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

nother shift in how preaching, as well as all the other ministries of local churches, was practiced. The impossibility to carry out any educational activities, and the strictly enforced ban on social and youth work, allowed Christians to successfully rival aggressive Soviet domination only in such areas as Spirituality and personal moral living. All of this has inevitably impacted preaching. The only available way to learn how to preach was through prayer and personal reflection on the Bible. The main preparation for the preaching event was through prayer. The success of the preaching ministry was measured by the preacher's integrity and spiritual maturity. Eventually, such attitudes led to a 243 situation where preachers were seen as special men of God, and their pulpit ministry was seen as a sign of God’s calling and anointing. Chapter 5 focuses on the post-Soviet period in the history of Russian Baptists. | briefly address topics, related to the context of worship, such as the liturgy, sacred space (the house of prayer) and participants. However, the main goal of this section is to continue developing the themes of a preacher’s spirituality, authority, and the listeners’ perception of the act of preaching. The main argument in this chapter is that the practice of proclamation plays a much greater role in churches than that of an educational or an inspirational instrument. Culturally inherent perception of the church leadership as ‘holy people, unable to err,’ leads to the formation of a separate class of people within the presumably non-hierarchical structure of the Baptist communities in Russia. “Sluzhiteli,” a kind of “Christian elite,” receive their authority through, first of all, the preaching office. Furthermore, the existing pattern of uncritical perception of the sermons, supported and encouraged by many preachers, opens the doors to various abuses of power in churches, due to the absence of “educated listeners,” lay members, able to hold preachers (and the wider church leadership) accountable. Thus, the neglect of issues of power and authority, which the preaching office attributes to its practitioners, affects the development of the contemporary Baptist congregations. Chapter 6 marks the beginning of a new section, passing from the description and analysis of the development of preaching to such themes as baptistic identity, and preaching as a social practice. Having claimed, in the previous chapter, that proclamation in Russian Baptist churches plays a greater role than a tool that only belongs to the areas of spirituality and rhetoric, the argument in Chapter 6 is that preaching must be understood as a powerful practice, to enable churches to address its constructive, as well as destructive potentials. However, before | introduce the concept of social practices, it is necessary to set the boundaries, to define the constants that constitute baptistic identity, something that preachin