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

attempt to attack theological liberalism, by asking all the ministers who were trained at the Pastors’ College Conference to sign a particular theological resolution. There were many who, even though they agreed with everything written in the resolution, refused to sign it and chose to leave the Conference because this was an attempt to restrict Christians in what they believed. (lan M. Randall, “Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Pastors’ College and the Downgrade Controversy,” in K. Cooper and J. Gregory, eds., Discipline and Diversity, Studies in Church History, Vol. 43 (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2007), pp 366-76). 138 Baptists did have confessions of faith but not creeds. Creeds are understood as ‘authoritative statements of what one must believe in order to belong to a particular church.’ Confessions, in turn, were meant to be descriptions of those groups of believers who adopted them. “They are written and adopted to help Baptists communicate their beliefs to their own children, to their fellow Baptists, to Christians in other denominations, 718 and to persons who are not Christians.”"~ In this estimation, the information accessible through the website of Russian Baptists is a confession of faith, or as previously stated, a general description of what they believe. The fact that different baptistic groups adopt slightly different confessions and the absence of one universal creed shows that this road to defining baptistic identity leads to a dead-end. As Parushev notices, ‘Baptists... cannot represent ecclesial consensus of any sort, apart from the perspective of a single congregation at best; a kind of “A Baptist’s” (R. Wayne Stacy, ed., A Baptist’s Theology (Macon, Georgia, Smyth and Helwys, 1999), v-x.) theology —a compendium of the thoughts of some 719 individual theologians.’ This lack of consensus, therefore, highlights the need for Another contemporary example of a split caused by reluctance to adopt a doctrinal statement compulsory for all the unions and local churches, comes from the life of the EBF. In 2005 two Baptist unions (the Baptist Union of Kazakhstan and the Baptist Union of Kyrgyzstan) demanded that the EBF accepted an official statement expressing their condemnation to such issues as women’s ordained ministry, charismatic churches, homosexuality, and affirmation of the authority of the Bible. Moreover, they wanted this statement to be normative for all the Baptist Unions that belong to the EBF. Furthermore, unions that would have refused to sign this statement were to be excluded from the federation. The EBF response to the proposal was that Baptists did not have, and would not accept any statement of a kind, despite the fact that many might agree on some or even most of the issues raised. The unwillingness of the unions to agree to this principle caused some of them to split from the EBF (see Klaus Rdsler, “EBF Saddened by Exit of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan,” a