page_title: Romanian Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Romanian Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Seventh Day Adventist church in the town of Lehliu-Gară, Romania.
context_page_description: The Romanian Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists is Romania's seventh-largest religious body. At the 2011 census, 85,902 Romanians declared themselves to be Seventh-Day Adventists. The church put its own membership at 64,224 in 2018. Ethnically, in 2002, they were 83.5% Romanians, 9.7% Hungarians, 4.9% Roma, 1.4% Ukrainians and 0.5% belonged to other groups. The denomination has 1,185 church buildings and some 340 pastors. It originates in the 19th century and is divided into six local conferences, standing for and named after some of the country's main historical regions: Banat, Northern Transylvania, Southern Transylvania, Moldavia, Muntenia and Oltenia.
context_section_description: In 1868-69 Michał Belina-Czechowski, a former Roman Catholic priest who had embraced Adventism in the United States, arrived at Piteşti and introduced Seventh-Day Adventist doctrines into Romania. Among the approximately 12 people he converted was Thomas G. Aslan, who later made contact with John Nevins Andrews and helped him prepare a Romanian-language paper. Visits in the mid-1880s from George I. Butler, president of the General Conference, and Augustin C. Bourdeau, an evangelist, followed these initial contacts. In 1890 Ludwig R. Conradi entered Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary, in search of converts. As a result of Conradi's efforts, by the mid-1890s several individuals in Cluj had converted to Adventism. Meanwhile, in 1892 Conradi organized several ethnic German Adventists who had recently moved from the Russian Empire to the Kingdom of Romania into a church. Eventually these Adventists settled in Viile Noi, a neighbourhood of Constanţa.
  Johann F. Ginter, an evangelist from Russia, moved to Bucharest in 1904 and soon converted several individuals, among them Peter Paulini (a medical student) and Ştefan Demetrescu (a Romanian Army officer), who then attended the Adventist training school in Möckern, Germany. By the time Paulini and Demetrescu returned to Romania, the government had expelled Ginter, but the newly trained Romanian Adventists were ready to take his place. Conferences organized beginning in 1907 and the Romanian Union Conference formed in 1919 with about 2,000 members. Starting in 1908 Romanian Adventists had their publications printed by the Hamburg press in Germany, but in 1920 they established the Adventist Publishing House in Bucharest. Three years later the Romanian Union Training School opened in Bucharest but moved to Diciosânmartin in 1926 and then Braşov in 1931. The Conference registered as a religious association in 1928, but during the period of Greater Romania, it functioned in semi-legality, sometimes permitted to function and at other times banned. In 1930 there were 7,700 (or 16,100) members, 65 ministers and 290 houses of prayer.
  At the start of World War II, there were some 13,000 (or 25,000) Adventists in Romania. In 1941, as Nazi German troops entered Romania, the Wehrmacht confiscated the training school building and completely closed the institution the next year (see also Romania during World War II). At the end of that year the Antonescu regime closed all Adventist churches and imprisoned church leaders, but meetings continued in secret. The school (as well as the churches) opened again in 1944 and beginning in 1950 operated under the name Romanian Theological Seminary. Meanwhile, the publishing house closed in 1942, opening again in 1944 until taken over by the government three years later. In 1946, Adventists found homes for 600 orphans affected by that year's famine in Moldavia. Having gained provisional recognition that year, the church was one of the fourteen faiths to gain state recognition in the 1948 Law on Cults.
  Under Nicolae Ceauşescu, services (some of which were bilingual Romanian and Hungarian in Transylvania) continued to be well-attended, with catechetical classes held Friday evenings and Saturdays. There were occasional reports of members having difficulties because of their views, but the official community developed a form of accommodation with the state that was on the whole acceptable to the Communist authorities. The church leadership was reluctant to complain about state interference if it meant losing any of its "privileges", which included travel to conferences abroad by 1980. The international Adventist community, which has given careful attention to its churches in Romania, acquiesced in this posture, seeking to resolve problems as quietly and responsibly as possible, a strategy dating back to the 1930s. Individual members, though, went further sometimes: eight Adventists were arrested in summer 1979 for printing and distributing religious literature; the police stated they had printed 10,000 copies each of fourteen different titles, mainly on 
caption: The Adventist church building in Lehliu Gară, Călăraşi County.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "NIKON", "Image Model": "COOLPIX S3100", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "COOLPIX S3100V1.0", "Image DateTime": "2013:05:30 08:05:02", "Image ExifOffset": "220", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/1000", "EXIF FNumber": "16/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:05:30 08:05:02", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:05:30 08:05:02", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "17/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "23/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4320", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3240", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "26", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Portrait", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}