Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

been avoided during the years of persecution. There was, after all, something unnatural about Evangelical Christians, Baptists, Mennonites and Pente- costals working together in the AUCECB, as if their historically distinct * David D. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing, “Missiometrics 2005: a Global Survey of World Mission’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IBMR), vol. 29, no. 1 (January 2005), p. 29. 19] polities and emphases were secondary. In the past, it had not mattered much that Adventists often shared a building with an ECB church. Now, in post-Soviet freedom, the overwhelming pressure apparently was to revert to separate denominations: Pentecostal, Evangelical Christian and Baptist.’ One wonders also whether the retention of the ECB label by the Baptists was a means to distinguish themselves contextually from western Baptists, possibly also a way of aligning themselves with theological streams from sixteenth-century Anabaptism or the Hussite tradition, in particular on the issue of a more Arminian view of human will. Across the former Soviet Union, autonomous national unions were formed, where sometimes the official language was the national one rather than Russian. Others began to imagine a new free church, unencumbered by the stodgy character of the ECB survivors, a church less suspicious of social involvement and mingling with the intellectuals, very different from the increasingly separatist churches of the Council of Churches of Evan- gelical Christians-Baptists (CCECB). To a major extent the Avtonomnye [Autonomous] (or Independents as they are now known) churches sought to free themselves from Gennadii Kriuchkov’s dictatorship, and also over- reacted to control by a central council by keeping aloof from denomination building.’ This brings us finally to a recognition of the intensely pragmatic approach to organisation and structure of free churches in general, and the Slavic free churches in particular. An early motivation for forming unions was mostly two-fold: for one, they organised in order to provide mutual support in the face of persecution, and eventually ensure common statements of faith and organisational constitutions in order to obtain legal recognition. Secondly, the Gospel called them to ministries that they could not do alone, so congre- gations joined together in supporting fulltime evangelists. They organised * Pentecostals withdrew first from the AUCECB under late perestroika conditions, hop- ing to form a broad union of formerly legal and non-legal Pentecostal unions. Between 1987-1993, about 100,000 persons of Mennonite origin, including the majority of those in the AUCECB, emigrated to Germany, and their positions on council and staff disap- peared. There were several attempts to form Evangelical Christian unions, one led by Sergei Nikolaev in the northwest region, and another in central Russia. The remaining Baptists and formerly Evang