was
against the worst political and government machine we can imagine. He couldn’t
buy food, he was about to be evicted from his house. There was no institution
to come to his defense, and there was no hope, humanly speaking. He was in a
situation that no American pastor in the 20th century
has been or had to be. And yet he compared himself to David against Goliath,
firmly convinced of his victory, against all human odds.
He just preached against the
government, against the principalities and powers, against the forces of
darkness in the high places of the land. And they fell. Our pastors should
learn from his example.
[This article was originally
published on December 15, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the attempted eviction
of László Tökés. Now almost eight years later, it is more relevant than
ever.]
