Epilogue

We hope you have enjoyed “coming along” on our Bulgarian adventure. Serving God by serving people truly is a great adventure and one of the most fulfilling things we have ever done. We invite you to share the adventure with us sometime in the future. In the meantime, we will leave you with some of the faces of the people we had the joy to serve in Bulgaria. Blessings on you and on all of them!

Teaching the Bible School Students

From November 2 to November 5 we are teaching leadership for pastors and bible school students from several of the bible schools run by our friend, Marina Dimitrova. We are teaching our basic leadership course.



Our host, Sasha, is one of the pastors that we met on our last trip here. He is an excellent leader and recognized the need for this kind of training for himself and others the first time he heard us, which was last year. The very next night, he brought five other pastors with him and when Marina told him we were coming he insisted that we hold the seminar in his church. So, we are here to fulfill a promise.


We are having a great time with these people. They are attentive, eager to learn and willing to engage and participate with us; just the kind of learning situation we love to create. Of course, before and after each meeting, we enjoy the marvelous gypsy worship music that touches our souls like no other music we have ever heard!

On to Plovdiv

On October 31, we traveled to Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria where we will be finishing our trip. We are staying with our friend Marina Dimatrova in her beautiful apartment. It is very comfortable and a great place to end our journey.
On Sunday, November 1, I preached a message in the Assembly of God church here. Their Pastor had asked me to do so while he was in Virginia; and interesting switch of locations for both of us. We met a very nice couple from Holland here. They are staying with Marina as well.


On Sunday afternoon, Pat conducted a seminar for women from a number of churches on how to set up and operate a women’s ministry program. She gave them a lot of ideas about ways that women can become more active in their church and reach out to their community.

A Day Off At Last!

October 30th was a day to relax in Sofia. We took a long walk and went to the outdoor market where Pat bought some pottery. That evening we had dinner with Grosdan and Slavitsa Soevsky and their little boy, Danny. They are good friends that we have known almost since we started coming here 11 years ago. It is always fun to get together when we are here.

Bulgarian Theological Seminary

Yesterday, today and tomorrow, we are teaching our basic leadership course at the Bulgarian Theological Seminary in Sofia. Our class consists of about 12 Pastors who are finishing up their formal education and will graduate with a bachelor’s degree next week. They are a very experienced group. One has been in ministry for 32 years and the others from about six to 20 years or so.


Our interaction has been very good and it is a lot of fun to work with them. They have been very quick to understand leadership because they are doing it. It is interesting to see how quickly people who are actually leading understand this material as compared to those who have never been in a leadership role.

Blaga Vast (Good News) Church

Today, October 24, we taught our course on “Creating a Sacred Marriage” at Blaga Vast Church in Sofia. Blaga Vast means Good News.

This is a church that we have been attending when we are in Bulgaria for quite a while. Our friends, Peter and Ellie Tachev, who ran the school for orphans where we met Stanley and Velin, used to attend here and they brought us here seven or eight years ago. When in Sofia, we have been attending here since then.


For years, the church has been meeting in a theatre building and working on their own building. They have been very creative at raising money for the project. For example, since they had more land than they really needed for the church, they built an apartment building on the excess land, sold the apartments and used the profits as a major source of funds for building the church. The building is nearing completion and next week they will move into the smaller hall and begin holding Wednesday night services there. They have already finished a large classroom (where we held our seminar) and administrative offices. They are finishing each room on the interior one at a time and will probably take another year or more before all is complete.


Two years ago, at their request, we began teaching this seminar. It was so well received that they have starting inviting people from the community and from other churches. Now, we are working together to use it as an outreach tool.


Many of the 40 to 50 people in this group were from all over Bulgaria. They are part of a divorce-recovery ministry that works with divorced people to try to help them heal from their divorces and meet new people. The ministry is about 15 years old and has helped about 50 couples remarry. The other people were from the church.


Our translators for this session were a young couple who are interested in being involved in a marriage and family ministry in the church. This was their first time to translate for us and they did a great job.

Meet Dinko

On Thursday, October 22, we were back in Sofia and taught our marriage seminar overview to a small group of people from a number of churches around Sofia. Our objective here was to give them a sample of the one day course and encourage them to go back to their churches and talk about it. We hope that when we come back the next time we can have a much larger participation and do the full day course.

We did the class in the COG missions building in downtown Sofia. This is a beautiful, new, multi-million dollar building that was constructed as a center for ministry to the entire country of Bulgaria. It is huge. There is space for several large churches to meet (all at once) a full restaurant or feeding facility, a large hall for conferences, numerous offices and support areas. We held the class in one of the smaller classrooms.


Our host was Dinko Zlatarov, President of Care For All Ministries and a dear friend. Dinko is one of the most talented (multi-talented) young men I have ever met. In addition to that, he is one big ball of energy. What a combination! He is a joy to work with and a solid, reliable partner. We have been working with Dinko and his wife, Petia for several years now and we look forward to doing bigger and better things with them in the future.