by Dénes Horváth-Hegyi
An already five-year-long initiative in Budapest, Hungary, the Thomas Mass (Tamás Mise) borrows for the season 2010-2011 the thematic of the LWF 11th Assembly: „Give Us Today Our Daily Bread”. Rooted from Finland, the youth service uses unconventional liturgical forms to persuade outsiders that Church is able to mediate traditional christian values in a clear, comprehensible and effective way.
The appellation derives from Doubting Thomas, Jesus’ famous disciple who could believe the Resurrection only by touching and seeing. As Jesus finally let him touch his wounds, animators of the Thomas Mass let also participants experience the Gospel not only through the speech and the communion, but through many different interactive tools such as multimedia, creative animations and modernized hymns.
As the „threshold stimulus” of the Youth of today is getting higher and higher in our continuously developing world, Church can not afford ignoring modern forms. Many young people don’t even think of entering God’s house because of the society’s negative stigmatization of the Church which is usually considered as „boring”, „old-fashioned” and „totally not cool”. Also called „the searchers’ service”, Thomas Mass is an amazing initiative to break these stereotypes against the people of Christ. In a country like Hungary, where the Bible’s teaching and the faith were systematically destroyed by atheist ideas during 40 years (in communist times), Christians need to fight against Church-related prejudices after all.
The Lutheran Church in Hungary has fruitful relationships among others with Finnish congregations, and the presence of Thomas Mass shows clearly how ideas from one Church to another infiltrate by brother-like exchanges – without borders. The alternative youth worship is run by the cooperation of six congregations in Budapest, and being brought into effect in several other Lutheran communion in the countryside.
Each time that gathers (every second months) the congregation of the Thomas Mass aims to advocate with his donations a group of indigent people. October’s offering (for the second time) has been sent to children living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. (The Daily Bread was the first theme of the season – according to the order of words of the Hungarian translation of Our Father, and referring to the Harvest Thanksgiving.)
We, the animators of the Thomas Mass, hope to become with our enthusiasm credible lights of the gospel so that to make „the doubting Youth” experience the salvation of our Christ. We ask the Lutheran youth of the world to pray for our efforts!
Dénes Horváth-Hegyi
is part of the Thomas Mass animation group
based in Budapest, Hungary
