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

se practices in the light of the biblical message, there is a call to something new, through challenging the old ways, through maintaining the vision, as a way into the future under the Lordship of the Lord Jesus Christ. In my next step | will turn to the important concept of practices, and, particularly, practices of reading and interpreting the Bible, with preaching as one of them. %4 Freeman, “The ‘Coming of Age’ of Baptist Theology in Generation Twenty-Something,” p 23. 164 CHAPTER 7. Practices: ‘actualizing resources’ of the vision” Introduction As | was following the argument of N. G. Wright, that understanding ‘who | am’ is a question that has to be answered prior to approaching the question ‘how | should live,’ Chapter 6 started with a query of what constitutes Baptist identity. | came to the conclusion that the major hallmarks of the baptistic movement and its core convictions, such as biblicism, missionary zeal, believers baptism, autonomy of the local church, separation of church and state, and others — are rooted in a particular theological hermeneutics. This hermeneutics is ‘a bi-focal strategy in which the communities find themselves both part of the story and being examined by it: it is “that” eschatological moral vision of the NT communities which defines ‘this’ present moral life of a community (or a person in it). And it is the “then” of the future fulfilment of the Kingdom vision that verifies the “now” of everyday living,’* therefore, can be seen as an organising principle for the whole baptistic theology, providing a good explanation for their unity and diversity, thus being a mark of baptistic identity. Chapter 7 will offer a transition from the principle to practice, from the question of what constitutes a formative element of baptistic community to the question of how the baptistic vision is implemented. Jesus’ public ministry was started with him calling his first disciples. They were invited to leave their professions, their friends, and even families, in order to respond to the calling of the Messiah. Matthew (4:18-22) emphasises the immediacy with which Peter, Andrew, James and John responded to the call. Thus, for Matthew, ‘discipleship implies the willing participation of each follower.’* The church, then, * 1am borrowing the phrase from Brown’s book Transformational Preaching. In the book, the phrase is used in reference to the rhetorical materials that a preacher brings ‘into the sermon to construct the biblical truth [they] are proclaiming.’ (p 403).This is a helpful way to define the subject for Chapter 7, as | am going to speak about those “tools” or “practices” that keep the baptisict vision alive. ? Parushev, “Walking in the Dawn of the Light...,” p 34. 3 James Wm. McClendon, Jr., “The Practice of Community Formation,” in Nancy C. Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg and Mark Thiessen Nation eds., Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian