What is the history of Christianity in Romania?
Archeological evidence for Christianity in the Romanian territories goes back to the third century AD when the proto-Romanians living in Dacia Traiana and Scythia Minor were part of the Roman Empire. In the first centuries of its existence, the Romanian Christian church was influenced by the Western church, but in the later centuries of the first millennium ties with the Byzantine church increased, so that in 1054 the Romanian churches joined the East in their separation from the Latin Church.
In the time of the Reformation, during the sixteenth century, there were a couple of attempts to bring the Reformation to the Romanian people. One of the first attempts was made by Jacob Heraclides, who ruled in the 1560s over one of the Romanian provinces. He founded a Renaissance academy and declared Lutheranism the official state church, although the vast majority of the population was Eastern Orthodox. After he was overthrown, neither the renaissance school nor Lutheranism survived. A second attempt was made in Transylvania, which is now part of Romania, though in the sixteenth century was part of the Kingdom of Hungary. There Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans lived together, and the Hungarian Reformed Church started a mission to the Romanians. The Geneva Psalter, the Heidelberg Catechism, and other Reformed books were translated into the Romanian language, and several Romanian Reformed churches were established. However, the majority of the Romanian population remained Eastern Orthodox and became increasingly hostile toward the Reformed Romanians.
Because of this conflict, and also because of the rise of the Romanian nationalist movement, the Romanian Reformed churches died out in the nineteenth century, and the remaining Romanian Reformed believers were assimilated by the Hungarian population. Since that time, leaving the Eastern Orthodox Church has been considered by many Romanians to be not only an act of spiritual apostasy but also an act of national treason.
What was the plight of the church before the fall of the Soviet Union?
Although Romania was not part of the Soviet Union, the politics of Romania were shaped by Russia for almost four decades of the twentieth century. After the end of World War II, Russian troops remained stationed in Romanian territory and helped Romanian Communists overthrow the king and the democratic government of the Kingdom of Romania. Following this, all the Christian denominations were controlled by the Communist Party, which persecuted any insubordinate Christian leaders across denominational lines. Many Christian priests and pastors were imprisoned, tortured, and killed for not subordinating themselves to the Communist regime and conducting ecclesiastical affairs according to the government agenda. Religious leaders were expected to be part of the Communist propaganda and help inculcate party ideas and attitudes in the minds of the believers who attended their churches.
The Communists also created a large secret police and intelligence agency offering benefits to citizens who enrolled and provided information about their neighbors, family, and friends. Sadly, many Christian priests and pastors signed up as informers for the secret police and spied on their congregants. This introduced corruption inside all Christian denominations, who even twenty-five years after the fall of Communism are still trying to figure out how to heal these wounds.
How did you come in contact with Reformed theology?
While growing up in Romania and being raised in an Arminian evangelical congregation, I started reading Christian books during my high school years. I happened to stumble upon some Calvinistic books I found at the local Christian bookstore. In the beginning, I was quite confused because it seemed that the books were contradicting one another. On the one side, I was reading Finney, who argued that spiritual revival can be produced if you know and apply the necessary methods, and on the other side I was reading Calvin, who had quite a different perspective on church life. Within a few months, however, I started to realize that the Reformed books were presenting doctrines that were faithful to the teaching of the Scriptures, and I was delighted to learn more about the history and doctrine of the Reformation.
The first time I attended a Reformed worship service was in 2006 during a trip to the Netherlands. There I first saw what a confessional Reformed church looks like, and I was glad that my contact with Reformed theology went beyond the books I could find in my home city. I realized that is the way churches should be, but at the same time I was sad I could find no Romanian Reformed church back home.
How do you plant a church in Romania?
In April 2011, I started thinking about planting a confessional Reformed church in Romania when I began meeting with a small group of Romanian believers to study Reformed doctrine. During the year that followed, a confessional consensus emerged that we could no longer be part of evangelical churches that rejected or at least were ambivalent toward the historical Reformed confessions. Since we did not have a Romanian Reformed denomination, we tried to contact confessional Reformed churches in Southern or Eastern Europe. Shortly, Rev. Andrea Ferrari, a United Reformed Church of North America (URCNA) missionary in Milan, Italy, responded to our call for help. With the advice of the consistory, we entered in the catechetical process and became members of the Chiesa Riformata Filadelfia of Milan in July 2012. The consistory of Milan, with the concurring advice of the overseeing consistory, advised that I should come to Westminster Seminary California to prepare for returning as a URCNA missionary to Romania. In July 2013, I started my first year of studies hoping that, Lord willing, I would be able to complete the Master of Divinity program in 2016 and return to my home country to plant a church in Bucharest. Our small group in Bucharest is looking for ways to reach other people from Bucharest with the sound doctrine recovered by the Reformation.
What are the main challenges a confessional Reformed church faces in Romania?
Looking at the social and religious outlook of Romania, one of the greatest challenges for a confessional Reformed church is the fact that it represents a small minority. In Bucharest there are about two million people, of whom almost 97 percent are Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic and 1 percent are evangelicals. In differing degrees, both Eastern Orthodoxy and evangelicalism are hostile toward Reformed theology, piety, and practice. Not having another established Romanian Reformed church nearby is a challenge faced by many missionaries who are ministering in a country with little or no confessional Reformed presence. This would also be the case for the future church plant in Bucharest.
Another challenge is the relatively high level of secularism among Romanians. Although in Romania there is an overwhelming majority that identifies itself as being Christian, most people are just nominal Christians and have little or nothing to do with their church. For example, in Bucharest there are a total of about three hundred churches (including all denominations), most of them of a small to medium size, and they are rarely full on Sunday. If these three hundred churches were full on Sunday, only about 5 percent of the population would be attending. As secularized and nominal Christians, most Romanians view religion as traditional folk culture, and they seek other answers for questions related to their origin, life, and death.
Another challenge to take into consideration is the fact that Communism and the post-Communist chaos of the 1990s have made the Romanian population quite suspicious of anyone who has strong doctrinal convictions and established church government. The 1989 anti-Communist revolution left an imprint in the consciousness of many Romanians who feel called to reject any authoritative claim beyond the necessary civil government. The trauma of Communism and the marks of the 1989 Revolution increase the difficulty of communicating to Romanian people the Reformed doctrine of the church, in a way that does not endorse individualistic piety but also does not leave room for confusing proper ecclesiastical authority or church discipline with authoritarian dictatorship.
