Toly: A vision for Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
“One day, a special rain will come,” I told my daughter, as I held her up to watch the thunderstorm.
Her three-year-old eyes were wide open. Grey clouds, lightning, claps of thunder. Rivers of water rushed down the streets. Heavy rain showered down the communist-era apartment blocks of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria.
“Shower, O heavens, from above,
and let the clouds rain down righteousness;
let the earth open, that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit;
let the earth cause them both to sprout…”
Isaiah 45:8a (ESV)
The promise concludes with joyous inevitability: “I the LORD have created it” (v8).
Many people have confirmed it with visions of crowds that cry out to God on the main city square, revival spreading like confetti across the region, and flight paths curving down all the way into the Aegean islands.
Life in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
From 100mph to 0 in 14 years
I received the promise in 2002, and it set me on fire for the following 14 years. I was fresh out of uni and dropped any plans for a business career. I stayed single for as long as I could, pastored a small Baptist church the best I could, and built unity among the Christians in town as much as possible.
Blagoevgrad is home to 70,000 people. It sits at the foot of the Pirin mountains within an hour of Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia, tourist hotspot Rila Monastery and the ski resort of Bansko.
The Greek, Macedonian, and Serbian borders are all within a 1.5 hour drive.
But ‘Blago’ needs new wineskins first. The Evangelicals in Bulgaria are less than 2% of population and, even though they pride themselves on not being trapped in tradition like the Orthodox church, they have plenty of traditions and strongholds of their own. Try as I could to move my Baptist church closer to a Word and Spirit expression of Christianity, it just wouldn’t budge.
I crashed.
It took seven years to recover.
Light shines in the darkness…
Renewal from the Lord
Then God, in His fatherly love, gave the grace to forgive and love the town anew. He is now rekindling the fire and drawing in like-minded people. There are a number of families from the UK that are set on planting their roots in Bulgaria again.
The town is thirsty for the rain. People are hungry for an expression of church that they have not seen yet - Word and Spirit, relationships and mission, true to the ancient ways (Jeremiah 6:16) yet appealing to Gen Z, welcoming the professionals yet not forgetting the poor, expressing the kingdom to come yet connecting to the heart of what it means to be Bulgarian.
Meeting with Vlada, Sonja, Maurice and Rachel
Will you go?
Would you join us on this journey? Would you hear God’s heart sing over Blagoevgrad and Bulgaria? This is the modern-day land of New Testament Macedonia – “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9).
This is not about quick wins, but about embedding in the community. Like Jesus, come to the weddings, help fishers with their nets and spend lots of time around the table. Live, grow, love and weep together. Incarnate the kingdom in everyday life so that people can see how the supernatural can be perfectly normal. And perfectly Bulgarian.
Contact us at bulgaria@relationalmission.com
Author: Toly
Toly and his beautiful wife have a smart cookie daughter who was born in the UK during the pandemic. They moved to the UK to be equipped after years of ministering in a small church in Bulgaria. Their passion is to unleash creativity in the church as well as in the marketplace, where he works as an IT professional.