8 Simple Rules for Doing Missions in the Spirit
1. Never put a price on the human soul, which you are not willing to put on your own.
2. Unsubscribing from missions’ newsletters may result in unsubscribing from the missional letter of God.
3. By no means raise an offering because a missionary needs it, do so because it’s needed for the survival of the church.
4. Not giving to missions is far better, than committing to give without any intention to do so.
5. Before using a missions’ offering to pay a church bill, think of whose offering a missionary should use to pay their bill.
6. Don’t wait on a missionary to ask you for what God has already commanded you to give.
7. Pray for missionaries without ceasing. For it could be your prayer that saves a soul.
8. Never delay sending a missions offering for tomorrow. After all, it was you who preached that tomorrow may be when the Lord comes back.
Church of God Eastern Europe Missions: Leadership, Economics and Culture
By the end of 2003, in a dissertation proposal for the Church of God Theological Seminary, which dealt with Bulgarian American congregation from an evangelical point of view, we suggested that there is not just one single problem that contributes to the struggle of these congregations to establish themselves permanently in the North American culture. The research which followed in the next couple of years, further showed that a multilayered dilemma consisting of economical, cultural and leadership factors was the reason for both the success or failure for the church communities established by Christians emerging from a postcommunist context.
The research results confirmed the originally proposed problem in ministry, not only within Eastern European congregations in North America, but also by partnering ministries, research foundations and practicing colleagues working in the former Soviet satellites. The majority agreed, that not only the existence of the described tridementional dilemma, but the lack of a properly applied solution for it, constrained Christian congregations emerging from this context from reaching their potential in their respective communities. Rather symbolic in this discussion still remains the remark made by one of the leading Bulgarian experts in religious freedom and human rights, who elaborated our statement that Bulgarian evangelical congregations remain “beggars in a land of plenty” not only in America, but in the European Union as well, being held prisoners of their own mentality formed by the communist past.
Our work in the Bulgarian evangelical context, gave us the opportunity to extend this research beyond the North American scope into Bulgarian immigrant communities in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. The study repeatedly confirmed that these congregations struggled with the same dynamics we had proposed originally, which naturally led to applying the research model in a native Bulgarian context.
Our direct work in the past five years with over 400 hundred Bulgarian congregations from various evangelical denominations has confirmed that the problem of ministry for the majority of Bulgarian protestant churches both in and outside of Bulgaria, emerges from three groups of factors related to (1) leadership, (2) economics and (3) culture. Problems and solutions of this nature or their lack thereof, conforms the work of any missional organization ministering in an Eastern European context. The work of the Church of God European Mission makes no exception to this rule, as the proper timely address of these issues with applicable and unambiguous resolutions defines the very foundation of the state of the Bulgarian evangelical church in the beginning of the 21st century.
Missions Conference at Pahokee, FL
We are ministering today at the Good Shepard Church of God in Pahokee, FL. We have been regular attendees of the mission conference organized by the church for several years now. Our first visit to the church was in 1999 while promoting the building project of the Central Church of God in Sofia, Bulgaria. Through the years we have been blessed by the ministry of the Good Shepard Church and we are always excited to visit with the congregation. At the conference this year, on Sunday morning, along with ministry the word, we presented our newly released film Revival Bulgaria 2, which purposed to give a report of our work in Bulgaria.
10 Things we are Thankful for
1. Another year of opportunities to minister in the United States and Bulgaria.
2. Provision for needs for the work in Bulgaria.
3. The prayers and support of family and friends.
4. Health and healings.
5. The registration of the Bulgarian Chaplaincy Association in February, 2007.
6. Conference of Bulgarian Church in North America in May, 2007.
7. Four weeks of Revelation Revival on the book of Revelation in June, 2007.
8. Holding the “X” Youth Event at the Black Sea in July, 2007.
9. Completing the new Bulgarian translation of the Gospel of John in September, 2007.
10. Missions’ revival services in South Carolina in October, 2007.
First Bulgarian Mission in Chicago (1907)
In May 1907, sponsored by the Chicago Tract Society, Petko Vasilev opened the Bulgarian Christian House in Chicago. The facilities had beds and a kitchen and served as a hotel and a shelter for new immigrants. In 1908, the name was changed to Bulgarian Christian Society and later was relocated several times.
A second similar work was started at the same time by Daniel Protoff called the Russian Christian Mission. Located in Chicago, it supported church services and a Bible school. In 1909, the City Missionary Society called Basil Keusseff to lead the mission. Keusseff was a Bulgarian born minister who was converted in Romania and was a graduate of the school in Samokov and Cliff College in Sheffield, England. In the 1890s, Keusseff pastored the Baptist church in Lom and then moved to Pittsburgh where he worked with Robert Bamber, pastor of the Turtle Creek Christian Church. The mission ministered to Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Turkish minorities.
Around 1910, the ministry of the Bulgarian Christian Society was aided by Reverend Paul Mishkoff, a student at Moody Bible Institute. Coming from a poor but strong Protestant family, Mishkoff was called to preach at a very early age. He studied in the school at Samokov and was often sent to preach in the nearby villages. After finishing the school, Mishkoff decided to come and study at the Moody Bible Institute. He was helped by a Methodist missionary who gave him four dollars – the price of a third-class ticket from Sofia to New York where he was put on the immigrant’s train to Chicago. He was denied admission to Moody with the explanation that there was neither room nor funds for him. With no job and no money, the young preacher had to find food at the saloons where it was offered free for ones who drank. During his struggles, Mishkoff had lost all his possessions except a pocket size New Testament. In his personal story, he recalled, “But I had the copy of the Bulgarian Testament in my pocket not only to keep it, but to read it when I was sitting on the benches of the Union Station and other public places night after night. My soul was wakened anew. An ambition was roused in me: I must prepare myself for a preacher any way.” Through a financial miracle, Mishkoff was eventually able to graduate from the Moody Bible Institute. During the course of his studies, he was supported by Chicago Tract Society and he was able to minister to the 5,000 Bulgarians living in Chicago.
Around 1910, the Bulgarian Christian Society established a library which served the Bulgarian community for over twenty years. The congregation of the mission numbered about fifty. The ministry included English classes and immigration law seminars.
Several changes in the leadership of the mission began in 1921. In 1924, the mission was headed by Zaprian Vidoloff and the mission was renamed the Bulgarian Christian Mission. Vidoloff was a graduate of the Samokov School in 1910, a student of philosophy at the University of Sofia and a graduate of Union Theological College in Chicago. He entered pastoral ministry in 1915 and later served as the secretary of the Baptist Union. At the same time, he was secretary of the Bulgarian legation in Washington, D.C. from 1921 to 1923.
All Bulgarian religious organizations initiated by evangelicals before 1930 existed as missions. In February 1932, the First Bulgarian Church pastored by Joseph Hristov was started in Chicago.
The Roma who Found Religion
By Nick Thorpe – BBC News, Lom, Bulgaria
The lives of Roma (gypsies) are often portrayed as being full of poverty and discrimination. However, for some in the Bulgarian town of Lom, religion and hard work are helping them build new, prosperous lives.
The good pastor, Iliya (Elijah) Georgiev was not at his church when we arrived in Humata, a suburb of Lom. We found him in a brown shirt, pouring the concrete foundations of a new outhouse for his animals, beside his home. A short, wiry man, he shouted his greetings as he worked, as a cousin slung him bucket after bucket. Handshakes could come later, when the precious grey liquid had set.
Music and mirth rose from Humata, whose name means something like mud, the silt or sediment of a river. A bloodshot sun sank at Iliya’s shoulder as he worked, painting his world a deep orange.
The settlement is built on a ridge, and behind the houses, a cliff falls suddenly onto a green plain below, dotted with brown horses. And finally a river, which flows into another river. The Danube.
But something was different here from so many gypsy neighbourhoods I have visited. Everyone was busy. They have built a church, rebuilt their own homes, and found an energy and purpose in their lives which seems, to a stranger at least, almost miraculous
These people are Pentecostalists – a church movement which has spread like wildfire among the gypsies of Eastern Europe in particular – a form of religion which fits better with their own mythology, than the strict rituals of Orthodox or Catholic. It is also giving a people much derided as work shy, a protestant work ethic.
“I stole, I drank, I was lazy,” Iliya told us later, with a twinkle in his eye, playing the caricature of a gypsy villain, on a stage of his own carpentry. “And then I got a life-threatening illness. And I started to pray.” That was 10 years ago.
With God’s help, he said, his whole neighborhood practices Christianity now. Together they have built a church, rebuilt their own homes, and found an energy and purpose in their lives which seems, to a stranger at least, almost miraculous.
Prayer meeting
Sixteen people, young and old, squeezed into a living room. We sat in a circle. The prayers came thick and fast, between a chant and a mumble, rising and falling like waves. A babe in arms. Wide-eyed children. Toothless ladies, shy girls and middle-aged men.
“Does anyone have a problem?” asked a young man in a denim jacket. One girl said her mother was working in Italy, and had a heart complaint. A man said he was deep in debt. A woman said her cousin was pregnant: “Could we pray for a safe delivery?” We sat in a circle. The prayers came thick and fast, between a chant and a mumble, rising and falling like waves.
“Now I’m going to tell you a story,” said the prayer leader. “A man was driving a bus down a steep hill. There was a cliff on one side, a ravine on the other. “Suddenly, a child ran out into the middle of the road. In the split second that followed, he had to make an appalling choice. “To kill the child, or all his passengers.”
The man paused for a moment. His audience froze. I felt angry. Why was he telling this story in front of children? “He drove straight into the child,” the man continued. “There was blood all over the windscreen. The passengers ran forward, remonstrating with him. “You should have killed us instead,” they shouted. “How could you kill an innocent child?”
“Then there was a deep silence.” On the bus and in the room. “Then the driver spoke. ‘That child was my own son,” he said, “and his name was Jesus.”
Better education
Earlier the same day, we sat with Nikolai Kirilov and other local gypsy leaders, in a restaurant beside the Danube. They all spoke English. The river stretched before us like an ancient, pungent, grey-green lion, the barges on its coat just scratches.
“Ten years ago, when we started our association with Roma Lom, only 5% of the gypsy children finished high school. Now it’s 75%.” The numbers come thick and fast here too, like prayers that have been answered. Until the year 2000, only five gypsies from the town had ever finished university. Now more than 40 have. “Everything depends on education,” says Nikolai, “if kids don’t get good marks at school, they can\’t play in the football team.”
Integration
There are 32,000 people in Lom, about half of them Roma. Four neighborhoods, three gypsy sub-groups, three different dialects of the Romany language. And lots of mixed marriages. “It\’s important that we teach Romany culture and language” he says. “But even more important that we teach Bulgarian. That will be more useful to them.\’
After an hour of conversation, I remark that he has not uttered the words discrimination, segregation or prejudice, the normal narrative of the Roma activist. He shrugs. “Those words have been devalued by overuse,” he says.
So we talk about politics. Is he not afraid of Bulgaria\’s new, ultra-nationalist party Ataka, which blames all Bulgaria\’s ills on gypsies and Turks? “My nightmare is that we create a crazy ethnic party of our own. Then the conflict would really start,” is his answer.
Mission Maranatha: The Vision
To proclaim a prophetic vision for Bulgaria and give an apostolic mission to the Bulgarian Church after the New Testament example
To evangelize in the area of Yambol and close by regions
To provide pastoral care in places where such is not present
To provide Pentecostal ministry in places where Protestant churches have never existed
To organize congregations or fragments of congregation and home groups in a Pentecostal network of praying and fasting saints
To reach villages and places forgotten by the Bulgarian government where hundreds of thousands of people starve in the middle of severe economical, political and social crises and to provide food for the body and for the soul
To train, equip and perfect ministers, mission teams and churches to fulfill the Great Commission of the Bible
Bulgaria: Historical Highlights
The first Bulgarian state was recognized in 681 A.D. and was a mixture of Slavs and Bulgars. Several years later, the First Bulgarian Kingdom or the “Golden Age” emerged under Tsar Simeon I in 893-927. During this time, Bulgarian art and literature flourished. Also during the ninth century, Orthodox Christianity became the primary religion in Bulgaria and the Cyrillic alphabet was established.
In 1018, Bulgaria fell under the authority of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine rule was short-lived, however. By 1185 Bulgarians had broken free of Byzantine rule and, in 1202, they established the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. Ottoman domination of the Balkan Peninsula eventually affected Bulgaria in the late 14th century, and by 1396, Bulgaria had become part of the Ottoman Empire. Following the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78) and the Treaty of Berlin (1885), Bulgaria gained some autonomy under the Ottoman Empire, but complete independence was not recognized until 1908.
The early-to-mid-1900s in Bulgaria was characterized by social and political unrest. Bulgaria participated in the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913) and sided with the Central Powers and later the Axis Powers during the two World Wars. (Although allied with Germany during World War II, Bulgaria never declared war on Russia.)
Following the defeat of the Axis Powers, communism emerged as the dominant political force within Bulgaria. Former King Simeon II, who is currently Prime Minister, was forced into exile in 1946 and remained primarily in Madrid, Spain, until April 2001, when he returned to Bulgaria. (Note: Simeon assumed control of the throne in 1943 at the age of 6 following the death of his father Boris III.) By 1946, Bulgaria had become a satellite of the Soviet Union, remaining so throughout the Cold War period. Todor Zhivkov ruled Bulgaria for much of its time under communism, and during his 27 years as leader of Bulgaria, democratic opposition was crushed, agriculture and industry were nationalized, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church fell under the control of the state.
In 1989, Zhivkov relinquished control, and democratic change began. The first multi-party elections since World War II were held in 1990. The ruling communist party changed its name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party and won the June 1990 elections. Following a period of social unrest and passage of a new constitution, the first fully democratic parliamentary elections were held in 1991 in which the United Democratic Front won. The first direct presidential elections were held the next year.
As Bulgaria emerged from the throes of communism, it experienced a period of social and economic unrest. With the help of the international community, former Prime Minister Ivan Kostov initiated a series of economic reforms in 1997 that helped stabilize the country. Recent elections in 2001 ushered in a new government and president, but the new leadership in Sofia remains committed to Euro-Atlantic integration, democratic reform, and development of a market-based economy.
Mission Maranatha – Bulgaria
Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the world has witnessed a miracle. In the corner of Europe, coming out from the severe Communist persecution and surrounded by the Balkan religious wars, one growing group of Christians is making a difference for the Kingdom of God. Placed on the crossroad of three world religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) and three continents (Europe, Africa and Asia), the country of Bulgarian has experienced an on-going spiritual revival in which hundreds of thousands of people have been touched by the power of God. But this miracle is not over just yet. Revival must go on …
In 1996 Mission Maranatha began a powerful and effective ministry in the area of Yambol City. The mission has been laboring in eleven churches, two of which were started by the Home Mission Team of Life of Christ Church of God in 1996-97. The humble work with the two small congregations has continuously grown to be a regional network of true apostolic churches, several of which were founded in villages where there has never been a Protestant church before. The total membership in the churches is over 300 which has been made possible through the powerful outreach ministries to orphans and widows that has touched both individuals and communities in a time of deep economical, political and social crises in Bulgaria.
The itinerary of the small mission team contains the minimum of four weekly trips to villages in the area. They often hold up to twenty services per week as the team is always open for new opportunities for ministry. Their church meetings are often accompanied with miracles and healings, which has drawn many new converts.
Naturally, besides converts and friends the magnitude of the work has drawn much opposition. It comes predominantly from Eastern Orthodox priests and believers, who are part of the traditional religious orientation of Bulgaria. Acting contrary to the established laws and constitutional rights, a nationalistic political organization that deliberately opposes Protestantism has brought a number of threats and manipulation against the outreach work of the church network. Despite the numerous external obstacles and financial difficulties, the work is continuously growing. The members of the team are regularly writing to both Christian and secular newspapers informing of their work. They are often asked to speak about their work at seminars and church meetings, and hold a weekly program on the local radio called Pentecost Today.
Mission Maranatha: Churches of Ministry
- Alexandrovo Church 45 miles away from Yambol has 10 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 1 service per week there since May, 2001.
- Bogorovo Church 38 miles away from Yambol has 30 members including the mayor. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 1 service per week there since October, 2000.
- Dobrinovo Church 42 miles away from Yambol has 30 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 3 services per week there since March, 2003.
- Iretchekovo Church 20 miles away from Yambol has 26 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 1 service per week there since January, 2003.
- Kamenetz Church 32 miles away from Yambol has 50 members including the mayor. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 5 services per week there since February, 2000.
- Leyarovo Church 38 miles away from Yambol has 12 members including the mayor. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 2 services per week there since May, 2000.
- Lulin Church 28 miles away from Yambol has 17 members including the mayor. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 2 services per week there since October, 2000.
- Parvenetz Church 35 miles away from Yambol has 6 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 1 service per week there since March, 2003.
- Polyana Church 52 miles away from Yambol has 60 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 2 services per week there since October, 1999.
- Robovo Church 38 miles away from Yambol has 10 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 1 service per week there since May, 2000.
- Tamarino Church 30 miles away from Yambol has 10 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 1 service per week there since December, 2002.
- Tchukarovo Church 52 miles away from Yambol has 12 members including the mayor. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 2 services per week there since May, 2000.
- Vodenitchane Church 26 miles away from Yambol has 16 members. Cup & Cross Ministry Team has held 2 services per week there since January, 2003.
