Brief History of Christianity in Albania

The gospel made it to Albania when the apostle Paul traveled around the northern Mediterranean regions on his missionary journeys. In Romans 15:19 he writes, “…from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ.” What was then known as Illyricum includes present day Albania. Tradition says that Albania welcomed Christianity even before it was declared a state religion by Constantine in the 4th century.

During the Great Schism between western and eastern Christianity in 1054, Albania was divided in half, the southern part becoming Orthodox and the northern half, Roman Catholic. Four centuries later, in the 15th century, Albania was invaded by the Turkish Empire. During this 500- year invasion, a policy of high taxes for non-Muslims helped convert the majority of the Albanians to Islam. These historic events are behind Albania’s religious make-up today, which is roughly 70% Muslim, 20% Greek Orthodox and 10% Roman Catholic.

In the last period of the Turkish domination, in the 1890’s, the first evangelical work began in Albania. As a result of the missionary efforts of the British and Foreign Bible Society and American Missionaries, several Albanians accepted Christ during that period and founded the Albanian Evangelical Brotherhood in 1892. The fall of the Turkish Empire in the early 1900’s, the Balkan Wars and the eruption of the First World War, limited these efforts until the mid-1930’s when some American missionaries established the first evangelical church in the south of Albania.

Soon the Second World War broke out and right after it, the communist regime took over the rule of the country. During their 45 year rule, the communist government worked hard to erase all traces of religion in the nation, destroying churches and mosques and imprisoning anyone religious. In 1976, Albania declared itself the first official atheistic country in the world.

When, in 1991, Albania began to open to the outside world, there were only 16 known evangelical believers who had survived the previous regime. Today, over 30 years later, there are about 20,000 evangelical believers and about 200 evangelical churches throughout the country. This is definitely one of the most open periods in history for the gospel among the Albanians. In such a very short period, the impact of the Evangelical Protestant movement has been such that in 2011 the Government of Albania has given the Evangelicals, organized under the Evangelical Alliance of Albania, the same status of a religious community as the other traditional religious communities (Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Bektashi (a Muslim sect) and Evangelicals). Evangelical Protestants are also part of the Albanian Inter-religious Council, committed to furthering religious freedom in the context of the reality of religious pluralism in Albania.