Evangelical Publishing Still Going Strong In Post-Communist Romania
Eugenia Rosian and her husband Gusti began circulating their evangelical magazine in Romania in 1990, shortly after the country’s independence. Photo courtesy of Rosian.
During the cruel days of communist-ruled Romania, the secret police stopped a young Eugenia Rosian and questioned her about her Christian faith and publishing.
“What are you up to?” the taller of the two policemen asked her in her home one autumn day. After a while of questioning, the men became restless and left. As soon as they were out of sight, Rosian snuck her typewriter out of the house, checked that no one was watching, ran to a nearby river and threw her beloved typewriter into the water.
“If the police found the typewriter, I would lose my job,” said Rosian, known to her friends as Jeni. The loss meant she would have to find another way to create homemade evangelical literature, particularly for children. At that time, the communist authorities found Christianity to be a threat, so her work was done covertly.
Romania gained its independence in 1989 when a number of countries shook off control of the communists, but the typewriter toss suggests the unchecked oppression under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, the second and last ruler of communist Romania, eventually executed by his fellow citizens for his brutality.
Now more than 30 years later, Rosian used her famous handmade stamp that says, “Freedom, God is with US!” to mark the end of the tyrannical rule of Ceausescu and the unleashing of her freedom to spread Christian messages through her publications, which continue to be strong in 2023.
According to Pew Research Center, Romania ranked as the No. 1 most religious country in Europe. The 2018 survey found that 55% of adults in Romania considered themselves highly religious. Armenia was the next highest, at 51%, and Ukraine came in at 31%. The survey defined “highly religious” based on attending religious services at least once a month, praying at least once a day, and believing in God with absolute certainty.
Indexmundi, a report generated by U.S. intelligence, found the Eastern Orthodox faith accounts for 81.9% of the population, while the Protestant faith that includes a variety of denominations accounts for 6.4% and Roman Catholic 4.3%. The category of other which includes Muslim accounts for 0.9%, none or atheist 0.2% and unspecified 6.3%.
Those numbers represent modern Romania, but demonstrating Christian faith could be deadly in Ceaușescu’s Romania. H.H. Drake Williams III, writing in the June 2020 issue of Journal of Global Christianity, reported Ceaușescu’s government dramatically persecuted Christians. “Many in the West will know of Christian persecution through people such as Richard Wurmbrand and his testimony in ‘Tortured for Christ.’ He was imprisoned and tortured for 14 years,” Williams wrote, adding, “Churches were demolished, and Christians were sent into exile.” Sometimes Christians were killed in automobile accidents to cover the crime, he said.
According to Dr. Sorin Sabou, associate professor of Bible and theology at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, after the fall of communism, the government allowed many Protestant groups including Brethren, Baptists and Pentecostals to develop theological schools and translate theological literature from English into Romanian. The Orthodox Church followed suit and opened theology schools in major cities.
The Pentecostal faith often is defined as Christianity that emphasizes the manifestation of gifts such as divine healing, the work of the Holy Spirit and direct experience of the presence of God by the believer.
“This trend has to be coupled with the very strong monastical presence in the country; the Orthodox monasteries are major factors when you study the religious life of Romanians,” he said.
Lately Pentecostalism continues to spread, he noted.
“The trend is still ascendent for Pentecostals, but not for Baptists and Brethren and Orthodox. When you compare the numbers from 2018 to those of 1992, the date of the first census after the fall of communism, you will see what I mean.”
In addition, the stability of the government is a benefit, added the Rev. Colin Morley, pastor of an independent Bible church in south central Pennsylvania.
Scott Olsen and his wife, Lori, work in at-risk communities, particularly in Eastern Europe.
“In my view, Romania continues to diversify, and the need for Christian media is as important as ever,” said Olsen, a full-time faculty member and president of PositiveWord, a ministry headquartered in Cibolo, Texas.
“Romanian life varies greatly from Bucharest to small farming villages, with moderate incomes to rural poverty,” he observed. “Faith has flourished well in poverty, but the big question is how will faith respond when more resources, financial and otherwise, become more broadly accessible.”
Olsen agrees with Pew’s research, and his recent summer trip found Romanian Christians to be faithful, industrious and humble. He said the dominant Easter Orthodox Church seeks to monitor the big events in a member’s life — birth, marriage and death — and it is customary for members to pay to be part of these events.
Bianca Calin, 24, in Bucharest, is a student at LCC International University, Klaipeda, Lithuania. She finds the rituals fulfilling and believes they can’t be separated from the life of Orthodox believers; she has always been a member of the faith, she said.
“Since I was born,” she said, “all my family is Christian Orthodox, so I was baptized as well in a Christian church, and years later, after I learned about the other religions, I realized that I identify myself in this one.”
For Protestants such as Rosian, now 56, the key to her faith is the appeal she gained as a child from evangelical publications and reading and copying articles from Billy Graham’s publications and broadcasts from Trans World Radio to share with fellow believers. In May 1990 she used her publishing experience to launch a library in Medias, that continues to thrive and created Children’s Friend magazine; she studied publishing with the Colorado Springs-based Magazine Training International ministry.
Trained as an engineer in a strident communist country, Rosian knew that writing to express her faith was her ultimate destiny. She learned faith as a child and found her mother and grandfather to be models of strong faith. Rosian combined her love of words — she read Victor Hugo’s French historical novel “Les Misérables” at age 5 — with her love of art to express her faith in publishing.
“My life was an adventure with God,” she said. “I served God in underground groups, translating for missionaries from the West, translating for Bible study groups for Bible Education by Extension, being an internal contact person for some missions, which were smuggling Bibles and books into Romania.”
With a printing press Rosian received on her wedding day, she and her husband, Gusti, began circulating the magazine in February 1990.
“The magazine had 24 pages,” Rosian said. “We didn’t have a long-handled stapler so we used a needle to put holes in the paper and stapled all of it by hand.” The magazine became four colors and had thousands of readers in Romania.
These days the magazine is published six times per year with a circulation that can be as little as 600 or as much as 7,000, depending on the economy. Sometimes an issue can be purchased for as little as 30 cents, Rosian said.
“Every issue has had a child-level spiritual theme, a missionary story, games for children and some kind of competition,” Rosian said. “Children have to fill the answers, and in the next magazine, we list the children that answered and the points they received.”
These days Rosian and her family concentrate more on Samuel Publishing, a Christian Publishing House in the center of Romania, Samuel Bookshop and Library in Medias.
Rosian sometimes gets feedback, particularly when speaking at conferences.
“Now I am working more at Samuel with books for children and women and I am writing articles for some Christian magazines,” she said. “We are a small publishing house, and our books are sold in the Christian bookshops in the country.
“For 40 years I have lived in Transylvania, but I know Romania well and I have a lot of friends in churches in many areas of the country — people of faith, living in faith and sharing faith,” she said. For Rosian, these days her home of Transylvania is not known for bloodthirsty vampires but for the shed blood of a risen Christ.
Theology professor Sabou praised the work of evangelicals who are using publications.
“Access to religion literature is a major factor that helps the neo-Protestant churches,” he said.
And this trend is helping the evangelical church.
“The recent history and perspective of Romanian Evangelicalism is an example of one of many places within global Christianity that receives less of a hearing in the global church,” Williams wrote in his journal article. “Romanian Evangelicalism, however, is a vibrant Christian community with over 5 percent of the population of nearly 20 million people in a country where 96 percent claim Christian allegiance.”
Rosian says she senses no religious discrimination these days, primarily because so many Pentecostals and members of the brethren faith immigrated to Romania.
And Calin said the rise in Protestants in Romania is not a concern.
“I respect every religion,” she said. “I am surrounded daily by a lot of religions among those close to me. I think it's another point of religion — to respect, to understand (as much as you can) the religion of the people around you. It doesn't make us any more different, any less good, or any less close.
Rosian is equally equanimous.
“A lot of Protestants immigrated here,” she said. “From Spain, Italy, England, Germany — they changed the demography!”
“I am member of the Brethren Church in Romania,” she said. “We are very similar with the Baptist in our doctrine, but the leadership is by a committee; we do not have a pastor, and we have Lord’s Supper every Sunday and baptism only of adults.”
For Rosian, publishing is still a vital mode of expressing her faith and doing the work of evangelism.
“In the today’s world, with the unbelievable new frames of the past three years, with the new fashion of online, online church, online fellowship — authentic or fake — it is more difficult for publishers of faith-based literature,” she said. “When the appetite for reading is less every day, it is vital for those who still think that the written word has power to learn and to know how to do it better.”
Do people appreciate her work? Not exactly, she said.
“In Romania (it) is not polite to praise someone during his life, especially a woman,” she said.
“In Romania, people here are very appreciative after you die! So we have to wait to see what people said. God knows with this COVID, I am (sick with it) for the third time, so it could be sooner than later,” she joked.
Michael Ray Smith is a communication professor at LCC International University, Klaipeda, Lithuania, and author of “7 Days to a Byline that Pays.”