Nothing Short of Evangelism
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In 1990, a hundred and thirty American and Canadian Unitarian Universalist congregations formed one-to-one covenantal relationships with the same number of Transylvanian Unitarian churches. Later this Partner Church Program widened to involve close to four hundred churches on both sides of the Atlantic.
This has been especially important because Unitarians in Transylvania are a Hungarian minority within an oppressive Romanian state, not unlike the modern situation of Tibetans within China.
Decades of communist totalitarian rule in Romania, with its policy of cultural ethnocide, martyred my minister father and demoralized the churches. On Christmas in 1989 a bloody revolution sparked by a Reformed (Calvinist) pastor overthrew the Romanian dictator, whose final plan was to bulldoze eight thousand villages in Transylvania. This plan failed because of his death, but the once prosperous ethnic Hungarian villages had already been economically crippled.
At that precarious time North American UUs were awakened by a call—my husband and I happened to be those awakening voices—to try to save the Transylvanian Unitarian tradition. In response, the Unitarian Universalist Association launched the Partner Church effort. I volunteered to bring life into a theoretical program, and I have been called an “evangelist” for this cause, which is facilitated and nurtured by our formal organization, the Partner Church Council. Today we witness deeply committed partner relationships between pairs of congregations, sponsoring hundreds of programs for mutual economic and spiritual revitalization.
Perhaps it seems odd that I would wear that description of myself as “evangelist” with pride. Evangelism is a notion and practice that ordinarily would not be part of Unitarian Universalist tradition. The Unitarian church is generally not an evangelical church. And yet, from my years of work with two times two hundred churches in the United States and Transylvania, I can only describe the resulting experience as a phenomenon nothing short of evangelism.
Take the Edict of Torda, a proclamation of religious tolerance issued in 1568 by Transylvania’s King John II Sigismund, a Unitarian. This decree bestowed on ministers a great collective and personal responsibility to evangelize: “Preachers everywhere shall preach the Gospel according to their understanding of it….for faith is a gift of God born from listening, and listening is through God’s word.”
In the traditionally action-oriented Unitarian Universalist church, however, the meaning of evangelism goes beyond pronouncement of the Good News, and beyond mere passive listening by the congregation. Through not only listening but also dreaming boldly, our faith will be awakened, prompting us to translate the Gospel into transformative service. The Good News for the church, therefore, will be about spiritual transformation through the power of meaningful action. Such a church is worth attending.
Many Unitarians practice only an inner evangelism, an inner mission, and don’t reach out. But Unitarians in Transylvania do not stop at preaching the Gospel; they put their words into work. This action orientation, translating the Gospel into service, is a strong Transylvanian characteristic.
Sixteenth century Unitarian leader Francis Dávid brought ethical, values-based Christian thought to light. “God’s word flows as the water and flies as a bird,” he wrote. “Nobody can raise mountains nor any impediments in its way.” The good news Francis Dávid preached is this: as humans, we have the divine potential to follow the example of Jesus, our ultimate ideal and teacher. And because we can, therefore we must. Ours is not a comfortable religion. It has the ultimate challenge of perfection. As another sixteenth century Transylvanian Unitarian leader put it: “The future will ask us not how many we are, but what values we represent.”
Later Unitarianism was dominated by an increasing social awareness and the struggle for freedom. A nineteenth century Transylvanian preacher expressed the spirit of his age: “The true minister is one who not only preaches the Gospel, but one who lives by it; one who not only reads the Bible, but gives it into the hand of ordinary people; one who not only encourages building schools, but himself takes up the shovel. To spread the Evangelium means to serve the process of moral, cultural, spiritual, material uplift of the people.”
Transylvanian Unitarians rejected a rigid dogmatism four hundred years ago. Our faith and church are not based upon authority and wealth, or powerful organization, but rather on the Gospel and the attraction of the human spirit to truth and justice. This message is just as relevant today, as progressive churches try to be non-dogmatic.
But some American Unitarian Universalists try not to even be religious. Being rooted in two quite different traditions (in spite of similar names: Transylvanian Unitarianism and North American Unitarian Universalism), I have an eye and an insight for both of these related groups.
Present day American churches in general appear as grand-scale businesses to an Eastern European, with their dozens of committees, sometimes involving half of the congregation in some leadership role or another. This large-scale involvement suggests empowerment of members to participate, to run, to own the church. But in many churches this virtue degenerates into power-games, militancy, flattering pride for the power-hungry, and ultimately pain and alienation for some members.
Why is the simple faith of the Transylvanians so compelling for the sophisticated, educated American Unitarian Universalists? Why does the encounter seem to fill a spiritual void on a large scale? A visiting Transylvanian minister intuitively answered this inquiry: “You Americans hold your faith far from your core.” Religious identity, cultural identity, is our core value in Transylvania. And though we are born into our faith, it never came cheap to practice our religion. Each generation had to fight for this basic right throughout four centuries. Ours is an active faith, an active existence against odds, against persecutions of all kinds—the cruelest being the communist oppression.
Transylvanian Unitarians take pride in having a coherent theological position which is positively formulated. Though we deny certain precepts, our theology is not denial but affirmation, clear cut and simply postulated. It is not abstract theory, but the very fabric of our living. My faith is an active faith. My religion is service to others through the transformative power of the Gospel.
We have always been aware that our faith will keep us. It did. Mine is not a narrow Unitarian apologetic. I am not talking about a Unitarian denominational membership. I am talking about faith, proclaiming the Good News, living the Gospel, and surviving by its power, by its empowerment. We have survived as Protestants under the persecutions of the Counter-Reformation, survived as Unitarians when we had been considered too radical, survived as Christians under the anti-religious reign of terror of communism.
Under oppression, denominational identity is somewhat less defined. The ultimate, shared goal—bringing forth the Kingdom of God—is not different for a Unitarian or a Calvinist or an Evangelical Lutheran, the three main minority churches of Transylvania. Each, both collectively and individually, has been an equally important link in a chain of Christian minority churches. We were able to survive only through a united spirit and sense of community. The weakest links had to be strengthened by others.
Today, this small Transylvanian Unitarian church of 80,000 members has become the clear spring where spiritually thirsty Americans make group pilgrimages seeking to recharge their souls and renew their hope. The late Peter Raible, a Unitarian Universalist minister, confessed:
I was not prepared for how holy the trip [to Transylvania] would prove to be. What is so transforming I found in no detached examination of our Transylvania movement, but in direct experience. To hear parishioners sing their long-banned national anthem as tears stream down their faces is before long to feel wetness on one’s own cheeks. To sit in a worship service, not a word of which one can understand, is to feel the depth of the spirit flowing.
My pilgrimage, as I suspect for most Unitarians, did not strive to create a religious experience, but I found it again and again. The experience, simply put, was transformative. Whatever North Americans may have done on behalf of their peers in Transylvania is more than repaid by the religious experiences that have come to us by visiting there. We return, I think, more deeply grounded in our own faith, more consecrated to seeing our Unitarian Universalist cause continue on this continent, and more assured that our religion has much to give in the hard times of life.
American UUs might well value a focus that is grounded in deeper theological understanding, to better bring a heterogeneous group together. Perhaps the Unitarians of Transylvania can serve as one wellspring that might serve a thirsty faith. Transylvania’s virtues include deep rootedness, stability, and continuity, as compared with the familiar American experience of uprootedness, moving on, constant change and lost tradition. The stubborn stability of the Transylvanian church has been one of its main strengths during the past centuries.
The Partner Church structure, with the richness of its programs and interactions, offers a healthy cross-fertilization of ideas and models that have helped us experience a shared global awareness. Notice how this popular hymn that Protestants and Catholics sing expresses the most desired goal of today’s evangelism:
In Christ there is no East and West, in him no South or North, But one great family bound by love throughout the whole wide earth.
This sentiment beautifully harmonizes with the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama:
Today’s world requires us to accept the oneness of humanity. In the past, isolated communities could afford to think of one another as fundamentally separate. Some could even exist in total isolation. But nowadays, whatever happens in one region of the world will eventually affect, through a chain reaction, peoples and places far away. Therefore, it is essential to treat each major problem, right from its inception, as a global concern. It is no longer possible to emphasize, without destructive persecution, the national, racial, or ideological barriers which differentiate us. Within the context of our new interdependence, self-interest clearly lies in considering the interest of others…. For the future of [humankind], for a happier, more stable and civilized world, we must all develop a sincere, warm-hearted feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood.
I see a natural symbol of evangelism in the banyan tree. Religions and congregations everywhere are its far-reaching branches, which drop new roots around, to anchor, protect and feed the tree: the shared Good News. The stronger the new roots are, the stronger the tree will be, from which we all draw nurturing energy. And we are all connected by it.
Proselytizing, mere preaching and passive witnessing, might not be good news any more. But there is good news lived in a values-based Unitarian Christianity that is evangelical, though not in the tired old understandings of evangelism. Transformation, touching each person’s core with the true spirit of the Gospel, brings about fruits in action.
- Nothing Short of Evangelism - January 1, 2012
