Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

t is never fully past. Indeed, the primary way to think carefully about the future is to keep ' The label “Soviet evangelical” was inclusive and precise, but lost meaning after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. I use “Slavic evangelical” as a replacement, although it does not refer in this paper to Slavic evangelicals outside the region of the former Soviet Union. The word “Slavic” is intended to underline the contextualised nature of the evangelical commu- nities under discussion, as distinct from American or even Western counterparts, so it at times includes believers technically not Slavic but culturally adapted. 187 on returning to the past - both recent and older past - with new ques- tions and with new perspectives on its data. In the officially remembered history of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists (ECB), the congresses of the union that started meeting regularly after 1963 were numbered to include the earliest gatherings of organised unions.’ It is worth asking again the question of why the union of churches was formed in 1867, as theological answers have seldom been addressed. A proto-Baptist Union was formed in 1884, which only became explicitly Baptist after 1886, and some have marked the organisation of an Evangelical Christian Union in 1909 as an important beginning. Yet we know that many in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Siberia or Ukraine remember other beginnings. Nonetheless, we need to ask, what was the purpose of forming a union of churches? Since I have other goals in mind here, the answer to “why form a union” is not one I wish to restate from the founding documents. Rather, it could be helpful to set free-church unions in a comparative context. Church historians now comment on the fact that throughout the history of the development of Christian doctrine, ecclesiology - the doctrine of the church - was never a major source of debate until the twentieth century. Now we recall the twentieth century as the era when ecclesiological issues became central.’ The missionary century preceding it forced the question of church unity upon us in innumerable places around the globe. How can we speak about the church as body of Christ, the most common biblical image for ecclesiology; and how can we claim that “our church” authen- tically reveals the marks of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church; and that the relations among the members point to the unity of the trinity, when most people in the world see the church as severely fragmented? Too often what the world notices is how we appeal to our version of Christi- anity as genuine at the expense of other essentially apostate expressions of Christianity. ? Most readily accessible in the Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR [History of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR] (Moscow: Vsesoiuznyi sovet evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov, 1989), this understanding had been passed on in the short historical intr