The Evangelical Church of Romania () is a Protestant denomination that emerged out of the Romanian Orthodox Church. It is one of Romania's eighteen officially recognised religious denominations. History The church originated between 1920 and 1924, the work of the young Romanian Orthodox theologians Dumitru Cornilescu (whose Bible translation is used by most Protestant churches in Romania) and Tudor Popescu (a former priest at the Cuibul cu barză Church). Also known as Tudorites, the deeply pietistic movement, regarded as the only Protestant church with Romanian origins, originated in a profound religious experience of Popescu's. Following this, he began to preach repentance and faith, questioning the significance attached by Orthodoxy to the saints, icons and the sacraments, and emphasising the centrality of the Bible instead of the liturgy. Eventually excommunicated and barred from addressing Orthodox congregations, he was lent an auditorium by an affiliate of the Anglican Mission to the Jews in Bucharest. Much to the consternation of his former church, he was able to firmly establish his work, drawing large crowds with his very popular preaching. Under the leadership of Popescu and Cornilescu, several hundred followers built a 1000-seat mother church in 1926, which still drew close to eight hundred worshipers on an average Sunday morning in the early 1990s. At the request of government authorities, some of whom Popescu deeply impressed, the new movement registered as an association in 1927 and, in order to be distinguished from other groups, took the name Christians of the Scriptures. Shortly thereafter, churches opened in Ploiești, Câmpulung, Târgoviște, Rucăr, Buzău, Pitești, Bârlad, Brașov and other places. In 1939, despite differences in dogma and worship, the National Renaissance Front regime compelled the Christians of the Scriptures to merge with the Christian Evangelicals, resulting in the Christian Evangelical Church. The resultant church had two branches: branch I, which practised believer's baptism, and the Tudorite branch II, which employed infant baptism. (The difference stemmed from the tradition whence each emerged: Plymouth Brethren and Romanian Orthodox, respectively.) Outlawed under the World War II-era regime of Ion Antonescu, in 1946, the Evangelical Christians were recognised as a religious body by the Romanian state, with the Tudorites once again merged into the Plymouth Brethren church, and also including a splinter group called "Christians" centred at Ploieşti. (For an overview of the church's development under the Communist regime, see Christian Evangelical Church of Romania.) Following the 1989 Revolution and the