Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

e Baptist theology with an Orthodox feel.’ The Russian Orthodox Church provided such an unstruc- tured environment, but the Baptists considered the Orthodox Church full of false teaching and an un-Christian lifestyle. But even Ivanov was impressed during a trip to Poland, where he visited the German Baptists. In a letter the following year (1900), Ivanov wrote of the mixed feel- ings he had had upon observing the lives of German Baptists in Poland.’° While he observed orderliness in their congregations, he had also felt a “cold formality’. Yet he was discouraged by the Russian believers’ inability to achieve a formal organisation like that of the Germans. Instead of prac- tical advice, he claimed, the Russians seemed interested in borrowing from the Germans only that which “gratifies bodily feeling, bare phrases such as ‘My sins are forgiven”." In the 1870s, the Europe-wide conference of German-speaking Baptists paid special attention to the work in the Russian Empire. In 1869, Oncken stated, The prospects in Russia among my countrymen ... are glorious indeed. I have at present with me a brother from the South, who is passing through a course of instruction to be initiated in to the practical working of a New Testament church. He will return in May or June (D.V.), and if I possibly can, I propose to accompany him. Numbers of converts are waiting there to be baptized, and to be united into churches of Christ. I have no doubt in my own mind that these churches are destined by from the Russian Baptists. As colonists, laws governing them were different than those over Russian subjects. Neither nationals nor foreigners were permitted to convert Russians from Orthodoxy. * The early Russians who became Baptists had been influenced heavily by their Russian Orthodox culture. They felt that Christianity should have a certain amount of liturgy, cer- emony, mystery and connection to the historic Orthodox Church. Despite the fact that most of them came from the Molokan sect within Russian Orthodoxy, they maintained certain practices in common with all the Orthodox Church such as bows, reading prayers and hymnology. Some early Russian believers attracted to the Baptist teaching on adult bap- tism felt that the free-church worship style was nonetheless foreign to their understanding of Christian worship. '° Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, p. 97. '! GMIR, koll. 1, op.8, folder 1, 1. 287, cited in Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, p. 97. 76 the Head of the church, ultimately to affect the first breach in the great Greek Church of the Russian Empire.” Graduates from Oncken’s-school did make their way into the Russian Empire and much talk in the following conferences was concerned with the inroads of the Baptist faith into the heartland of Orthodoxy. However, Oncken did not acknowledge that Anabaptist communities had already existed within the Orthodox land, and tha