Istoria Bisericii Creștine după Evanghelie din România

The History of the Assemblies of Brethren in Romania

Abstract

The article has traced the historical roots and development of the Assemblies of Brethren in Romania. It has found that the religious landscape in the second half of the 19th-century and the first half of the 20th-century Romania had become diversified through the establishment and spreading of the neo-Protestant denominations. The roots of the Christian Church of the Brethren are outside Romania, and can be found in the West. Known as the Movement of the Brethren in the West, it came to be founded, in Romania, as the Brethren Assemblies, in the second half of the 19th century. The Church of the Brethren succeeded in establishing itself in Romania due to the evangelistic outreach of Swiss and German missionaries. Despite their being persecuted and even prohibited in the period between the two World Wars and during Antonescu’s dictatorship, the Assemblies of Brethren had known large-scale developments and revival, spreading over the entire geographical area of Romania by the end of the first half of the 20th century.