Women’s evangelical activities and church growth in Romani communities

Abstract

Stories about church growth in Romani communities proliferate across Europe but the question of how women contributed to religious mobilization in the interwar period requires further study. The Roma in Bulgaria became an important target group for foreign and local missionaries from various denominations, including, among others, evangelical Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals. Their aim was first to correct the laxity of Romani morals, and then to support them to win a religious place of their own in society. Women, in particular, were encouraged to work among children and the female part of their communities and to be collaborative with the male evangelists in advancing common activities. A specific field of action for female believers was women’s associations which were purposely created among both the Bulgarians and the Roma. This article is configured as an ethnographic discussion on the role of women acting as agents of religious change. Thus, I refer in detail to the cases of Boyana (Puncheva), Anka Minkova, and Keva Stefanova, whose activities were mainly related to the Romani church in the village of Golintsi in northwestern Bulgaria. Using a combined ethnological approach, I employ information from different sources: open-ended interviews, hard-to-reach archival sources, and periodicals issued in Bulgaria and abroad.This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.