Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ia in 1884, two months after Pashkov’s attempt to begin an Evangelical Alliance in St Petersburg.”” The purpose was to organise the mission work of like-minded Christians in the Russian world. There were thirty-six attendees from various groups, including Mennonite Brethren, Stundists and Baptists. Mennonite Brethren leader Johann Wieler [Ivan Willer] and Kargel, both Germans, were elected as president and vice-president, respectively. It appears that the Russians were looking to the Germans for help in organisation of the group. The name of the group is not clearly Baptist. They called themselves the “Union of Believers, baptised Christians, or as they are called, Baptists, of South Russia and the Caucasus’. The meeting was a blend of German Mennonite and German Baptist contributions. They opened the Lord’s Supper to those who had not been baptised by immersion, clearly outside both the boundaries of the Mennonite Brethren and the German Baptists. (It is noted that two brothers left soon after this decision, stating that Baptists do not share the Lord’s Table with others.) This reveals some of the influence of Pashkov’s Pashkov's main aide in the revival work. In 1867 Count Korff attended the World Exhibition in Paris and carried three thousand copies of the Gospel of John back to Russia for distribu- tion. In 1874 he converted to evangelical Christianity under Radstock’s preaching. 4 Molokans and Dukhobors were sects that had broken from the Old Believers, themselves a sect which had broken from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1654. Molokans had a deep reverence for Scripture and paid little attention to sacraments. Dukhobors rejected the priests, icons, and marriage ceremonies of the Russian Orthodox Church. Stundists were a free-church movement among the Russian peasants of southern Russia in the nineteenth century. > See Lawrence Klippenstein, “Russian Evangelicalism Revisited: Ivan Kargel and the Founding of the Russian Baptist Union’, Baptist History and Heritage, vol. 27, no. 2 (April 1992), pp. 42-48. 81 Pietism on both Wieler and Kargel.** A second important issue was the Anabaptist custom of foot washing. Wieler considered it an essential part of church life, while Kargel believed otherwise. They decided that the practice would be left to the discretion of each local community. It is apparent from this meeting that Kargel wanted the newly formed group to be inclusive. He was the elected vice-president of the group and, despite his personal convictions, did not seek to limit the inclusion of the participants in the newly formed conference. He did not want anyone excluded because they were not baptised by immersion, nor because they practised foot washing.” Clearly he was moving away from his German Baptist understanding of ministry toward a more open understanding of cross-denominational ministry, yet he returned to Bulgaria to build the Baptist denomination there and accepted the role of