1681 · 1688–1689 Two churches per county, and a deadlineDva kostoly na stolicu — a termín

The 1670s were the hard years: Protestant churches across royal Hungary were taken away, ministers were tried and some were sold to the galleys. Then at the Diet of Sopron in 1681, Leopold I gave a narrow permission back, in articles 25 and 26 of its acts — which is where the word articular comes from. The conditions were designed to keep it small: at most two churches in a county, at the edge of a settlement and outside any town wall, built of wood on a stone footing barely a foot high, with no tower, the door not facing the street, and the whole thing finished within a single year. Orava's two articular places were Istebné and Vyšný Kubín; the Vyšný Kubín church was in the end put up here at Leštiny in 1688–89, on the order of Jób Zmeškal, captain of the guard at Orava Castle, with the family giving ground for the church, the graveyard and the parsonage.Sedemdesiate roky 17. storočia boli tvrdé: evanjelickým cirkevným zborom v kráľovskom Uhorsku brali kostoly, kazateľov súdili a časť z nich predali na galeje. Potom Leopold I. na šopronskom sneme roku 1681 vrátil úzke povolenie — v článkoch 25 a 26 jeho zákonov, odkiaľ pochádza slovo artikulárny. Podmienky mali povolenie udržať malé: najviac dva kostoly na stolicu, na okraji obce a mimo mestských hradieb, z dreva na kamennej podmurovke sotva stopu vysokej, bez veže, so vchodom nie z ulice a celé to hotové do jedného roka. Oravskými artikulárnymi miestami boli Istebné a Vyšný Kubín; kostol určený Vyšnému Kubínu napokon postavili tu v Leštinách v rokoch 1688 – 1689 na príkaz Jóba Zmeškala, veliteľa stráže na Oravskom hrade, a rodina darovala pozemok na kostol, cintorín aj faru.