Go, stand and speak...

Olathe Bible Church

12/7/97

Acts 5:17-42

“Go, stand and speak…”

The Possibilities of Political Action

“To explain the collapse of communism most commentators have focused exclusively on the aspects seen comfortably through the conventional looking-glass of analysis:  economics and politics.  But . . . what has been largely overlooked is the most important aspect of the collapse:  it was a moral and spiritual revolution.”

In December 1989, Romania seemed to many to be one of the least likely places for a popular uprising among the eastern bloc countries.  Nikolai Ceausescu, the country’s Communist dictator, appeared to be firmly in control.  But neither Ceausescu nor the world had taken into account the power that can reside in a single man of faith.

Lazlo Tokes may have appeared an unlikely source of the fall of Romanian Communism.  A member of Romania’s ethnic Hungarian minority, Tokes was, for most of his life, a simple pastor in the Hungarian Reformed Church in the Transylvanian town of Timisora.  Then, in March 1989, everything changed.

Indignant at the religious oppression of the Ceausescu regime, Tokes gave a television interview in which he blasted the government policy of religious persecution and forced relocation of ethnic Hungarians.  Quickly, Tokes moved from being an obscure member of a minority faith to a national symbol of resistance.

He paid a price for that notoriety.  The government suspended Tokes’s right to preach and confined him and his family to their home.  Members of his congregation also suffered reprisals.  But Tokes stood firm, and finally the government had had enough.  On December 15, the police came to evict his family from the house where they had been confined and to arrest Tokes.

Aware of his impending fate, Tokes asked members of his church to witness the government action.  And so, on the fifteenth they gathered – not just his parishioners, but thousands of townspeople.  Ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians stood together; Catholic, Baptist, Orthodox, and Reformed believers joined forces circling the home of Lazlo Tokes to prevent his arrest.

Soon the protest spread throughout the town, and the military was sent in to put an end to the demonstration.  Men, women, and children were mowed down by automatic weapons, and Tokes and his wife were arrested.  But for the government, the end had come.  As word spread of Tokes’s fate, so did the revolt.  On December 22, 1989, crowds gathered in Bucharest in support of Tokes.  First chanting “God exists!” then, at the behest of a Baptist minister, thousands knelt to recite the Lord’s Prayer.  The moral authority of the Communist regime was gone, destroyed by the religious faith of one man who would not yield.