Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

pe: A Contribution to Modern History (London: Carey Press, 1915), p. 74. 20 faith in Christ and did not place emphasis on believer's baptism. He told Count Sievers that the object of Baptists was to “win souls to Christ” and that Baptists preached a message about Christ's death “among the millions throughout Europe, who have rejected all revealed truth and who form a most dangerous element to all good governments’.” This stress by Oncken on his commitment to general evangelical distinctives and to social stability was not quite the full truth, since Oncken’s more radical aim was the setting up of Baptist churches across Europe.” The concentration on mission to Germans was to change. Martin Kalweit, a German born into a Lutheran family in Lithuania, who had been baptised as a believer in 1858 by a Prussian Baptist, settled in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) in 1862, and became known within the evangelical circle in the city. Through a Bible colporteur, Kalweit met a Russian merchant, Nikita Voronin, a Molokan who was studying the question of baptism. After talking to Kalweit, Voronin became convinced about the truth of believer’s baptism. Under cover of darkness, on 20 August 1867, Kalweit baptised Voronin in a mill creek on the Kura River in the Caucasus, near Tiflis.” Other baptisms of Russians followed in the later 1860s and early 1870s, with Baptist life drawing to a considerable extent from the German Stundists, who were concentrated primarily in Ukraine. Their origins lay in the practices of some German Mennonites and Lutherans who held weekly hours (Stunde) of Bible study and testimony. As was the case elsewhere in Europe, Baptists drew from existing movements.”** Many people from a Russian peasant background became Baptists, reflecting to some extent the new freedom of Russian peasants, who had been emancipated in 1861 by Alexander II. Links between British evangelical leaders and Russia were strengthened through the work of a prominent British evangelical, Granville Walde- grave - Lord Radstock. In 1868 he spoke about the evangelical faith to 25 J.H. Cooke, Johann Gerhard Oncken: His Life and Work (London: S.W. Partridge, 1908), pp. 146-148. 76 See I.M. Randall, “Every Apostolic Church a Mission Society’: European Baptist Origins and Identity’, in A. R. Cross (ed), Ecumenism and History: Studies in Honour of John HLY. Briggs (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002), pp. 281-301. 27 W. Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals since World War II (Kitchener, Ontario: Herald Press, 1981), pp. 27-33. 28 [.M. Randall, “Pious Wishes’: Baptists and wider renewal movements in nineteenth-cen- tury Europe’, BQ, vol. 38, no. 7 (2000), pp. 325-6; cf. P.D, Steeves, “The Russian Baptist Union, 1917-1935: Evangelical Awakening in Russia” (PhD Dissertation, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1976). 21 several members of the Russian aristocracy who were in Paris.” Radstock spoke fluent French. These contacts led to Ra