Gypsy Church

On Tuesday, David drove us the three hours to Samokov, a small city south of Sofia. We drove through some magnificent mountain scenery to get there. He had arranged for us to meet Sacho, the pastor of one of two very active Gypsy churches.

Sacho met us on the outskirts of town and took us to his church a bright and beautifully cared for building on the edge of a Gypsy quarter which is home to about 12,000 people.

We talked for about 30 minutes and then Sacho said he would take us for a tour. Most people in the community are unemployed. When they do work, they work in construction which has been devastated by the recent economic downturn. Most of the houses are makeshift, built without proper building permits, which means they don't pay taxes, which means they don't receive city services. They do not have running water and what electricity they have comes from tapping into one main line that runs along each street.

Children have little or no schooling and so the prospects of getting ahead are very limited. Most people are born, live their entire lives and die in this community.

Sacho told us that they had begun a ministry with abandoned children, many of whom they found scavenging in the garbage dump for food. They fed them

cared for them and began to teach them to read. But contributions from both their own church and overseas supporters have dried up with economic downturn and they have had to suspend the program.

This is one of the great challenges for indigenous Bulgarian churches. After the fall of communism, money and resources flowed in from the west, creating a rush of growth and excitement. This created an unhealthy dependency culture, and churches don't believe that they can sustain many of their ministries without infusions of support from the west. As these churches mature, their challenge will be to become self-supporting, both in financial and leadership terms.