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

preaching. It simply cannot exist. For the majority of the respondents a sermon is a mystery. This idea features in one way or another in nearly 90% of all the surveys. True preaching starts “on the knees” (which means “in prayer’), as some pastors like to remind us, and is fully dependent on the Holy Spirit. Such understanding explains why those people who have belonged to a church for a long period of time are afraid to be critical about preaching.*° Some of them have “corrected” my questions in a survey: “Are there bad sermons?” and “How often do you hear bad sermons in your church?” They wrote phrases such as, ‘Preaching is a result of God’s work, it cannot be bad.’ Another characteristic feature of such “fear of criticism” 33 The discussion took place at a seminar on preaching, which | organised for the preachers and potential preachers from their church, Vinogradnaia Loza [The Vine]. The seminar took place at IBTS, Prague, 15.05.2006. 34 This quotation is taken from one of the surveys, collected in the First Baptist Church of Voronezh. 3° This claim, however, is based on my personal experiences of meeting various people in a number of Russian Baptist churches, hence requires further testing. 126 can be summed up ina sentence that both preachers preach and listeners affirm: ‘If you do not find the sermon edifying, something is wrong with your spiritual condition.’ Let me expand this point a little further. The questions related to bad preaching were answered by “the listeners” in a following way: - approximately 60% of the non-preachers (37 people) firmly stated that preaching cannot be bad. Only 8 people in this group were under 50 years of age. Thus, the majority of those who view preaching as the supernatural activity of God, which therefore cannot be criticised, are people over 50 years of age, who have been members in Baptist churches for over 2 years. They see their spiritual immaturity or the “hardness of their hearts” as main reasons for some sermons “not touching them.” - Approximately 20% of the “listeners” (12 people) say that there are too many bad sermons. They define bad sermons as speeches that lack structure and meaning, which is a result of preachers having insufficient education and preparation for the act of proclamation. However, these people also believe that ‘God can use even bad preaching to change the hearts of the listeners.’ - Finally, the last 20% of the responded non-preachers (13 people) believe that although there are some bad sermons, this is often caused by preachers not investing enough time in prayer and preparation, since preaching by itself cannot be bad, being in its essence the work of the Holy Spirit. (This last point is a contradiction in itself, yet such conflicting views are not unusual when people express their views about church and faith.)°° Among the people involved in preaching the attitude to “bad sermons” is slightly differen