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

as an alternative to Orthodoxy. Nonetheless, he insists that all of these factors are secondary, pointing to the indigenous roots of the movement.” Without rejecting the contribution of Christians from abroad, | wish to concentrate on the indigenous elements in the origins of the baptistic movement in Russia.’° | will argue that the general meltdown in state internal politics and control allowed freer thinking in society, which, when projected at the serious crisis that the Russian Orthodox Church was going through, resulted in a radical movement within the Church. This movement grew out of a desire to bring a positive change into the established Church. To a large extent, this desire was a result of communal interpretation of the Bible, which in most cases took the form of preaching — a simplistic interpretation and direct application of the Scriptures into the lives of the hearers. The politics of persecution that both civil officials and the Orthodox clergy had acquired, forced these radicals to split away, gradually forming a new denomination. One of the major marks of this denomination was preaching. Thus my claim is that preaching, developed in a particular form of retelling the biblical story with its immediate unsophisticated interpretation,’ played a formative role in establishing and spreading of the Russian Baptist movement. ° “Penetration of Baptists...”, p 47. 1° For more information on this subject see Puzynin, The Tradition of the Gospel Christians, where he argues that the roots of the movement of Evangelical Christians or Pashkovites, must be seen in an Anglo-American pietistic tradition. Similarly, Konstantin Prokhorov points out that ‘it is hardly possible to doubt seriously that the Ukrainian Stundists initially accepted “from the Germans” at least some important paradigms of a Protestant perception of the Holy Scriptures.’ (“Between the West and the East: Notes on the origin of the evangelical movement in Russia,” in Theological Reflections, Vol. 13 (2012), p 82.) It is important to emphasise that preaching among Russian Baptists at the earlier stages of their development had a very particular form and meaning. Its main purpose was retelling the story of the Bible in understandable language and offering a simple application. Very often, it was a message about Christ, which was always followed by an invitation to repent and believe 14 In the following pages | am going to start with a general overview of the socio- political situation in the Russian Empire and then narrow my focus to a particular case — the communities of the Ukrainian Stundists and their gradual dissent from the Orthodox Church. | will make a claim that Biblicism, embodied in a form of communal preaching was a major driving force behind the formation of the new denomination on the Russian religious scene, since a similar pattern could be observed in the movement of the Gospel Christians in St. Petersb