Protestantism in Bulgaria

The marked rise in the number of Protestants in the last two decades is partly due to a boom in conversions among the Bulgarian Roma.

Besides setting up churches, the Protestants established schools, clinics, and youth clubs, and they distributed copies of the Bible and their own religious publications in Bulgarian.

Like the practitioners of the other faiths, Protestants in Bulgaria enjoyed greater religious freedom after the fall of the communist leadership in 1989.

In 1991 the Pentecostal Church had thirty-six clergy in forty-three parishes, with sufficient concentration in Ruse to petition the government to establish a Bible institute there.

The Adventist movement began in the Dobruja region of Bulgaria at the turn of the century and then spread to Tutrakan, Ruse, Sofia, and Plovdiv.

Some twenty parishes with forty pastors remained active through that era, although a breakaway reformed group was banned because of its pacifist beliefs.