Gottfried Lehmann, an associate of Johann Oncken of Hamburg, Germany, preached in Hungary during the 1860’s, baptizing converts after dark for fear of persecution.  Baptist work in Hungary began again in earnest in the mid-1870’s through the efforts of Heinrich Meyer, another associate of Oncken.  Meyer formed a church in Budapest in 1874.   The following year, at 3 in the morning of August 26, he baptized eight converts in the Koros River near Gyula.  Two of those converts were Mihaly Toth and Mihaly Kornya, later to be known as the “Peasant Prophets.”

 Mihaly Kornya

In 1877, Kornya was ordained to the Gospel ministry in Szalonta (in what is now Romania), his home town, by Oncken.  Kornya was a poor, illiterate sharecropper who learned to read at age 30 so that he could read the Bible.  He and his friend Toth evangelized eastern Hungary and Transylvania (which is now part of Romania) for the next 30 years.  Toth thought that they should limit their outreach to Hungarians, but Kornya insisted on spreading the good news to everyone, Romanians included.  In order to appreciate this decision, you have to understand the great hostility that exists between Hungarians and Romanians.  Kornya is said to have baptized more than 11,000 converts in the 325 towns and villages where he preached.  Baptists churches sprang up in almost all of those places as a result.

For sheer moral and physical courage, Kornya deserves to rank with other great Baptist heroes.  The following two anecdotes (from the many about him that survive) illustrate the kind of life he lived.

All the large towns in Transylvania and Hungary have a weekly shopping day where farmers and merchants from the surrounding villages bring in their wares to sell.  These fairs attract thousands of people.  At one of the fairs, a stranger walked up to Kornya and asked him if he would hold the stranger’s horse while he did something.  The stranger returned a few minutes later with the authorities shouting, “There is the man who stole my horse!”  The word soon spread that the preacher had been arrested for stealing a horse and a crowd of thousands gathered around the building where the mayor heard the case.  A number of witnesses verified Kornya’s honesty and the mayor dismissed the charges.  As Kornya emerged from the proceedings, he saw the huge crowd and seized the opportunity.  He was very small in stature, so he mounted the horse that he had “stolen” in order to be seen and preached to the people.

All of the Baptists experienced persecution during those times, and Kornya’s effectiveness attracted the attention of the persecutors very frequently.  In one village, he was arrested and placed inside a barn for the night, in the pen of a very ugly bull.  This bull was so dangerous that no one dared go near him.  As mentioned above, Kornya was a small man.  When he retreated to a corner of the pen, the bull tried to butt him, but was not able to reach him because the bull’s long horns struck the walls before his head could hit Kornya’s small frame.  After a couple of hours of butting, the exhausted bull fell asleep.  The night was extremely cold–the kind of weather in which one could die of hypothermia.  Kornya kept warm from the breath of the sleeping bull.  Like Darius of old, the villagers were astonished to find that the God of Daniel had kept Kornya alive through the night.