Towards Understanding of the Practice of Proclamation: The Core Element of Russian Baptist Worship, Timofey Cheprasov, 2015

for the congregation across the Soviet Union. It featured a number of publications on preaching. | have shown that most of these articles presented biblical interpretation and more specifically ministry of proclamation as an impossibility without due spiritual preparation. Although the editors of the journal also touched upon some practical aspects of sermon preparation and delivery, nonetheless it can be said that the journal played an important role in making preaching a practice where preacher’s spirituality was given far more weight than any other aspect of this ministry. In churches, such views led to a situation when being a preacher at first meant being an exemplary Christian, who spends sufficient amount of time with God and the Bible. However, gradually preachers were lifted to a special place of honour. The pulpit by itself became a sign of God’s special calling and anointing. This brings me to the last, most recent period in the development of the Baptist church in Russia. In the next chapter, | am going to address the current situation in Baptist churches in Russia and prevalent views of preaching. 110 CHAPTER 5. Preaching in contemporary Russian Baptist churches. Introduction The preacher’s spirituality, the authority of the pulpit, and the listeners’ attitude to proclamation in Russian Baptist churches — these are the main subjects of Chapter 5. At this stage of my research, it would be helpful to take a detour from the historical overview of the development of preaching in Russian Baptist communities, and to focus on another important question — how is preaching understood today? What do listeners of sermons and ministers of the Word say about preaching? | will introduce this subject by first mapping a context where preaching happens, offering a short overview of a place of worship and its significance.’ Then | will turn to a worship service, its pattern, and participants. This will bring me to preaching as a central element of Christian worship in Russian Baptist communities, at the same time highlighting the need to view the ministry of proclamation in Russian Baptist churches as a more complex phenomenon than a public speech pronounced from the pulpit with a particular purpose. | will argue that preaching plays a far greater role in churches today than that of mere educational or inspirational speech. Preaching is as much about teaching the Bible as about authority, which “the ministry of the Word” gives to its practitioners. As questions of power and authority are never taken into consideration when homiletics is taught in churches or Bible schools, this lack of understanding leads to tensions and conflicts between churches and educational institutions. Therefore, understanding preaching as an activity that belongs only to spheres of spirituality and rhetoric is reductionist, since such views cannot account for the various positive and negative dynamics in churches that p