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

the Russian Church (Milwaukee, The Bruce Publishing Company, 1960), p 113. 3° Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), p 17. 20 Thus entering a time of social unrest and radical movements, a time of disillusionment and spiritual search for the meaning of life by many people, the Church needed help itself. Its clergy were unable and, to a certain degree, uninterested in understanding and helping people. Its witness, ethical life and teaching were almost non-existent due to corruption caused by poverty, poor education and almost total lack of support given to local parish clergy. The teaching of the Church, its rites and liturgy were unclear and seemed inadequate to simple people and were considered irrelevant by the nobility and intelligentsia. ** Not surprisingly, one of the reforms of Alexander II was related to the Orthodox Church. Freeze observes that Special commissions designed a broad range of reforms, including the establishment of parish councils in 1864 (to raise funds for local needs), the reform of ecclesiastical schools in 1867 (modernising curriculum and opening schools to youths from all social classes), the formal abolition of the clerical caste in 1867, and a radical reorganisation of parishes in 1868. Still more reforms were in preparation...” Ironically, it was exactly such “care” on behalf of the state that resulted in the above mentioned crisis, and in the unwillingness and hostility of the Orthodox clergy to conform to the reforms.** The church leaders saw that the church ‘was kept like a captive under the pretext of its own safety,’** whilst state officials were blunt about 3 Sergei Margaritov, a Russian Orthodox priest at the beginning of the 20" century, offered an Orthodox perspective on the reasons for the appearance and spread of the baptistic movements in Russia (whilst his work is written with a clear denominational stance, it still provides valuable insight into the life and practice of early evangelical groups in Russia). He names among the first the failure of the Orthodox Church to provide guidance for the freed serfs, and the uncontrolled reading and interpretation of the Bible. (/storiia Russkikh Misticheskikh i Ratsionalisticheskikh Sect [The History of Russian Mystical and Rationalistic Sects], \zdanie 3, dopolnennoie (Simpheropol, Tavricheskaia Gubernskaia Tipografiia, 1910), pp 147-148). # Freeze, Russia, A History, p 180. 33 A. |. Polunov, “Church, Regime, and Society in Russia (1880-1895),” in Russian Studies in History, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Spring 2001), p 34. 34 Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, p 17. 21 the nature of their care. Consider the words of Dmitrii A. Tolstoi (Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod from 1865 to 1880) about the role the Church was to take within the state system, ‘I view the clergy... as no more and no less than a force that must be subor