An Interview with Terry Lingenhoel
On an Indian summer afternoon in late 2017 in Érd, a small city just to the southwest of Budapest, the East-West Church Report came across a scene familiar to towns across the United States. Teenagers and children in helmets slightly too large faced off at the plate against pitchers from opposing teams. Family and friends cheered wildly if the crack of ball on bat produced a home run. But hazai (home) and vendég (visitor) signs revealed that these baseball teams–Érd Moose, Debrecen Tigers, Skopje Sluggers and more–were a very long way from Iowa. Instead of hotdogs and Cracker Jack, cauldrons of steaming hot goulash were offered between innings. Terry Lingenhoel, the linchpin of Érd’s Youth International Baseball Tournament, is a long-term missionary with the international evangelical mission organization Operation Mobilization (OM). An American Presbyterian, Terry is now also a Hungarian speaker and elder at a Baptist church in Budapest. As the tournament wound down, he spoke in the dugout to the East-West Church Report about his unusual ministry through baseball.
What brought you to Hungary?
Our family originally came to Vienna in May 1990; OM didn’t place foreign missionaries here until September 1990. But after nine months we realized we wanted to be in a cross-cultural situation. We had visited Hungary, and the OM team needed a family here. So we decided to come in January 1991, and we’ve been here ever since.
How did your baseball ministry come about?
I was OM director in Hungary for 12 years. We did a lot of evangelism, church planting, and mobilizing Hungarians for missions. But during that time I especially saw that OM is typically a short-term mission with a lot of proclamation evangelization. That wasn’t really working in Hungary, because Hungarians need a long-term relationship to understand and respond to the Gospel. When I finished my leadership time, I wanted to find a ministry through which I could develop long-term relationships.
We started here in Érd in 2002, when a group of baseball enthusiasts came out from my home church in Akron, Ohio. We just advertised in the local paper here that we were going to teach baseball, and we had 60 people come out for that weekend to play with us! One of my current helpers responded to that very first announcement, and now his son is playing. We didn’t win too often to begin with, but we were able to recruit young people and keep them, thanks to our coaches and training program. Now I continue my recruiting through schools; every year we go into schools and teach the sport in gym classes.
When we started, I didn’t know there was already baseball in Hungary. I thought I was the first, but the Hungarian Baseball Federation actually started in 1992. When I started 10 years later, the internet still wasn’t very good, and it took me a year to find them! But their baseball was mostly for adults, so I was able to help develop it for the youth. The Federation asked me to coordinate the youth, and I’ve been doing that for the past eight years.
How much of a role does Christianity play?
Our club is a secular club in the sense that you don’t have to be a Christian to join, but our purpose is mission: to share the Gospel and help people understand what it means to follow Jesus. My board members are not believers, but most of my coaches are, although now I don’t require them to be. It is enough if they take on our values and purpose, even if they haven’t made a personal decision to follow Jesus. For example, the coach of our Under-15 team knows the Gospel and has translated it for us many times, but he hasn’t come to faith. We have over 100 players and around 15 coaches. Most of the coaches are missionaries, but we also have older players coaching younger ones, and parents who have learned the sport. The children who come are mostly not believers, similar to the general population. We have quite a few Catholic families, but they are not really practicing.
I’ll help anyone get a team started, but I especially like to help Christians so they can use it for ministry. I helped a Hungarian Baptist pastor get the team from Hatvan started; Hatvan, meaning 60, is a town 60 kilometers from Budapest. The Hatvan Hunters have only been going two years, so it’s really exciting to see them here today at the tournament. It’s one of four mission-based clubs I’ve helped get started.
Why baseball?
I wanted a team sport, because I think team sports are very good for teaching life lessons. I had actually planned to be a professional American football player, so that probably would have been my first choice. But I also wanted something I could do together with my kids, and at the time they were between 10 and 16, and having three girls I decided baseball was probably better than American football. It’s a women’s sport as much as it’s a men’s sport. The only problem is that the fields are much different. You can play American football on a soccer field, which you can find everywhere, but you need a special field for baseball.
Do any specifics of the sport tie in well with what the Gospel teaches?
Baseball is actually quite a good sport for teaching life skills, because baseball is a game of failure. You can fail at hitting seven out of ten times and still be a great hitter, so you have to learn how to deal with that failure, and not let it get you down. It’s a team sport, but it’s also very much an individual sport, because when you’re batting, it’s only you. When you’re pitching, it’s pretty much only you. But you also have to have your team behind you. So it has the benefits of teaching individual selfcontrol, responding to failure, but also teaching team dynamics.
We don’t do devotions every day at practice. We pray every game, but mostly our spiritual input happens in the time in-between, when we have camps, or at baseball Bible clubs during the winter off-season. But life lessons are very easy dayto-day with this sport. For example, the sacrifice bunt in baseball makes it extremely easy to talk about Jesus’s sacrifice for us. You also have to admit your failure and then forget about it. That ties in with us having to admit and confess our sin, but then God cleanses us. We also take Bible principles and apply them to the situation and struggles that players are going through. So there are some good things that tie it together.
