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

t of the Baptist movement in Russia, marked by the baptism of a Molokan leader Nikita Voronin on the 20th of August in Tiflis (contemporary Tbilisi, Georgia).’ These dissenters from the Orthodox Church were constantly persecuted; nonetheless their numbers grew rapidly, counting tens of thousands of active members in only twenty years.® The fact that the Baptist movement started only in the second half of the 19" century and quickly spread over the vast territory of the Russian Empire points towards ° For more information on the history and convictions of the mentioned sects and movements see Georg Bernard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1999); Irina Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850 (Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2003); A helpful perspective can be found in A. Katunskii, Staroobriadchestvo [Old Believers] (Moscow, IPL, 1972), pp 39-40. ® pashkovites, also known as Evangelical Christians, has a particular meaning in Russia. Evangelical or Gospel Christians is the name of a baptistic movement that began in 1870s and was associated with the names of Lord Radstock, an English lay evangelist, who made several trips to Russia, preaching among Russian nobles (see pp 58-59 of this research for information on his theological views and ministry), and Colonel Vasilii Pashkov, a wealthy aristocrat, who became a passionate evangelical preacher and a leader of the movement of Evangelical Christians (see p 60 of this thesis for a more in-depth presentation of his theological views and ministry among Russian Evangelical Christians). In 1944, Evangelical Christians merged with Baptists forming the AUCECB. (See also Sheryl Corrado, Filosofiia Sluzheniia Polkovnika Pashkova [The Philosophy of Ministry of Colonel Pashkov] (St. Petersburg, Biblia Dlya Vsekh, 2005); Edmund Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy 1860-1900: Radstockism and Pashkovism (The Hague, Nimhoff, 1970)), and a recent study of the denomination by Andrey Puzynin, The Tradition of the Gospel Christians: A Study of Their Identity and Theology During the Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Periods (Eugene, Oregon, Pickwick Publications, 2010). ” Albert W. Wardin, Jr., “Penetration of Baptists into the Russian Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” in Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol.7, lssue 3 (May 2007), p 45. 8 J. G. Fetzer, “Baptists in Russia and What They Need,” in Baptist Missionary Magazine (April 1903), p 126. 13 significant reasons for it. Albert W. Wardin argues that multiple factors are to be considered: the sociological, political and religious situation within Russia, the financial support, evangelistic and educational efforts of German Baptists and Mennonites as well as the passion and zeal of laypersons and indigenous evangelists in spreading the teaching that w