Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

m its beginning among Aramaic-speaking Jews in Jerusalem, Christianity has remarkably flowed from one foreign culture to another. It spread to Hellenistic Jews and then to Greek-speaking Gentiles. In the West it reached Latin-speaking peoples and later to Germanic, Celtic, and English peoples. In the East it spread to Armenians and Copts in Egypt and became the state church of Byzantium or the Eastern Roman Empire and later entered Russia. Russian Orthodoxy itself is a foreign implantation along with other Christian groups that have entered the Russian state. Secondly, the Baptist movement itself has had a varied history. One might start four hundred years ago with John Smyth, an Englishman living in the Netherlands, but his movement of General Baptists soon transported itself to England. Another segment of the Baptist denomination, Particular Baptists, began in England but soon spread to Wales and Ireland. Both movements reached America. Finally, in the early nineteenth century Baptists arrived on the European continent. Johann Oncken, the father of the continental European Baptist movement, although German-born, in his younger years lived in the British Isles where he learned English. In Hamburg, Germany, he joined an English Reformed Church. In his missionary work, the word soon circulated about a ‘new English faith’. 3 Mikhail Timoshenko, a Russian Baptist leader, in his article in 1911, ‘Baptisty i ikh’ protivniki’ (Baptists and Their Adversaries), declared, ‘The Baptist movement is not foreign but clearly international. For as all people on the earth need bread, water and air, so also all need spiritual nourishment.’ 4 Baptists are not a cult with their own special revelation. It is a movement that tries to approximate the faith and life of the apostolic church and to proclaim to all in any nation the gospel of Jesus Christ. But all religious movements come in a cultural garb. And so the question still remains - how indigenous to Russia was the Baptist movement? 1 Hans Luckey, ‘Johann Gerhard Oncken und die Anfange des deutschen Baptismus’ (Kassel: J.G. Oncken, 1934), pp. 70-71. 4 Baptist, 1911, no. 9, p. 69. How Indigenous was the Baptist Movement in the Russian Empire? 31 2. Stundism Years before Baptists appeared in the Russian Empire, other Protestants such as Lutherans and Reformed had already arrived some centuries before, settling not only in towns but especially as German colonists in southern Russia. Stundism, a pietistic movement stressing personal religious experience and piety, took root among the German colonists. Stundism came from the German word, ‘stunde’, meaning hour. Stundists, led by laity, gathered for an hour or more for prayer, Bible reading, and song. German stundism was primarily a movement within the established Lutheran and Reformed churches. Their adherents, by and large, were not separatists but remained in their own parish churches, attending the service