Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

their impact on religious life in South Russia. At the time of Baptist beginnings in South Russia, Pietism in Germany already had a history of nearly two centuries. With rare exceptions, Pietism as arule did not create new churches. Even if new church structures emerged, they did not depart from the framework of protestant theology and territo- rial division into parishes, as demonstrated by the example of the Herrnhut Brethren [Herrnhuter Briidergemeinde] under Count Zinzendorf.’ Pietism was above all a religion of the heart, and it produced several factions within the protestant church body in Germany. The Pietism of the common people in Wiirttemberg, as well as the Pietism of the academics in Halle, demonstrated its ability to activate the laity in the church, a feature important from the viewpoint of structure. Philipp Jakob Spener, known as the “father of Pietism’, organised the collegia pietatis, additional meetings of “true believers” within the main church body, which produced a new pattern in church life - a pattern of fellowship’® - alongside the pattern of the regular worship service. Fellowship became an important mark of Pietism. Pietism did not change the normative base of decision-making in the church (combining tradition with Scripture interpretation by univer- sity-trained clergy) or the parochial structure. Russian and Ukrainian Baptists had actually a very short period of Stundism in their “pre-history’, before the organisation of their first congregations.’ Nevertheless, it is helpful to explore the religious patterns ® Episkop Aleksii [Dorodnitsyn], Materialy dlia istorii religiozno-ratsionalisticheskago dvizheniia na iuge Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX-go stoletiia [Bishop Aleksii, Materials for the history of the religious rationalist movement in the south of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century] (Kazan: Tsentral’naia tipografiia, 1908). * Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf was a leader of the eighteenth-century Moravian Pietist revival in the town of Herrnhut, on his estate of Bethelsdorf, Saxony. The Herrnhut Brethren copied the Lutheran Church organisational structure dominant in the area. Johan- nes Wallmann, Der Pietismus (G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). '0 Throughout this paper, the word “fellowship” refers to the Russian obshchenie, which emphasises close personal and spiritual relationships and the sharing of a common faith. '! Reshetnikov, “Stanoviennia ta diferentsiatsiia ievangel’skogo rukhu v Ukraini’, pp. 53-56; Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR {History of the Evangelical Christians-Bap- tists in the USSR] (Moscow: Vsesoiuznyi sovet evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov, 1989), pp. 62-66. 36 of German immigrants in Russia because of the structural similarities between German Pietism and Russian Stundism. The classification into old and new Pietism commonly used by Russian authors” is very sche- matic and is based primari