Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

Eerdmans, 1998), p. 20. ” Wilhelm Kahle’s Evangelische Christen in Russland und der Sowjetunion merits careful reading still on this point. See Wilhelm Kahle, Evangelische Christen in Russland und der Sovetunion: Ivan Stepanovic Prochanov (1869-1935) und der Weg der Evangeliumschristen und Baptisten (Wuppertal: Oncken, 1978). More recent attention to the nondenominational emphasis on fellowship across classic confessional divisions evident in Lord Radstock and the Pashkovites through the influence of the Keswick holiness movement underlines its activist lay character. 190 | | high vision of ministry and church order, yet tended to permit a few char- ismatic leaders to function in near dictatorial fashion. We should acknowl- edge, too, that as the Stalinist version of centralised leadership transformed Soviet political culture from its initial intensely democratic forms, so too the early All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB) adapted itself to dictating from the centre. Although Volf viewed the persistent growth of a free-church ecclesi- ology positively, he also directed rather trenchant criticism toward the lack of discipline in churches of the free-church model. Their capacity for accountability to Scripture, Tradition and Reason was weak, since the temptation toward an excessively individualised appeal to the authority of experience was also the overriding pressure of the global culture of moder- nity. Describing this in statistical terms, a mere decade ago, David Barrett reported the astounding fact that there were 20,000 distinctly organised denominational bodies in the world. That number increased to 37,000 as of January 2005, a proliferation of denominations due primarily to the free- church impulse.® The Slavic evangelical free-church ecclesiology was a reaction against the failure of a hierarchical Orthodox church and its inefficient functioning as an organisation, quite subservient to tsarist and later Soviet control. The evangelicals manifested a vision for a church free of hostile state controls. Positively, it was a vision of numerous people who had discovered the personal promise of salvation in Jesus, seeking to be faithful to the radical ethic of Jesus their Lord, seriously preaching love of enemy, peace and reconciliation, and less able to resonate with nationalist claims. The evan- gelicals were seen as a consciously international church, above racial, social and nationalist divisions, just as the Marxists had claimed to be. The great transformation between 1988 and 1991 tested these traditions. After the policy of perestroika was applied to religion in 1987 — believers claimed increasing freedoms with the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988 - and the breakdown of the Soviet Union, social hostility to reli- gion ended. Thus the quest for what kind of free church they were now called to be forced the ecclesiological question in ways that had