30 Years of Miracles: 2020
Our emergency team meeting at the end of 2019, set Bulgaria’s national holiday on March 3, 2020 as initiation date for the new-normal strategy for ministry. When the United States declared state of national emergency on March 13, 2020 and the Bulgarian government followed with the same shortly, we continued ministering in every possible alternative venue available to us. Small groups in churches as per the regulations, home gatherings, internet portals we’ve used since 1996 for the ministry and so on. Only with this timely ministry strategy in place, we were able to continue to minister and celebrate the:
- 25th anniversary of the Bulgarian church in Chicago
- 30th anniversary our own Cup & Cross Ministries International
- 100th anniversary of the Pentecostal Movement in Bulgaria
This book should have been published seven years ago in 2013. Its original subtitle was going to read “7 Years in Bulgaria.” Instead, it took seven years to finish it with all documents, research archives and new cases. Now, it is finally here and it finally reads like a story – not just choppy interviews, deposition documented testimonies or court records, but a story of struggle, strength and solitude. A story of life and a story of us.
1995-96 The establishing of the first Bulgarian Church of God in Chicago and its first split
2000-01 The contracted building of the ministry center for the Central Church of God in Sofia
2002-03 The church split in Southaven and what followed next
2005-06 The post-communist split of the Bulgarian Church of God and consecutive sub-denominations
2010-13 The social media network that cost us millions (of souls)
2016 The vote that forced to kill a church
2019-20 The sale of the ministry center for the Central Church of God in Bulgaria
READ: CONFESSIONS of a Pentecostal Preacher
CONFESSIONS of a Pentecostal Preacher
To Mark Alan
We know not why good people have to die,
but we do know we must tell their story…
Chapter I: Beyond the Church and into God
Be without fear in the face of your enemies.
Be brave and upright that God may love thee.
Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death.
Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong.
That is your oath.
~Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Separation of church from politics of false religiosity
The phone rang heavy and long. It was 4 AM in Bulgaria, but I was already up. A friend on the other end of the line was calling from South Carolina with a warning of some bad situation. The following morning, I was going to be contacted by the Director questioning why we were ministering in churches outside of our denomination.
The truth was we had ministered in some 300 local churches across the Balkan country of Bulgaria crossing all denominational boundaries and gathering youth from just about every confession. God had used us not only to reach and minister and to lead, but to step into an untouched spiritual realm, to undertake an unfamiliar ministry paradigm and to approach a brand new dimension of reality where He was to be the center of it all. And we had obeyed without questions. Now it was time to pay the price!
* * *
Our denomination, the one to which I remain both critically loyal and loyally critical, spreads over some five generations. Through its century old existence, the struggles and tension between theology and praxis has been in the center. And there, in the very essence of Pentecostalism itself, while some are always celebrating and being celebrated in the office or temple, others are always pushed in the periphery of normal life, hidden from the world behind closed doors and seeking a much deeper experience with God.
These modern day mystics are not only forgotten, but often forbidden. For their riot for righteousness cannot be conceived, contained and controlled by the religious norms of organized officiality. They speak as prophets to a world they so fervently try to escape from, about a reality that does not exist in the normal believer’s mindset. A stage of spirituality that cannot be preached without being lived in the social existence. And a relationship of God that goes far beyond common relationism and into God himself. That God, Who does not abide in offices and temples, but on the cross outside of the city walls…
But I knew nothing of this until that cold winter morning when the phone rang through darkness of the night. Knowing what is coming, rarely changes what we have done to get here.
7 Years in Bulgaria: CONFESSIONS of a Pentecostal Preacher
by Dony K. Donev, D.Min.
Upcoming Releases for United States (October, 2020)
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