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

Ethics After Macintyre (Pennsylvania, Trinity Press International, 1997), p 90. 165 became an intentional community of faithful individuals, obedient to the teaching of Jesus and committed to one another, trying to reflect in their shared life the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence, Christianity is, first of all, a way of life. The words of Jesus, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life,’ (John 16.4) are a constant reminder of this simple, and yet often, challenging truth. And whether Christians take this Way as something that follows salvation or constitutes salvation, does not change the important emphasis on a transformed life. However, discipleship does not end with the transformation of one’s life. Walking in Jesus’ footsteps is not a lonely venture. On entering the Way, an individual does not step on some empty highway — many others are already there to share the joys and difficulties of the journey. Entering the Way is about becoming a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), becoming part of a new peoplehood (1 Peter 2:9) which requires active participation in the lives of other people. Yoder notices, The Christian community, like any community held together by commitment to important values, is a political reality. That is, the church has the character of a polis (the Greek word from which we get the adjective political), namely, a structured social body. It has its ways of making decisions, defining membership, and carrying out common tasks.“ Accepting the concept of the body in relation to the church has profound consequences for its members, as it means ‘the awareness that each member needs and serves each of the others, that the whole is more than all of the parts, and that the interdependence of all is structured according to an already given plan, flexible and able to grow, but neither chaotic nor infinitely negotiable.’” McClendon defines the life of the Christian community by offering an image of three interwoven strands, which are ‘embodied existence [body ethics]... communal structures [social ethics]... and the ongoing engagement of God in our individual and * John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Nashville, Herald Press, 1992), p vii. ° Yoder, Body Politics, p ix. 166 social lives [eschatological vision].’° They are distinct but inseparable strands. He argues that ‘the connecting link between the body ethics and social ethics... is to be found in the body of Christ that is the gathered church,’’ because it is in a community of believers that Christians learn to live, to walk the Way, and are able to witness to the world.® Therefore, the existence of the Church with its rules, traditions, practices, and laws does at least partially answer the question of how Christian identity is passed — through the involvement in a community, and by participation in its practices. Church practices receive their meaning