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07/12/2017 08:30 AMAttila Tobias had been in the United States for one year with his wife, Zsuzsanna, when he was offered the position of pastor at the Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ in Wallingford. It was just in time—he was on his way home from the airport to ship his family’s packages back to Europe.
A decade later, he works at Yale, runs a Hungarian school on Sundays, and serves as pastor at the Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ in Wallingford while he, Zsuzsanna, and their daughter Julia, 5, live in Madison where they moved last November.
Attila didn’t set out wanting to be a pastor originally when he was growing up in Eastern Europe.
Attila, an ethnic Hungarian, was born in southern Slovakia, making him part of the largest ethnic minority in that country.
When he was in high school, Attila says he wanted to be a graphic designer or an architect. That all changed though, one winter at a Christian camp for teenagers that he attended just before his last year of high school.
“There was a blind girl who was talking about how she is thankful for that she is blind that she cannot see because on that way God saves her from a lot of temptation,” says Attila. “And that was something I never heard before, I thought that that was kind of like a disability to be blind and she looked at it totally differently.”
After his experience at that camp, he says his direction changed and he wanted to become a priest. While there were many other factors, Attila says his encounter with his fellow camper who was blind was the biggest influence.
After finishing high school, he went to Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic to complete his studies to become a pastor upon his return to Slovakia—or so he planned.
“I had, I think, four Hungarian schoolmates and our task was to finish the study [to become pastors] and go back to Slovakia where we were born and serve in the churches there,” says Attila.
While they were studying in Prague, there was no way for them to practice for their job, says Attila, since all of their lessons were taught in Czech, not Hungarian.
“I found out there are a lot of Hungarians in Prague and they never had a Hungarian Church,” says Attila. “So, I had a meeting with the bishop [of Slovakia], and he changed the task.”
Instead of returning to Slovakia, Attila remained in Prague to start building a new Hungarian church.
“It took a while, but it was successful,” says Attila. “It was exactly 10 years after I finished my studies when we left and we came to the states, but when we left the congregation, we had a choir full of young people, we had a church full of young people, and it was so active.”
The couple moved to the United States in 2007.
While working on the church in Prague and later in the U.S., Attila has always worked a job or two in addition. He has done work in graphic design and advertising as well as shipping, home improvement, and more.
“It’s kind of controversial that I studied theology to be a pastor and that takes 20 percent of my time and 80 percent of my time is spent doing something totally different,” says Attila.
Currently, he holds three positions: he leads the Sunday services at the Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ, teaches the Sunday school, and works at Yale in human resources, communications, and Internet communications as one of the webmasters at Your Yale during the week. (He has worked in other positions at the university previously.)
He says the Evangelical and Reformed United Church of Christ in Wallingford is “a small church that was formerly just 100 Hungarians, but there are people who don’t want to speak Hungarian anymore, so half is kind of American and half is Hungarian,” says Attila.
Attila says that in Slovakia, the pastor of the church, if the church is part of a smaller village, is a leader in the community. He says that in Wallingford, though there is a large population of Hungarians living there, the situation is different because 80 percent of the church members are still not living in town and travel sometimes up to an hour to get there for Sunday services.
The reason so many drive is their desire to maintain a link to their culture—or, for their children to develop a link.
Though the church, Attila says, is around 110 years old, the Sunday school services are newer and led by him every week. He says that the lessons have been ongoing for about six or seven years now. Unlike Sunday schools at other churches, it really is focused on teaching Hungarian to its students.
“We have a Hungarian school at the church, which has 26 or 28 kids, from ages 3 through 14,” Attila says. “They are in three groups, separated by grade, so the smallest group is maybe preschool or kindergarten, and that is mostly playing with the kids and teaching them some Hungarian, maybe tales and some history. And we are teaching the middle group, which is grades 1 to 3 or 4, how to read and write in Hungarian, and the older kids they are learning literature and history.”
However, Attila says he does want the school to have some focus on religion as well.
“That was my idea to have kind of like a Sunday school, but it just became a regular Hungarian school in the church building,” says Attila. “So, I didn’t give up.”
In his spare time apart from working Yale and the church, Attila says he enjoys playing guitar and working on cinematography and photography projects, though there is not much time otherwise.
“I started being pastor of the church—I would say eight or nine years ago, then a year later or two years later we started the school,” says Attila.
That just leaves Saturdays.
“Saturdays are the days we have like a weekend,” says Attila. “During the week we both work. My wife works at Yale as well, so Julia is in the preschool. Saturdays are free, Sundays are services at the church and school, so we just have one day and we are just exploring the area now. In the summer we spend every afternoon on the beach.”
Attila says that so far, even though it has been a short time, he and his family have enjoyed being in Madison.