From Pennsylvania to Transylvania: A God-Ordained Path to the Mission Field

In the heart of a young American girl growing up in the foothills of northeastern Pennsylvania, God placed a love for other countries and cultures. Hannah (Weiss) Căldăraru was raised in a community where Slovak, Polish, and Italian roots ran deep, and she was always interested in learning about her own Eastern European heritage.

This simple fascination was the first of many guideposts that would lead Hannah to her calling as a missionary to Romania. Regent University was another.

A Spark Fanned Into Flame

As a teenager, Hannah noticed that church was something many people did on Sundays out of religious obligation rather than genuine faith in God, especially among her peers. She was open to her mother’s authentic Christian beliefs, but she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be identified as a Christ follower.

Then Hannah went through a season of depression that crystallized her need for the Lord. “I don’t think I would have been as desperate for Him if I hadn’t gone through that dark period first,” she says.

In her new search for the Light, she went on a short-term mission trip to Haiti after high school graduation, in the summer of 2014. She had a desire to share the gospel, though she wasn’t yet bold enough to do so with friends. She admits she was disappointed when the trip didn’t offer many opportunities for evangelism. But God wanted to speak to Hannah instead.

During a devotional, the group read Galatians 1:10: “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Those words rang with powerful conviction.

“The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, ‘Hannah, I brought you here to make you realize that sharing the gospel is a privilege and not a chore,’” she recalls. “‘Until you do that among your own people, I’m not going to have you do it among others.’”

It was clear that there were a few more steps of preparation in Hannah’s path, but a love for missions had been sparked — and her newfound commitment to the Lord became a consuming fire. “I was 18, and that’s when everything really came to life,” she says.

Hoping to attend a Christian college in Virginia, Hannah moved to her sister’s house in Chesapeake. While considering universities and potential majors, she earned an associate degree at Tidewater Community College. There, a Bible study connected her with a community of young believers refreshingly serious about their faith, which deepened Hannah’s own walk exponentially. “That ignited it for me,” she says.

A Divinely Opened Door?

Hannah wanted to study Christian counseling, and she had heard that Regent University had a strong psychology program. But she was still prayerfully trying to decide between two schools for her bachelor’s degree, surrendering the decision to God.

In late 2016, Hannah’s grandmother, who had championed Regent along with her mom, passed away. On the day of the funeral, Hannah received an email: Regent University was pleased to offer her admission.

There was only one problem. Hannah had filled out an application — but she doesn’t recall ever sending it.

“I called them and said, ‘I think you have the wrong person,’” she laughs. “They said, ‘Are you Hannah Weiss? Well, you’ve been accepted.’ So, I took that as confirmation.” She followed God’s leading to the next stop on her journey.

Becoming Equipped

Hannah transferred to Regent in the fall of 2017 to pursue a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, commuting from Chesapeake while working and staying active in local ministry. Regent accepted all her transfer credits seamlessly, offered affordable tuition, and even provided scholarship assistance for transferring from a community college — a financial mercy she would later appreciate even more.

“It’s hard to enter the missions field if you have student loans,” she says. “Within months of graduating in 2019, I had mine paid off. That was all God.”

Having been in public schools her whole life, Hannah found comfort in the Christian education and atmosphere she’d been craving. At Regent, she discovered that faith could be integrated into any subject — even psychology, which can skew toward the secular.

“We talked about how people focus on the physical, the mental, the emotional — but so many times they leave out the spiritual side,” Hannah says. “Especially as Christians, we know that’s a focal point. Regent helped me cultivate balance and discernment, and that has helped me on the mission field. Psychology in general also helps when you’re working with people.”

Having professors who demonstrated godly character in the classroom was also impactful for Hannah. One psychology professor in particular, Daniel Hitchcock, Ph.D., spoke about his wife and children with such respect and warmth that it left a lasting impression. “His love for the Lord and his family really stood out to me, and he did his job with excellence,” she says.

But it was an elective missions class that clarified something she’d been sensing. “Being in that class confirmed this was the direction God wanted me to go,” she says. “While I loved my psych classes, I loved my missions class.”

She also credits Regent’s regular corporate worship opportunities — especially Thursday-night chapel services, where she experienced a new freedom in worship — with building a way of life that she now considers essential for enduring life on the mission field.

“I didn’t realize how integral it is to have a faith-based community around you. Creating a rhythm of worship and incorporating spiritual disciplines into my studies is something that impacts our work now,” she says. “If you don’t have that in place before coming on the mission field, you’ll come off it quickly.”

In his kindness, God was preparing Hannah for what was ahead.

Finding Calling and Love in Rural Romania

During college, Hannah attended a small church in Chesapeake that was passionate about sharing the gospel and focused its entire missions outreach on Romania — a country with an extremely low percentage of evangelical Christians. Hannah explains that most citizens consider themselves Orthodox Christians, yet only practice their religion on Christmas and Easter.

“The idea of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is pretty foreign,” Hannah says. “Romania is a very shame-based culture. It’s all about appearing okay from the outside. There are a lot of hidden sins. In America, we tend to be very proud of our sin. One is not better than the other — we’re all sinners.”

In the fall of 2016, Hannah joined her church’s efforts, serving for two weeks in remote Romanian villages. In one village, Hannah and a fellow church member were invited to dinner at a family’s home, in the customary way of Romanian hospitality. The home belonged to the parents of Octavian “Tavi” Căldăraru.

Tavi was 19, a new believer, and the first convert from his village. Hannah had actually heard about his testimony through her church a year earlier. His pastor introduced them as something of a joke. Tavi spoke no English. Hannah spoke no Romanian.

But by Hannah’s second trip to Romania two years later, Tavi had begun learning English. When she returned home, he messaged her: “I think you’re the person God has for me.” She wasn’t sure. She was focused on ministry at home, based on God’s direction in Haiti. “I really wanted to grow in evangelism to people in English,” she says.

In early 2020, though she wasn’t planning to travel to Romania again, a friend invited her on another mission trip, just before global travel shut down. She saw, once more, Tavi’s passion for the Lord. When she came home, she ended the relationship she was in and began months of serious correspondence with Tavi.

Long-Term Mission Trip Becomes Full-Time Life

While she was seeking exactly where the Lord was calling her, a door opened for Hannah to go on a long-term mission trip to Romania. She arrived in July 2021 and, during her nine-month stay, she and Tavi became engaged.

They married in Romania in November 2022 and, with support from local churches, became independent missionaries with Central Missionary Clearinghouse, a Texas-based organization that provides financial and legal infrastructure. They began their work immediately in Negoi, a small, disadvantaged village near the Danube River — where Tavi was born and raised.

The village is half Romanian, half Roma, with few resources and little outside attention. “There’s nothing there,” Hannah says. “But God sees those people. He hasn’t forgotten them.”

Hannah and Tavi poured themselves into Negoi, providing programs for children — many of whom don’t attend school — as well as discipling families and hosting people in their home two or three times a week. “The people in this village are so open,” Hannah says. “They ask, ‘Why are you coming to help us and teach our kids?’ But it’s very hard — you’re watching a lot of suffering.”

Through the children’s program, they built a relationship with a grandmother struggling to raise three grandchildren largely on her own while their parents worked seasonal labor in other countries. “We watched how God opened up the door to her heart through reaching out to her grandkids,” Hannah says. She has attended the local church plant ever since.

A New Chapter in Sighișoara

In 2024, Hannah and Tavi relocated to Sighișoara — a medieval city in the Transylvania region of central Romania, famously tied to the legend of Vlad the Impaler. The move brought them into partnership with Bethany Baptist Church (Biserica Baptistă Betania Creștina), a mother church that has planted 10 congregations in surrounding villages over the past 26 years. Because many Romanians don’t have cars, and those who do must pay exorbitant gas prices, it’s important to have a church in each village.

Hannah and Tavi now serve one of those church plants, shepherding the small congregation, meeting their spiritual and practical needs. Tavi leads preaching and men’s ministry. “He’s not officially a pastor yet, but he’s doing all the functions of a pastor,” Hannah says. Meanwhile, she works with women and children while caring for their infant son, Immanuel — her primary ministry right now.

Grounded in Calling

For all the fruit Hannah has seen and all the joy that comes with working alongside her husband, learning the unspoken rules of an unfamiliar, unmodernized culture — and of ministry in general — has also been genuinely challenging.

“But through that testing, God shows you if your faith is for real, if you’re really in it for Him, or if it’s just when you’re in a Christian nation going to worship nights on Thursday,” Hannah says. “I will be honest — it’s been really hard.”

What keeps her going, she says, is certainty — not the absence of doubt or difficulty, but the settled conviction that this is where God called her. “You need to know that you know that you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is what God has called you to,” she says. “The passion has to be grounded in calling.”

She and Tavi have committed to Sighișoara through July 2027. After that, they are prayerfully considering a season in the U.S. Not only would they like for Tavi to experience America and to spend some time near Hannah’s family while raising children, but they also want to receive more formal ministry training and build toward returning to Romania with a team.

Changing the World Through Serving

Hannah is living out Regent’s mission in a way that looks a little different from what she first thought it would.

“My idea of Christian leadership before was very stereotypical — the person up on stage, speaking,” she says. “God has really changed that. Jesus said the first will be last, and the last will be first.

“Leadership is a posture of humility. It’s usually the person in the background, doing things nobody sees. Christian leadership to change the world should mean that God’s name is glorified — not ours.”