Instead, Zack Oprea worked for years in a factory, aware at all times of Securitate agents who lurked on and off the job: "You could not go to get a cup of coffee without someone watching you. Spies everywhere. Can't practice your religion. Can't say nothing about nothing."
He says he and three friends tried to escape Romania through Hungary in 1976. The "plan" was to somehow get his family to join him wherever he found refuge. But Hungarian authorities returned Oprea to Romania, where he was imprisoned for six months.
Dan Huff
New Elim pastor Petru Lascau says he has come to a "church in turmoil."
Dan Huff
The Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church opened near 19th Avenue and Cactus in 1998.
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"My wife didn't know I was alive for weeks," he says. "No lights there. Freezing cold. Bad food. I thought I was gonna die. I got a little crazy. But I still believed in God."
Three years later, the Communists allowed Zack Oprea and his family to leave Romania. The Opreas were among the lucky ones. Life for most Romanians during the 1980s was exceptionally cruel. Already living in one of the poorest nations in Europe, residents routinely found themselves without heat, hot water and electricity.
During that time, the Ceausescu regime outlawed birth control, and mandated couples to produce five children, in hopes of boosting a shrinking work force. The Securitate was more potent than ever, using its web of impoverished citizens to spy for money on friends, neighbors, even family.
Romania's Pentecostals weren't allowed to practice their faith freely, if at all. Government agents infiltrated those churches that were allowed to operate, and made life unbearable for clerics who dared even to allude to Ceausescu's shortcomings.
"We would worship in back rooms, with the lights down low, after hours, and always be frightened of getting caught," recalls Jacob Cotan. "You're always thinking, 'Who is a spy? Who is my friend, but not my friend?'"
By the late 1980s, about 200 Romanian Pentecostals had migrated to the Valley. Almost all made a beeline to Ted Oprea and his network who knew the lay of the new land.
By now, they could call themselves a congregation.
The Romanian Pentecostals rented, then bought a building on North 23rd Avenue, south of Missouri. Ted Oprea continued to share pastoral duties, but he knew the budding church needed a full-time pastor to lead it into the future.
In 1992, the church hired Dorin Druhora to do just that.
Dorin Druhora would not discuss his past for this story, other than to stress, "You cannot believe anything that the people who hate me say about me."
Aspects of his background, however, are verifiable through public records and other sources. Born in November 1958 in the northwest Romanian city of Cluj, Druhora in the late 1980s attended the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Bucharest.
He came to the U.S. in 1992 to study at evangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University in Virginia. When Ted Oprea learned from school officials that a Romanian Pentecostal was attending the Christian institution, he contacted Druhora.
"My wife and I decided to support him financially at school," Oprea recalls, "then to help him and his family establish residence in Phoenix. I thought he was the angel of light when he came here in 1993."
Even those who came to despise Druhora admit he's an excellent orator. His stirring sermons lured dozens of immigrating Romanians to the growing flock in the early and mid-1990s.
By then, church members had donated much of the money and labor needed to purchase land and to build a new church. In 1997, for example, records show that Druhora and the church board collected $675,000 in cash from parishioners for construction costs.
The new Elim church opened in 1998, and is an impressive structure, with a high-vaulted ceiling and lovely stained-glass windows. It comfortably seats about 700, and features state-of-the-art audio/visual equipment and other amenities.
The celebrations that marked the opening of Elim went on for weeks. But the excitement soon was dimmed by what had been the simmering concerns of many parishioners. Though no one can point to a galvanizing incident, some church leaders, including Ted Oprea, say they had begun to suspect that Druhora was stealing money from Elim.
The pastor denied wrongdoing as Oprea and others started to air their grievances. But the animosity was palpable by 1999.
"We found out that this guy is a Communist, 100 percent," Zack Oprea says. "The Devil brought this man to us. He did whatever he wanted with people and money."
Evidence of this, however, was inconclusive.
In mid-1999, Elim's governing board asked parishioner John Hactu, an accountant, to examine the church's ledgers. Hactu later said Druhora repeatedly refused to give him the records he needed to properly do his job. Still, his audit revealed that Elim's finances were, to be kind, a mess.
Thousands of dollars in "personal loans" to Druhora hadn't been repaid. And the pastor quietly had billed Elim for numerous personal items -- cell phones, furniture and the like.
Druhora's response was to damn the report as biased, and to disallow its presentation to the church as a whole.
Then, in an unexpected August 1999 maneuver that outraged many, Druhora disbanded the church board and installed his own supporters. The pliant new board later expelled John Hactu and others from Elim for conduct allegedly detrimental to the church.
