Diagnosing church health across cultures: A case study of Turkish Roma (Millet) churches in Bulgaria

Abstract

Much missionary work is focused on helping churches become healthy and mature. In doing so, missionaries face the challenge of contextualization. The local people’s ideals and images of church usually reflect different emphases than those of the missionary’s home culture. Indicators that have been used to assess whether a church is doing well in the missionary’s home country may not be the best measures of maturity or health in the host culture. This article describes the application of an approach to contextualization—Paul Hiebert’s “missional theology”—to the diagnosis of church health and maturity in Turkish-speaking Roma (Millet) churches in Bulgaria. In the process, the limitations of using indicators of church health developed in another cultural context without adaptation are discussed, Millet ideals of healthy churches are analyzed, and biblical and Millet ideals are brought into dialogue with each other to produce a contextualized portrayal of a healthy Millet church.