Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

elism. Oncken’s detailed statement of faith sank deeply into all the Hamburg students, including Kargel. In Hamburg, Kargel began to understand more profoundly his German > Johann G. Kargel, “Missionsreisen des Br. Kargel’, Missionsblatt aus der Briidergemeinde [Herrnhut], vol. 32, no. 5 (1874), pp. 83-88. 6 John B. Toews, “Baptists and Mennonite Brethren in Russia (1790-1930)”, in Paul Toews (ed), Mennonites and Baptists: a Continuing Conversation, p. 95. 74 heritage. He was raised in a German household, but only his father was German. He had lived within the German colonies of the Russian Empire with their own distinct understanding of the German way of life. In Hamburg, he was in a Lutheran culture, no longer a colonist separated from the rich history of the homeland, but in his Vaterland. He returned to Soroczin as a German Baptist, echoing the voice of Oncken and imple- menting the tools that he had learned in Bible school. Cultural Tensions Many of the graduates from the Bible school in Hamburg seem to have adopted a certain confidence in the German culture, worldview and order, leading to conflicts when they worked as missionaries in other cultures. Such a conflict arose in the Russian context. Vasilii V. Ivanov, who later became a missionary to the Caucasus and Ukraine, explained that in Tiflis, the Russian Baptists wanted to hold to many Molokan prac- tices in the service, such as singing psalms in the Molokan way, and performing bows during singing and prayers and so on... [The Germans] wanted to toss out everything Russian and Molokan from the service and set up everything in the German manner.’ Vasilii Pavlov, who rose to leadership in the small German-Russian Baptist church in Tiflis, had been sent in 1875 to Oncken’s missionary school in Hamburg, where he learned the German methods of church structure, orderly meetings and an overarching conference organisation. As Pavlov moved into the upper leadership of the Russian Baptists and remained there for years to come, he set a precedent for future implemen- tation of German patterns in Russia. Despite the tension between the German Baptist ways and the early ethnically Russian Baptist perspective, eventually Oncken’s missionary preachers prevailed, and the Russian Baptists of the Caucasus developed strong ties to the German movement and copied their style of ecclesiology.® ”? Gosudarstvennyi muzei istorii religii [State Museum of the History of Religion] (GMIR), koll. I, op. 8, d. 516, 1. 240b; cited in Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 96. * For political reasons, German-speaking Baptists in the Russian lands remained separate 75 Some early Russian Baptists found the German style cold and rigid. It was considered too confining for the Russian soul, which longed for an unstruc- tured religious expression. They sought to combin