W a r s a w – Following God’s call is not always easy for budding evangelical pastors in Poland - pay is terrible. That was pointed out by the Brit Michael Bochenski (Radosc near Warsaw), Director of Warsaw’s Baptist Theological Seminary (WBST), in a conversation with the European Baptist Press Service (EBPS). Yet this institution does more than simply train Baptist theologians. According to Bochenski: “Evangelical pastors in Poland are

living on salaries that would amount to little more than an expenses bill for a pastor in some of our West European Baptist churches.” Which makes the call to full-time service all the harder to fulfil. His seminary has only a very modest budget at its disposal: “We train 200 or so students here, and that on a budget smaller than the one I had to run a single, medium-sized church in the UK.” Bochenski has a means for comparison: Before becoming WBST-Rector in 2005 he spent 25 years as a pastor in Britain. He also served as Officer in the British Baptist Union for three years and for two years as its honorary President. Answering the call to come to Poland had roots in his biography: He is the son of a Polish Catholic father and a Baptist British mother. “I grew up an internationalist,” he states. He is attracted to both Western and Eastern Europe with their differing religious heritages. But since he attended a Baptist Sunday School from an early age, “the Baptists won”.

Living as a Protestant in a heavily-Catholic country is not always easy. Yet Baptists have long played a constructive role in Polish ecumenical life. The biggest breakthrough occurred through the evangelist Billy Grahams’s visit to Poland in 1978. Bochenski believes that Poland never was truly a part of the Eastern bloc. That Poland now belongs to the European Union is “the culmination of many centuries of longing to be a free country on a free continent.” Poland’s younger generation has only known freedom; yet some older persons must still learn to trust and enjoy it. Bochenski’s conclusion: “Poland is a great place to live and work.”

WBST was founded in 1923 as the Bible school “Bethel”. It survived the Second World War nearly unscathed, but only in 1984 did communist authorities grant the school permission to expand. In 1994, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, a new campus was inaugurated. The seminary’s Bachelor of Divinity degree is officially recognised by the Polish government. The institution now includes an EU-financed English-language school with 150 students.

Poland has 79 Baptist congregations with approximately 4.700 members. Ninety-five percent of the country’s nearly 40 million citizens are Roman Catholic.