Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

inadequate support. The swirl of ideas from what was essentially a younger emergent generation of church leaders, and from the professors from abroad, I once described as “visions in conflict’,*° suggesting that the evangelical community was now looking to the schools to provide respon- sible leadership, as the old union structures hovered on the verge of collapse. A further visionary initiative was the formation of what is now called the Euro-Asiatic Accrediting Association (EAAA), which allowed schools to break away from dependency on accreditation abroad and fostered stand- ards attuned to the Euro-Asiatic context, including formation of a sepa- rate association, instead of becoming satellites of the existing evangelical European/Middle East accrediting association. In surprisingly short order, the EAAA began hosting biannual conferences, at which theology was discussed, and carefully planned publication of necessary scholarly books — in translation or through indigenous writing — was negotiated. Pentecos- tals and ECB (autonomous and registered traditions) were meeting with each other; soon other denominations sought links as well.*! Foreign influence has turned out to be a crucial element of success, as 8 Here too, tensions between foreign supporting groups and the self-understandings of SPCU leaders helped account for changes in school leadership. Currently the board chair is a Canadian. ? Mark Elliott, “Protestant Theological Education in the Former Soviet Union’, Interna- tional Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 18, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 14-22. *° Walter Sawatsky, “Visions in Conflict: Starting Anew Through the Prism of Leadership Training’, in Niels C. Nielsen, Jr (ed), Christianity after Communism: Social, Political, and Cultural Struggle in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 125. *! Walter Sawatsky, “Evangelical Theological Schools in FSU Now Accrediting’, Religion in Eastern Europe, vol. 20, no. 2 (April 2000), pp. 11-13. See also the EAAA website, http:// www.e-aaa.org, for recent reports and details on its documentary publication series on CD- ROM of the history of the Evangelical movement in Euro-Asia, four CDs published as of 2005. 202 well as a great danger to the contextualisation of theological education. There was a relatively rapid shift from imported lectures in translation to an increasing number of graduates of western Masters of Divinity (MDiv) programmes returning to teach in local languages. School administrators obtained graduate theological degrees through part-time study leaves. The review of curriculum from a more specifically contextual point of view is beginning. Along the way, favourite theological debates were imported from the West, some of them turning out to be less relevant in the new context. Some schools began to compete with each other, each claiming to be more theologically faithful, leading to alignment along a conservative- liberal spec