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

inary Press (forthcoming 2015), Chapter five. 6 It might be helpful to illustrate this point by referring to various conflicts that took place after the exile of Pashkov and Korff, among the Pashkovites in St. Petersburg. Princess Sofia Lieven noted that the lack of education of many ‘brothers’ of Baptist and Stundist origin that moved to St. Petersburg and joined Evangelical Christians led to various conflicts in the movement, due to their inability and unwillingness to go beyond certain doctrines (such as church membership and church discipline, the Lord’s Supper, believer’s baptism, and even questions of appropriate style of clothes) and have open discussion of the Biblical texts (Dukhovnoie Probuzdeniie v Rossii, pp 71-75). 7 In his educational ministry, Prokhanov always emphasised the need to go beyond the idea of training ministers. His educational programmes included various subjects and events aimed at raising educational levels of the whole churches, not only their pastors. Thus, they offered various training seminars on theological as well as secular subjects (Prokhanov, V Kotle Rossii, p 148). 223 | have now briefly touched upon the troubled present of Russian Baptists and their preaching, and suggested the need to look into the past, the history of the movement in search of an inspiration for a potential revival. What about the future? Approaching preaching as a social practice, that must be exercised within a wider cluster of practices of reading the Bible, and calling churches onto a path of rediscovery of the value of the true openness of its pulpits, by bringing the ministry of the Word back into the community of believers, is too ambitious a call to expect an instant response. A wide range of complications, issues of authority and power, as well as now deeply engrained convictions of church communities and their individual members regarding certain ecclesial practices should not be discarded as insignificant issues. Whilst a lot of inspiration can be drawn from the past history of the baptistic congregations in Russia, it can hardly be seen as a road map for implementing a full- scale experiment of transforming today’s Baptist congregations, marked by rigidity of their theological convictions and ecclesial practices, into open-minded communities of biblical interpreters, thus solving various problems of abuses of power, and lack of relevance in sermons. At best, this thesis can serve as a starting point for a serious discussion on the nature of worship practices in Russian Baptist churches, and their role in giving shape to practices and convictions of the believers. Hence, the conclusion of this dissertation inevitably brings me into the educational space — theological schools, which must be serving as places of ministerial formation, but also as places of further theological reflection, thus enabling continuous growth and development in various areas of church ecclesial life. 9.