But I’ll tell you what it is about Romania that gets me so excited. Romania historically has suffered a great deal as a nation. They have suffered a great deal as a church, highly persecuted in certain parts of their history. Yet they’re making some tremendous progress in these current times. Let me just give you a little bit of history about Romania. After World War I Romania established a parliamentary system of government, like England has for example, with opposing political parties and debate. There were human rights and women’s rights that were established. It was a genuinely democratic government that was launched at that time. They also were a prospering country. At this time Romania ranked number six in the world in terms of oil production. So they were well on their way to developing a fairly good economy with rights, freedoms and opportunities. But in the 1930s the king of Romania dissolved the political parties and he became a royal dictator once again. And like so many other people in Europe, the Romanian gypsies and the Jews were the brunt of a lot of murderous activity and policies. Then of course the Nazis showed up and they added to this long painful history of persecution. By the end of the war the king had abdicated his role as king and Romania fell under communist rule. So they went from Nazi rule to the USSR having their foot on their neck for a number of years. They raised up another dictator by the name of Nicolae Ceausescu, who was a horrifying dictator with a secret police, forced labor camps, and execution for any kind of dissent. It was during this period of time that the church, many pastors and many Christians suffered, even in the distribution of Bibles. There was a whole secret movement effort and stories of much persecution and endurance that is painful to read, but is glorifying to see how they endured in their faith over that period of time.
During Ceausescu’s reign he outlawed abortion, which would sound like a very good thing. From a perspective of biblical morality, it was. But his motive for outlawing abortion was because he wanted to grow a larger population for his own ends and purposes, not out of some sense of human rights and human dignity. He wanted more soldiers, a bigger army and more factory workers. So people were treated as widgets in his machine. He went so far as to impose monthly fines on single women over 25. In childless married couples, he required physical exams for women at work. And miscarriages were investigated to make sure that they didn’t actually replace the word abortion with miscarriage. In other words, all this oppression became attached to this idea of abortion and the policy of the government. So when Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989, the first thing that the people did to liberate themselves from this oppression was to legalize abortion. And look what happened. Let me share with you some of the remarkable statistics that happened in the early years of the 1990s regarding abortion ratios. For every 1,000 babies born, how many others are aborted? According to the data, there were another 3,152 babies that were aborted for every 1,000 babies that were born. I don’t know that the world has ever seen this kind of a ratio before. Now according to the last 35 years this ratio has dropped significantly, but that’s what it was like in the 1990s. Not counting miscarriages or babies that die naturally, what percent of total pregnancies end in abortion? The answer was 75%, 75.92% of all pregnancies were terminated in the early 1990s. Now that’s dropped all the way down to 14%, which is amazing in and of itself. But my intention is to share with you the incredible, uniquely historic suffering that the Romanian people endured during that period of time. And finally I’d like to discuss the abortion rates. This means out of every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 39, how many of them had an abortion in a year? The answer is 236 back in the early 90s. That’s down to 11 at this point, which is more normal among the nations of Europe. But you can see that by every measure, abortion was unleashed at a terrible level in Romania after the fall of their dictator.
So we’re going back to Romania to try to be an encouragement to the churches and leaders there and encouraging them to continue to bring healing to all of the men and women who suffered through abortion during this time and to renew a biblical orientation toward the value of life and to help them to lead their church well on the moral crisis of abortion. We desire that they really encourage their people to treasure human life in the womb, reject abortion as the shedding of innocent blood, to really experience the cleansing grace of God that washes away all guilt and grief and replaces all that with a testimony of God’s kindness towards us. And then to roll up our sleeves and to get into the call to rescue the innocent, one mother and child at a time. There are a number of pregnancy centers that are in place in Romania, unlike some of the other countries that we go to. But of all the countries that we have traveled and trained in, I would say that the least level of openness to the call of God regarding human life and abortion, the resistance has been the greatest in Europe, other than the US which is also quite resistant. In most other places of the world abortion is not a political issue. They just want to ask, what does the Bible say and how can we be obedient and how can we be a part of God’s plan. But in Europe, as it is here in the United States, abortion is seen through the lens of politics as if it’s a social issue or a political issue. And so that makes our trip to Romania extra special and earnest. We hope to go in there and see God spark a new wave of biblical commitment among His own people that will slowly penetrate and change the culture and then begin to spread and create a witness for other countries in Europe. Much the way we’ve seen Colombia which has opened many doors to other parts of Latin America. So I think it’s one of the most important trips I’m going to be making this year.
I welcome you to join me. The way you can do that is to sign up for our daily text. On the day that we leave, we’ll send out a text through your phone. And every day you’ll get a very brief video or picture, a little quick update that will show you where we’re going. We might do an interview or tell a story, but you’ll get to join us on this trip if you sign up to receive our text updates. You can do that on our homepage of our website at passionlife.org. I would really welcome you to join us, to pray us forward and to pray that God would send a refreshing spirit of life through all these six cities that we’re going to visit. And then pray that the message will be spread throughout the country for the glory of His own name.