Bulgaria Update-2009

Past years I have been able to give you updates as I was ministering in Bulgaria.  This year has been quite different.  As you who have read these updates over the past several years, you know I have taught in Star Zagora, a small (pop. about 75,000) city in central Bulgaria whose claim to fame is that it is the oldest city in Europe.  I have taught at the Theological College which is about ten years old and is sponsored by the Church of God.  A chief thrust of their ministry is toward the Gypsy population.

This year was very different.  While the Church of God still maintains the school in Stara Zagora they are in process of moving the center of their educational ministry to Sofia, the capital, with a population of about 3 million in the greater Sofia area.  Many of their classes are held in conjunction with the other theological faculties associated with the University of Sofia.

My classes (I taught 2) were held at the Assembly of God college campus located about 20 miles north of downtown in a residential area.  The look and feel of the institution is very different than in Stara Zagora.  The buildings are old—well over a century and the plumbing is primitive (e.g. don’t flush the toilet paper because it clogs the system!).  The local culture of the college is far more reserved than in Stara Zagora, and the only people that spoke English (more than a few phrases here and there) were my translators.

The week started off slowly—I was suffering both jetlag and from a cold that was affecting my mental clarity and my voice.  That evening I started on the antibiotics my physician had given me before I left in case I got sick.  By the next day I was doing much better.

The first class, Dogmatics (what we call Systematic Theology in the US)  lasted until Wednesday noon.  We surveyed the development of Trinitarian understanding as well as the subjects of Man and Sin. My translator, Tanya is one of the faculty members who teaches Old Testament.  She did quite well but struggled with some of the theological terms.  (Theology and OT have different technical vocabularies.)  Wednesday afternoon through Friday . 

Tanya my translator for 1/2 the weekThe second class was Patrology (the thought of the early church fathers up till about A.D. 600). I covered the major figures  and then the students expressed a real interest in Christology (the doctrine of the person of Christ),  so I switched gears and covered the development of Christological understanding up through the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451.  My translator was Kostadin, Tanya’s husband and acting Academic Dean of the College.  He was far more comfortable in his role and we developed a good rapport .

As the week progressed the students warmed up and began to ask many questions—this opened up the opportunity for some lively and probing discussions of theological issues that tied directly into their ministry situations. I am always hesitant to say too much in a cross-cultural situation lest I  transgress cultural mores. But the nature of the questions demanded a frank openness that would “let the chips fall where they may.” 

The questions were both illuminating and troubling.  Illuninating, in that it gave a look into the mentality of the Bulgarian Church in a way I had not seen in Stara Zagora—there the pastors were mostly gypsies who had been believers for just a few years.  Here we were looking at a protestant church culture that was generations old.

From the discussion I learned that the protestant community is stuck in an authoritarian system that mirrors the larger culture.  Pastors on the whole are not open to training the next generation of leaders.  The system is one which is locked in a survival mentality and is not looking toward growth.  I suspect that this comes from the four decades that Bulgaria spent under communism where the church literally struggled to survive.  (In talking to Dinko he reminded me that while communism lasted forty years, Bulgaria itself has been insubjection for foreign powers for centuries.)  But the change in the political situation has not changed the survival mentality. 

There is a mentality undergirded by a perfectionistic theology that is more concerned with outward appearances and abstaining from "sinful" practices than with embracing the grace and freedom offered by the gospel.

There are those actively working to break this mentality.  Our good friend Dinko Zlatarov has founded a church in Sofia where he regularly challenges the prevailing mentality of self-righteous legalistic churchianity.  Likewise Dinko’s brother Stefko has founded a new church in Stara Zagora that looking to inculcate grace into the community.  But from the sample I have seen, their perspective is the exception rather than the norm.

Kostadin and Tanya, Dinko and Petia, and Stefko all represent a new hope for the Bulgarian church—please keep them in your prayers.