Dirty Hope: Bulgaria 2008

I'm just back from twelve days in Svishtov, Bulgaria, a small town on the Romanian border. A group of six of us went to support, encourage, teach and fellowship with the church there, which was planted just over a year ago. It's really really hard to sum up a place like Bulgaria. It's like a heavyweight boxer who eventually wears you down with blow after blow of helplessness and despair. It's really hard to be there and really hard to leave. I loved it! Here are some snapshots of life in Bulgaria.

• A year ago there was some optimism in the country. They'd just joined the EU and things were looking up. Now however, their funding has been stopped, due to corruption, and the man on the street is in a worse position than he was before, as wages have flat lined but prices have gone up. Two factories face each other across the Danube in Svishtov, the people on the Romanian side earn 2-3 times as much as the people in the Bulgarian factory. Who work 12 hour shifts. 6 days a week.
  
  
• Bulgaria has the highest per capita abortion rate in Europe, and therefore probably the world. Svishtov must have more licensed premises in a smaller area then anywhere i've been, so that's probably not a surprise. The tragedy is the age of the girls involved. We sent time in a school working with 14 and 15 year olds in an English class. It was a lot of fun. What was less fun was seeing those same 14 and 15 year old girls walking into bars near our hotel at 1030 on friday night. There were no bouncers anywhere to be seen. It's not unusual for them to stay out drinking until 330 or 4 the next morning. Tim, who Pastors out there, regularly sees uni students leaving bars and clubs as he walks his children to school the next day. Given the conditions that most of these kids live in, (three or four small rooms, parents, siblings and grandparents) it's perhaps not a shock they don't want to go home.
  
  
• If an unreached people group is a language, ethnicity or nation that can not sustain an indigenous led church, then Bulgaria must be only half a step away from that. Svishtov has 35000 people and one church of about 50-60. Veliko Turnovo has 250000 people and maybe 3 churches numbering about 50-100, Sofia has 2 million people and maybe a dozen churches, a couple who gather over 100 on a sunday morning. Most small towns have no church at all, most big ones, only one. It's shocking. The saddest thing is that when Communism fell in Bulgaria, the people were hungry for truth. Who turned up first? Benny Hinn and his prosperity pals. The prosperity gospel was the first 'gospel' heard freely in Bulgaria for fifty years or so. And it's a bunch of junk. The Evangelical church is still struggling to make up the ground lost by the disillusionment caused in these early years.
  
  
• There is hope. Dirty Hope. In a corrupt, desperate society the only hope is the universally true Gospel. In a happy, comfortable society the same is true. It's good to remember that. The uniqueness of Gospel hope is so clear in places where there simply is no other hope. There is no other hope in Bulgaria apart from Jesus. Every leader always lets these people down. He never will. Living in the west, living in the Bible Belt, it's so easy to forget that. To put hope in people, places or things. That will never ever do. One day these will fail and fall. I love being in Bulgaria, because there i'm reminded that beyond the hopeless despair, there is Hope. The One Hope of the nations. Jesus Christ.

Gone to Bulgaria: Hold the rope

Monday morning sees me and five others from church fly out to spend just under two weeks in Svishtov, northern Bulgaria. I'm very very excited, for a number of reasons, but mostly because i love Bulgaria and Bulgarians, and i'm fairly convuinced that thats where the Lord has me and rachel in the future. Do pray for me, Ken, Steve, Ross, Eddie and Darren as we fly across Europe. I love these words that Andrew Ryland wrote of William Carey, some two hundred years ago:


Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men, who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine, which had never before been explored, we had no one to guide us; and while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said “Well, I will go down, if you will hold the rope.” But before he went down . . . he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us, at the mouth of the pit, to this effect—that “while we lived, we should never let go of the rope

something of a postscript

This is a photo of, what i think is Bulgaria's answer to Forum. Thats all the BXCC staff, and leaders. I think. Nacionalna Konferenciq is probably 'National Conference' isn't it?

Missions are good, no?

Just got this email from a friend spending her summer in northern Bulgaria.

Bulgaria is going well, it is sooooo hot lately. and I think it's made me a little sick, but I'll be alright. I'm living with a girl named xxxx who is a Christian. She got saved in Tim and Lydia's church about 7/8 months ago. She used to be a party girl, I'm talking every night at the club, it's amazing to see how much she's growing. The first week I was here she showed me all of the clothes you loves but can't wear anymore, they were pretty slutty, AND she used to go "monokini" at the beach, which means topless. She's super fun, but yesterday I took her to the train station because she's leaving to go and work at the sea the rest of the summer...That totally bummed me out. The other girl I'm living with is xxxx. xxxx is not a Christian and she's still in the whole club scene, it's common for her to come home at 4am or to call xxxx and say she's not coming home at all.

It's pretty sad, and xxxx doesn't speak much English at all past introductions. She also works a lot so I haven't really been able to connect with her much. But yesterday was AWESOME. So xxxx's mom teaches me Bulgarian. At the end of every lesson she has me read a few pages of a children's book. Yesterday when I got done reading she told me I didn't mess up at all and asked me if I had been reading the paper or something.

Well, I had been reading the gospel of John to Cvete cause she helped me with words, so before xxxx got on her train she gave me her Gospel of John and had written in it. And xxxx's mom speaks no English so I pulled it out and said I've been reading this. She smiled, opened it and had me read the first chapter to her!! Who would have thought the first time xxxx's mom would hear the Bible is me reading it to her like a first grader?! Then she told me for homework to practice the 2nd chapter and she'll dictate parts of it to me to write down tomorrow. So Bulgarian just got better. Learning the language is like a roller coaster, some days you feel like wow, i've learned so much, and other days you just feel like you're wasting your time. But it's worth it when you see how excited people get to hear you speak their language.

BXCC video

There are some good looking people hidden away in there!

obicham te

Bulgaria

The cafeteria was mostly deserted, as it should be half an hour after dinner ended. Just three people remained, sat at a table by the door.

'Its like' said the first American 'Bulgaria went to sleep in the 1300s, and woke up just before the first world war'
'wow' said the second American
'man...thats crazy' said the Englishman.

There are few places bleaker to be an evangelical in mainland Europe than Bulgaria. Now there's a brave statement, but for many reasons, some of which we'll go into, some of which we won't, i think its true. It's not the case in all of south east Europe either. Tim, the first american above, pastors a church in Shvistov in north Bulgaria. From his house he can look in Romania, where the frontier missionaries are being pulled out, because, well, it's not frontier mission in Romania any more. It sure is in Bulgaria.

We've already seen a reason for that. In the 1300s having spent a couple of generations as one of the most powerful Kingdoms in Europe, Bulgaria was overrun by the Ottoman empire, and subjected to Serfdom. It stayed that way for the best part of five hundred years. We can't imagine what that does to a national psyche. For five hundred years while the rest of europe pushed forward technologically, fought boundary defining wars and state defining civil wars, built empires and formed alliances, Bulgaria was nothing more than a large slave camp for the Ottomans. No one helped them, no one stood up to the Ottomans, until the 1870s when armies from Greece, Macedonia, Russia and Finland helped them to free themselves. Then seventy years later the communists turned up and that was that until the early nineties. Bulgaria is a country with a gaping hole in it's history, and that has an effect. And then of course there's the suffocating influence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to whom 86% of Bulgarians claim allegance. Couple this with a mistrust of outsiders and Protestants are viewed as a cult. Orthodoxy is the one true church, Catholics are just about ok, and then there's JWs, Mormons and Protestants, the weird cults.

The biggest result of this, probably, is that Bulgarians, on the whole, do not believe in, and are not interested in outside help. And you can see straight away the consequences that has for the Gospel. It is a country that struggles to trust, as indeed you or i would, if we found out after the communists left that the reason my dad was killed in the sixties was that my next door neighbour had informed on him. My next door neighbour still lives there. Again, the implications for the Gospel and for evangelism there are huge. An interesting side effect of this is that while watching Superman Returns, most of the Bulgarians there agreed that Lex Luther was the hero. Superman was a curio, and oddity to be disregarded. But Lex was the man, he built himself and empire with his brains, on his own. Thats what the Bulgarians there respected.

We don't know what it's like to live in the west any more than a fish knows what it's like to be wet. If something happens in England, it's world news more or less. If the Prime Minister and President of Bulgaria got blown up tomorrow would we even know? Certainly almost no one outside Bulgaria would care. Which leaves the country in a suspicious, insular, self dependant state, which makes mission hard. Really hard. But i love it there. So much i can almost taste it. Nowhere is the contrast, the collision, between old and new more stark than in the centre of Sofia. There, on the lawn of the former communist part headquarters fly the flags of the member states of NATO. And that neatly sums it up.

People

Joining the small British team in BG were a team of ten from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and a team and eleven from the Free Will Baptist Church of American who came from all over the south, places like Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee. Places that have always seemed incredibly exotic to me, it was great to meet people from there.

It was such a blessing to meet Craig, the IFES working in Bulgaria, and the already mentioned Tim, both from America, who's lives both said 'God doesn't care about the American dream, and neither do i'. Both of them inspired me, both of them challenged me. Both of them made me want to be like them. I'm thankful for Ben, from UoP. He was like me only a couple of steps ahead. When we had the conversation with Tim he would be asking the questions i was getting towards, and ask them in a much more thoughtful way. I'm deeply thankful for another post dinner conversation we had together that was among the highlights of the trip. Ben was a top bloke and a good friend. We even got sick on the Black Sea together (and boy did we get sick, i've never before felt that my insides were climbing up my stomach, but hey we can say that we've had a pirate ship fight on the black sea and then watched the sun set into the hills behind Varna...even if we did feel like we were dying in the half an hour in between!). Given a couple more weeks i felt he could have been one for the inappropriate theological joke, surely the seal of any good friendship. And there was Someone Else as well. But this, as you'll appreciate is clearly not the place. I am in the excting but tough situation of trusting Christ and not having a clue. Which is hard.

God

I think God taught me two major lessons in BG. Here they are.

1) I really want to be a missionary. I really want it to be in Bulgaria. Put the words 'student' 'pioneer' and 'mission' together and i'm there. But God taught me a glimpse of what this would be like on the camp. Before i probably had a slightly idealised view of missionary life, but less so now. Am i prepared, God asked, to give up everything for the Gospel? To give up my family, and my friends, more or less all my close human relationships, all the benefits that come from living in the west, my chance to work a good job with good money, my chance to ever feel comfortable and at home? am i prepared to give up the little things? English radio, the view from my parents back garden, food i like, all for the Gospel. When i went to BG i thought i was. When i got there i was seriously homesick and realised that i wasn't. Now i think i am. Now what i want most in the world is to be back there. And i pray this isn't just an emotional response. It feels different. Am i prepared to learn a tough language with an alien alphabet, to put ten years in the bank before i can expect to get anywhere, to be regarded as a member of an odd western cult? I so want to be. I think something inside of me changed or broke during my time there. Drew said it was like i'd divorced my country, i keep calling her England, rather than home. I want to keep this feeling, this focus on BG with all my heart.

2) I was made for a relationship with God. I love really love the guys i emt out there, and saying goodbye was so hard, and it reminded me that i wasn't made for relationships that will break or end, i was made for one that will be perfect, and forever, and eternal...my relationship with God the Father through the Son. It was good, if painful, to remember that.

and thats Bulgaria, my heart is still there. I hope i'm there as well soon. Please pray for me, that i would learn what God is teaching me. I've shed tears over what God is teaching me...but the missionary life, thats the life for me. I want to put my hands and face agains the granite and push, and heave with all my might, while i have might, for Jesus in Bulgaria.