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June-July 2006  

”We believe that God has chosen the Gagauz to spread the Good News to other Turkic peoples”

The main road in Chadir Lunga leads past low houses with beautifully decorated windows. At the market place women with head scarves are selling home grown vegetables. A tall building stands out among the houses – it is the Baptist church, one of many churches in the Gagauz area in southern Moldova. According to pastor Vladimir Kusursuz there are about 4,000 Evangelical Christian Gagauz, besides all the Orthodox believers. The Gagauz are a Turkic people, about 198,000, but contrary to most other Turkic people groups they are mainly Orthodox Christians and not Muslims.

”We believe that God has chosen the Gagauz to spread the Good News to other Turkic peoples,” says Vladimir. “We can speak to Turks and Crimean-Tatars, Azeri, Kazakhs and Turkmens, and they understand us. When we went to Turkey, we noticed that the Turks opened up more to us Gagauz than to people of other countries, as we could speak to them in a language they understood.”

The Gagauz Bible translation process took many years to complete and encountered many setbacks, including the death of the translator 5 years ago. But in May 2006 the Gagauz New Testament was at last delivered from the printing house. Some 7,500 copies were published – 5,000 in Cyrillic (Russian) script and 2,500 in Latin script. Young people nowadays use Latin script, while older people know Cyrillic better. A joyful celebration was held in Chadir Lunga on 27 May 2006. The late translator’s family and members of the translation team, as well as representatives from England, Sweden, Hungary, Romania and Russia were present.

“For me and my travelling companions it was absolutely fantastic to be present at the celebration and experience the warm Christian atmosphere, wonderful singing by the big choir of 120-130 persons from three different churches and listen to many fine speeches,” one of the Swedish participants wrote afterwards.

The crowning moment of the event was when children dressed in black and white carried the New Testaments to the front of the church where the books were stacked to form a picture of a white cross on a blue ground. When excerpts from the New Testament were read aloud it was obvious that everyone was astounded to hear these words in Gagauzi. All the pastors and mission leaders present at the celebration came forwards and dedicated the book to the Lord in prayer. Afterwards the participants were invited to taste the New Testament – the ladies in the church had in fact made a big cake looking just like the book!

A week later one of our co-workers from Moscow attended a Russian-speaking service in England, where she showed the Gagauz New Testament and mentioned the celebration in Moldova. A young man called one of the ladies in the church, who turned out to be Gagauz! The woman reverently took the New Testament in her hands and with shining eyes began to read – but after a while it was evident that she could not understand the Latin script… Our colleague was able to tell her that the book also exists in Cyrillic and that we would send her a copy later. When the woman heard the name of the translator she was completely overwhelmed, saying: “He was my neighbour in the village where I used to live!”

Project of the month

The Children’s Bible has been translated into Gagauz and a new exegetical checker has moved to the area to work with the team. Please support this work with your gift this month!

Here you can sign for the IBT Russia/CIS monthly English Newsletter

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