We commemorate, because we must remember! One who doesn’t remember the past will have no future. We need to know what happened, we need to make a memento and we need to remember who we really are and what we tend to do in certain circumstances. Human wickedness has no limits.
But we must not only look far, since organized genocides also happened in the recent past: remember Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, the massacre in Srebrenica, or today: Syria, the Middle East war zones or the wars in Africa.
Many claim that people are basically born with a good nature, but the Bible clearly states that people are inherently evil, they are born with a nature to satisfy their own desires and they will inevitably commit sins. This is shown in Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.”
On one of the first pages of the Holy Scripture we can already see Kain, the first murderer who killed his brother, because he was jealous of him.
Gypsies are a special people of God, since others wanted to silence them, to chase them away and to destroy them all the time. But just as the Jewish people, the more the Roma people were attacked, the stronger they became and the stronger they are.
Today, on 2 August, together with citizens of many countries we commemorate the Roma Holocaust.
Wikipedia describes that tragedy like this, I quote:
“The Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust—also known as the Porajmos (Romani pronunciation: IPA: [pʰoɽajˈmos]), the Pharrajimos (“Cutting up”, “Fragmentation”, “Destruction”), and the Samudaripen (“Mass killing”)—was the effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies to commit genocide against Europe’s Romani people.
Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying Gypsies as “enemies of the race-based state”, thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, in some ways the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Jewish Holocaust.
Historians estimate that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. Ian Hancock puts the death toll as high as 1.5 million.”
End of quote.
I have mentioned the past and the future, but we also need to consider the present. I wonder how we look at our Roma fellow citizens and how what we think of them? What would we do, if there was an obvious act of violence against them? Would we remain silent, would we escape or would we rather reach out to help them? What do we do in order for them to not only hear phrases, but to experience that they are useful and respected members of society? It is so easy to judge them: it was their fault to fall into the pit, they should manage to come out of it on their own also. If we look at their history, they have always been outcasts without any rights, people in persecution or in sufferance within all the countries, yet it was us who have stolen all their opportunities and pushed them into that pit.
There is a kind of Holocaust even today: in hatred, in speech, in action and all those things can make a deadly wound on their souls or even on their bodies.
Yet, God is merciful, who turns to the Roma people today to lift them up. The Japanese or even the Chinese “economic miracle” will become small compared to what God is going to do for the Roma people. They will receive compensation here on Earth for all the bad deeds that had been committed against them.
Jesus says many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. Those who feel themselves in position, in security and very high today will be following Roma people to even touch the edge of their clothes, because God will make the Roma to be first and make the first to be last.
The future is in the Roma! The best investment today is to invest into the Roma, because the cross of Jesus Christ makes them entirely new people. The old nature dies, disappears and a brand new nature emerges and grows in them.
Let’s remember, do the right thing today and expect the good future!
May the blessing of God be on all of us!
Albert Durko
Mission Leader
Appeal for continuous prayer warfare
/in Articles, Videos /by Laszlo AdamikThe National Prayer Network of Hungarian Gypsy Missions International calls all Christians to fight in prayer.
The Hungarian Gypsy Missions International Announces National Prayer and Fasting
/in Articles, Videos /by Laszlo AdamikThe message of Christmas: God’s response for you is Jesus Christ
/in Articles /by Laszlo AdamikWe are in the time when the nights are longer in the physical world, darkness is getting greater. It is not only the physical world where we face difficulties, but in the souls of people as well. Fear and uncertainty keep attacking more aggressively. Fear from the future: what else can come, what is waiting on us.
Thick clouds cover our nations, our continent, even the whole world.
Yet, into this dark, hopeless, depressed time full of fear, comes the encouraging Word of God as a ball of fire which brings light to everything. It sound like this in the Old Testament from the book of Isaiah, chapter 9 verses 1-2:
“Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress… The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.”
God’s message in the most difficult times is: There is solution! The light will shine up!
Then on Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night, a multitude of angels appeared in great light in front of the shepherds to proclaim: the Redeemer, the Savior, the Deliverer, the Messiah, Jesus Christ was born.
God’s response to the darkness is Jesus Christ!
God’s response to the darkness in your life is Jesus Christ!
God’s response to all your questions and problems is Jesus Christ!
When Jesus was at the peak of his earthly ministry, He was crucified for our sins. And there, at that time, in the middle of the day there became darkness on the land. There, at that time Jesus took all the darkness upon himself.
Yet, His resurrection has been shining light on our lives ever since.
You are important to God! God loves you! God will not leave you alone with your problems!
God’s response for you is Jesus Christ!
Call upon Him! Get to see Him! Receive Him!
This way you will have Life, this way you can become victorious over everything.
Albert Durko
President of HGMI
Mission and integrating education
/in News /by Laszlo AdamikReview of the 3rd Gypsy Mission Methodology handbook .
Jesus Christ “…loved everybody, taught everybody, He loved to make the little people great… Let’s think about the ethnic minorities, and the Gypsies among them… Let’s see, and let’s believe in the great plans and intentions of God, when He calls us to go amongst the little and despised ones!”
The united publication of the Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal and Reformed Churches’ Gypsy missions tries to offer new visions and practical approaches by showing some examples to those who work hard to raise the living standards of the Roma, and especially to those who try to achieve this goal by working with children.
The time of collecting vessels
/in News /by Laszlo AdamikShort introduction video of Hungarian Gypsy Missions International.
“It is not a good motivation if I want to minister in order to seek fulfilment. Ministry means the death of one’s self, total humility, the washing of the feet of Roma people. I’m not the great one in that situation… rather I’m the servant, used by God…”(Albert Durko, mission leader)
Commemoration – Roma Holocaust Memorial Day
/in Articles /by Laszlo AdamikWe commemorate, because we must remember! One who doesn’t remember the past will have no future. We need to know what happened, we need to make a memento and we need to remember who we really are and what we tend to do in certain circumstances. Human wickedness has no limits.
But we must not only look far, since organized genocides also happened in the recent past: remember Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, the massacre in Srebrenica, or today: Syria, the Middle East war zones or the wars in Africa.
Many claim that people are basically born with a good nature, but the Bible clearly states that people are inherently evil, they are born with a nature to satisfy their own desires and they will inevitably commit sins. This is shown in Psalm 51:5: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.”
On one of the first pages of the Holy Scripture we can already see Kain, the first murderer who killed his brother, because he was jealous of him.
Gypsies are a special people of God, since others wanted to silence them, to chase them away and to destroy them all the time. But just as the Jewish people, the more the Roma people were attacked, the stronger they became and the stronger they are.
Today, on 2 August, together with citizens of many countries we commemorate the Roma Holocaust.
Wikipedia describes that tragedy like this, I quote:
“The Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust—also known as the Porajmos (Romani pronunciation: IPA: [pʰoɽajˈmos]), the Pharrajimos (“Cutting up”, “Fragmentation”, “Destruction”), and the Samudaripen (“Mass killing”)—was the effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies to commit genocide against Europe’s Romani people.
Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying Gypsies as “enemies of the race-based state”, thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, in some ways the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Jewish Holocaust.
Historians estimate that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time. Ian Hancock puts the death toll as high as 1.5 million.”
End of quote.
I have mentioned the past and the future, but we also need to consider the present. I wonder how we look at our Roma fellow citizens and how what we think of them? What would we do, if there was an obvious act of violence against them? Would we remain silent, would we escape or would we rather reach out to help them? What do we do in order for them to not only hear phrases, but to experience that they are useful and respected members of society? It is so easy to judge them: it was their fault to fall into the pit, they should manage to come out of it on their own also. If we look at their history, they have always been outcasts without any rights, people in persecution or in sufferance within all the countries, yet it was us who have stolen all their opportunities and pushed them into that pit.
There is a kind of Holocaust even today: in hatred, in speech, in action and all those things can make a deadly wound on their souls or even on their bodies.
Yet, God is merciful, who turns to the Roma people today to lift them up. The Japanese or even the Chinese “economic miracle” will become small compared to what God is going to do for the Roma people. They will receive compensation here on Earth for all the bad deeds that had been committed against them.
Jesus says many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. Those who feel themselves in position, in security and very high today will be following Roma people to even touch the edge of their clothes, because God will make the Roma to be first and make the first to be last.
The future is in the Roma! The best investment today is to invest into the Roma, because the cross of Jesus Christ makes them entirely new people. The old nature dies, disappears and a brand new nature emerges and grows in them.
Let’s remember, do the right thing today and expect the good future!
May the blessing of God be on all of us!
Albert Durko
Mission Leader
A little act of love
/in Articles /by Laszlo AdamikGypsyAid in cooperation with our Social Services Center were able to create some food packages and to deliver them to our clients at Social Services with the help of our social nurses.
Some clients were deeply moved by this little act of love, since some of them had never received any gift from anybody…
Some elderly people even wrote thanking letters to express their appreciation. You can see some of those below.
It’s Time To Believe Your Life Can Be Changed!
/in Articles /by Laszlo AdamikThere are many events organized in Budapest that have significant news value, with more and more Christian events among them. There was such an event in the BOK Sport Hall at last weekend, on 6th and 7th March named as “It’s Time To Believe Your Life Can Be Changed!” The organizers’ team, consisting of young pastors, had been working hard with the help of many volunteers to prepare this event of large significance.
During the morning and the afternoon there was a Pastors’ and Leaders’ Conference where Pastor Gary Wilkerson and Pastor Tim Dilena had been ministering, and there were evangelistic outreach events at the evenings with the testimony of Nicky Cruz. The conference was attended by 500-600 people – pastors, preachers, ministers and their wives – from several church denominations. At the beginning of each session a new music team of young people led the praise and worship. Afterwards the two speakers encouraged the audience in turns by inspiring, awakening, sometimes shaking messages to examine their former attitudes to ministry. They made the weekend unforgettable.
Gary Wilkerson is the Founding Pastor of The Springs Church (Colorado Springs, CO) and he is the President of World Challenge, an international mission organization that was founded by his father, David Wilkerson. His desire is to encourage and strengthen believers and pastors, and to give them theologically clean Biblical teachings about God. Gary works passionately on providing such tools to Christians as what they can use, to become people of active faith. He is also the leader of the Poverty Solutions mission branch, that is concerned with the feeding of people who live in poverty.
Tim Dilena used to be the Founding Pastor of Revival Tabernacle church in Detroit, Michigan for 30 years. He renovated a movie building for adult films with 900 seats, to create a church facility in downtown. His father, Paul Dilena was the Chief of Police in New York, when David Wilkerson arrived there to help young people who were in gangs. He was the one among the policemen who could see, those young people needed a Savior, and he actively helped the work of that young pastor. Until recently Tim had been the lead pastor of Our Savior’s Church (with 3,000 members) in Lafayette, Louisiana.
At the evening meetings several thousands of people were watching and singing along with the worship teams. The musicians and singers of the Summer Praise and Prophetic School were leading us into the presence of God at the first night, and the worship team of the Pentecostal Music Ministry proclaimed the glory of God in the evening on Saturday.
Probably the most anticipated part of both evenings was, when former gang leader, Nicky Cruz stepped on the stage to graphically proclaim the richness of God’s love, patience and mercy to all people through his own life story. Nicky was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His parents were a satanist priest and a witch, and they regularly held seances in their home. Nicky had repeatedly been a victim of physical abuse during his childhood, and he was rejected by his own parents. He escaped from the abuse to New York in the mid ’50-s, where he soon found himself in the vicious environment of gangs of young people, what was a serious problem in New York those days. Without fear, and seemingly being insensible to physical pain, he became the “warlord” of the infamous Mau Mau gang. Then one day a skinny preacher – David Wilkerson – arrived to the apparent war zone of the streets of Brooklyn, with a message to Nicky: Jesus loves you! At first Nicky gave a death threat to the preacher, but few weeks later at a meeting in St. Nicholas Arena organized for the gangs, he gave his life to God and exchanged his weapons to a Bible. During the last more than fifty years Nicky has been traveling around the world and has been preaching to several millions of desperate people, in order to give them hope. His life story can be read in the bestsellers titled “Run Baby, Run” and “The Cross and the Switchblade”, and can also be watched in the movie with the same title as the second book.
The culmination of the evenings was, when in reply to the encouragement from Nicky, many people came forward to the space in front of the stage, who decided to experience the same love and forgiving mercy of God, and to experience the same life changing miracle what the Bible calls new birth. Several hundreds of people made this decision during the two evenings, but there were some people, who decided to stay at their seats and prayed the sinners’ prayer there. We trust in God, that those decisions will last in many people, and later some of them might become such witnesses of Christ who will encourage others to make the same decision.
Many participants have expressed their gratitude for this extremely valuable and spiritually rich event; and we hope the lives of many people – leaders, pastors, preachers, church members and former non-believers – will become such examples to follow as the lives of Nicky Cruz, Gary Wilkerson and Tim Dilena.
Main Partners of the event:
5th Conference of 5 Protestant Gypsy Missions
/in Articles /by Laszlo AdamikIt was the 5th Annual Conference organised by 5 Hungarian protestant churches (Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal) of Hungary that was held in Debrecen on 8th February 2020. The event venue was the large church building of the Reformed Church, where around 1,500 people gathered together from the Carpathian Basin to praise the Lord and to listen to encouraging messages. Daniel D. Szabo, an elderly, yet still active Gypsy mission worker of the Reformed Church said the following words 10 years ago: “It is a surprising miracle from the Lord, that He uses the Gypsies to bring the different denominations closer to each other.” Many years later his words became true.
The theme of this conference was “Create in me a clean heart, O God” from Psalms 51:10. Zoltan Kurdi (Methodist Church) worded well the purpose of the day like this: “Our hearts are under attack, and the Word of God tells us to guard it above all else. That is why we need to clean our hearts.” Several other mission leaders and government representatives greeted the audience as well. The songs for this event were led by the Exodus Worship Team, who created good spiritual atmosphere at this special event.
Rupi Gabor from Korond (Romania) was the main preacher of the day. He emphasised the following: “God’s love is in the hearts of all people, and this is why the devil doesn’t seek the wardrobes in our houses, but the treasures in our hearts.” Then he addressed the audience with a challenge: “So let us throw out the bad things from there and ask God to give us a clean heart!” His sermon was followed by a prayer time.
Several Christians shared their testimonies during the afternoon session, when they testified about the great changes only God was able to perform in their lives. After each testimony the brave testifiers got prayed for by their own Gypsy mission leaders.
Peter Bakay closed the day with the following words: “We have heard about miracles–so let’s be brave to ask things from God!” God wants us to pray for our loved-ones, for our own success, for the growing of His Kingdom, and last, but not least, for clean hearts and steadfast spirit, in order to be able to stand firm in all challenges of our lives, and to have a live relationship with Him.
National Gypsy Mission Conference in Nagykallo
/in Articles /by Laszlo AdamikAlmost 1,000 people gathered together in the local sport hall in Nagykallo (Szabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg county, Hungary) for the National Pentecostal Gypsy Mission Conference on 16th November. The hall was an excellent scene for the several hundreds of interested Gypsy brothers and sisters, who had great anticipation in their hearts while they were taking their seats.
In the morning session we could listen to the sermon of our guest speaker, our Swedish brother, Pelle Hörnmark, who is the Chairman of the Pentecostal European Fellowship. After him the leader of our Mission, Albert Durko addressed the congregation. Following his sermon about repentance many people stood up to indicate their (re-)dedication to God and together we prayed for them.
After the lunch break there were lots of different programs, with a surprise. Ferenc Molnar “Caramel” who is a well known singer, shared his testimony about his faith in Jesus. Afterwards he confessed his faith in a song. His appearance on the stage was the surprise for the audience. Many of the young participants took some photos together with the popular performer.
This was followed by the encouraging speeches of three tested Gypsy leaders, pastors: Miklos Rezmuves (Nyirvasvari), Jeno Lakatos (Hajduhadhaz), Pal Peter (Zakanyszek). They are the pledge of our future, we believe and declare that many other similar Gypsy leaders will step up and step into the ministry, so the revival among Gypsy people can come to pass.
As a closure we could listen to the biblical thoughts of HGMI Mission Elder Mihaly Rezmuves, in Gypsy language, of course with the assistance of an interpreter.
Let us take time here to thank the praise and worship ministry of the two teams: the music team from the Christian Life Center church in Verpelet, and the new Budapest formation called EXODUS.
“Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with cries of joy. For the Lord Most High is awesome, the great King over all the earth.”
(Psalms 47:1-2, NIV)