25 Years of Miracles: 2001

Week 7 of Mission BULGARIA 2001 (September 30 – October 6, 2001 – Sofia, BULGARIA)

We had two meetings in Varna – on Saturday night in the largest auditorium in the city and on Sunday morning in the Evangelical Pentecostal Church in town. More than 3,000 attended. The Lord touched us all, as the Gospel was preached. Many were healed and testified in the services.

Week 8 of Mission BULGARIA 2001 (Week 8 – October 7-13, 2001 – Sofia, BULGARIA)

On Saturday we had two meetings in the largest auditorium in Bulgaria at the National Palace of Culture. More than 7,000 attended as people came with buses from their local churches. More than 150 Church of God congregations were represented, as many of the visitors were from other denominations as well. We preached, prayed worshiped and ministered to the people throughout the whole day, as the Lord confirmed his Word with miracles and healings. The services continued on Sunday as well. At the later service some 300 men, women and children gave their lives to Christ. More than 40 people testified that they have been healed since we started the series of crusades four weeks ago. The most amazing fact is that God touched children who testified of their healing.

Week 9 of Mission BULGARIA 2001 (Week 9 – October 13-20, 2001 – Sofia, BULGARIA)

My further work has daily included a few hours as coordinator at the Bulgarian Church of God Headquarters in Sofia and the participation of the last four crusades organized in the cities of Lom, Samokov, Varna and Sofia. The numbers total to more than 300 saved and 40 healed.

Week 14 of Mission BULGARIA 2001 (Week 14 November 17-24, 2001 Sofia, BULGARIA)

I had to take a trip to my hometown Yambol this week to check on the ministry of the mission team there and to renew my driver’s license. On the way back to Sofia on Friday, we stopped at a town called Sliven nearby Yambol. As mother and I walked in the street a lady in her mid 40s stopped us and asked if we recognized her. I did not, but mother did and even remembered her name, Maria. Maria attended the church in Yambol a few years ago when I served as an associate pastor there. She had a large tumor-like mass in her back and the doctors urged her to let them operate. In one on the services, she said, I prayed for her and the Lord healed her. As she went back to the doctors a few weeks later, they could not find even a trace of a tumor or cancer formation.

Week 15 of Mission BULGARIA 2001 (November 25 – December 1, 2001 – Sofia, BULGARIA)

This past Wednesday night (November 28) we had the best church service since I have come back. About 150 were present and I preached on Revelation chapters 14 and 15. The text finished with the passage about the glory of God. Then God touched us. At the altars people were crying everywhere, kneeling and falling on their faces. Four were healed – one from severe headache, one from pain in the kidneys, one from heart problems and one from pain in the lower back. I praise the Lord for all these and expect even more reports.

Celebrating 25 Years in the Ministry

We’ve completed another successful term of ministry for 2015 marking a decade since the start of Mission BULGARIA in 2005 and also our 25th anniversary in the ministry. From humble beginnings in September of 1990, God has taken us to a full quarter century of ministry literally throughout the globe.

As the Thanksgiving season is now upon us, we will be commemorating this event more extensively with a series called “25 Years of Miracles.” The series contains testimonies with various healings and miracles from our ministry, which we’ve collected and recorded through the years.

We are grateful to the Lord for giving us the opportunity to preach the Gospel and be a part of your life through our ministry. Thank you for your partnership and friendship through the years and Happy Thanksgiving!

95 Years Ago Voronaev Set Sail on a Pentecostal Mission to Europe

Rev. Ivan Voronaev’s last letter to Assemblies of God headquarters in Springfield, Missouri was received by Rev. J. Roswell Flower on June 22, 1920 and was marked “He plans to return to Russia.” The letter outlined Voronaev’s six-point mission strategy:

1. he was leaving with his family and some brothers from New York to Russia on July 13, 1920 on the steamboat “Madonna”
2. Voronaev trusted the Lord for the finances necessary to complete the mission
3. First Russian Assembly of New York was poor and unable to meet the ministry expenses
4. Voronaev was unable to get in touch with Assemblies of God missionaries Johnson and Schmidt
5. but planned to preach in Russia
6. finally, the group had decided to purchase Russian Bibles and New Testaments in New York to take to Russia.

The group included the families of Voronaev, Zaplishny, Koltovich, along with V. Klibik and N. Kardanov from Ossetia. They could only purchase tickets for the deck, which proposed problems for the children during the cold ocean nights. According to Voronaev’s later records, the group set sail from New York on July 15, 1920 (thou Martha C. Zaplishny- Jackson recalls July 8th or 17th in various statements). The only standing proof for the exact departure date is the ship’s records with the French Fabre Line.

Madonna sailed via Marseille in France and Naples, Italy. The group’s trip to Europe included a stop in Greece before reaching Constantinople on August 10, 1920. Both Voronaev and Zaplishny’s children have pictures from visiting “several other Balkan countries,” thou not well documented and quite improbable. Consecutively, when the Zaplishny family had to flee Bulgaria in 1924, they used the same route taking a train to Cherbourg, France and then a boat to New York’s Ellis Island.

Through all these difficulties, Voronaev reached Bulgaria by the end of 1920 and Odessa in the U.S.S.R by August 12, 1921. The movements his mission started from Varna to Vladivostock were Pentecostal pioneers for this part of the Old World. By the time Voronaev was arrested in 1930, over 400 Pentecostal churches with 20,000 members strong were started by his ministry throughout Eastern Europe.

Read about the legacy of Ivan Voronaev:

• Ivan Voronaev: The Death of a Hero is a Legacy to Remember
• Arrest and Imprisonment of Rev. Ivan Voronaev (1930)
• Arrest and Imprisonment of Ekaterina Voronaev (1933)

More about the Voronaev’s children:

• The Real Voronaev Children
• The (un)Forgotten: The Story of Rev. Ivan Voronaev’s Children

Ivan Voronaev in the historical archives:

• Finding Ivan Voronaev (a.k.a. John Voronaeff) at the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley, California
• Letters from Bulgaria: Overview of Rev. Ivan Voronaev’s Correspondence

20 Years of the Bulgarian Church of God in Chicago

July 10, 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the first service of the Bulgarian Church of God in Chicago in 1995.

We have told the Story of the first Bulgarian Church of God in the Untied States (read it here) on numerous occasions and it was a substantial part of our 2005 dissertation (published in 2012, see it here).

From my personal memories, the exact beginning was after Brave Heart opened in the summer of 1995 and the Narragansett Church of God closed the street for a 4th of July block party with BBQ, Chicago PD horsemen, a moonwalk and much more.

The first service in the Bulgarian vernacular was held Sunday afternoon, July 10th 1995 being the true anniversary of the Bulgarian Church in Chicago. Only about a dozen were present and the sermon I preached was from Hebrews 13:5. Unfortunately, to this day 20 years later, we cannot locate the pictures taken that day to identify those present. And some have already passed away.

Using a ministry model that later became a paradigm for starting Bulgarian churches in North America (see it in detail) the church grew to over 65 members in just a few weeks by the end of July. This was around the time the movie Judge Dread had opened and the first edition of Windows 95 was scheduled for release in Chicago. I saw them both at the mall on upper Harlem Boulevard.

The Bulgarian Church of God in Chicago followed a rich century-long tradition, which began with the establishing of Bulgarian churches and missions in 1907. (read the history) Consecutively, our 1995 Church Starting Paradigm was successfully used in various studies and models in 2003. The program was continuously improved in the following decade, proposing an effective model for leading and managing growing Bulgarian churches.

Based on the Gateway cities in North America and their relations to the Bulgarian communities across the continent, it proposed a prognosis toward establishing Bulgarian churches (see it here) and outlined the perimeters of their processes and dynamics in the near future (read in detail).

After a personal xlibris, the said prognosis were revisited in 2009 in relation to preliminary groundbreaking church work on the West Coast and then evaluated against the state of Bulgarian Churches in America at the 2014 Annual Conference in Minneapolis.

We’re yet to observe the factors and dynamics determining if Bulgarian churches across North America will follow their early 20th century predecessors to become absorbed in the local context or alike many other ethnic groups survive to form their own subculture in North America. We will know the answer for sure in another 20 years…

12 Benefits from Walking in the Desert for 40 Years

1. You lose excessive weight you don’t need
2. You lose treasures/gold you thought you needed
3. You go on God’s diet
4. You learn your true friends/brothers and sisters
5. You learn to trust God daily
6. You learn to keep walking
7. You see your enemies defeated by God
8. Walking in the desert takes you to the top of God’s mountain where you meet God
9. Your children receive the Promise Land
10. There is a generational genetic cleansing of unfaithfulness. When the faith of a generation grows, the faith of the nation increases
11. You learn to walk in unity or you get lost and die alone
12. You begin to appreciate the small things in life (like bread and water)

Bibliata.com Celebrates 15 Years of Ministry on the World Wide Web

One of our websites, which we use daily in our ministry, Bibliata.com is now 15 years old. Through these years it has become an icon of one generation and we celebrated its birthday with a great mega youth rally for the southeastern region of Bulgaria.

We are thankful to all who supported us in this ministry endeavor through the years and the ones who came to celebrate this spiritual birthday with us at the New Generation Church in the city of Dimitrovgrad. Among them were longtime Bulgarian friends and partners in the ministry from the churches in Sofia, Haskovo, Sliven, Plovdiv and Yambol.

Celebrating 20 Years in the Ministry

During the month of September, our ministry is celebrating 20 years in the ministry. I was saved in my hometown of Yambol Bulgaria on August 9, 1990 and baptized with the Holy Spirit seven days later. In two weeks time God called me to preach and I preached my first sermon one September Friday at the Church of God in the small mountain town of Pravetz, Bulgaria. Fourteen were present at the meeting. The Bulgarian Church of God was still underground. Little I knew that only a few months later, the youth group of the church would count over 100 strong and growing, the Berlin Wall would have had fallen and revival would’ve been on the way. That night in Pravetz Bulgaria I just preached a sermon from the Word. That same Word, which God still claims cannot return void. For Revival must go on …

Our story has a humble beginning working with small Pentecostal-holiness groups in the Bulgarian mountains and growing the Pravetz Church of God youth group to over 300 members in a city of 5,000. And thus our ministry moved forward: from the storefront churches of Bulgaria to establishing the Bulgarian congregation of Chicago; from the backwoods Bulgarian villages to postgraduate level research; from the old red back hymnal to the latest technological invention; from hitchhiking to the charter flights and using any transportation necessary to get to the Sunday morning service and minister. We have done whatever needed to be done for the ministry to go on in Bulgaria and abroad. But we never forgot where we came from and we have faithfully kept on returning to minister to our humble beginnings…

At age 20 a ministry is not an old veteran, but just starting in its prime. We are both convinced and committed toward a new level of ministry in 2010 in a new spiritual realm. With this vision in mind, we have present the Bulgarian Church of God a dynamic strategy for the next five years of its development and ministry. We invite you to partner with us in payer and fasting for this endeavor.

90 Years of Bulgarian Pentecostalism

Bulgarian Pentecostal believers celebrate 90 years of ministry and history. The Bulgarian Pentecostal movement is rooted in the Azusa street holiness Pentecostal revival which began in April of 1906. The revival then spread through the United States and less than a decade later, large Pentecostal denominations as the Church of God and the Assemblies of God were formed embracing the vision to send missionaries to foreign lands.

After establishing contact with the World Missions Department of the Assemblies of God at the end of 1919, Cossack born immigrant, who later took on Ukrainian citizenship, Ivan Voronaev received a calling to return to his motherland and preach the message of Pentecost there. Alongside him traveled the family of Ukrainian immigrant Dionissey Zaplishny and his Bulgarian born wife Olga, who like Voronaev left the church they pastored in the United States to obey the call to missions.

On March 10, 1920, Assemblies of God issued Voronaev a certificate as a “pastor and evangelist in Bulgaria” valid till September 1, 1921 and on June 22, 1920 Voronaev notified them his plans to set sail for Russia with his family on July 13, 1920. On the said date, the Voronaev, Koltovitch and Zaplishny’s families set sail on the “Madonna” steamboat from New York to Constantinople. Along with them traveled a group of Kavkaz believers among which was Bulgarian Boris Klibok.

After arriving to Constantinople, they had to wait for visas to enter Russia. Voronaev immediately began meeting with the Russian community in town recognizing the lack of Russian Bibles and Pentecostal churches. He wrote on August 15, 1920: „ ….with the help of God opened Russian mission here [Constantinople], and God our work blessed;” and on August 30, 1920: „…. we had first baptism with water in river. I baptized one lady wife of a Russian office. Glory to Jesus!”

After waiting for three months in Constantinople, Voronaev arrived in the Bulgarian port city of Bourgas along with Bulgarian Boris Klibok. The Zaplishny family had already established their ministry there through Olga’s Congregational home church. What followed next was a revival that made history.

March 5, 1921: The Pentecostal Evangel published Voronaev’s report from Bulgaria where he has been holding Russian-Bulgarian revival services in various churches in the cities of Sliven, Yambol, Varna and Sofia. Seven received the baptism with the Holy Spirit.

April 16, 1921: The Pentecostal Evangel published Voronaev’s second report from Bulgaria about services in Sliven, Bourgas, Plovdiv and the Baptist Church in Stara Zagora where the daughter of the Baptist pastor from Kazanlak received the baptism with the Holy Spirit.

May 14, 1921: Services in the Congregational Church in Plovdiv and baptismal service in the Martiza River.

June 11, 1921: „In Bourgas, Bulgaria the Lord baptized with the Holy Spirit about fourteen souls. We have about twenty candidates for baptism with water, and about thousand Bulgarians and Russian were there and were much interested.”

July, 1921: The Latter Rain Evangel published an article under the title “Pentecost in Bulgaria” in which Voronaev wrote about new Pentecostal believers in seven Bulgarian cities, his relocation in Varna to work with the local Methodist church and his plan to move to Odessa. The Pentecostal Evangel from the same month wrote, “God called Brother J.W. Voronaeff, who had charge of a Russian Pentecostal Assembly in New York City, to Russia.”

The early Bulgarian Pentecostals spoke in other tongues, embraced the gifts of the Spirit, practiced foot washing and conservative holiness, and received the Bible as their rule of life almost to the point of ritualistic ascetism. It was their prayer, preaching and serving before the Lord that ensured the future of the movement. Many of them would be forced underground when the Pentecostal Union is registered with the Bulgarian State in 1928. Others will be persecuted even unto death during the Communist Regime after WWII. The more conservative group split right down the middle by two strong leaders, Tinchevists and Borisovtsi would protect the faith to the best of their abilities. Many modern religious formations, among which the Bulgarian Church of God, would spring out from these grassroots of these holiness seeking Pentecostal Puritans. By 1990, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, this group of people will go through the largest evangelistic revival in Bulgaria since the Christianization of Bulgaria in 861AD.

10 Years of Military Ministry in Bulgaria

Military Ministry in Bulgaria is celebrating 10 years. The special events will be held in the Black Sea town of Varna, Bulgaria. Chaplains from around the country, as well as international colleagues and friends, are invited for a time of reunion and inspiration. Special speakers of the event are Paul Pettyjohn and Chaplain Bernie Windmiller from the International Association of Evangelical Chaplains.

After serving the military in Bulgaria for a decade, the ministry is strategizing the legalization of chaplaincy and pastoral care in the Bulgarian professional army and police. Today, this difficult task seems closer than ever before, as ministers, pastors and caregivers are excited about the opening of such doors and the new opportunities which it will present for Bulgaria.

Pravetz 16 Years Later

Thirteen years after graduating from high school I was able to return to Pravetz again for a reunion of the Church of God youth group there. As many of us traveled from various parts of the world to attend the meeting, it was only natural to recall what the Lord had done for us in this small mountain town.

The Church of God in Pravetz was founded as an outreach ministry of the close-by Etropole church. For many years, the Etropole Church of God was known as an underground evangelical congregation that served many in prayer and preaching regardless of limitations set by local and national authorities.

When the church in Pravetz began regular services in the early 1980s none of the secular observers suspected that it would have any influence on the town. Pravetz was the birthplace of the Bulgarian communist prime minister who ruled the nation for over 30 years. In the 1980s, Pravetz was known as a “privileged” city where the Communist Regime had build its own ideological stronghold. Yet, the Church of God in Pravetz survived the Regime and after much prayer and anticipation the church officially opened its’ doors after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

This was also the time of my affiliation with the church. Just having been saved in my hometown Yambol, I returned to Pravetz at the beginning of the school year in 1990 and begun attending the Church of God there. The church had a small group of young people who sought the Lord. In less than a year, their prayers were answered as a great multitude of young people begun attending the church. I remember one of the meetings where over 170 young people were present in the small military cafeteria adapted for church services. Having gathered at the recent meeting, we concluded again that for the period of 1990-1995, over 300 young people where saved in the city of Pravetz. Their stories remain forever recorded as part of the history of the Pravetz Church of God.

These were the events that we remembered at the gathering on June 24, 2006 in Pravetz. Many shared their stories since graduating from the school and beginning a carrier in various professional fields. Pastor Ivan Sabotinov, who has served in the church almost from its beginning, greeted the audience and reminded everyone of God’s love and grace that has remained the same through all these years. We were also given the opportunity to share from the Word and speak about the First Love. The message urged the remembrance of God’s miraculous power and assured those present that although we might have lost our first love, we are never lost from the first love of God. In addition, we were able to hold three more services on Sunday, June 25th at 8:00 a.m. in Pravetz, 10:00 a.m. in Etropole and 12:00 p.m. in Yablanitza.

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