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

aping of the state, brought forward the need in developing a more pragmatic, professional approach to preaching and ministerial training. For Baptists and Evangelical Christians it was a period of fast growth and expansion, which ended with active persecution of 3 It must be noted that despite greater religious freedom for non-Orthodox believers that came with the Edict of Religious Toleration, various restrictions and limitation were kept. For example, it was still prohibited to proselytise. Nonetheless, this did not restrict members of the baptistic communities in Russia in their missionary work. In a very short period from 1905 until 1912, their numbers grew by 30%, reaching over 60 thousands of active believers. (Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, p 27) 48 Christians by the Communistic authorities. The law from April 8, 1929 “About Religious Organisations” allowed free preaching only to the newly established religion — atheism.” The third period, which will be addressed in Chapter 4, covers a wide epoch from the beginning of persecutions until the end of the oppressive era during Mikhail Gorbachov’s perestroika (1989). The policies of militant atheism, which was later developed into “scientific atheism,” severe persecution from the communistic regime (which included killings of thousands of Christians), and an impossibility to develop educational institutions or even receive advanced secular education for the believers resulted in the decrease of the value of education in the eyes of both church leaders and ordinary Christians and over-spiritualization of preaching as a practice, with spirituality of the preacher becoming more important than the message proclaimed by that person. Finally, the fourth period is modern history (1989-current time), which | will review in Chapter 5. Throughout all the stages of their history, Russian baptistic churches had to deal with the process of contextualization of their message and practices: at the beginning they were learning to cope with the Bible instead of the Tradition as the main source for their life and faith. Emphasis on personal ethics and highly critical views of the Orthodox clergy was important to justify the dissent. Freedom (2" period) brought new challenges — learning to be more open to the newcomers, challenges of preparation and training of the new missionaries and ministers, and theological questions of unity in a context of a growing number of self-taught and “home-grown” teachers and preachers. Communistic oppression (3° period) at an unprecedented scale raised a question of survival. Spiritual formation, personal holiness, faithfulness to the calling and total reliance on God came to the forefront. A new period of openness and freedom (4 period) to a degree of anarchy, which neither church nor society has ever experienced, mounted the biggest contemporary challenge to the Church — how to make its message relevant not