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.

Ministry under challenging conditions

One of the reasons we wanted to go to eastern Europe was to experience some of the challenges that people face in difficult circumstances. In Canada, we often talk about all the obstacles to the church. I've really had my eyes opened since being in Bulgaria.

On Monday we went with David Leistrum and Stilian, another ministry leader from the church in Stara Zagora, to visit a community in Nova Zagora that is populated by Turkish speaking people. It was like driving into another world -- Ramshackle houses, dirt roads teeming with people, animals and trash. We stopped outside a gate behind which was the home of Pastor Simeon and his wife Janka. This is Simeon and Janka with their three youngest children, Maria, Islam and Yussef.

Once inside I was surprised at how clean and well-kept their home was, in contrast to the surroundings outside. They invited us into their living room where there were refreshments waiting. With David as our interpreter, we asked them to tell us the story of our church.

Simeon and Janka have seven children. Their oldest daughter is 25. She was born with crossed eyes. When she was five years old, a visitor came and said "You know, there is Someone who can help her" -- meaning Jesus. As a Muslim, Simeon didn't want to go to their church, but he told his wife to go and find out more. He learned that many of her family had become Christians.

"One day," he said "they invited me to go and for some reason, I decided to accept. They said, 'Let's pray,' but I didn't even know how to pray or who this Jesus was. But as they prayed, I found myself weeping and felt a warmth and a joy in my heart. When we came home, I vowed before God and promised my wife that I would go to church. The next night, I went up for prayer. I was such a beginner! These people were so nice, so pleasant, and I was a sinner among them. But I prayed and saw a vision of angels and heard a voice saying, "Believe in me.' I answered, 'Lord, I don't know church that had started up in the neighborhood, but being Muslim, she waif you even exist or not, but I believe, and I know that when I go home, my child will be healed. I came home in tears, leaving my wife at church, and saw my little girl asleep. I woke her, she rubbed her eyes three times, looked at me and said, 'What do you want, Daddy?' Her eyes were straight. I went back to the church to get my wife and my faith was strong from that time on."

Simeon related how his son, who was born with a hearing impairment, was also healed.

We were joined by Slav, another of the pastors at the church. They spoke about the kind of life that people lead in this community. 95% of the people are unemployed. Most have very little access to health care. A woman in the church requires medication for extreme hypertension and had to get a loan (from a loan shark, not a bank) to pay for it. This only increased her stress. The church managed to scrape together enough funds to pay off her loan, but conditions are such that many people are sick.

It occurred to me that in affluent societies we have the privilege of having theoretical debates about the plausibility of divine healing. For these people, it is what they have. Slav said that the healings and the miracles that take place among them are one of the strongest attractions to the church. As in New Testament times, people are suffering and longing for someone to make them whole, and who are we to argue?

We asked about how people's lives were changed when they came to faith in Christ. A recurrent theme is that they give up drinking. These people are called Turks, but we heard that they are really Turkish speaking Roma (Gypsies), who, like North American First Nations, are devastated by the effects of alcoholism.

But they also spoke about changes in family relationships. Their inherited culture is highly patriarchal. Women are completely under the domination of their husbands. When people join the church, it's usually the whole family, because women and children won't come without the husband and father's permission, and when he decides to join, they follow.

Simeon answered this question like this: "At our church, we proclaim the Word of God. We tell people the story of God creating Eve from Adam's rib. We tell them that God did not create Eve from Adam's foot so that she would be crushed by him, or from his head so that she would rule over him, but from his rib so that they would be close to one another's heart. My wife and I are in partnership. We discuss things and when she has the better idea, we follow her way." They said that Janka is preparing to leave for Italy to work in the harvest for three months so that they will have the funds to support their ministry among their people.

We asked if there was tension in the community when people become Christians. "Not really," they said. They can't evangelize aggressively, but on the whole people respect the decision. However, Stilian told us that he was accosted by a knife-wielding man when he was visiting. It's a pretty dangerous place to live. "The devil is always trying to scare us," Simeon said, "but we are not afraid. God will take care of us."

We were so moved by the dignity and quiet strength of these people of faith.