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

, whilst others did not show any connection. Some appeared independently, others were “planted” by known Stundist leaders. Yet it is possible to point to several 3 Ibid. 4 Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2005), p 16. See also Rozhdestvenskii, Yuzhno-Russkii Stundism, chapter 2. °° Johann Wieler, a German Mennonite, played one of the leading roles in the formation of the Baptist movement in the south of the Russian Empire and the Russian Baptist Union. Being closely connected to J. Gerhard Oncken and German Baptists, Wieler started the first German speaking Baptist church in Odessa in the late 1860-s. At the beginning of the 1970s he supported Stundists in their unsuccessful appeals to the emperor to obtain greater religious freedom. Wieler was one of the main organisers and a chairman at the 1884 conference in Novo-Vasilievka, when the Russian Baptist Union was formed. At that conference Weiler was elected as the first president of the union. (see Johanness Dyck, “Moulding the Brotherhood: Johann Wieler (1839-1889): And the Communities of the Early Evangelicals in Russia,” MTh Thesis (Prague, IBTS, 2007)). °° Wardin, “How Indigenous was the Baptist Movement in the Russian Empire?”, p 35. °” Rozhdestvenskii, Yuzhno-Russkii Stundism, p 108. °8 Savinskii, /storiia Evangelskikh Khristian — Baptistov, Vol. 1, p 115. 27 features that all these groups shared. First, for a number of years all of them continued to practice their Orthodox faith, including infant baptism, attending the church, observing the fasts and holidays, venerating icons, etc. They all shared the desire to read and study the Bible in their homes. They practiced high standards of moral life. They were keen evangelists — passionately telling/retelling what the Bible was teaching. Considering their sincere faith, zeal for study and application of the Bible, and strict moral rules that governed their lives, it could be said that Stundists were exemplary Orthodox believers. However, the local clergy could neither understand nor accept these new expressions of the Orthodox spirituality, and tried to suppress them, often seeking assistance in this task from the state authorities and the police. Such actions caused the breakaway of these non-conformists, who were already dissatisfied with the official Church, beginning to see it as “idolatrous” and “false.””° Naturally, they turned to the non-Orthodox churches for help, which became a beginning for the baptist movement.” Despite their newly gained non-Orthodox identity, the baptistic movement grew among the peasants, the most conservative of Russia’s social groups. This can only be explained by the closeness of the new movement to the beliefs and worldviews of simple people. Unlike the efforts of populists, considered by peasants as western and therefore rejected, baptist movements t