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A Shorter Way to Fall
Brendon Sylvester on a Romanian Cautionary Tale for Fallible Pastors
In the 1980s, at the height of Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist dictatorship, the underground church in Romania operated clandestine youth camps deep in the Carpathian Mountains. Missionaries, pastors, church members, and youth sought solace in the wilderness, to pray and worship outside the government--sanctioned church—away from Ceaușescu's crushing grip on religious practice. My father attended these camps as an American missionary. There, one summer, he met a young man named Petr Cseboli and formed a fast friendship. Cseboli was one of only seven students enrolled in the tiny Hungarian Reformed Seminary, which was only allowed to exist so Romania could present a facade of religious freedom to the West.
My father spoke no Romanian; Cseboli spoke no English. But over the four years they worked together, their love—for the camp's young people, for Christ, and for each other—bonded them in spiritual kinship. My father describes how the two of them once clasped hands in prayerful friendship as they hiked up the mountain to worship God.
Thriving Under Dread & Deprivation
My father smuggled Bibles from the safety of Austria across the border into Romania and Hungary in specially outfitted cars and campers. To him and his fellow smugglers, Cseboli was a champion of the faith. Cseboli was studying to become a pastor in a country where professing Christians were refused work, and where it was illegal to proselytize young people or to meet in groups of more than five outside the state church, which itself was strictly regulated. Still, he came to the mountains every summer, zealous to share the Scriptures with the young and to worship Christ with abandon. My father, in attending the youth camps, risked only deportation to the Netherlands; Cseboli risked imprisonment in the barbaric Pitești Prison.
In Romania, believers lived communally and hand-transcribed hymnals for their brother churches. They risked discovery in order to evangelize the hitchhikers they picked up along the back roads. For years, food rationing was so strict that each family received just one kilogram of meat—about four chicken breasts—to last them an entire month. Basic conveniences—pencils, aspirin, eyeglasses, cans of Coke—were so scarce that my father's team once successfully bribed a police officer with a single bar of Dial soap. In this world of dread and deprivation, Cseboli's faith thrived.
Cseboli continued attending the camps and pastoring until the Romanian people overthrew Ceaușescu in 1989 and executed him at a military base outside Bucharest.
Taken Down by Clothes & Furniture
The Revolution of 1989 swept the Socialist Republic of Romania out of power, and the new National Salvation Front established democratic reforms. New relations were initiated with the West, and in 1991 Romania began to privatize Ceaușescu's state-owned enterprises. During this time of economic instability, churches and NGOs in Western Europe flooded Romania with sorely needed supplies—canned meat and sausages, boots and winter coats.
Cseboli was given supplies to distribute to his church, which had finally come out of hiding, and for a few years, he did. He had resisted the Romanian principalities for nearly a decade, but soon surrendered to the subtler powers of material wealth. He squirreled away goods: clothes to wear, a comfortable bed to sleep on, pills to sell on the black market. "This isn't the church's—this is mine," he thought to himself. But his lapses were eventually discovered, and the church asked him to leave. He moved on to pastor a different congregation, but he did the same things there. Again, he was forced to leave.
Having looked up to Cseboli as he did, my father, upon returning to Hungary in 2005, was shocked to hear about his downfall. "After putting up with communism," my father said, "to be taken down by clothes and furniture seemed crazy to me." Cseboli boldly loved Christ when his country hated him, but he failed to love his congregation when his country became more tolerant. When living under oppressive conditions, he had never been tempted by personal profit, by free goods that could be sold at the expense of his congregation. Those lapses were easier to rationalize than neglecting a nation's soul in obedience to an anti-Christian regime.
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