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The Story of Mozaika – Leadership – Evangelical Free Ch.

The Story of Mozaika

A group of people from several Brethren Church congregations came to understand God's story and one simple picture.

God desires to enter into the broken and often dark world of our shattered relationships. Biblically—and even sociologically—the best model for this is the local church community itself.

God chose to bring hope into the world through fragile people who would trust Him and follow Him with both courage and humility. That's how our beginning looked. In 2014, six of us embraced this vision from God, prayed for it (and have prayed thousands of times since), and started working. Everything we did, of course, was with the help of other local Brethren Church congregations.

Today, our church community—Mozaika—consists of about 70 people including children, gathered in 4 Gospel Communities and 10 DNA groups, currently in the city of Košice.

TOGETHER, WE LOVE GOD, ONE ANOTHER, AND THE CITY OF KOŠICE.

The Leadership of Mozaika

Our team includes around 15 volunteers, but the key leaders are:

Jozef

Ján

Peter

Brethren Church / Evangelical Free Church

The Brethren Church is a young branch on the trunk of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Its roots are planted in the person and work of Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Scriptures. Life flows into it through the centuries of faithful witnesses to this Christ. That is why we joyfully affirm the early Christian creeds, the teaching of the devout of the Middle Ages, as well as the heritage of both the global and domestic Reformation, and the principles of the evangelical movement.

Fragments from the Story of the Brethren Church
A hundred years before the Reformation (1517)—in today's Germany (M. Luther) and Switzerland (O. Zwingli and J. Calvin)—the Czech reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake (July 6, 1415). Like the later reformers in the West, he called the church to return to the Scriptures.

His death ignited a strong reform movement and the zeal of the Hussites. One of them, Peter Chelčický, is considered the founder of the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum, 1457). In that time, the word Unity was used to mean "church." The Unity of the Brethren thus became the first "Protestant" church in the world.

From the Unity of the Brethren came outstanding figures of European significance. Its last bishop was the great educator Jan Amos Comenius. Under heavy Counter-Reformation pressure, however, the Unity was forced into exile. Later, in Saxony, it was renewed and became a church with remarkable worldwide missionary activity. Its motto was: "The Lamb has conquered. Let us follow Him!"

In our region, under Habsburg rule, new churches were allowed to exist only after the Edict of Toleration (1781). In 1880, the first congregation of the Free Reformed Church was established in Prague. After World War I, the church changed its name to the Czechoslovak Brethren Church (Církev českobratská), seeking to reconnect with the legacy of the Unity of the Brethren and its rich history.

An interesting historical note: after the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1919, the spiritual advisor and confessor to its first president, Tomáš G. Masaryk, was a pastor of the Brethren Church, František Urbánek.

As the church gradually grew also in Slovakia (the first congregation in Prešov in 1923, the second in Bratislava in 1926), the need arose to change the name once again. Since then, across both countries, it has been known as the Brethren Church (Cirkev bratská).