Hungarian Pentecostal Church Credited with “Kicking George Soros Out of Hungary”

From Charisma News:

Some say Europe is post-Christian. But although there’s a great deal of spiritual darkness in that continent, pockets of revival are also springing up. In a recent interview with evangelist and pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, he told me how God is moving across many European nations through his revival tour, Europe Ablaze….

One area where the Spirit of God is stirring up revival is Budapest, Hungary. Faith Church in Budapest, where Howard-Browne recently ministered, has experienced revival nonstop for 20 years. This Pentecostal church single-handedly kicked George Soros out of Hungary, Howard-Browne says.

Howard-Browne is a long-serving neo-Pentecostal evangelist, best-known for his involvement in the 1990s “Toronto Blessing”. These days, he also revels in the validation he has received from physical proximity to Donald Trump – he was among evangelical figures who laid hands on Trump in the Oval Office last year, and prior to Trump’s election Howard-Browne declared him to be “the New World Order’s Worst Nightmare”, who would frustrate Satan’s plan to bring about an End-Times one-world religion.

The above article is based on an interview between Howard-Browne and Charisma’s owner, Stephen Strang. For his part, Strang has written two books elucidating the supernatural significance of Trump’s presidency, one of which – God and Donald Trump -Trump obligingly waved around at journalists.

The Faith Church in Budapest is headed by Sándor Németh (or Németh Sándor, according to the Hungarian practice of placing the family name first), and according to Howard-Browne their meeting was a last-minute affair arranged at the prompting of God – indeed, an actual angel appeared to Németh with the instruction to invite Howard-Browne to the church.

According to his official biopage, Németh is a former seminarian who left Catholicism and affiliated with the Charismatic movement in the 1970s – he and his wife were ordained by the Good News Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1980, and Németh was particularly influenced by the British Pentecostal revivalist Derek Prince, whose ministry placed a particular emphasis on spiritual warfare against demons. Starting out as an illegal underground church, Németh says he now has 70,000 members nationwide plus “a support base of several hundred thousand”, and that his international ministry reaches “the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Romania, the Ukraine, Kirgizstan and Cambodia”.

Németh’s church also owns ATV, which is Hungary’s third-largest 24-news station, and his Patmos Records publishing house produces Hungarian translations of American evangelists ranging from Jonathan Cahn (blogged here) to Joel Osteen and the late Kenneth Hagin, as well as secular works by the likes of Geert Wilders (as reported here) and Sebastian Gorka (1). Information in English is scare, although Németh’s influence in the country – and support for Viktor Orbán – was critically chronicled by the US-based Budapest Beacon, which drew on various media sources in Hungary before the decline of the country’s media plurality.

It is not clear how exactly Németh’s church supposedly “kicked George Soros out of Hungary”, but I think the idea is that the popularity of Németh’s church squeezed Soros out of the marketplace of ideas, rather than that Németh is responsible for laws in Hungary that suppress Soros’s civil society activities. Howard-Browne also reports Németh as saying that

So [Faith Church Pastor Nemeth Sandor] said to me, ‘Look, I need your help, because Soros is trying to work to shut my money down and is attacking tithing and everything.'”

I take this to mean that the church has come under some critical scrutiny as regards donations and financing, and that “Soros” here is a bogeyman thought to be behind negative coverage. Németh has previously identified Soros (Soros György) as an opponent of ” the anti-global, anti-immigration, national and Christian political forces in Europe”, and as responsible for the EU’s Sargentini Report, which criticised increasing authoritarianism in Hungary.

Charisma News has a history of running anti-Soros stories – I previously discussed one effort here.

Footnote

1. The Gorka book is A Dzsihád legyőzése, a Hungarian translation of his Defeating Jihad. Although Gorka is himself of Hungarian heritage, the book was translated by Péter Morvay (Morvay Petér), a producer at ATV and editor of Faith Church’s Hetek magazine. This site shows that it formed the basis for a formal presentation with military and defence officials at Hungary’s army headquarters.