David Pandy-Szekeres receives E. H. Johnson Award.

David Pandy-Szekeres is the second person from Eastern Europe in recent years to win the E. H. Johnson Award for mission on the cutting edge.

David was born in Hamilton and grew up in Delhi, Ontario, son of Laszlo Pandy-Szekeres, a minister of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto as well as the University of Bordeaux, France, and from the Reformed theological seminary in Budapest.

In the late 1970s, he went to Hungary and, during the last years of the Communist era, played an active role in the Hungarian Reformed Church and its efforts to reform itself. During that period, he also took part in relief operations, often taking relief supplies and people from Hungary across the border into Romania at great risk.

David now lives in Ukraine with his wife, Anna, and their three young children. He is active in establishing Christian schools for the Hungarian-speaking minority in Ukraine as well as serving as supervisor of missions, general director of schools, and public relations officer for the Reformed Church of the subCarpathian Ukraine. He has been active in attempting to bring renewal to border churches that had been isolated and neglected during the Communist regimes. Since 1987, he has organized summer camps for disadvantaged children and orphans in Hungary, Romania and Croatia.

The award was presented to David on June 5 at a luncheon held at York University during the meetings of the 127th General Assembly. Present for the ceremony were David's mother, his sister and his two brothers and their families. Also present for the occasion were Rev. Russell and Margaret Hall who initially discovered Laszlo Pandy while visiting patients in the hospital in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, shortly after the Pandys had immigrated to Canada.

When introducing David, Marjorie Ross said that most recipients of the award have been either one of our own or someone from a partner church. "David PandySzekeres' she said, "is the first person to be both one of us and one of them."

The luncheon began with Rev. Ronald Mulchey, a member of the trustees of the fund, recalling personal remembrances of E. H. Johnson. "He inspired me," Mulchey recalled, "to sign up for Nigeria." However, the Nigerian civil war intervened. Later, he served as a co-worker with Ted Johnson at church offices.

In his address, David spoke of Eastern Europe under communism where "those who openly practised their Christian faith too enthusiastically or too devotedly were appropriately bridled" and where "the Christian faith was methodically excluded from all aspects of everyday life [and] atheism took hold by attrition."

"The Lord of history had reserved a different vision for this part of the world," he went on, when, in 1989, "the Communist story collapsed beneath the weight of its accumulated sins."

Following that collapse, Christians began to recover the idea of mission both in terms of rebuilding former institutions of the Reformed Church, like schools, and reaching out to generations who have never heard the gospel.

David became the director of the first missionary training school of the Reformed Church of the sub-Carpathian Ukraine. Graduates serve in various areas, including new work in gypsy communities.

David Pandy-Szekeres is now an overseas staff member with International Ministries of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. He is the 19th winner of theE. H. Johnson Award, the first given in 1983.