The Glorious Bride of Christ

“And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” 

~ Revelation 21:2

I was a freshman in college when I became a Christian. My mom led me to Christ. I was one of those girls who didn’t really know what to do in life, but I did know that I loved boys and found my worth in being wanted by boys. But I also believed that there is one true love. I did fall in love with a boy at the end of high school whom  I firmly believed was the one, I hurt so many people so that I could be with him and I lost my very best friend over that relationship. And he ended up breaking up with me, during my freshmen year of college while I was living in the city of Győr. I was devastated. I didn’t like who I had become. My boyfriend ruled my heart, and I couldn’t change. But my mom was already a Christian at the time, my grandma led her to Christ,  so she explained the gospel to me and what Christ did for me on the cross. I didn’t care much about being saved from eternal damnation but I did want to be forgiven and I wanted to be free from my ex-boyfriend. So I prayed to receive Christ. 

Before all this, I would go home from college almost every weekend so I could be with my boyfriend. And after we broke up and I became a Christian I thought it was best not to go home for a while. All I wanted was to get to know Christ better. My grandma sent me cassette tapes full of sermons and anything she could find that talked about the Bible and Jesus. Jesus became everything to me, the more I learned about His love for me the more I loved him. 

Eventually, I had to go back home and face my past. Three or four months later on  Easter, I went home, and some of my friends invited me to go to a party. I had no desire to drink and party anymore but I went and met my ex-boyfriend and we started dating again. But this time I was different - I made it my goal to show Christ to him. There was not really a church in my hometown that I could go to but there was my grandma, my mom, and a few of my grandma’s friends. They got together on Sundays to listen to a sermon and discuss it. About once a month a pastor would come from Budapest but we had no pastor to regularly shepherd the sheep. There was nowhere I could invite my friends. Without a shepherd, I didn’t understand the sanctity of marriage and that I was living in sin. It was only after reading Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot that I knew we needed to break up. But ‘even if break up’ I thought, ‘I could never live a life so pure, my heart is too sinful’. But I knew I had to make a choice. So I did, we broke up. From that point on I could freely pursue Christ with my whole heart, the One who deserves my love more than anyone or anything.

Once again I ended up in my College town but this time I fully moved out of my parent’s house and made the city of Győr my home. And I really wanted to find a church and there were not a whole lot of options, especially not one with young people in it so I was discouraged.  When I mentioned this to one of my coworkers at a business event, she got so excited. She was also a believer but lived in Budapest. She told me about two missionaries from Texas, Larry and Melinda. They lived in Győr and led her to Christ when she was in college. She organized a meeting for us at McDonalds in Győr. 

Larry and Melinda didn’t speak Hungarian and I didn’t really speak English. I took two of my friends with me. The missionaries wrote Romans 6:22-23 on a piece of paper and they drew the Bridge to Life diagram. Looking at the diagram we understood enough that they were asking where we stood. I immediately knew where I stood. From that point on I started going to their Bible studies. They had one on Tuesday nights and on Sunday mornings, they became my little house church. And I was beyond happy when I finally had a place where I could invite my friends to hear the Bible. 

Previously I could share the gospel and I had some material to give out but I had no place to invite them where we could grow in our faith and be cared for. Fast forward about a year I moved into the “Friday Night” flat with a girl from Texas, Ally. She became my sister and one of my very best friends. We hosted the youth group on Friday nights (that is where the name of the flat came from), and a few months after that a team from Ally’s church came for a week. That was the first time I met Joel - he was part of that team.

I wish I could tell you we fell in love at first sight but that would not be true. We both loved Christ and wanted to serve Him for the rest of our lives. And that was the foundation of our friendship and later our love for each other. It was the purest relationship I have ever been in he treated me with full respect and tenderness. While our relationship grew through Skype I got to visit him once in Texas to help us decide how to move forward. No boy ever treated me like he did, he would not give way to temptation and tried to avoid it - he wanted to keep our relationship pure until our wedding night. It truly blew my mind and I never felt safer in my life and more loved than in his arms. On August 16, 2014, we got married in Győr. This was the most beautiful day of my life after coming to Christ. We spent 75 beautiful days together serving our little house church living in the Friday night flat (Ally had already moved back to Texas). 

Before we got married we decided I would be the one who moved after the wedding since he could not provide for me in Hungary. We didn’t know getting a green card would take a long time. He stayed with me as long as he could but he had to return back to the US to finish his education and continue college ministry at First Baptist Church Amarillo and I couldn’t go back with him until my green card came. It was very very difficult and we had no idea when I would receive my green card. When we said goodbye we made arrangements so he could come back for Christmas. I kept hoping that maybe we could go back together. 

Larry and Melinda took wonderful care of the Friday night youth group and they wanted to be as prepared as they could once it was time for me to go. An Irish girl came to be my new roommate to take over after I left. Christmas came, and so came the news with it. Our attorney said not to expect anything for another 4+ months.  My heart shattered into pieces. 

I stayed at the flat for another month or two but the youth group was ready for its next phase and its next leader. And I was ready for the next phase of my life too. We all thought the best would be if I moved back to my hometown with my parents and enjoyed time with them before the big move. There was only one problem - I couldn’t find a church. So there I was a wife without a husband and a Christian without a church. Total misery in one sense, yet in another I experienced Jesus’ saving and keeping power but it also helped me realize the importance of Christ’s church in a believer’s life. 

Dr Harry  Reeder pointed out in his sermon “Christ’s Church For All the Ages” that “when people work through things like a geographical dislocation, the last thing they usually think about is a church. Do I have a job, a place to live, what are the schools like, a hospital nearby? They will work through all of those things before they make a move but never even think about the church. Is there a solid, Bible-believing, evangelical, faithful church that is serving the Lord effectively?”

Well, I certainly didn’t think about how miserable I would be in one of the hardest seasons of my life without a loving house church; a place I was fed weekly with biblical teaching and where I was able to serve. I had my grandma, my mom, and a few other believers around me, but after experiencing the blessings of the local church it was just not the same. Not the same when you have a place where you can go weekly on Sundays to worship the Lord, partake in the Lord’s supper, see baptisms, and have a pastor who faithfully preaches the Word. Not only that but to have a place where you can do life together, have weekly bible studies and prayer meetings. 

If you, dear reader, are a Christian who loves the local church and experiences its blessings you probably got a taste of this kind of hardship during COVID-19 when you couldn’t see your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ face to face, when you couldn’t sing the praises of Our great God together. You couldn’t be served or serve others with your gifts. You knew that something was missing something was not right. And to this day my mom’s great sadness is that while she can share the gospel with the young and old, there is no church she can take them to. If she has no church to fold them into all she will see around her are baby Christians struggling through life like a baby or a child without a home. So that is why after moving to the US it broke my heart/our hearts when we heard the news that Larry and Melinda were suddenly pulled out of Hungary. We heard how the church struggled afterward, there was not really anybody who was equipped to keep it going. Our church in Texas sent us back with a team twice but there was only so much we could do. The members slowly fell away from the church and from faith, only a few remained faithful. Even while we were at seminary when I went back every year to visit there were fewer and fewer people with whom I could connect. Sometimes I even got on to Joel “Why can’t we just drop everything and go back to ‘You want to be a pastor and a preacher after all’”, but he gently reminded me how he needed to be equipped, he needed to be prepared to preach the whole counsel of God. And at Westminster, he received just that. 

Although while we were at seminary the desire remained to somehow serve the Hungarians in the future, it wasn’t until the third year that we felt strongly we needed to pursue that right out of seminary. By that time, we belonged to the PCA (Presbyterian Church of America), and in the Presbyterian world, you need to complete a year-long internship after seminary before you can become ordained as a teaching elder. One of our professors, Dr. Currie, thought it would be beneficial for us to do that at Briarwood PCA here in Birmingham.  Briarwood is a very mission-minded church and we could learn a lot from Pastor Harry Reeder. Pastor Reeder had a big heart for the local church and young ministers. This heart was shared by Briarwood’s founding pastor, Frank Barker. Dr. Currie said this about Dr. Barker: “What Dr Barker’s ministry was marked by and founded by was not just his amazing evangelistic gift but his commitment to prayer and we want the pastors that we send from Westminster Seminary to be men who lead from their knees, who are depending on God to do more than we can possibly ask or imagine because they are praying.”

This in a nutshell, is the work that we are passionate about: not only to plant a church in Győr and continue the work that Larry and Melinda started, but to equip pastors and young men and to see churches pop up in small towns like my hometown. We can not do this without partakers in the gospel without fellow workers in Christ who pray for us and support us or even come with us. So Would you pray about this, dear reader, and consider partnering with us?

If you’d like to partner with us you can do so by going to https://www.ufm.org.uk/member/joel-and-eszti-richards/