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

d spiritual senses. The understanding of literal meaning as dependent on changing realities of life of the community of interpretation and spiritual meaning (discovered by typological reading of the text) presupposes the need for the existence of the community of interpreters, who can both discover the meaning, but also offer its necessary validation by implementing it in their lives. The need for the existence of such community (which serves as a safe-guarding strategy against potential destructive forces of its practices) leads to the necessary existence of a number of practices of reading the Bible in community. | have argued that Baptist churches must become intentional in developing their members into biblical interpreters. First of all, this emphasises the need for cooperation between churches and theological schools. However, the process of raising biblical interpreters must not end only with biblical scholars, graduated with qualifications in theology. Every member of the Christian community needs to be involved (which is a challenging, yet rewarding enterprise) in the process of communal hermeneutics. This leads me to the final stage of this work — looking at preaching as one of the practices of reading the Bible in the community. This brings me to a final point of this work, the question ‘Which preaching?” In the following Chapter | will argue that it is possible to draw a positive lesson from the formative years of the Russian Baptist movement, as well as its contemporary practice of multiple preaching. However, the future development of the practice of Thus, fairly small things might encourage people to be more involved in practices normally reserved for “experienced Christians” or even labelled as “pastors only.” While allowing less trained or gifted people to participate in preaching and teaching might seem as damaging to the quality of worship service, it certainly results in these people’s greater commitment to the church and to the way of Christ, but also produces a liberating effect on regular church members, sending a clear message that everyone has the right and responsibility to interpret the Scripture. 214 proclamation has to be seen within educational space. The University’’ must see its task not only in training future preachers and pastors, but also, and, which is equally important, needs to be engaged in a second order theological task, which is ‘the discovery, understanding or interpretation, and transformation of the convictions of a convictional community, including the discovery and critical revision of their 78 Such ‘discovery and relation to one another and to whatever else there is. understanding of convictions,’ raises the question of group identity, which is an important, and nonetheless neglected element of theological education. This once again highlights the aim of this research — to offer a critical tool that can be used by educational institutions