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After the falling of the communism in 1989, in Bulgaria have appeared a lot of changes in each area of our lives. Out of the sudden the hunger and the thrust of knowing God came in thousands of young hearts. Traditional church buildings were full of excited people who wanted to express the freedom and the joy that they had found in the Lord. But after a while most of the old pastors, who had suffered from the communists, understood that they could not serve to the youths and started forbidding them to raise their hands, to clap, dance and to praise the Lord noisily. That was the reason a lot of young leaders, who had real desire in their hearts to serve the Lord, to leave the churches and establish new ones. Our church was found in the same period, at the beginning of 1991, which we called "Life of Faith Church". We stared our services with eight people only. For about five months we gathered in "Drujba", one of the Sofia regions, where our church grew ten times, so we had the need to hire a larger place for our services near by the center. There we started to evangelize and new people came into the church straight from the street, so we were about 200-250 at that time. We started our Bible school and eighty people attended the classes regularly.
During that time (1991-1992) in Bulgaria were coming a lot of powerful preachers of the Gospel such as Peter Ungren, Ulf Ekman, and Luis Palau and started gathering large crowds. Our church took part in these meetings and we saw thousands of people hearing the Good News and shouting "Praise the Lord" and this was on the same square where a few years ago they has been persuaded to march and shout "Praise to the Communist Party". That was an exiting and extraordinary thing that could be seen. But the ruling political party during that time got scared of so many people worshiping the Lord and they said to themselves as the Pharaoh did in Exodus 1:10 "we must deal with them shrewdly or they will become more numerous". That's how the new persecution started against the church in Bulgaria but this time it was through the media, which spread lies, especially against the young pastors and the newfound churches, which were called "sects". Most of those churches had more than 500 members, so they were obviously some kind of danger to the national security. So the government started to take back their official registrations and made them register under some of the traditional religious societies in Bulgaria in order to be controlled easily. (That was the time when we got registered under The United Church of God. After six years, when we knew more pastors and leaders of denominations we decided to become part of Foursquare churches with the name Zion. In their face we have found real friends and co-workers.) Apart from that, the government started closing the public buildings that we used to rent until then. Up to 1997 we had changed ten different buildings. That was really inconvenient for some of the members of the church, some of them got scared of the media attacks and others had thought that it was modern to go to church, but soon after they understood that it was a matter of personal decision, denying sin in their lives, commitment to God and eagerness to live a holy life, so they left the church. Since 1997 we have been using a private hall but its rent has been too high for us and most of our income was spent on that, we have decided to believe for our own church land and building. With the help of many our friends we bought a piece of land in a busy crossroad among three regions - "Drujba", "Slatina" and "Mladost". We made a project for the building, electricity and we have put a stone fence and foundation for the whole building. So step-by-step we could see the promise of God for our own building where we had to be good stewardship and to meet everyone who would like to share our faith.
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