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

e group was not persecuted at the beginning. The members of the group were devout Orthodox believers who actively participated in all church services and ceremonies, and read and studied the Bible and used it as a guide for their lives.*? About four years later “Stunda” began to spread into the neighbouring villages.“ 3° The police reports show that Ratushnii started his meetings in 1862 (Sergei |. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (Washington D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), p 192), which is another important indirect confirmation of the importance of the Bible’s appearance in the hands of lay people. “° These practices can be identified as evening meetings for Bible study, extemporaneous prayer and singing Christian hymns. Their exemplary moral life, manifested in the rejection of consumption of alcohol and use of bad language was another “similarity”. As Arsenii Rozhdestvenskii puts it, ‘They did not pay attention to the theoretical side of faith, but they put to the front its practical moments — the desire to live according to the Scripture, trying to live out the Christian ideals.’ (Yuzhno-Russkii Stundism [Southern-Russian Stundism] (St. Petersburg, Tipographiia Departamenta Udelov, 1889), p 1). “* Nicolay N. Yarigin, in his analysis of the emergence of the Baptist movement in Russia, argues that the label “stunda” was invented by the Orthodox clergy, in order to create an image of the foreign origins of the movement in the eyes of simple peasants and, more importantly, of the state officials. For the same reason, there were attempts to “link” Ukrainian Stundists to the Peasant Wars of 16" century. (Evangelskoie Dvizheniie v Volgo-Viatskom Regione [Evangelical Movement in Volgo-Viatski Region] (Moskva, Akademicheskii Proiekt, 2004), p 28. ”? Rozhdestvenskii, Yuzhno-Russkii Stundism, p57. “3 Ibid., pp 56-57. “4 In 1865 there were about 20 people in the group; by 1867 the numbers grew to 35 families; in 1870 there were over 200 members. (Reshetnikov, Sannikov, Obzor Istorii, p 77). 24 Although the police disliked that, suspecting Stundists of preaching the “German faith,” they could not find ‘any evidence of a German presence at the peasant meetings, [recognising that] the peasants read only books printed by the Russian Orthodox publishing houses.’”” There are documents showing that sometimes Stundist leaders were arrested for ‘teaching the Gospel falsely’ but were quickly released, after the Orthodox priests visited them. This shows that the police at that time did not consider Stundists to be spreading a different faith, which was a criminal offence.*° There were several important characteristics of this first Stundist group. First, the group was an indigenous movement that was formed around an educated individual (Ratushnii) in order to read and reflect upon the Bible.*” According to Ratu