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FEATURE: The Accidental Participant
Hungarian Pastor George Posfay Looks Back 60 Years
LUND, Sweden/GENEVA, 11 May 2007 (LWI) - This is how it all started: "Listen boys, I have received a message from Geneva."
George Posfay, then an assistant pastor in Hungary, got the word shortly after World War II ended. European governments were being re-organized. Families were rebuilding their lives. Churches were re-examining their priorities.
A group of Lutherans in Geneva had invited Hungarian pastors to go to Sweden for post-graduate study. He went first to Uppsala, then to Lund.
Lutherans in Geneva were talking, too. From 30 June to 6 July 1947, representatives of Lutheran churches gathered in Lund, Sweden, for the founding Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. At the assembly, Posfay represented his native Hungary. He adds, he attended the Lund meeting by accident.
The initial plan was to spend one and a half years in Sweden and then return home. "But this idea never materialized," Posfay says. The reason? The Communist regime was in control in Hungary. The Hungarian Lutheran Bishop Lajos Ordass upon his return to Budapest after the First LWF assembly, was arrested and subsequently dismissed from episcopal office. Even when he was allowed to reassume those duties, new trials and dismissals awaited him. Posfay himself was not allowed back into Hungary even to visit, for another 18 years.
Today, the LWF has 140 member churches in 78 countries all over the world, with a total membership of more than 66 million. As it celebrated its 60th anniversary in Lund during the 20-27 March 2007 Council meeting and Church Leadership Consultation, Posfay was one of the few people present at both events, 60 years apart.
Isolation
Barely 26, Posfay was one of the youngest delegates at the assembly. The mood in Lund was hopeful, he recalls, despite a Europe in which millions of people were homeless. He hoped "the LWF would represent a continual development of the world, especially the spiritual side." Many places in Europe, Hungary for instance, were "isolated theologically." Connecting Lutherans across the world would allow for resource sharing.
Relationship building was crucial, Posfay says. Germany had sat on the "seat of sinners," and welcoming them into the LWF was important. "The LWF was something new, fresh, no discriminations," he says. "We started anew. We didn't ask, 'What did you do during the war?'"
Like a Thread
Since that first meeting in Lund, the LWF has run through Posfayâs life like a thread, weaving a tapestry of a life of church service. Unable to return to Hungary, Posfay stayed in Sweden, waiting for news from home. "Not even our parents dared to write," he recalls. He was open to other options and when an offer came from the United States he took it, and went on to serve three years with a Hungarian congregation in Cleveland, Ohio.
He took the next offer, too, and developed a Hungarian-Lutheran congregation in Venezuela, where he met and married his wife Emese Ava, a Hungarian-born Argentine. While in Central America he took a sabbatical in Lund and finished a doctoral thesis on Luther's Small Catechism and the Holy Spirit. He worked in Venezuela until the next offer, which launched him back into the LWF, some 24 years after Lund.
It was 1971. Posfay was attending an LWF conference in Tokyo as an observer from Latin America when he received an offer: would he work as the Latin American secretary for the LWF, based in Geneva? He had until noon the following day to decide.
Unable to contact his wife by phone, Posfay agonized over the decision. "I went back to my hotel and prayed and read the Bible," he says. Then this epiphany: he remembered that some nine years before, while traveling in Geneva, his wife exclaiming she loved it so much she could live there. And so they did.
Posfay worked 15 years in the then LWF Department of Church Cooperation [now Department for Mission and Development], so-called because "we didn't want to use the word 'mission.' It had a very negative connotation," he says. "The Russian government was using the word 'mission'".
Optimistic
Posfay retired at the age of 65. He and his wife still live in Geneva, where he does volunteer work with a Hungarian congregation.
Sixty years after that first LWF meeting in Lund, he remains optimistic about the LWF. Simply, "it is still a good organization." He believes that the challenge for the LWF now is to remain focused on congregations and supporting that strong foundation.
Posfayâs advice for the individual is simple: "Get acquainted with people in other countries. Learn [another] language," he says. Many gathered in Lund from 20 to 27 March 2007 for the LWF Council meeting and 60th anniversary celebrations hopefully did just that. (805 words)
Rev. Lisa A. Smith (USA) interviewed George Posfay during the LWF Council meeting in Lund, Sweden. Smith is a member of the LWF young communicators' training program, "Towards a Communicating Communion - A Youth Vision."
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(The LWF is a global communion of Christian churches in the Lutheran tradition. Founded in 1947 in Lund, Sweden, the LWF currently has 140 member churches in 78 countries all over the world, with a total membership of nearly 66.7 million. The LWF acts on behalf of its member churches in areas of common interest such as ecumenical and interfaith relations, theology, humanitarian assistance, human rights, communication, and the various aspects of mission and development work. Its secretariat is located in Geneva, Switzerland.)
[Lutheran World Information (LWI) is the LWF's information service. Unless specifically noted, material presented does not represent positions or opinions of the LWF or of its various units. Where the dateline of an article contains the notation (LWI), the material may be freely reproduced with acknowledgment.]
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