2 of 4

In 1995 someone broke into my office and stole my computer with the records of my court cases. I was growing tired of meeting with "religious police" operatives who, using only code names, tried to persuade me to rat on my pastor-clients. I realized I needed a break. I wondered if I should again do "purely spiritual" work (I had been in church-planting teams since my conversion) or remain engaged in the battle for religious freedom. But going to court or pointing officials to the constitution made no difference. I felt like Moses, working in the flesh to liberate God's people. After hearing that I was being "surveyed" by the police in Sofia, my American wife and I decided it was time to get out for a while. At the end of 1995, we left for the United States, where I ended up graduating from Fuller Theological Seminary.

Now I'm back in Bulgaria, where the freedom for evangelicals to conduct services and outreach is still limited. Last year the Parliament almost adopted a law that was "most probably. … the worst in all Eastern Europe," according to an October 2000 press release of Tolerance Foundation, a Bulgarian human-rights group. Critics called the measure more restrictive than the law of 1949, which was used by the communist regime to end religious freedom in the nation. For example, the proposed law stipulated that people could not use their homes for religious meetings, and it imposed enormous fines for preaching without registering with the state. In other words, no expression of faith was allowed under this project unless the state had approved it. The restrictive draft was tabled only after the pro-Western government heard protests from human-rights groups, church leaders, and even U.S. politicians.

But hearts and minds, not laws, need to change. "The constitution provides freedom of religion; however, the government restricts this right in practice for some non-Orthodox religious groups," says the 2000 Annual Report on Religious Freedom in Bulgaria prepared by the U.S. State Department. "This restriction is manifested primarily in a registration process that is selective, slow, and nontransparent." The mentality is this: If a congregation is not registered, then the state hasn't recognized it, which makes it an illegal sect. A process that should be just a formality ends up giving the government power to approve or disapprove of religious beliefs.

The dominant sentiment is that evangelicals had the most freedom under the government of the Union of Democratic Forces. (In 1997 the same union vetoed the embarrassing anti-religion bill and convinced Parliament to approve the status of the first evangelical seminary in the country since 1948.) This first post-communist coalition of democratic anti-Communist parties lost in this summer's election to the party of the Bulgarian King Simeon II (a.k.a. Simeon Saxcoburggotski), who is now the prime minister.

But political trends are decided by political forces. Moral trends and worldviews, which fuel political forces, are decided by the spiritual climate. In the last several years, I have become convinced that the problem of liberty in Eastern Europe originates in the church. It's not that evangelicals should be held responsible for a culture that has bred oppression for years—but not standing up to such a culture, and letting it shape the behavior of the church herself, allows oppression to thrive in Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations.

When the Iron Curtain fell and the gospel flooded the nations of the Eastern bloc, alongside the good news came its counterfeits. One of them was the prosperity gospel. Its message found a fertile soil among young, charismatic congregations. I was embarrassed for Bulgarian pastors as they imitated their favorite U.S. prosperity preachers, sometimes even speaking with a slight American accent. Many Bulgarian Christians, tired of the years of marginalization and poverty, allowed the health-and-wealth doctrine to seduce them.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

October 22 2001, Vol. 45, No. 13