Pathfinders in Romania

In 1869, a former Polish priest began preaching the Adventist message in what is now Romania. The following year, in Pitești, Michael Belina Czechowski started gathering a small group around the Aslan family, merchants of Armenian descent, who took up Sabbath keeping. Within a few decades the church grew so much that the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists describes it as the largest Adventist community in Europe, and after 1989 it made room for Pathfinders in Romania, known in the country as Exploratori.

Along the way came persecution, mission schools, decades of faith lived quietly during the communist era and a fast new beginning after December 1989. This is the story of how the clubs flourished in a mostly Orthodox country.

📜Who was Michael Belina Czechowski, the Adventist pioneer in Romania?

The story begins with a missionary nobody sent. Michael Belina Czechowski was a former Polish Catholic priest who had embraced the Adventist faith in the United States and gone back to Europe on his own, with no official appointment from the church. According to the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA), published by the General Conference, he was the first to proclaim the Adventist message on Romanian territory, between 1869 and 1870.

His first stop was Transylvania, but his stay there was short and, as far as anyone knows, left no stable group behind. The preacher then moved on to Pitești, in Wallachia, where he lived until 1875. During that time he baptized the first converts and built up a small congregation made up of members of the Aslan family, merchants of Armenian descent. If you have read the history of Pathfinders in Germany, you have already met the same pioneer.

After Czechowski left, the Pitești group went on keeping the Sabbath without a pastor. In 1879 it was visited by two Adventist pioneers who came from Italy, Bertola and Ribton. By their account, those families received and read the French magazine Les Signes des Temps on a regular basis.

🏛️How was the Adventist Church in Romania organized?

The 1880s gave the Pitești group a voice. In 1881, Toma Aslan sent two letters with news to the French magazine's editors and, because of them, was invited to the 1883 council of European Adventists. In 1884, he helped launch the first Adventist publication in Romanian, the quarterly Adevărulu Prezentu (The Present Truth). That same year, General Conference president George I. Butler met with the believers in Pitești, and the missionary A. C. Bourdeau, sent shortly afterward, organized the church there.

The beginning was fragile. After 1887 and 1888, under hostility and persecution, the Pitești church broke up: most of its members emigrated or moved to Bucharest. The message took root again by another route. In 1890, Sabbath-keeping families of German origin had to leave Crimea and were given land in Dobruja, where some of them organized the Viile-Noi church, near Constanța. According to the ESDA, it is the oldest Adventist church still active in the country. In 1902, the German missionary Gerhard Perk, the first ordained pastor to arrive as a missionary, settled in Bucharest, and in October of that year there was a baptism in Lake Floreasca.

Formal organization came in 1913. At a meeting in Bucharest, the first Adventist gathering in the country held in public with the authorities' approval, the delegates voted to create the Romanian Conference, with 442 members, and elected Petre P. Paulini as its first president. In July 1920, right after World War I, the Romanian Union Conference was born, with three conferences and one mission field, adding up to almost 2,500 members in 99 churches. Paulini was also elected the Union's first president.

🎒Where were young Romanian Adventists trained?

Concern for training young people shows up early. Ștefan Demetrescu, one of the first Romanian pastors, opened the first mission school in Focșani between 1923 and 1924, starting with a six-month course. The school changed address twice: it ran in Diciosânmartin from 1926 to 1932 and in Stupini from 1932 to 1948, where it got a modern building of its own. By the ESDA's count, hundreds of students, young women and young men, passed through its classrooms, and those graduates served the churches as pastors for many years.

The Romanian church also sent people far away. Constantin Tolici worked in Madagascar from 1930 to 1936, Ieremie Florea left in 1938 to serve Romanian immigrants in the United States, and Ilie Curmătureanu went to Cameroon in 1939. The reports they sent home became inspiring reading in the churches, and many young people began preparing for the same kind of calling, according to the ESDA.

📊What is the largest religion in Romania, and where do Adventists fit in?

The largest religion in Romania is Orthodox Christianity. In the 2021 census by the National Institute of Statistics (INS), 14,025,064 people, or 73.6% of the resident population, declared themselves Orthodox, and for about 14% no religion was recorded. Seventh-day Adventists numbered 65,861 people, the seventh most declared religion, behind the Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Reformed, Pentecostals, Greek Catholics and Baptists. In the previous census, in 2011, cited by the ESDA, the Orthodox made up 86.5% and Adventists 0.4%.

That small share hides a story of fast growth. In the 1930 national census, more than 16,000 people declared themselves Adventists; in 1948, the church officially counted 25,800 members, 551 churches and 79 ordained pastors. The ESDA credits much of this growth to the colporteurs, pastors and members who carried literature to towns and villages, and to the reading of Ellen White's books, to the point that Romania became the largest Adventist community in Europe.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (ESDA), article Romania (2020), for 1903 to 1948; National Institute of Statistics of Romania, 2021 census.

🕯️How did children and young people live their faith in the communist era?

After World War II, Romania came under a communist government. From 1949 on, the church lost much of the structure that supported its normal life: the Bucharest publishing house and the Stupini Missionary Institute were confiscated, and religious activities were limited to the inside of church buildings.

For Adventist families, the most sensitive point was the Sabbath, because the work week ran from Monday to Saturday and there were classes on that day too. According to the ESDA, Sabbath School classes for children were discouraged or banned, and children and young people received an official atheist education in a systematic way. In military service, hundreds of young Adventists were prosecuted for not reporting for duty on Saturdays.

Even so, the churches stayed full. The ESDA describes tens of thousands of Adventists who, every Friday evening and every Sabbath, brought their children to services in cities and villages. Many Adventist students simply did not go to school on the Sabbath. Some paid for it with expulsion from school or university, and there were times when the whole class stood up in support of their classmates.

The ESDA calls what was achieved under those conditions a miracle, including semi-clandestine educational activities for children and young people. After 1965, and even more after 1980, some of the restrictions were eased. Knowing why Adventists keep the Sabbath helps you understand the weight of that choice.

⛺When did Pathfinders in Romania begin?

In December 1989, the change of regime opened the doors all at once. Preaching moved from church buildings to public halls, and within a few weeks about 300 churches were reopened or opened in new places. In 1993, the Romanian church held more than 7,000 baptisms, the highest number recorded in the country, according to the ESDA.

This is the moment when Pathfinders enter the country's history. According to the ESDA, branches of work that the previous regime had suppressed were revived or set up for the first time, such as the various stages of training for children and young people. The encyclopedia singles out the Pathfinders, who helped thousands of young people grow spiritually and morally. In Romania, the club is called Exploratori, the Romanian plural of “explorer”. The date of the first club after 1989 does not appear in the official sources we consulted, so we do not state it.

Ten years later, Adventist teenagers faced a test of their own. In 1999, the Ministry of Education created the first national exam at the end of the first eight years of school and scheduled one of the papers on a Saturday. Negotiations to change the date failed, and about 800 Adventist students had to choose. Nearly 630 skipped the exam, even knowing that, under the rules, they would be kept out of any school for at least a year. The case reached the Supreme Court, which found the ministry guilty of discriminating against these children in education and ordered a special exam for them. Read also how to live your faith at school day to day.

Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.1 Timothy 4:12, New International Version (NIV)

🧭How do Romania's Pathfinders, the Exploratori, work today?

Today, the Youth Department of the Romanian Union Conference works with the conferences' youth teams to coordinate programs for several age groups, among them Exploratori, Companioni and AMiCUS, the network of Adventist university students. The department has an associate director dedicated to the Licurici (Romanian for fireflies) and Exploratori programs, and it organizes or coordinates conventions, camps, congresses and national projects.

Day to day, a Romanian club looks a lot like the clubs you know in Brazil. According to the Exploratori România website, weekly meetings last about 90 minutes and mix games, songs, skills and team-building activities. The club is aimed at students in grades 5 to 8 of the Romanian school system, and the site says there are clubs in most of the country's large cities. The same page presents the Exploratori as part of an international organization with more than two million members.

The Bible sits at the center. The report by Pastor Aurel Neațu, president of the Romanian Union, covering 2019 to 2024, mentions the Bible Experience in 2023 and 2024, the Bible Game in 2024 and at least 2,000 participants in the local rounds of the Bible study programs for children and young people. In 2021, 5,000 children were given a teen Bible as a prize for reading the Bible for the first time.

The Trans-European Division (TED) officially adopted the Pathfinder Bible Experience (PBE) in 2019: each year, teams of six club members study books of the Bible and go through rounds of tests. According to the TED, since 2023 teams from Romania, which belongs to the Inter-European Division (EUD), have taken part in the TED final. See what one of these finals looks like in our coverage of the Trans-European Bible Experience in Budapest.

Source: TED Youth Ministries, Pathfinder Bible Experience page (accessed October 2026).

🌍Pathfinders in Europe: why are so many Romanian Adventists living outside Romania?

The freedom of movement that opened up after 1989 led thousands of Romanian Adventists, most of them young, to look for a better life in other European countries. The main destinations were Spain, Italy, France and Belgium. Hungarian-speaking believers from Transylvania moved to Hungary, and practically the whole German-speaking Adventist community went to Germany. According to an estimate cited by the ESDA, about 5.6 million Romanians were living abroad in 2020.

In the encyclopedia's view, these immigrants brought new energy to the Adventist Church in the countries where they settled, both in Romanian-speaking congregations and in local churches that use the language of the country. The Romanian Union holds regular mission conferences to support this diaspora. Anyone who reads the history of Pathfinders in Spain knows one of the main destinations of these immigrants.

In Romania, the departures came at a cost: congregations lost people just when they most needed hands to build churches and share the gospel, and membership in the country went down. From Romania to Spain, the clubs belong to the same worldwide movement whose official recognition by the General Conference in 1950 this portal has already covered.