30 Years of Miracles: 2008

Ministering in Sofia with Three Services a Day (July 1, 2008)

Ministering at the Grace Church of God in Sofia, Catholic Ecumenical Apostolic Church of Bulgaria and the Gipsy ghetto of Phillipovtzyi, on the Westside of the capital Sofia. The brief sermons were followed by an hour long alter services in which we prayed for people and anointed them for their needs. Through the prayer a number of people reported various healings. A father and son we prayed for were respectively baptized in the Holy Spirit and delivered from drugs. Among many other healings that happened, one miracle in particular stands out. A father of a little girl came into the service requesting to be anointed with oil and prayer from for his two month old daughter whom he left in hospital with double pneumonia. He returned the next day to report that he girl was healed after the prayer and released by the doctors with a clean bill of health.

Preaching in Yambol (July 20, 2008)

We have been preaching through the Gospel of Mark in the Pentecostal Church in Yambol for several weeks now. As we have trusted the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of the Gospel text, we have seen again how the Word of God is confirmed with miracles and wonders. These signs have surpassed simple healings, supplying of financial needs or family restoration and has proceeded into life transforming experiences expressed in salvation, sanctification, Spirit baptism and extraordinary illumination opening the spiritual eyes of many to receive the text in a practical experiential matter of which many have not been yet aware. We have literally seen how the Word touches hurt hearts, heals sorrowed souls and transformers lives forever. And this is the miracle of preaching the Good News of God to the world. For if we want revival to go on, the Gospel must be preached…

Mission BULGARIA 2008 Miracles Reports (September 10, 2008)

We were pleasantly surprised upon our return to Yambol with a new healing report. During the Wednesday night service in Yambol the worship team always sings the old gospel song “There’s Power in the Blood” right before we minister the word. After the song a lady that plays the violin testified that some ten years ago, while ministering in Yambol we had asked for that same song to be sung before the message. She sang the song with the congregation while her left hand was quenched by a sickness not only causing her constant pain and discomfort, but disabling her from playing the violin. She testified that her healing a decade ago in one of our services was still powerful and real today. Little we knew that while she was testifying another lady in the congregation was suffering with a similar painful condition in the right side of her body disabling her leg and foot. During the time when we sung the songs and the testimony was presented she reported that she felt the presence of God in a very powerful way and continued to feel it through the next 48 hours. She later testified that God had healed her entirely from the pain and she confidently went to the doctor only to confirm that her condition had disappeared completely.

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)