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

s that are at the heart of McClendon’s theology, thus supporting his argument that the baptist vision, understood as a contextual reading and application of the biblical story, using the ‘this is that, then is now’ strategy, is a sufficient organising principle for the whole of baptistic theology. Human convictions are formed through different participations in the life of the community. With Christians, it is a Christian community that contributes to the development and formation of their convictions, particularly convictions about God, Christ, and the Church, and moral convictions’® of how they should relate to the world outside the church. The practices of the church are rooted in the Scripture that is read as the Story of the church, used as a mirror, reflecting the contemporary situation as well as the way into the future for those people who read it. Naturally, they read it through the lenses of their convictions, formed by their Christian community as well as secular communities to which they belong. Biography, living together in a community of a local church and as separate individuals, influences baptistic reading and understanding of the Bible, producing practices that result in certain convictions. Thus, life experience affects their Bible- reading. However, Bible reading also helps believers to interpret their life-story, to °+ McClendon, Ethics, 33. Cf. “We follow our Lord, aware that he may always have further light to cast on our pathway and new truth to teach us about his Father, the world, our neighbour, and ourselves. We confess that our religious knowledge, like all knowledge, is partial and incomplete and is in continuous search for deeper and newer insights. Therefore, we refuse to say we have ever arrived spiritually or have the ultimate interpretation about God or the scriptures... We trust Christ who goes before us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to have a word for us today. Our theology is not confined to the past but awaits God’s word for us today” (Brooks Hays and John E. Steely, The Baptist Way of Life (New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, 1964), p 27). *? Parushev, “Walking in the Dawn of the Light...,” p 110. °3 On baptistic vision creating a conventional moral space, see Hank Bakker, “Convictional Theology as Mapping Moral Space”, Baptistic Theologies, Vol. 6, No 1 (Spring 2014), pp 81-97. 163 understand themselves in a different way, producing changes in what they believe and do. This is how the vision works — the Bible is read in a context, always anew, being continually reinterpreted and interpreting its readers. Theology in this case ‘is not 7754 rather, it is about discovery of what reduced to a kind of religious “identity politics, the community (and its members) believe through the examination of their practices (including the practices of reading their Sacred Story) and the world they live in. After such critical evaluation of the