Achievements and Influence
Wurmbrand travelled 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. He became known as "The Voice of the Underground Church," doing much to publicise the persecution of Christians in Communist countries. He compiled circumstantial evidence that Marx was a satanist.
In April 1967, the Wurmbrands formed Jesus To The Communist World (later renamed The Voice of the Martyrs), an interdenominational organisation 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.
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. The new mayor of Bucharest had offered a storage space for the books under former dictator Ceaucesceu's palace - where Richard had spent years in confinement, praying for a ministry to his homeland. Wurmbrand engaged in preaching with local ministers of nearly all denominations.
Wurmbrand wrote 18 books in English and others in Romanian. His best-known book, titled Tortured for Christ, was released in 1967. In several of them he writes very boldly and emphatically against Communism; yet he maintained a hope and compassion even for those who tortured him by "looking at men .. not as they are, but as they will be ... I could also see in our persecutors ... a future Apostle Paul ... (and) the jailer in Philippi who became a convert." Wurmbrand last lived in Palos Verdes, California. He died at the age of 92 on February 17, 2001 in a hospital in Torrance, California. (His wife, Sabina, had died six months earlier on August 11, 2000.) In 2006, he was voted fifth among the greatest Romanians according to the Mari Români poll.
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