I am sitting in SFO waiting for my flight to Honolulu and on to Guam to leave in about an hour. It has been seventeen days since we got back from Bulgaria—the trip was wonderful but exhausting. (Note to self—don’t schedule major trips so close together in the future). Reconnecting with old friends, teaching one of my favorite subjects, seeing more of Bulgaria and Europe than I have ever seen before. I am still ruminating on (processing ) the trip.

This year was different from the past couple of years. First, the newness (but not the foreignness) has worn off. I was going into a known situation, meeting with staff people who have become dear to us over the past three years. Second, the class was more fun than the past two years. 2/3 of the students in the class were pastors who were vitally interested in the topic. They face theological issues on a day to day basis so come with an awareness of what they don’t know. As a result, they were engaged, asking questions and probing and questioning as I lectured. On several occasions, we got involved in theological discussions that lasted over an hour. That never happens when a student is not being challenged to think in some way that he had never considered before.

As pastors, the questions arose out of the concerns with the lives of their people. Theology connecting with life! (Imaging that !) Some of the discussions focused (predictably) on free will and predestination others focused on the nature of sin and grace, and how we approach these issues in the life of the church. There was concern for the church’s reputation in the community when their members did not live out their faith—this was articulated particularly in the problem of the men as the providers for the traditional families, coming home from work and drinking. Should these men be disciplined? Should they be expelled? Aren’t we as Christians to live lives holy and different from the non-believers? How do grace and forgiveness intersect with holiness and righteousness? (This problem has been exacerbated in the past several years as inflation has hit the Bulgarian economy hard.) This has provoked a sense of hopelessness and pain in the working men and they turn to alcohol to escape the pain.

Dinko Zlatarov, the president of the college and I had many hours of discussion of how the situation in Bulgaria—as I shared in my email update (now posted elsewhere on this website under Bulgaria 2008)—has changed in the past year. Culturally the mood has shifted. In the early 1990s with the fall of communism there was a sense of euphoria, the oppressor of the people was dead. There was freedom to worship. People came to Christ in droves. The Holy Spirit was working in miraculous ways. That time is now in the past. Things have settled down. The euphoria and hope in the culture has faded and been replaced by a cynicism as grim economic realities have set in. The entrance of Bulgaria into the EU has been a double-edged sword. While in the long run the promise of economic development is good, the present result has been rapid inflation—somewhere between 20-30% in the past three years. For a people who earn an average of $200/mo this is devasting—there is a sense of hopelessness.

This hopelessness has discouraged the churches as well.  Attendance has fallen, in some cases dramatically. Many look at the situation and feel that the Lord's blessing has gone.

It is a pattern in Christian communities that when things are going well opposition will also arise from within. This has been true from the time of the Apostolic church and it is true today. We like to think of these “Camelot times” as what should be the norm. In fact they are the exception. The world is a battleground—the Lord forewarned us: “in this world you shall have tribulation.” But there was more than a warning there were words of hope as well: “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”