Sources for the institutional relationship between the Lutheran Diocese of Bánya and the Pentecostals from the 1940s

Abstract

With the outbreak of the Second World War, a state of emergency was declared, restricting the congregational rights of Neo-Protestant and other small church communities, and a decree issued by the Minister of the Interior, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer, even banned their operation, including the denomination known as the Assemblies of God (Istengyülekezet), which was specifically mentioned in the bulletin. József Tomi, as the pastor of the Pentecostal congregation called Assemblies of God, which met in the prayer house at 7 Aréna Street in Budapest, and on behalf of the central organization of their community, the Federation of the Assemblies of God, together with István Siroki, initiated negotiations with the Lutheran Church to establish the legitimacy of their community. They found understanding and willingness to help from the Lutheran Church, namely, the Lutheran Bishop of the Bánya Diocese, Sándor Raffay.The Lutheran Church helped their community by allowing the Pentecostals to become members of the “historical” denomination through a regular conversion, which meant that the Aréna Street Congregation officially belonged to the Damjanich Street pastoral office of the Lutheran Church, under the leadership of Deacon Lajos Kemény, and from then on they could use their church as a prayer house of the Lutheran Church. On June 5, 1946, the Minister of the Interior revoked the decree banning them, so the denominations that had been illegal since 1939, were once again free to operate. So far, we have not been able to find any account of the more than five years of semilegal operation beyond the few facts mentioned above, and we have not been able to read any documents or studies about the negotiations and coexistence of the Pentecostals and the Lutheran Church, or the problems that resulted from this.The published sources present the material found during the research in all the relevant archival fonds of the Lutheran Central Archives, with detailed explanatory annotations. They reveal that Bishop Raffay’s and Deacon Kemény’s support was accompanied by internal resistance and confusion, while it required special attention in an already difficult wartime period, and we can see that the infiltration of new doctrines and religious practices, which caused unrest in the Pen-tecostal denominations, was also a problem for the adopting church.