Romania 01

So last Thursday I set off nice and early for Heathrow Airport where I caught a KLM flight to Schiphol, Amsterdam [Pic 01]. There to greet me, fresh in from Teesside Durham, was John Rubens, who had arranged this trip on behalf of Evangelical Press and in association with Dinu Moga in Oradea. John is pastor of an FIEC church in Newton Aycliffe but continues to work part-time for EP. We were soon joined by Phil Arthur who had flown to Amsterdam from Manchester. Phil is pastor of the Grace Baptist Church in Lancaster. I knew both John and Phil before this trip but it was good to get to know them better.

After a short stop for lunch we headed on, with Malev, to Budapest (Hungary), an hour and three quarters away. At the airport we were met by Lazslo who took us the 160 miles east, to Oradea, just over the Romanian border. It was soon dark and there was not much to see - on the return journey I realised it is not much different in daylight as Hungary is incredibly flat an we went through no major towns. The road is good but mostly single lane. The church and university in Oradea has a lot of interaction with the west and so Laszlo spends a lot of time driving to and fro.

We came first for a meal to the very tasteful home of Dinu and Lydia Moga [Pic 02 Them with John and Phil]. I have met Dinu several times before. He studied at LTS in the nineties and more recently has completed the MTh with the John Owen Centre. He is on the staff of the large Emanuel Baptist Church and heads up the Editura Faclia publishing house. The office is next door to his home. He was telling us how there are over 40 Christian publishing houses in Romania but still a very small market.

We were accommodated in basic but adequate accommodation on the campus of the Baptist University in Oradea (the only such institution in Europe). (See the Romanian language website here). I shared a suite with Phil and John was down the corridor.

Oradea is Romania's tenth city and lie within the Transylvanian region. There have been Baptists in the city for decades and some 3% in the city would identify themselves as such (there are more Pentecostals with something like 4%). Following fierce persecution before the revolution in 1989, it has been possible to build a large church building (the largest in Europe) [Pic 03] with Christian but state funded schools on site and the Baptist University on the outskirts of town. [Pic 04 shows the view from my bedroom window].