Haunted by Totalitarianism

Haunted by Totalitarianism

Communism no longer
menaces Bulgarian churches— In
Theory!

By Viktor Kostov, PhD 
~ 
October 2001

Religious Police

I took this attitude personally. I had become a
Christian thanks to the witness of American evangelical missionaries. The
long history of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, or its contribution to the
national spirit, meant little to me—she never cared enough for my soul to
let me know about salvation in Christ. I found liberty because of people who
left their country, came to Bulgaria, and answered the questions that had
tormented me for years. I heard the clearly articulated gospel for the first
time in English. My first Bible was also in English: an NIV New Testament.

While defending the legal rights of U.S. missionaries and
Bulgarian Christians, I gladly vented my frustration at the injustice done
to my fellow evangelicals. I took some high-profile cases that other lawyers
had dropped. I filed lawsuits on behalf of slandered and harassed
evangelicals—against police departments, newspapers, individuals, and
organizations. I delighted in the astonishment of police officials, used to
bossing citizens around, at the subpoenas I served them. But most of the
time, that was all the reward I got for seeking justice for evangelicals in
the courts. I lost 90 percent of the cases.

It soon became obvious that even the
Parliament would
defy the constitutional freedom of conscience and faith. A law passed in
1994 indirectly required government approval for the registration of
Protestant churches.

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 Wind of Change
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.

Neediness, Control, and Fear
It was not just the Western prosperity preachers’
fault. Evangelicals in Bulgaria were accustomed to seeking foreign help—an
understandable reflex after years of being second-class citizens in their
own country. The church did not err in accepting help from American
Christians; but the neediness of many Bulgarian evangelicals had distorted
their view of American wealth. A leader of a Christian training school in
Sofia once told me that his school was reluctant to hire Bulgarian
theologians and teachers because they had to be paid. If American teachers
were invited to teach, they paid their own way, did not receive any salary,
and even brought gifts to the school. This conversation made me realize how
difficult it is to break loose from the ruts of poverty.

Bulgarian evangelical Christians are a brutalized people.
Stuck in a wounded culture, church leaders tend to multiply hurt and deny
liberty, as if they took lessons from communist leaders. Their harsh
authoritarianism cripples Christian witness and repels young and educated
Christians.

Milena Michailova, a manager of a Christian bookstore in
Sofia, had trouble finding a home church. The leaders of various
congregations were threatened by this avid reader who asked questions. “The
pastors I know don’t allow anyone or anything to challenge their authority,”
she told me. “They treat people as if they don’t understand anything, and
with an attitude of being irreplaceable.”

When traveling with her mobile bookstore, a bus loaded
with Christian titles, she finds a lot of rivalry among local pastors. “They
also seem to be threatened by [Christian booksellers], and we just want to
sell literature that will help the believers,” she says.

Bulgarian evangelicals’ church leadership style—a mix of
control and fear—reveals the need for spiritual mentoring that would
liberate leaders from their insecurities. My brother, Yavor Kostov, pastor
of four small congregations in the poorest, northwestern area of the
country, thinks dictatorial church leadership inhibits church growth.
“Pastors don’t lead people to Jesus but to themselves,” he says. “This means
that no gifts, talents, or freedom can blossom in the church.” His primary
church started after a dispute regarding leadership style.

It is hard for many new-generation believers to join
churches that use methodologies reminiscent of the Communist Party. When
Milena Eneva was considering attending a U.S. Bible college, her pastor
bluntly told her that this was not God’s will and that she would lose the
presence of the Holy Spirit in her life—not exactly the blessing she wanted.
She is now a graduate of a U.S. Nazarene college.

Totalitarian harshness among evangelicals is not only a
Bulgarian phenomenon. Many evangelical churches in other post-communist
countries (such as Ukraine, Romania, and Poland) practice a legalism that
defeats the Christian message. A missionary to Eastern Europe told me he
once took a nonbelieving relative to a Ukrainian Pentecostal church. The
church members looked at her makeup and fancy clothes with such obvious
disapproval that she vowed never to return to church again.

Why would anyone, beat up by a hard life to begin with,
want to come to church to be subject to the will and strife of insecure
individuals? Didn’t Jesus say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and
burdened, and I will give you rest”?

Zeal, Vision
By now you may be asking, “Is there anything right
with the post-communist church?” The zeal with which Eastern European
believers kept the message during the communist era is an example of the
church’s strength. Persecuted pastors put in hours of work, with minimal or
no pay, and traveled miles to care for their brothers and sisters.
Evangelicals were harassed, fired, detained, and interrogated for owning
Bibles or just talking about their faith.

Haralan Popov spent 13 years in concentration camps,
accused of spying for the United States and England. He was not a spy, but a
pastor of the largest Pentecostal church in Bulgaria, when the communists
took over in the 1940s. He not only did not renounce his faith amid torture,
but he also shared the gospel and the love of Christ with his fellow
prisoners. In 1972 he founded Door of Hope International, a U.S. mission
agency that spread the news of the persecuted church in the West and helped
underground churches behind the Iron Curtain. This past is the great
spiritual inheritance of Eastern European Christians, one empowered by the
freedom found only in Christ and displayed in the Book of Acts.

A new generation with a vision for change is emerging,
too. Here are some of its leaders:

• Michailova leads a missionary campaign with her bus,
  selling Christian books.
• A missionary friend told me of a humble Bulgarian
  couple who minister to Bulgarian Turks in southern Bulgaria, with the
  vision of raising missionaries to go to Turkey.
• My brother’s primary church reaches out to
  institutionalized orphans, and his church’s rock band seeks to win young
  people’s souls.

All these hope-filled glimpses show that true freedom for
a servant and visionary church is not that far away.

My wife and I have returned to Bulgaria as missionaries
with Door of Hope to pursue “the Bulgarian dream,” as I often joke. But the
dream is not a joke. The vision from that summer night of 1991—for a whole
nation, a bride of darkness and hopelessness for decades, to find a better
way, a way to truth, forgiveness, and liberty in Jesus Christ—is still very
much alive in me. I think the same dream made the apostles follow Christ
against all odds. It made the apostle Paul travel restlessly, building up
churches. And it made missionaries go to foreign nations, reminding us over
and over again that “for freedom Christ has set us free.”

See also “Faith
That Works: Worshipping God or Caesar?”

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