An Interview with Pastor Daniel Pastirčák

“Welcome to the machine!” jokes Pastor Daniel Pastirčák, greeting the East-West Church Report with the Pink Floyd lyric following a service with his Kaplnka [Slovak: chapel] congregation in downtown Bratislava. The 150-strong community of mostly young adults meets in the A4 Space, a performance venue for contemporary theater, music, and film.

In keeping with its other purposes, this cavernous black studio is lit during Sunday worship by intense spotlight and white pillar candles. The focal points are also minimal: Pastirčák in a white cassock, an altar table draped in white. Accompanied by piano and cello, the congregation sings devotional refrains whose lyrics are projected onto the entire back wall. They are illustrated by an image of Christ on the cross in the form of an upturned peace symbol. 

Kaplnka was the church frequented by Juraj Kušnierik, a past contributor to the East-West Church and Ministry Report. A prominent journalist with the Slovak weekly current affairs magazine, .týždeň, Juraj died of a heart attack at the age of just 51 in November 2015 while at the Iceland Airwaves music festival in Reykjavik, an event also attended by the editor of the East-West Church Report. On hearing these connections, Pastor Pastirčák shared his fondness for both Juraj and contemporary Icelandic music. The conversation then turned to his church.

What is Kaplnka’s background? 

Kaplnka belongs to Cirkev Bratská [Slovak: Church of the Brethren], which comes from a few movements or denominations. Before World War II there was a Blue Cross movement here in Slovakia in mainline churches like the Reformed Church and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church. This was a movement encouraging abstinence from alcohol based upon born-again, pietistic experiences. When the Communists took over, they forbade religious associations like the Blue Cross, and the leaders of the mainline churches didn’t back it up, so people from that movement shifted to our church or similar churches like the Baptists. So our church is partly from that background. 

But the name we have comes from Czech influence, and for me this is an even more important part of our church. It comes from the Unity of the Brethren, which is a much bigger church in the Czech Republic. This is a tradition I like to stress, because John Amos Comenius–its last bishop in the 17th century–was very ecumenical in his thinking, even at a time when there was the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism: those religious wars. When the first Czech Brethren movement came to an end during the CounterReformation, Comenius said he did not regret the end of this small Unity of the Brethren, because God wants the great unity of all. 

And what is your own background? 

I studied in art school, then practiced the restoration of sculpture, and later studied theology. But I’m mostly a writer. I write fairy tales with mystical, symbolic meaning; poetry; and books of philosophy, theology… it’s difficult to say what it is! But somewhere there–I like philosophers who were also theologians, like [Thomas] Aquinas. 

What drew you to Christianity in Communist Czechoslovakia? 

Under Communism everything was black and white. You were an atheist because Communism claimed to be a scientific theory, and atheism was the scientific theory of the human being. Atheism was institutionalized in that period. If someone was openly a believer, he was against society, the system. I was sort of a dissident. I was studying in Košice [Slovakia’s second largest city] Art School, where we were kind of hippies–against civilization, but also against Communism. We organized an exhibition of our works, and it was banned. They locked our exhibition because it was critical of the system. After that, they threw me out of art school, because they thought I was the main initiator of the event. 

I was a strong atheist at that time. My first contact with the church was as a place of soft dissent, an island of silent resistance. I struggled a little bit, because the attitude of even many active Christians was that we should not be dissident, because our task is not politics. You know the verses about obeying rulers [Romans 13]. Those were misused, and I came into conflict about that even with my friends a few times. That was the difficult part for me, because I had this dissident-minded history. 

But resistance to the system was also good for Christians in this period. If you wanted to be actively or openly Christian back then, they would just press you into resistance to the system. It wasn’t that Christians wanted to be dissident–they didn’t. And real ecumenism developed in that situation. Those small, sometimes artificial theological issues we have against each other became just funny and unimportant, while the deep-rooted faith we find in each other formed brotherhood. During that time my relationships developed with my pastor on Cukrová [street in Bratislava where the main Cirkev Bratská church is located] as well as with a great man, Anton Srholec, a Catholic priest who was in prison under the Communist regime. He was very freeminded; after the [1989 Velvet] Revolution, even his own church sidelined him. He became my closest friend. 

Under Communism in the 1970s, Christians in Bratislava were afraid to express themselves, so they lived more bound in their communities. But on Cukrová, Milan Cicel [a prominent member of Cirkev Bratská] was in touch with The Navigators movement, so some Americans were coming here and encouraging much more of a missionary spirit. People started to share their faith with people outside of the church, and it was in that period that I also came to Bratislava and to this church. I became a Christian in 1979. Through the influence of this missionary-minded group, Cukrová developed quite differently from other churches. Many people came who were involved in culture– artists and different kinds of people involved in the public cultural scene, such as Juraj [Kušnierik] in journalism. We were looking for a culturally understandable expression of our faith. And so we slowly started to lose this narrowly evangelical, almost fundamentalist mindset. 

How did this develop into your current ministry at Kaplnka? 

Around seven years ago, when I was a pastor on Cukrová, the church there was becoming too crowded. The church leadership team asked me if I would try to start a new church community. This started with an idea. While we were still on Cukrová, we had one worship service in the morning and another in the evening. The sermon was the same, but they said that the form of the evening worship service should be different. This gave us a place for creativity. There were plenty of visual artists and musicians; people who feel that– and this is one of the burdens of that community–somewhere in the past something wrong happened in relation between art and spirituality, between art and religiosity; some kind of negative separation. For example, on one side philosophy, on the other theology. Or artistic sensitivity on one side, spiritual sensitivity on the other. For a long time we had been dreaming of creating a space where this would be unified somehow, that art would be involved. And we said we wanted to create a place of worship where it would be possible for non-religious people to meet God. 

What elements are different from a conventional church? 

We often have art involved in meditation; for example, a video or installation, or some happening. We had a series of sermons and worship on the The Decalogue* by the great Polish film director, Krzysztof Kieślowski. The Decalogue is the Ten Commandments through Kieślowski’s eyes. We started our worship with a five-minute presentation from one part of the film. Then I incorporated the story of the film into my sermon, and interpreted that particular commandment. 

Even though there are these modern elements, it’s not like some contemporary Western forms of Christian worship. It has a contemplative atmosphere. 

Yes, “contemplative” is right. Another special thing we do is to have seven or 10 minutes after the sermon for meditation, with improvised music. What is also not typical for a church is that we play new music by contemporary composers, like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, or Arvo Pärt. That’s part of the liturgy. 

Given your experience of being an atheist finding Christian faith during the Communist period, what similarities or differences do you see now for people outside the church? What are the challenges of presenting Christianity to them? 

The challenge of presenting Christianity today is that sometimes you feel ashamed to call yourself Christian. We are living in a situation where almost 70-80 per cent of the [Slovak] population would say they are Christian, most of them Catholics, but the leadership of the Catholic Church behaves very defensively. They don’t like Pope Francis, for example. I find that strange, because I love Pope Francis; for me he’s one of the greatest Christians of today. For many, Putin is regarded as the man who will save Christianity from the decadent West. And together with this come political parties that are openly fascist. [During World War II] we had a government in Slovakia where the president, a Catholic priest [Jozef Tiso], was co-operating with Hitler; we were sending Jews to the concentration camps. And some people are saying we should go back to this Slovak state; they are even in parliament now. The Church is not vocal enough about saying this is not Christian. They say it, but very quietly, because they are afraid that they will lose plenty of people who follow them. This is not only in Slovak Catholicism, but also the Lutheran Church, and even our Evangelical Church. 

We have friends and people to whom we want to communicate who are more secular people, and these mainline churches do everything to make it more and more difficult to communicate the Gospel to them. I understand why they hate church and how it is used by the radical right in a political battle to say that we are Christian and so we don’t want Islam or refugees. Another of the main themes of Christianity in Slovakia now is to fight homosexuals and their issues. This is how the church presents itself, while people have their existential questions and needs. It’s so sad, because we have a great opportunity. 

One major secular event you are involved in is the Pohoda Festival. Could you say a little about what that is and what you do there? 

Pohoda is the largest music festival in Slovakia; around 30,000 people attend. For seven years now it ends with a worship service. We have been doing that together with this Fr. Anton Srholec [prior to his death in 2016] and Anna Polcková, a Lutheran pastor. We always have a kind of drama, with professional, well-known actors. We choose a theme–a Biblical text–and I write a small script that interprets the theme; for example, God playing chess with the Devil over Job. Then we have music, short speeches. And we always have some ritual involving the people there: an anointing; everyone opening their eyes; sharing bread. So that is what we do for these secular young people. Maybe many of them never attended church.