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

roach for the purpose of this work, which is an exploration on the formative nature of preaching in the Russian Baptist churches. | will follow in his thesis that what makes baptists a separate group of people, a separate ecclesial type, is a distinctive guiding vision: [T]he vision can be expressed as a hermeneutical principle: shared awareness of the present Christian community as the primitive community and the 3 In the use of the phrase ‘ecclesial culture,’ | am following John Howard Yoder’s critique of H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology of Christ/Culture relationships, that it is based on a wrong assumption, since ‘culture must be assumed to be a single bloc, which an honest and consistent approach would either reject entirely or accept without qualification; you must either withdraw from it all, transform it all, or keep it all in paradox. Niebuhr cannot conceive of, much less respect, a position which would not make a virtue of such consistency.’ (John Howard Yoder, “How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture,” in Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager and John Howard Yoder, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1996), pp 54-55.) In a similar way, it is impossible to speak about the Church as one entity when addressing practices of the communities of believers. Thus, speaking about churches (plural) as different cultures might provide a solution. And so, an attempt to study preaching in Russian Baptist churches focuses on the practices of a particular Christian or ecclesial culture. * On typology of Christian ecclesiologies, see Donald Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (Scottdale, Pennsylvania/ Waterloo, Ontario, Herald Press, 1985, 1968), pp 3-33. °N. G. Wright, New Baptists, New Agenda, p 11. 135 eschatological community. In a motto, the church now is the primitive church and the church on the judgment day; the obedience and liberty of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth is our liberty, our obedience, till time’s end.° | want to stress here that the approach | am taking views “identity” as something robust and coherent around the vision.’ Thus, my inquiry into the notion of baptistic identity cannot be separated from the vision that this peoplehood holds being a particular ecclesial culture. The vision that defines identity is actualised through a certain way of communal and individual living. However, the important question that is to be answered is how does this happen? Thus, | will try to identify a set of practices that actualise the vision. This, in turn, will create a framework for Chapter 7 where | will introduce and focus on the concept of powerful practices with preaching as one of them. 6.1 Various ways to define Baptist identity The answer to the question of who are Baptists may be difficult to find. If this question is asked in Russia, most likely there will