Протестантската конверсия сред ромите в България: между глобалното и локалното
The Protestant Conversion Among Roma in Bulgaria: Between Global and Local

Summary/Abstract: The change of the religious identity among Bulgarian Roma has been an important and intriguing change, which has started decades ago acquiring, however, mass character and social significance, in the wake of 1989. The process of conversion among the Roma and their joining the ranks of the Protestant churches was noted by Bulgarian ethnologists and sociologists far back at the start of the 1990s. The authors paid attention to the rapidity and sweep whereby these processes developed. This has not been in the least an isolated phenomenon; it has proceeded in a similar way also in neighbouring countries like Romania and Serbia. The mass scope of the evangelization among the Roma should be discussed within the context of globalization, as part of the advance of the Pentecostal movement throughout the whole world. The main research questions I am going to look for an answer are the following. How the Evangelical churches in Bulgaria are functioning in their capacity of social communities, structured on a religious basis? How the religious conversion of the Roma should be qualified: as a fait accompli, or as an open and controversial process? How and whether evangelization entails changes in the identity and traditional culture and values of the Roma? To what extent this process may be characterized as an original local phenomenon and how far it may be discussed as a product of the globalization? The article has been written on the basis of field work in two churches, located in the outskirts of Sofia, both of them belonging to the charismatic Bulgarian Church of God (steaming from “Church of God“ with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee in the US). The field work was carried out in the course of five months in 2008 in the Gornitsata and in Bulgarian Church of God in the Lyulin-5 residential district.

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