Richard Wurmbrand (March 24, 1909 – February 17, 2001) was a Romanian evangelical Christian minister, author, and educator who spent a total of 14 years in confinement in Romania. Following his release he founded the international organization The Voice of the Martyrs.
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Richard Wurmbrand, the youngest of four boys, was born in 1909 in Bucharest in a Jewish family. He lived with his family in Istanbul for a short while; his father died when he was 9, and the Wurmbrands returned to Romania when he was 15.
As an adolescent, he was sent to study Marxism in Moscow, but returned clandestinely the following year. Pursued by Siguranţa Statului (the secret police), he was arrested and held in Doftana prison. Wurmbrand subsequently renounced his political ideals.
He married Sabina Oster on October 26, 1936. Wurmbrand and his wife became believers in Jesus as Messiah in 1938 through the witness of Christian Wolfkes, a Romanian Christian carpenter; they joined the Anglican Mission to the Jews. Wurmbrand was ordained twice - first as an Anglican, then, after World War II, as a Lutheran pastor.
In 1944, when the Soviet Union occupied Romania as the first step to establishing a communist regime, Wurmbrand began a ministry to his Romanian countrymen and to Red Army soldiers. When the government attempted to control churches, he immediately began an "underground" ministry to his people. He was arrested on February 29, 1948, while on his way to church services.[1]
Wurmbrand, who passed through the penal facilities of Craiova, Gherla, the Danube-Black Sea Canal, Văcăreşti, Malmaison, Cluj, and ultimately Jilava, spent three years in solitary confinement. His wife, Sabina, was arrested in 1950 and spent three years at penal labour on the Canal.
Pastor Wurmbrand was released in 1956, after eight and a half years, and, although warned not to preach, resumed his work in the underground church. He was arrested again in 1959, and sentenced to 25 years. During his imprisonment, he was beaten and tortured.
Eventually, he was a recipient of an amnesty in 1964. Concerned with the possibility that Wurmbrand would be forced to undergo further imprisonment, the Norwegian Mission to the Jews and the Hebrew Christian Alliance negotiated with Communist authorities for his release from Romania for $10,000. He was convinced by underground church leaders to leave and become a voice for the persecuted church.[2]
Wurmbrand traveled to Norway, England, and then the United States. In May 1966, he testified in Washington, D.C. before the US Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee. That testimony, in which he took off his shirt in front of TV cameras to show the scars of his torture, brought him to public attention.[3] He became known as the "The Voice of the Underground Church", doing much to publicize the persecution of Christians in Communist countries. He compiled circumstantial evidence that Marx was a satanist.[4][5]
In April 1967, the Wurmbrands formed Jesus To The Communist World (later renamed The Voice of the Martyrs), an interdenominational organization working initially with and for persecuted Christians in Communist countries, but later expanding its activities to help persecuted believers in other places, especially in the Muslim world. However, when in Namibia, and confronted with the case of Colin Winter, the Anglican Bishop of Namibia, who had supported African strikers and was eventually deported from Namibia by South Africa, Wurmbrand criticized the latter's anti-apartheid activism, and claimed resistance to communism was more important.
In 1990 Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand returned to Romania for the first time in 25 years. The Voice of the Martyrs opened a printing facility and bookstore in Bucharest. He engaged in preaching with local ministers of nearly all denominations. The Wurmbrands had one son, Mihai, now 70. Wurmbrand wrote 18 books in English and others in Romanian. His best-known book is entitled Tortured for Christ, released in 1967.
Pastor Wurmbrand died on February 17, 2001[6] in a hospital in Torrance, California. His last address was in Palos Verdes, California. In 2006, he was voted fifth among the greatest Romanians according to the Mari Români poll. His wife, Sabina, died August 11, 2000.
Richard Wurmbrand (March 24, 1909 – February 17, 2001) was a Romanian evangelical Christian minister, author, and educator who spent a total of fourteen years imprisoned in Romania, as well as the founder of Voice of the Martyrs.
A great part of my family was murdered. It was in my own house that their murderer was converted. It was also the most suitable place. So in Communist prisons the idea of a Christian mission to the Communists was born. -- Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 58 (1967).
A faith that can be destroyed by suffering is not faith. - Richard Wurmbrand, If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)
Past sins, if you repent of them, whiten you. They made a great psalmist out of David, a faithful believer out of the prostitute Rahab, a zealous apostle out of the persecutor Saul. I have been a loved preacher and writer with a particular vocation. My sermons and books would not have had the same quality without my past of anarchy, vice, and violent atheism. - Richard Wurmbrand, If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)
It was in prison that we found the hope of salvation for the Communists. It was there that we developed a sense of responsibility toward them. It was in being tortured by them that we learned to love them. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 58 (1967).
I have seen Christians in Communist prisons with fifty pounds of chains on their feet, tortured with red-hot iron pokers, in whose throats spoonfuls of salt had been forced, being kept afterward without water, starving, whipped, suffering from cold--and praying with fervor for the Communists. This is humanly inexplicable! It is the love of Christ, which was poured out in our hearts. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 55 (1967).
When you speak in His presence about your past sins, He does not even understand your language. Only the present and the future have any interest for Him. . .I have committed crimes and have blood on my conscience. I told Jesus about it again and again. But because He had long ago washed all this away, there was no possibility of communication between us. He did not understand what I was talking about. - Richard Wurmbrand, If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)
I have decided to denounce communism, though I love the Communists. I don't find it to be right to preach the gospel without denouncing communism. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 75 (1967).
Some Western Church leaders don't care about [persecuted believers]. The names of the martyrs are not on their prayer lists. While they were being tortured and sentenced, the Russian Baptist and Orthodox official leaders who had denounced and betrayed them were received with great honor at New Delhi, at Geneva, and at other conferences. There they assured everyone that in Russia there is full religious liberty. A leader of the World Council of Churches kissed the Bolshevik archbishop Nikodim when he gave this assurance. Then they banqueted together in the imposing name of the World Council of Churches, while the saints in prison ate cabbage with unwashed intestines, just as I had eaten in the name of Jesus Christ. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ: 30th Anniversary Edition, p. 74-75 (1998).
Some tell me "Preach the pure gospel!" This reminds me that the Communist secret police also told me to preach Christ, but not to mention communism. Is it really so, that those who are for what is called "a pure gospel" are inspired by the same spirit as those of the Communist secret police? - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 75 (1967).
I don't know what this so-called pure gospel is. Was the preaching of John the Baptist pure? He did not say only, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" (Matthew 3:2). He also "rebuked [Herod]...for all the evils which Herod had done" (Luke 3:19). He was beheaded because he didn't confine himself to abstract teaching. Jesus did not preach only the "pure" Sermon on the Mount, but also what some actual church leaders would have called a negative sermon: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!...Serpents, brood of vipers!" (Matthew 23:27,33). It is for such "impure" preaching that He was crucified. The Pharisees would not have bothered about the Sermon on the Mount. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 75 (1967).
Sin must be called by its name. Communism is one of the most dangerous sins in the world today. Every gospel that does not denounce it is not the pure gospel. The Underground Church denounces it, risking liberty and life. The less have we to be silent in the West. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 75 (1967).
We cannot always judge man for only one part of his attitude. If we did so, we would be like the Pharisees in whose eyes Jesus was seen as bad, because He did not respect their rules about the Sabbath. They closed their eyes entirely to what would have lovable in Jesus, even in their sight. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 82 (1967).
Montefiore's impression of Jesus was wrong. Jesus loved the Pharisees, although He denounced them publicly. And I love the Communists, as well as their tools in the Church, although I denounce them. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 83 (1967).
Writers around the world protested when two Communist writers, Siniavski and Daniel, were sentenced to prison by their own comrades. But not even churches protest when Christians are put in prison for their faith. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 74 (1967).
Some leaders of denominations are not of the Bride of Christ. They are leaders in a Church in which many have long since betrayed the Master. When they meet someone of the Underground Church, a martyr, they look at him strangely. - Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured For Christ, p. 82 (1967).
'And he who overcomes, and keeps My works until the end, to him I will give power over the nations' (Revelation 2:26). I see myself on a throne. Why should a throne be made of gold and velvet? Can it not as well be the few planks of a prisoner's bed? Men have given a certain kind of chair the name of "throne." I can give this name to any other object I please. From this my throne I decide about nations. - Richard Wurmbrand, If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)
The leaves of the tree of life will serve for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2), which means that there will be in the life beyond people who need a cure for their souls. - Richard Wurmbrand, If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)
   | Pastor Richard Wurmbrand's Biography - Pastor Richard Wurmbrand Biography |
| | "Tortured for Christ" Video -- click here to watch it - The Voice of the Martyrs Canada :: Video Player |
| | Pastor Richard Wurmbrand texts and Biography - Richard Wurmbrand - Biography and texts |
| | Pastor Richard Wurmbrand's biography - Pastor Richard Wurmbrand |
| | "Tortured for Christ" Video -- click here to watch it on Youtube.com - YouTube - Tortured for Christ |
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