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

they followed the “biblical way,” being assumed as their own, rather than borrowed. | have offered an insight into such major Orthodox theological concepts as theosis and sobornost, their meaning for worship, and, particularly, for preaching. The anti-rhetoric or charismatic preaching, which dominated Orthodox pulpits at a time, when the first baptistic groups appeared on the religious stage of the Russian Empire, have produced a major imprint on their understanding and practice of preaching. This will become obvious in the following chapters, 3 and 4, where | am going to turn to the question of the development of the art of proclamation amongst Russian baptistic Christians, beginning from their first communities at the end of the 19" century, until late 1980-s, the time of Perestroika. Then | will turn to the contemporary state of the practice. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971); Michael J. Quicke, 360 Degree Preaching (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2003); John Kilinger, Fundamentals of Preaching (Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 2"? Revised Edition, 1996); Fred Craddock, Preaching (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1985), etc. 46 CHAPTER 3. Development of Russian Baptist preaching in the 19" and 20" centuries Introduction An attempt to study the development of preaching among baptistic’ Christians in Russia is bound to face difficulties. Firstly, it is nearly impossible to rely on primary sources —the texts of the sermons.” There are several reasons for this. One is that Russian society has always been (and still is) predominantly a culture of oral communication, therefore, writing manuscripts has never been a custom for preachers, most of whom were illiterate at the early stages of the development of the movement. Secondly, the tradition of charismatic preaching widely practiced in the Orthodox Church, and reviewed in Chapter 2, has made a significant impact on baptistic tradition, emphasising the importance of spontaneous, extemporaneous preaching without the use of the written manuscript. Thirdly, Baptists and other dissenters from the Orthodox Church were experiencing constant persecutions both under the tsarist government and the communistic regime, which is responsible for the destruction of those documents collected in the archives of various local churches and individuals. However, the project is not a hopeless one. There are number of sources that can be used for such study depending on historical period. All available materials can be divided into two categories. Firstly, a variety of resources originated from baptistic groups that include publications in major magazines of Baptists and Evangelical * Apart from the development of the ministry of proclamation in churches of the RUECB, the historical overview in this chapter focuses on Stundist communities as well as churches of Evangelical Christians prior to the formation of the AUCECB, ther