The senior pastor of an influential Pasadena...

The senior pastor of an influential Pasadena church, who says God directs his choice of ministries, has relayed another revelation; this one calls on him to take a job outside of California.

The Rev. Paul Cedar, pastor of the Lake Avenue Congregational Church, disclosed to members last Sunday that he will resign his nine-year pastorate May 1 because he has been nominated a second time to be president of the Evangelical Free Church of America, a 150,000-member denomination based in Minneapolis.

“The Lord has spoken to us clearly about the future,” Cedar and his wife, Jeannie, wrote in a letter accompanying his announcement to the 4,700-member congregation.

Only last May--three months after the church had opened a $20-million, 3,700-seat sanctuary--Cedar shocked members by saying he would leave his pastorate if he was elected president of the denomination to which he was originally ordained, the Evangelical Free Church.

Disclosing that he earlier had rejected overtures from the denomination, Cedar said in a congregational letter dated May 21 that nevertheless “the Lord gave a great sense of unity and direction” when Evangelical Free Church officials continued to seek his candidacy. “If I am elected by an overwhelming majority of votes, we will rejoice that the Lord is calling us to that exciting ministry,” he wrote.

At the Evangelical Free Church annual convention in June in Kenosha, Wis., delegates gave Cedar a resounding 94% majority in the voting for president. But Cedar surprised delegates only hours after the vote by turning down the post. “God has shared very clearly with me” that I should not accept the presidency, Cedar told the convention.

The Rev. Thomas A. McDill, who had planned to retire as president of the Evangelical Free Church, agreed to stay on another year while the denomination conducted another search for nominees.

Cedar was beckoned again, however, as the Evangelical Free Church board of directors unanimously recommended the Pasadena pastor as the nominee. The election will take place June 21 during the denomination’s convention in Rockford, Ill.

Michael Yoder, communications director for Lake Avenue Congregational Church, said Cedar’s announcement to resign “was a major shock last year, but not so much this time.” Yoder said in a telephone interview that while last year Cedar “felt that he could not in good conscience leave the church so soon after the new facilities had opened, he feels better about passing the baton to someone else now.”

PEOPLE

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder-dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow has told him that fears of a resurgence of fascism in a reunited Germany “are definitely justified” in the light of multiparty politics coming to the formerly Communist country. The letter to Hier followed an earlier response from West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Both replied to Hier’s written entreaty that the two Germanys should take steps during reunification to educate citizens about the Holocaust and provide government structures to combat anti-Semitism. Modrow’s letter, signed by an aide, noted that the right-wing Republican Party in West Germany, led by a former Nazi soldier, “is trying to gain a foothold” in East Germany. At the same time, Modrow said East German students “have a remarkable knowledge of the events of the Nazi period.” Kohl, in his response, had said Germans are knowledgeable about Nazi tyranny. He also had said that West Germany already has laws punishing “crimes of hatred” and questioned whether additional steps were necessary.

The Rev. Laszlo Tokes, the Hungarian Reformed pastor prominent in popular uprisings in Romania last December, will preach a sermon in Hungarian at an ecumenical worship service starting at 6 p.m. toay at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles’ Wilshire District. Currently a member of Romania’s governing Council of National Salvation, Tokes is the best-known advocate of Romania’s 2.5-million-member ethnic Hungarian community that for years resisted the long assimilation campaign by the Communist government, which banned the use of the Hungarian language and Hungarian cultural education.

MEETING

In a conference commemorating the 450th anniversary of the founding of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit priests will examine their educational efforts around the world Thursday through Saturday at Loyola Marymount University. The public talks at the fourth annual Casassa Conference, named after the late president of the Jesuit-run campus from 1949 to 1969, include a lecture at 8 p.m. Thursday in St. Robert’s Auditorium by Father Joseph A. O’Hare, president of Fordham University.