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

in the Anglo-American Christian context to Russian ecclesial realities. Neither do | aim at developing and presenting my own unique homiletical method. Nor is this an attempt to argue a case for a revolution in various aspects of Russian Baptists’ theology and worship practices. Rather, my aim was to offer a starting point for a critical reflection on one of the most important practices that has originally contributed significantly to the shaping of contemporary Russian Baptist churches and continues to influence them in various ways. Reviewing preaching as one of the practices of reading the Bible in a Christian community, as well as pointing to the constructive and destructive potentials of this practice, | hope to offer a tool that could be used for the furthering of homiletical and hermeneutical thought, first of all, in Russia’s theological educational institutions. Secondly, | am neither approaching the subject of preaching as a skill that lies in the fields of rhetoric and theory of communication, nor do | plan to address the question of which homiletical method should be used and promoted as the most effective and productive. These are important questions; however, not central to this research. | have focused on preaching as, first of all, a social practice. As a practice, preaching may yield diverse results, leading to the development of both virtues and vices. My argument is that to nullify its destructive potential, preaching must be understood and practiced within a wider cluster of practices of reading the Bible in the community. Thus, the following discussion will be focused on preaching as a practice of communal hermeneutics. Thirdly, it is the important contribution that a concept of baptistic vision brings into the discussion. When the biblical story is understood as a normative narrative that forms both corporate life of the community of faith and individual lives of its members, the limiting factor of preaching is immediately brought into the focus. Even the best preaching strategy cannot lead people to appropriating the whole of the biblical story as their story. At best, preaching can help the listeners to adopt some behavioural patterns, learn a number of doctrines of the Church, and motivate or inspire them to act or think in a certain way. Therefore, what is required is a transformation of a congregation of listeners into a community of preachers/interpreters of the Word (this was my argument 217 in Chapter 8), since this is the only way to make a deep penetration of the biblical story into the lives of people possible. Hence, in the following pages | will, first of all, address the phenomenon of multiple preaching. However, instead of attributing too much value to its current form, | will argue that Russian Baptist communities need to rediscover the roots of this practice, which was an excellent example of the whole community being involved in the process of discover