On 22 April 1859, the Protestant missionary William Merriam and his wife were appointed as missionaries to the newly established missionary station in Plovdiv. This appointment formed part of a coordinated policy between the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Methodist Mission aimed at curbing the ambitions of the Catholic Uniate movement […]

“I have looked upon nothing with such satisfaction as upon the six hospitals which I have built. Where there were most afflicted by the insurrection, old men, children, and mothers, nothing that was strange, because of typhus and dysentery. Sofia, one of my sisters, was only 18 years old – she died here, in the […]

Following the suppression of the April Uprising, horrific massacres were carried out in Batak, Perushtitsa, and other places in southern Bulgaria. In northern Bulgaria, the uprising in the Tarnovo district was also suppressed and its principal leaders executed. All of this adversely affected the evangelical work of both missions north and south of the Balkan […]

For reasons obvious to most of our readers, I was able to attend no less than 10 (ten) VBS/Kids crusades this summer. Seven Baptist, several Pentecostals and a Methodist one. The themes ranged from jungle journey and the Lion King to giddy up cowboys and cowgirls and world/planet/time travelling. All cool themes with lots of […]

  At the next house a man stopped us to show where a blinded little brother had been burned alive, and the spot where he had found his calcined bones, and the rough, hard-vizaged man sat down and sobbed like a child…. On the other side of the way were the skeletons of two children […]