The first American Nazarenes arrived in Bulgaria in the summer of 1994. From the very beginning, they used sports as an icebreaker. It began with "pickup" soccer games on a school playground. Young adults from the U.S. would meet to play with neighborhood young people after school. Eventually, exhaustion would take over. As they sat resting, they would begin talking about more than just soccer. Conversations would often turn to deep spiritual issues. When cold weather arrived, a dilapidated gym was rented for one evening a week. The playground soccer games turned into indoor basketball games.
The sports evangelism strands in this tapestry did not begin on that asphalt playground. They go back to 1962. That summer, a Venture for Victory basketball team recruited an All-American player from Pasadena College. The team had a sports evangelism tour scheduled in the Philippines. They had games planned against various Filipino teams. At halftime of those games, the American players did not go to the locker room. Instead, they stayed on the court to share their Christian testimony with the spectators.
That All-American basketball player from Pasadena was Loren Gresham. The trip to the Philippines was his first time outside the United States. It was a transforming experience. Over the next four years, he participated in sports evangelism every summer. He began to wonder: "Shouldn't every Nazarene college student be involved in some meaningful cross-cultural missions experience?"
By 1967, Loren Gresham had about finished his master's degree. He landed a teaching position at the Nazarene college in Bethany, Oklahoma. While teaching, he went on to complete his Ph.D. in international studies. Besides teaching history and political science, he also wound up as the school's basketball coach. Finally, after twenty years at SNU, Loren became the school's provost. Four years later, in 1989, he moved up to become the president.
That same year, momentous events began unfolding on the international scene. Just months after Loren Gresham became SNU's president, the Iron Curtain shattered. Communist governments across Eastern Europe fell, and, two years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.
The summer following his first year as university president, Loren Gresham went to Berlin. There, he met with several Nazarene leaders to brainstorm evangelistic strategies for Eastern Europe. It was a productive meeting. They talked about ways to use Nazarene college students in the former Warsaw Pact nations. That Berlin "summit" produced some concrete results. One was that students from several Nazarene colleges spent the summer of 1991 in Russia.
Loren continued to dream about longer-term missions involvement for Nazarene college students. Most young Mormons spend two or three years as volunteer missionaries. That fascinated Loren Gresham. By the summer of 1993, his ideas had crystallized, and he began talking about sending young Nazarenes to mission fields for a year. It was a vision of new college graduates copying the "Mormon model" of volunteer service.
Each year, the SNU president attends the annual Nazarene district assemblies in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. When given an opportunity to speak at these gatherings, SNU presidents usually exhort churches to send their young people to the university and fulfill their annual educational budget commitments. In 1993, as Loren Gresham spoke to district assemblies in SNU's region, he outlined a dream: that of mobilizing young people for a year of volunteer missionary work. The young volunteers would serve primarily as helpers for career missionaries.
Two trips to Eastern Europe were fresh in Loren's mind. American tourists were pouring into Russia. Some of those were Nazarenes. Loren Gresham saw missionaries Chuck and Carla Sunberg spending time assisting these tourists. That wasn't the focus of their missionary call, of course. They had gone to Moscow to evangelize the Russians, not care for Americans. So Loren began imagining how pairs of fresh college graduates could lighten those missionaries' load.
Loren envisioned pairs of young volunteers going to the airport to pick up visiting Nazarenes. They would then be the tour guides for U.S. visitors. The volunteers could even handle some office chores, such as bookkeeping and correspondence in English. They could help educate missionary children. And they would do all this at no cost to the church or the missionaries.
That same summer, Robert Scott, Nazarene Global Mission director, attended the Dallas district assembly. Loren Gresham was there representing SNU. When Loren talked about his "Mormon model" idea, he got Dr. Scott's attention right away.
At that point, the church faced more open doors than it knew how to enter. Robert Scott had found one of those open doors on the Balkan Peninsula. While in Bulgaria on a fact-finding visit, he had fallen in love with it. He liked the flower stalls lining cobblestone streets and the open-air cafés. They gave Bulgaria a homey, lived-in feeling. Robert Scott's interest in Bulgaria went beyond its attraction to him as a tourist. As he walked through Bulgaria's cities, he sensed the call of God to Nazarenes to come. Unfortunately, Nazarene World Evangelism Fund resources were already stretched too thin. Following his trip to Bulgaria, Robert Scott was at the Dallas district assembly. There, he listened to Loren Gresham explain his "Mormon model" idea. He saw how, with minor alterations, Loren's idea could be used to enter Bulgaria.
At the Nazarene General Assembly that same summer, Loren was elected the General Board's lay college representative and assigned to the committee overseeing the World Mission Division. A few months later, Southern Nazarene University submitted a written proposal outlining a partnership through which the university would help begin Nazarene work in Bulgaria. SNU would provide the young volunteers, while the World Mission Division would formulate the strategy and supervise them. In February 1994, the proposal came before the Nazarene General Board. It was exactly what Dr. Scott had requested, and Loren was present to explain it. The proposal was swiftly approved.
By late May 1994, the first volunteers had begun arriving in Sofia. Two months later, Loren Gresham went to Bulgaria for a visit. Greeting him were eleven young adult Nazarene volunteers, the first fruits of his vision.
As Dr. Gresham's dream of youthful volunteer missionaries unfolded, not everything went smoothly. Bulgaria's political bureaucracy presented the volunteers with formidable challenges. Most of the first group of Nazarene volunteers were in Bulgaria on thirty-day visas. About once a month, they had to exit Bulgaria. They would usually cross the border into a neighboring country for a day of sightseeing. When they re-entered Bulgaria, they got a fresh entry stamp in their passports. That gave them thirty more days in Bulgaria. This did allow (or force) them to visit other countries. It also made for some uncertainty in their ministry.
The government did not have to keep giving those visa renewals. In fact, one day, team members left government offices with glum faces. Officials had just said that new visa renewals would not be forthcoming. It was nearly Christmas. It was supposed to be a season of joy. For those volunteers in Sofia, however, there was considerably more apprehension than joy. It looked like they might have to return home or transfer to another country.
It was an uncertain time. At one point, Linda Gresham said to her husband, Maybe we
got in over our heads.
She was right. From a human point of view, the university was in over its head. This was a pioneer faith adventure into uncharted territory. Christian colleges struggle to recruit students and stay solvent financially. Partnering with a mission board for overseas work was far removed from a university's usual responsibilities. That is why there are university-president threads in the tapestry. It would be hard to imagine trying to weave it without Loren Gresham. . . . [ continue reading ]
| We needed to keep doing more, continually reaching into new areas. But with resources already stretched thin, how could we? Had our resources been stretched as far as they could possibly go? . . . [ more ] |
— Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
