Titi surrendered to Christ at 17 at the height of the Communist persecution of Evangelicals in Eastern Europe, in a Baptist church in Arad, Romania. Ligia, his sweetheart throughout high school, was gloriously saved at 21, and they got married in 1974. Following his graduation from the University of Timisoara’s School of Architecture, Titi worked in a designing institute for 14 years, while serving as the lay youth pastor of Love Baptist Church in Arad. However, the fall of Communism in December of 1989 shifted his focus, as he became the Senior Pastor of a uniquely persecuted and viciously desecrated church in Arad. The 14 years he served there were incredible, challenging, and rewarding beyond words—as was his interpretation work for Karl Henry, Louis Palau, Walter Kaiser, Samuel Kamaleson, Sammy Tippit, Walt Henricksen, Billy Graham and many others.

The Bulzans came to the U.S. in 1995 as Titi pursued his MDiv and then a PhD in Missions at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, where he graduated in 2008. It was during his grueling years of study that God prodded Titi to move from academic pursuits to hands-on involvement in Missions, to contribute to the awakening of the European Evangelical Church.

Impressed with the missional DNA of Crossroads, a collaboration deepened between “Team Titi” and then-Missions Pastor Doug Gamble. Soon, Crossroads saw their involvement in Europe move from one ministry in a particularly needy area of Romania to shaping the best and brightest of Eastern Europe—students at Emanuel University of Oradea—and supporting hundreds of Evangelical church plants across Central and Western Europe.

Since 2009, Titi and Ligia travel, visit, provide for, encourage, counsel, teach, and train overextended, bi-vocational lay pastors—providing not only 45 years of ministry skills and missionary experience but also much-needed information about developments in Evangelical church life and applied theology. The 37 pastors and lay leaders they work with live in Serbia, Hungary, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

Titi continues to teach and preach in Romania and is very involved in the church plant they helped found in Timisoara. Time in Romania is much-needed, for it is in Romania that their car gets maintained, fixed, patched, and repaired!

Isaiah 58:11-12 (MSG) is the motto of their ministry: “I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—firm muscles, strong bones. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again.”