If you’re reading this, you’re one of the first people to hear about Mission 17:17, so let us tell you why we exist.
It starts with a question we couldn’t stop asking: what happens to a country’s faith after two hundred years of being told it isn’t welcome?
Bulgaria has been asking that question for a long time. For centuries under Ottoman rule, Bulgarian Christians paid extra taxes for their faith, lost social standing, and even watched their sons taken to serve the Sultan. The church survived mostly hidden away in mountain monasteries but it survived quietly, in survival mode, not growth mode.
Then, just as the rest of the world was moving on from that era, Bulgaria was handed a new one. From the end of World War II until the early 1990s, the Communist government treated evangelical Christians as enemies of the state. Pastors were arrested. Church buildings were confiscated. Even the Orthodox Church, Bulgaria’s own majority faith, was quietly taken over from the inside. For two full generations, there was no space to disciple anyone in anything.
When the Berlin Wall fell and Bulgaria held its first free elections in 1990, something remarkable happened: people started coming to faith, especially within the Roma community. But an open door isn’t the same as an easy road. Opposition just changed shape smear campaigns, denied building permits, revoked visas for missionaries. The pressure didn’t disappear. It adapted.
Here’s what struck us most: after all of that, the problem in Bulgaria today isn’t a lack of hunger for God. It’s a lack of access to the tools that help that hunger grow into something deep and lasting.
That’s the gap Mission 17:17 exists to close.
We’re working with Crossway to translate the ESV Study Bible notes and all into Bulgarian, and then get it printed and placed directly into the hands of believers and churches across the country. Not just Bibles. Study Bibles the kind that help someone who’s two years into their faith actually understand what they’re reading, without needing a seminary degree to do it.
Consider this: it’s not unusual for a Bulgarian city of 50,000 people to have a single evangelical church of maybe 100 believers. Now imagine that church with a thousand study Bibles in hand. Two thousand. That’s the kind of gap we’re trying to help close one translated page, one printed copy, one discipled leader at a time.
Our name comes from John 17:17, part of Jesus’s prayer for His followers the night before His crucifixion: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” That’s the whole mission, really. Not just handing someone a book, but trusting that God’s Word, placed in someone’s own language, does the sanctifying work we never could.
We’re just getting started. Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing updates on the translation process, stories from churches on the ground in Bulgaria, and ways you can be part of this with us — through prayer, giving, or both.
Thanks for being here at the beginning.
By clicking “donate today” you will be redirected to a donation page, please select “Mission 17:17” in the drop down.
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