BC/AD 2011 (Bible Camp/All Denominations) – God’s Favor Realized
Just like last year, in order not to interfere with church services, the camp began on Sunday afternoon, followed by registration of over 75 young people already active in the ministry. This number does not include the guest who traveled for daily seminars and evening services from the nearby towns and villages. Some even traveled from the capital Sofia, located over 200 miles west on the other side of Bulgaria and from nearby countries.
After pitching tents and getting settled in, Pastor Anton Penev of Reformation Church in Haskovo opened the camp with a message on Fixing Our Eyes on Jesus. First time guest, Regional Bishop Vassil Petrov of the Gabrovo Church of God, spoke during the next evening service and gave testimony of his salvation and calling to healing ministry. Dr. Dony Donev delivered a message on Tuesday night on the Glory of God, followed by guests from Greece who arrived Wednesday to minister during the closing service. Praise and worship during services was lead by the youth praise team from the Yambol Assemblies of God. (Continues)
ALL ABOUT BIBLE CAMP 2011 BULGARIA:
BC/AD 2011 (Bible Camp/All Denominations) in Bulgaria – A Vision of Purpose
BC/AD 2011 (Bible Camp/All Denominations) in Bulgaria – A New Paradigm for Ministry in the Spirit
BC/AD 2011 (Bible Camp/All Denominations) in Bulgaria – A Vision of Purpose
Since 2008, when we began the Mobile School of Ministry in Bulgaria, our team has been able to organize an annual youth camp purposing the training and equipping young ministers for the harvest of God in Bulgaria. Just recently, our training model has been featured by youth outreach organizations like Youth for Christ via their European regional office in Barcelona, Spain.
When you hear about a youth camp you have a certain picture in mind like a reunion of friends who haven’t seen each other since last summer or times of fun, of games and so forth. But Bible Camp is not your typical youth camp. It was specifically designed for a select group of young people called and involved in the ministry.
This may sound strange at first, however, today in Bulgaria there are plenty of Christian camps for kids to hang out, play games and enjoy themselves. This camp is for young people who have accepted a calling for ministry on their lives. It is a time of prayer and fasting; a time of being one on one in a quiet place seeking the face of God, hearing His voice and seeing His Glory abide in a genuine Biblical and personal experience.
As early as 2008, this unique opportunity to train workers for the Harvest has been in the planning. It began with a Word that the Lord is calling a new generation to a new level of ministry in Bulgaria. This vision was casted among the churches and as a result teams from various towns were formed and we began having monthly leadership training seminars in the village Katunishte in the Balkan mountain in 2009.
Then, 2010 marked the first year of having an organized camp. Now, several years latter, we are able to announce that the second national annual Bible Camp in Bulgaria was a reality and a success. This is a camp that did not just spring up over night. Much prayer, planning and partnership went into making the vision a reality. (Continues)
ALL ABOUT BIBLE CAMP 2011 BULGARIA:
BC/AD 2011 (Bible Camp/All Denominations) – God’s Favor Realized
BC/AD 2011 (Bible Camp/All Denominations) in Bulgaria – A New Paradigm for Ministry in the Spirit
NEW REVIVAL in BULGARIA
Unprecedented revival is sweeping the country of Bulgaria again and has started among the Pentecostal Church of God. We have spent the last full month in traveling and preaching in key churches crossing the country from the capital Sofia to the Black Sea and from the Danube River through the Balkan Mountains to the Thracian Valley.
While people in general are struggling with the economic and political crises and the church is in continuous leadership dilemmas, God is on the move with a new revival mainly among the new generation of young people. We saw this in recent national youth events like our spring 2011 youth leaders gathering near Yambol and the regional youth revival in Silistra during Easter. Similar meetings were reported in Eastern Bulgaria in May and in the capital Sofia in June with the arrival of praise team from Hillsong, which gathered over 7,000 people in one single event. And last but not least, various meetings of Roma leaders and youth, to which we had the privilege to contribute as well.
We are now looking forward to combining these experiences within our national Bible Camp which we hold for young ministers and youth leaders, followed by the New Wave camp at the Black Sea and the traditional Karandila Youth Camp in the Balkan Mountain. For when one generation looses touch with God, as described in Jeremiah 5:31, God always brings a new generation to serve Him. Today, God is raising a generation of young and faithful people full with the Holy Ghost, and we simply cannot afford to stay out of this great move of God in the last days.
2011 Historic Pentecostal Revival Tour in Bulgaria
Celebrating 90 years since the first Pentecostal revival in Bulgaria
Exactly 400 years ago, the first King James Bible was printed in June, 1611. The first Bulgarian Bible was printed 140 years ago in June, 1871. The first Pentecostal Revival in Bulgaria took place between Easter and Pentecost of 1921. And finally, exactly 20 years the Pravetz youth group, where I had the privilege to begin my ministry, experienced a spiritual revival in which hundreds of young people were reached and saved.
To commemorate this great heritage, we undertook a historic revival tour during the month of June in Bulgaria. We started at the Black Sea with the momentous ordination of presbyters in the church of Aheloy – one of the few Church of God congregations with the original doctrine and practice. The special ordination service on Saturday night went on with prayer and praise, communion and foot washing until 2am.
Then on Sunday we gathered at 6:30am for prayer and followed with the morning service. We continued with services in Pravetz, where our youth group celebrated its 20-year anniversary, then at the church in Verdical near Sofia with a special foot washing and communion service, and finally in Sofia with a prophetic word to the Church of God in the Obelya suburb.
Bulgaria in the Archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Cambridge
For the past 15 years, which we have dedicated to the study and translation of the Bulgarian Bible, it has been a personal dream of ours to visit and work with the Cambridge Library and more specifically with the historical documents which are related to the translation and publication of the Bulgarian Bible through the 18-19 centuries.
The closest we had come to examining the archives was back in 2005-2007 while searching for the lost copy of Theodocy Bistritzky’s 1820 translation of the Gospel of Mathew. We then found the only two copies left of that translation, one located in St. Petersburg (with a reproduction at the U.S. Library of Congress) and the other at the Cambridge Library.
Therefore, it was a great pleasure to receive an invitation to visit the Cambridge Library in connection with the 400-year anniversary of the King James Bible (1611) and use the opportunity to examine the available documents related to Bulgaria. The main difficulty with this task comes from the fact that during the 19th century Bulgaria was under Ottoman occupancy and documents related to the Bulgarian Bible are cataloged under various locations: European Turkey, Near East Mission, New Bulgarian Kingdom, Western Turkey, Bulgarian Kingdom or the Balkans. For this reason, many documents are yet not cataloged and remain the library’s stacks, which makes their discovery both difficult and exciting. Successfully completing our initial survey of the archives, we were able to take over 1,000 pages in pictures with the library’s permission. This first look at archives that have remain hidden for more than a century reveled three groups of documents containing the following items:
Catalog series BSA/E3/1/4 contains some 30 volumes with whole or partial copies of letters and documents. For the lack of copy machines back then, the items in the archive were written by hand. Eighteen of these volumes listed bellow, contain information about Bulgaria.
BSA/E3/1/3 (p. 23, 54, 69, 70, 107, 185, 190, 211-12, 229) – letters from 1859 to and from Rev. Dr. Chauffer, Benjamin Barker, Dr. Van Dayk, Dr. Riggs, etc., predominantly referring to the revision of the Bulgarian New Testament.
BSA/E3/1/4/2 (p. 60, 75, 96-99, 107-109, 160-166, 272, 305) – letters from 1862-63 of Rev. Баркър, Thomson, etc., about the translation of the Pentateuch including an important index of the corrections in revision of the Bulgarian New Testament (p. 162).
BSA/E3/1/4/3 (p. 48, 64, 102, 111, 114, 149, 160-1, 172, 185, 222, 227) – letters from 1861-62, 1865 на Benjamin Barker, Dr. Riggs, J.W. Muller, Thomson and others. This correspondence set discusses the importance of changing the Bulgarian translation to the Eastern (Tarnovo) dialect.
BSA/E3/1/4/4 (p. 3) – letter by Dr. Thomson about Dr. Riggs work on the Bulgarian Bible.
BSA/E3/1/4/5 (p. 302, 311) – letters from 1867 about Dr. Long’s work on the Bulgarian Bible.
BSA/E3/1/4/6 (p. 150) – letter from Dr. Riggs to Dr. Thomson from October 3-29 1868, about the measurements in the Bulgarian translation.
BSA/E3/1/4/7 (p. 127, 136, 156) – letters from 1870.
BSA/E3/1/4/8 (p. 21, 24-25, 78, 102, 124-25, 129, 238) – letters from 1870-71 by Riggs, Thomson and others. Contains a fully revised table of the measurements in the Bulgarian Bible translation.
BSA/E3/1/4/9 (p. 275-76) – letter by Dr. Thomson about Dr. Riggs’s work on the translation of the Bulgarian Bible.
BSA/E3/1/4/10 (p. 150) – letter from 1874.
BSA/E3/1/4/11 (p. 66, 129, 199, 213, 237) – letters from 1874.
BSA/E3/1/4/12 (p. 40, 185, 248, 253, 260-61, 265) – 1876 letters to and from Dr. Thomson with a request to receive 200-300 copies of the Bulgarian edition of the Psalms. The collection ends with a parallel of several translations in a printed edition for the revising committee. (p. 265ff).
BSA/E3/1/4/13 (p. 13, 63, 73, 90, 304-05) – 1877-78 letters to Dr. Thomson.
BSA/E3/1/4/14 (p. 113) – letter to Dr. Thomson.
BSA/E3/1/4/16 (p. 181, 279) – letters by Dr. Thomson.
BSA/E3/1/4/20 (p. 232-35) – letter to Dr. Thomson from August 29 recommending a 3,000 copy publication of the Four Gospels with the Book of Acts in one volume in parallel with the Slavic text.
BSA/E3/1/4/25 (p. 196, 333) – letters from 1887-90.
BSA/E3/1/4/30 (p. 16-17, 51, 350) – letters from 1892.
Two additional folders marked with “Bulgarian” and catalog series BSA/83/3/67/1-2 has the complete BFBS correspondence from the first half of the 20th century. It refeers predominantly to the new revision of the text prepared for the 1924 Royal Publishing House edition of the Bulgarian Bible. Various other items are included as well, many of which related to the Evangelical School in Samokov (near the capital Sofia) and its full operational publishing house, along with many more documents important for the Bulgarian protestant history. A third and final item of interest is catalog series BSA/E3/2/19-20, BSA/E3/2/23 and BSA/E3/2/24-26.
Bible Ministry Camp 2010
Ministry Camp 2010 was a complete success with over 65 registered campers gathered for a week in the heart of the Bulgarian Balkan mountain in a location that is kept authentic as Bulgarian architecture was a couple of centuries ago. A number of newly started churches and ministries were represented among which the churches in Sliven, Yambol, Haskovo, Zheravna, Mokren, Bourgas, Kotel, Razgrad and Sofia. Beside the Bulgarian youth, we had friends and partners in the ministry who came from Greece, the United States, England, Spain and Macedonia. But the most important thing for us personally, was the unique opportunity to train workers for the Harvest in a camp that was not targeted towards a general audience, but focused on youth with a ministry call upon their lives.
Camp began on Sunday afternoon in order not to interfere with any church service and official registration began at 8:00 am the following morning. The opening message as well as on Tuesday night was delivered by Rev. Anton Penev, pastor of the newly started Reformation Pentecostal Church of Haskovo. He challenged the youth in a very powerful way to seek the Lord’s will through the week and focused on the calling and direction He has upon their lives.
We were able to teach the morning sessions, a total of six lessons from the Epistle to Ephesians, using our new translation of the Bulgarian New Testament, which is currently in print. Topics like salvation, sanctification, baptism of the Holy Spirit, family relationships in the ministry and spiritual warfare sharpened the minds and hearts of the young people, preparing them for the afternoon sessions which focused on the practical issues of Christian ministry.
In the afternoons the campers broke up into smalls groups which focused on three aspects of the ministry, as follows: preaching, prayer and worship according to their ministry calling. It was during the small groups that we were able to work more personally with the youth specially called to preaching the Gospel. The service on Ephesians chapter 4, when we taught on the ministry of the church, was specifically powerful and as a result some 30 young people received the call for ministry or a confirmation with the special laying of hands by the elders present. Several water baptisms and a baptism with the Holy Spirit followed the service.
Pastor Anton, was aided in the evening sessions by Pastor Encho Hristov from the Sliven church who ministered on Tuesday night and guests from Greece ministered during the closing service on Wednesday evening. We were also able to minister with puppets to the children that were present at the camp as guest from surrounding villages and towns came for the evening service from the Church of God in Mokren and Zheravna. Praise teams from the Yambol and Kotel Assemblies of God churches provided the music for the camp.
We thank all of those who made this camp a success and extend a special thanks to the Eco Complex in Katunishte for graciously hosting our event and allowing us to use their facilities. We thank the Lord for this great opportunity as our team is already receiving reports of healings and miracles. A lady from Sliven, whose daughter was deaf in one ear, just wrote us that her daughter was healed during the service last night. We are hoping to be able to do a follow up in a couple months down the road with the people who dedicated their lives to the ministry.
Presenting at BibleTech 2010
Mobile Bible School in Bulgaria Implements Three Online Programs
As our Mobile Bible School demands constant upgrade and the addition of various new modules, we have been able to implement three complete Bible training schools available in the Bulgarian vernacular within our program. They are presented as media resources to the students and now we have been successful in posting them online to a larger audience, which has interest in them. This include church pastors and independent churches, lay ministers and ministry teams, all the way to the common folk who want to learn about the Bible. These three programs have been historically present in Bulgaria since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and it is our hope that with their internet presentation they will continue to serve for the purpose of ministry training. They are:
1. Oasis of Love Bible School which was taught in Bulgaria by American missionary Keith de Mayo and his colleagues in 1990-1994. After the Fall of the Berlin wall, Oasis of Love became the first major ministry training center on a national level in the capital Sofia. Several hundred ministry students finished the school and entered the ministry by 1994. We were blessed to be able to gather the recordings of the lessons and publish them online. (icon)
2. The School of Christ International directed by Rev. B.H. Clendennen (May 22, 1922 – December 13, 2009) was introduced in Bulgaria around 2000-2001 and for a brief time received great attention, especially among the Roma Gipsy churches of Southwestern Bulgaria. It introduced a new approach to Bible training through media resources, which were flexible to present and easy to replicate in the local church, thus becoming an important training device for the ministry in the Bulgarian context. (icon)
3. International School of Ministry (ISOM) is a largely recognized training tool for churches around the globe. It comprises the teachings of leading ministers and renowned theologians, who have gathered together in one team to impart to a next generation what they have learned about the ministry. The chosen theme series covers virtually every aspect of Christian ministry and are invaluable training tools for both ministers and members within the local church (icon)
Mobile Bible School in Bulgaria Implements Three New Courses
In the past six months in which we have implemented the mobile Bible school into the Bulgarian context of ministry, our team has added three more courses which will be included in our 2010 class program. They are:
1. Systematic Theology. This is a course that we developed back in 2001 to respond to the need for Bulgarian contextualized studies in systematic theology from a Pentecostal perspective. After teaching the course at the Pentecostal Department of the Bulgarian Evangelical Theological Institute, we published a small Sunday school series on the subject, which have since then been used for congregational Bible studies within the Bulgarian Church of God. We are planning to reprint this publication in 2010 and present the course not only to the students who study Bible doctrine, but also as a practical model for teaching Systematic Theology from a Pentecostal perspective in the context of the local church.
2. The Christian Chaplaincy course was first presented within the context of the Bulgarian Evangelical Theological Institute in 2006 as part of the educational program of the Bulgarian Chaplaincy Association. It purposes to introduce students to the ministry of the chaplain and help ministers recognize a calling to chaplaincy ministry they may have in their lives and set them forth to a higher level of education on the subject. The course has been taught several times in the past five years in various locations across Bulgaria and has been instrumental in the development of the Master’s Program in Chaplaincy, which we will begin teaching in September of 2010 in partnership with the Bulgarian Evangelical Theological Institute.
3. Demons, Disease and Deliverance is the latest class developed along with two Church of God pastors. Vasil Petrov and Plamen Petrov who have served with the Bulgarian Church of God for over two decades now. Their healing and deliverance ministries have extended beyond the borders of Bulgaria, as they are frequent guests to Bulgarian emigrant communities in Europe and the United States. Plamen Petrov is currently serving with the Bulgarian church in Malaga, Spain, while Vasil Petrov is a regional overseer for the Gabrovo Church of God region. They both hold weekly online programs on the subject of healing and deliverance and were instrumental in the developing of this class as practical training which the Mobile Bible School now offers as an online training course for ministers and lay leaders.
Bible School and Services at the Mission Church in Sofia
We are just returning from a powerful weekend of teaching in Sofia. With temperatures below zero and snow covering the larger part of Bulgaria, we travelled to the capital city to minister at the Mission Church there. The church is only a couple of years old, but we have worked with the pastor and the leadership team for over a decade now as part of our Church of God ministry and the Bulgarian Chaplaincy Association as well.
Since April, 2009 the Mission Church has had services in the heart of the Sofia metropolitan of some 2.5 million people living in it. The church started with a handful of folks and now has some 120 members in their regular meetings, a Bible school, home group program, arts program and a very powerful praise team and choir that have held several successful concerts already.
Our visit was connected with a series of lectures on New Testament interpretation at their Bible school and ministering in their Sunday service. Although the school has only 30 students, we felt a powerful presence during the lectures and were able to extend the material and connect on a more personal level with the students. Naturally, the Sunday service became a great continuation of what we had already completed with the students. During the first song of worship, a demon possessed man ran to the altars screaming and rolled on the ground, only to be delivered a few minutes later. Then, the preaching took the attention of the people in the congregation, followed by an alter service in which many rededicated their lives praying to God to bring them to a new spiritual level in their Christian walk. Along with the pastor and his family, we were blessed to observe the Word working within the people and changing their lives forever.
