A Reflection on Being on Mission in Hungary

In July, I had the privilege of travelling on mission with my dad, Peter Herbeck, to Budapest, Hungary, where we were able to serve at two different summer camps led by Deacon Zoltán & Panni Kunszabó and the New Jerusalem Community.

YOUNG ADULT SUMMER CAMP

The first week, we served young adults who are eighteen to twenty-five at Lelkes Napok, a camp hosted by multiple communities in Budapest that minister to young adults. Each day at camp, there would be preaching and teaching in the morning, followed by prayer workshops, activities, Mass, and then preaching, adoration and worship each evening. Each morning, we were able to preach the Gospel and help invite these young people into a deeper encounter with the Lord.
During the camp for young adults, we focused on sharing the core of Jesus’ message:

We have been given new life in Him.

As many participants were already following the Lord, we encouraged them to go even deeper in their relationship with him and to begin to live differently each day through the power of the Holy Spirit because of the new life God has given us in his Son.

One of the things I was particularly moved by was the importance of personal relationships on the road to eternity. I was sitting at lunch with a group of young women in their late teens and early twenties just talking about the Lord in a little small group. As I developed relationships with these women, it reminded me of the small groups we run at home in the United States. As I learned their hearts and their stories, as we prayed with them, and ultimately, as we loved them, the power of what the Lord was doing was increasingly powerful, intimate, and precious. Our preaching was important and necessary, but Jesus showed me how much he wants to do when we deliver his message in the context of relationships where we truly love the people to whom we are ministering.

FAMILY SUMMER CAMP

Our second week in Hungary was spent at a camp for families run by the New Jerusaem Community. With a similar schedule of preaching, teaching, camp activities, Mass, worship and adoration as the young adult camp, we embarked on a series of teachings about Jesus’ warnings about the end times in Mark 13.

This week was particularly beautiful because the attendees included many young families who came to camp for a whole week to encounter Christ and to receive deeper formation as a family. Their commitment to leading their families to Christ was inspiring and amazing to witness, as the Lord ministered to these families in such a beautiful way. One particular day stands out to me; my dad preached the deceptions that will come in the last days before Christ’s return in the morning. In the evening, the whole camp gathered and began the night by diving into Revelation 1, in which John receives a vision of Jesus standing in the center of his Church. We made a deliberate choice not to do prayer ministry that evening, and stayed completely and totally focused on the person of Jesus that was before us in Eucharistic adoration. As Revelation 1 was broken open, we heard Jesus described as the beautiful and magnificent One in God’s word and we worshipped in the Eucharist.

This sounds so simple, perhaps it is like something we do often at our church or in our community, but the Holy Spirit was with us in a special way because the role of the Holy Spirit is to exalt Jesus. So often, when we pray and worship, we focus on Jesus and ourselves, but that week, as we walked through Jesus’ warnings on the end times, instead of caving into fear and despair, we chose to focus on him. We chose to worship him, to exalt him, and to ask for a deeper and clearer revelation of him. There was both an intense weight and an intense freedom to our worship as we focused solely on Jesus.

While there was a lot of fruit from our ten days on mission, the Lord clearly showed us that he wants the preaching of the Gospel to be supported by personal relationships. He showed us that, throughout the communities he is building and bringing together all over the world, the Holy Spirit wants to work powerfully by lifting up and exalting the name of Jesus.

As I reflect on our mission, we were loved, we loved, and we lifted up the name of Jesus each day. Friends, let us commit to doing these things in our daily lives no matter where we go or where we are planted.