Services in Sofia, Bulgaria
Upon a recent invitation we preached this past weekend at the United Church of God in Sofia. For several years now, we have maintained partnership in ministry with the people of this church, as they have worked in Christian education, para-church ministries and strategic leadership among Bulgarian evangelicals. We further discussed holding a series of revival meetings in the capital during the upcoming summer months. We are hoping that these revival services will occur in the context of the National Bible Tour which Cup & Cross Ministries is preparing to launch in a few weeks.
Services in Yambol, Bulgaria
I preached one of my first sermons in the Pentecostal church in my home city of Yambol over fifteen years ago. It was followed by many other speaking engagements there, especially at the youth services held every Saturday night at the church.
Many years passed since then and due to extensive travel for ministry and educational purposes, it has been awhile since we have been able to minister at the church. It was this past Sunday that we were fortunate enough to be in service with my home church. Upon the pastor’s invitation we were able to preach at the Communion service as some 400 were in attendance. Many more were also able to respond to the service via the media.
The Pentecostal church in Yambol is one of the first evangelical churches in the country. For many years, before and during the Communist Regime it served as a national center for Bulgarian Pentecostals. Many National Assemblies were held there and important decisions about the development of the Bulgarian Pentecostal Movement have been made in this church.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Yambol Church again led the Bulgarian Pentecostals in a number of important ministry and public endeavors. The church initiated the first Bulgarian mission work during post communism, the Mission for Christian Upbringing. The first, and so far the only, Bulgarian evangelical political party was founded in Yambol in 1997. This event was followed by the first attempts for a Christian TV production and broadcast in Bulgaria. The city has produced many prominent evangelical ministers. But for me personally, the return to Yambol was much more sentimental. The Yambol Pentecostal Church was the placed where the Lord saved my soul and where for the first time in my life I felt free at last.
Beyond the Self
June 5, 2006 by Cup&Cross
Filed under 365, Publication
by Kathryn Donev
In today’s postmodern western context there is a great desire to become more aware of the self. Who am I? What do I want out of life? What will make me happy? These have become common questions. This fixation with introspection stems from our desire to reach a certain level of self-fulfillment. Some believe that the better they know themselves, the more likely they are to be fulfilled as individuals. Undeniably, introspection may produce a certain level of satisfaction, but there is also the danger that the more one looks inward, the less one has the ability to see through another’s eyes. When we become too consumed with ourselves, egocentrism sets in and it becomes difficult to value the opinions of others.
Having Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind, it appears that this desire to look inward is most prominent when the basic needs have been fulfilled and an individual is comfortable and safe within a certain way of living. Thus there exists a connection between achieving self-enlightenment and having one’s needs met. It is when one is secure that he or she begins to look inward. So, if one were to be removed from his or her comfort zone it is reasonable to conclude that he or she would be more readily to look outward, beyond the self. Consequently, once one is removed from his or her comfort zone, then one becomes less concerned with the self and finds a greater appreciation for other perspectives. In other words, being away from one’s familiar context ultimately produces a greater appreciation and sensitivity for the unfamiliar.
If we reach a point of becoming so secure and comfortable that our vision of the world beyond us becomes blurred and we become immersed in our own world, then how can we reach true fulfillment? It is only when we look beyond ourselves that we are truly able to enjoy life fully. When we step out of our comfort zone our eyes are opened.
It would be safer to remain secure in our small self-centered worlds, yet this is not what God called us to do. He said go unto the uttermost parts of the world. This is a command to live outside of what is comfortable: to look beyond. We can attempt to be fulfilled or satisfied through remaining in a safe zone where all our needs are fulfilled and therefore are able to reach a certain level of enlightenment, yet regardless of how introspective we become, satisfaction can only be achieved through knowing our creator and not through knowing the creation.
So being consumed with ourselves, being safe with our lifestyles, being surrounded by what is familiar will not satisfy. It is only when we move beyond ourselves, beyond our comfort zones into the unfamiliar that we can reach true fulfillment. It is then that we are doing what creation is purposed to do and that is to go beyond the walls of comfort and security, to step out in faith and to listen to His voice to go wherever He leads and do whatever He commands.
The Story of Jesus for Children
June 1st in Bulgaria is the National Day for children. Cities all over the country participate in festival celebrations which are held in honor of children. In the second largest city, Plovdiv kids from all ages gather to paint a three kilometer mural which stretched between the Council of Ministers office building and the Art Academy.
On this day Bibliata.com in cooperation with Agape Bulgaria was able to release an online version of the Story of Jesus for Children. Within the first twenty-four hours alone, the complete film was downloaded over three hundred times. We are currently working on releasing online the original version of the Jesus film.
Services in Samokov, Bulgaria
We just returned from Samokov, which is one of the oldest industrial towns in Bulgaria. Almost 200 years ago the first protestant missionaries to Bulgaria discovered its strategic location and used it as a halfway point between Europe and Asia in their mission trips. Soon a modern American school opened its’ doors some of the brightest minds of the Bulgarian Renaissance were educated there.
Last October, our team visited with one of the Roma (Gipsy) Church of God congregations in the town and held a Sunday service followed by two youth rallies. Hundreds came to the altars as we prayed together in the presence of God. These services were part of our national ministry and support to the Roma people of Bulgaria.
This past Sunday the miracle occurred again. Led by the Holy Spirit we found ourselves in Samokov ministering to the same Church of God congregation there. We preached and prayed with the congregation and were to meet again with several old acquaintances. A citywide evangelization meeting in cooperation with the Assemblies of God Church was held in the center of town that same evening. Over three thousand were in attendance. We are already planning our next return to the city of Samokov to hold a regional youth conference there.
Rebecca St. James in Sofia
Grammy award winning pop-rock singer Rebecca St. James will be performing in Sofia this Sunday. She and her band will take part in a concert organized by Harmony Media. The event will also feature the popular Bulgarian duet Karizma as special guests who will promote their first long awaited album Ecclesiast. The concert will be held on Sunday, May 28, 2006 in the National Palace of Culture. The event will be part of Rebecca’s European tour for promotion of her new album ‘If I had one chance to tell you something’, released at the end of 2005.
New Ministry Websites Released
Regardless of the busy traveling schedule which our ministry demands in Bulgaria, our team has been able to outsource and finish several major websites which have been released in Bulgaria during the past 60 days. Two of them offer free audio and video Christian worship and sermons, as well as entire Christian programs and Bible studies in the Bulgarian language. They have successfully reached a rating between 650-980 visitors per day just in the past month alone.
A website which presents a large volume of Bulgarian gospel songs (www.Hvalenie.com meaning “praise”) is an old dream of ours. We have begun working on it some five years ago as a sub department of another one of our websites, www.Bibliata.com. After much work and anticipation, the time came to release a stand-alone web interface which offers visitors a large database of Bulgarian gospel music to listen to and download free of charge.
The second website (www.Propoved.com meaning “sermon”) is surprisingly building a much larger audience than anticipated. It offers audio and video sermons online also free of charge. This is the first Bulgarian website to create and offer a nationwide database of video sermons by Bulgarian ministers. The website can be viewed on a regular computer as well as on internet enabled cell phones. This technology is so innovative, that we are being persistently asked by secular media companies and independent producers to partner in its future development and implementation. Although the website is in Bulgarian, you can also watch the current episode by opening www.Propoved.com and clicking on the “PLAY” button which will appear on the right hand side of your computer monitor or cell phone display.
National Chaplaincy Meeting in Yambol
A national chaplaincy meeting was held in the city of Yambol to discuss the recent agreement for placing NATO airbases on Bulgarian territory. The participants expressed their interest in joining forces with existing chaplaincy ministries in Bulgaria with a special focus on chaplaincy within the Bulgarian Army. The next step in the chaplain’s educational program was also devised and dates were set for its final presentation, accreditation and implementation as a graduate level course. Strategic meetings were scheduled with the head of the Bulgarian Evangelical Alliance and concerning the visitation of NATO’s chaplains in Bulgaria this fall.
Romani Evangelical Theology
The Role of Evangelical Theology among Roma Communities in Bulgaria
The Roma (Gypsy) ethnic group, which abides on the territory of virtually every country of the world, has found prolific context of existence within the borders of Bulgaria – a postcommunist, Eastern European country expecting its immediate merge within the European Union.
Despite the racial and religious tensions, quite typical for the Balkan region, the Roma ethnic group has historically flourished in Bulgaria. After the liberation of the country from the Ottoman oppression, Roma communities were freely established throughout the territory of the new Bulgarian Republic. During the brief nationalistic waves that followed, the Bulgarian state generally protected its ethnic minorities including Armenians, Jews and Romanies. The Communist Regime in the country presented a dilemma for ethnic minorities, especially when the infamous “Vazrozhdenski” (revival, renovation) process took place in its latter period attempting to assimilate cultural minorities within the Bulgarian nation.
Today, the Roma culture is an undividable part of the Bulgarian reality forming the third largest ethnic and cultural group in the country. Every Bulgarian city has a Roma suburb and every small village has Roma inhabitants. The last census shows their number is 313,396, but analysts insist that these figures should be handled carefully because many of the Romani prefer to declare external ethnic self-identification.
Most Romani are from the Muslim Roma circles that present themselves as Turks. A portion of the Christian Romani identifies themselves as Bulgarians, and a third as Wallachs or Romanian in origin. Most Romani speak more than one language at home. The most used language among them is, of course, the Roma language (67%), followed by Bulgarian (51%), and Turkish (34%).
The living conditions of the Roma communities are often dire. Many are still living in poor quarters resembling ghettos. The Roma child mortality rate is much higher than that of the Bulgarians: 240 per 1,000 versus 40 per 1,000.
The Roma community is characterized by lower levels of education. Consequently, its representatives are less competitive. Less than 1% of the Roma women in Bulgaria have higher education. The number of high school-educated among them is 4 percent.
A great deal of opportunities have been introduced for the Roma minorities in Bulgaria by the European Union. The integration of Bulgaria within the European Union has concurred with a general self-realization among Roma communities with political, economical and religious implications.
Much of the current revitalization of Roma communities is owed to the transforming power of evangelical theology actively present among them. Today, nearly a quarter of Bulgarian evangelicals claim to be of Roma origin and the number continues to grow.
Bulgarian Audio Bible
Several years ago, our team at www.bibliata.com adopted a very valuable project to record the Bulgarian Bible in audio format. The project was managed by Hristo Hristov from Shumen, an old time friend of ours and founder of the Prosteveten.com Project.
When we first started working with Hristo in 2002, he had begun recording the Bulgarian New Testament. Our team quickly implemented the audio files into a subproject of our website at: http://audio.bibliata.com. Soon after, the complete New Testament was ready and we were able to freely distribute it online to our visitors who downloaded over 3,000 complete copies of it in the first month alone.
The whole Bible was recorded in the Bulgarian vernacular in 2003 and became the first Bulgarian Audio Bible ever. Through our website, www.bibliata.com our team was able to distribute the Bulgarian Audio Bible free of charge for the next two years.
During our National Bible Tour in 2005, we released a new version of the audio Bible making the product more user-friendly, easier to navigate and download through a streaming media server. The intention was to include the audio Bible in the online parallel of Bible versions hosted by our website. This vision was realized in 2006, when 20 text versions of the Bible were included in the online parallel along with four audio versions of the Bible (KJV, Hebrew, Greek and Bulgarian).
Since then, over 10,000 copies of the full Bulgarian Bible have been distributed over the internet. This amounts to 30,000 GB of information or the equality of some 40,000 CDs. Two larger projects will be implementing the Bulgarian Audio Bible in the near future. One will be its official DVD release next month, and the second will be its incorporation with a live broadcast through a dedicated radio station. Until then, the Bulgarian Audio Bible is available for free download and use by all visitors of www.bibliata.com.
You can listen to Psalm 23 in Bulgarian here.
