In 1868-69 Michał Belina-Czechowski, a former Roman Catholic priest who had embraced Adventism in the United States, arrived at Pitești and introduced Seventh-Day Adventist doctrines into Romania.

[5] Johann F. Ginter, an evangelist from Russia, moved to Bucharest in 1904 and soon converted several individuals, among them Peter Paulini (a medical student) and Ștefan Demetrescu (a Romanian Army officer), who then attended the Adventist training school in Möckern, Germany.

By the time Paulini and Demetrescu returned to Romania, the government had expelled Ginter, but the newly trained Romanian Adventists were ready to take his place.

[7] Under Nicolae Ceaușescu, services (some of which were bilingual Romanian and Hungarian in Transylvania) continued to be well-attended, with catechetical classes held Friday evenings and Saturdays.

The international Adventist community, which has given careful attention to its churches in Romania, acquiesced in this posture, seeking to resolve problems as quietly and responsibly as possible, a strategy dating back to the 1930s.

Despite the wartime and Communist-era difficulties it experienced, Adventism had grown faster in Romania by this time than elsewhere in Europe,[5] reaching some 70,000 members and over 500 church buildings by the early 1990s.

[6] The church runs a university-level Adventist Theological Institute at Cernica, three high school-level seminaries and a post-secondary health school at Brăila.

Members, who are convinced they are living in the Last Days, object to oaths, military service, and reportedly marriage, probably because Saint Paul enjoins Christians to abstain from normal marital relations during the end times.

They were involved in a confrontation with the Communist state (which declared them illegal in 1948) and the official church, to which they were an obvious embarrassment and whose leaders they felt very strongly were too closely linked with the regime.