Stories from the Field

I recently attended an event in which young people from Plovdiv could gather and practice different languages they spoke.  It was a great opportunity to meet new people!  I shared with a new acquaintance that I am an American and am working with the Protestant church.  This always comes with a bit of hesitation on […]

One of our goals for our English as a Foreign Language ministry is to form friendships with the people God brings to our English Clubs. While we have seen a lot of chances to have one-on-one friendships, I’ve also seen God using English Clubs to give people a place to belong. Many of our students […]

At our English Club Thanksgiving Meal we asked if anyone wanted to share what they were thankful for this year. Every single person shared! And multiple times our club members said that they were thankful for English Club, and the community that they have found in it. “I’m so thankful for all of you Americans […]

On Christmas day, a miscommunication with one of our newer English Club students, who is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, meant that he showed up for a breakfast we organized at our church space for the ladies in the Daughters of Bulgaria program, who had cancelled at the last minute! Our student thought he […]

We recently witnessed two baptisms on the same day in the Evangelical church in Plovdiv. What an exciting thing to see! A young man and an older gentleman, representing two different generations with two very different stories, but both professing faith in the same God who does not change. We rejoice with these men as […]

There is a Bulgarian song of the Lord’s Prayer that our team thought would be nice for the church to learn. “We would learn it, but we don’t have any piano music” was the response we received from the church. Being the only one on the team who had piano knowledge I went home and […]

For two years I had asked my landlord for his pickle recipe, and for two years he had told me we would make them together. The season finally arrived – it is an end of summer activity – and he came by to tell me that it was time and the next day we would […]

When you arrive at our MTW Bulgaria website, the first thing you see is a banner. Notice the dirty hands. They’re not just a pretty graphic but the reality of what it means to be God’s people in a broken world. But why dirty? Now, notice our team’s motto.  “Showing the love of Christ to […]

Lilly and I were walking through the city one afternoon when we began to discuss Easter traditions. In the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, she said, people would walk once around the church, each carrying a lit candle. “The number of times your candle flickers is the number of times you’ve sinned in the past year,” she […]

So said Kristin, a woman who works in a second-hand store just down the street from my apartment. I had gone to return an item that wasn’t working correctly, and Kristin remembered me from my previous visit. We chatted a bit, and she began to tell me about how she understood her country’s people. Kristin […]