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

vy emphasis on God’s mysterious work that took place in the act of proclamation, regardless of the level of listeners’ comprehension of the message. 3.3 Big dreams and dashed hopes: 1905-1929 Prior to 1905 Russian law drew a sharp difference between ethnic Russians and non-Russians when it came to questions of religious practice. Non-Russians were allowed to form their own churches and were free to worship the way they wanted. For example, those Germans who lived in the Russian Empire could belong to Lutheran, Mennonite or Catholic congregations. Ethnic Russians could only be Orthodox. Only the Russian Orthodox Church could proselytize among the citizens of “8 Kuznetsova, “Early Russian Evangelicals...”, p 404. “° | have argued this point more extensively in my article “Back to the Future.” 65 the Empire. Conversion to any other faith was a criminal offence.°’ Nonetheless, Baptists and Evangelical Christians were extremely active in spreading their beliefs. The fact that their preaching was supported by their transformed life made it compelling for others.’ Baptistic groups and churches were appearing in many towns and villages of the Empire. They were so successful in their missionary work that, as Kushnev noted, by 1916 there was not a village in Russia that did not encounter baptistic witness.°” Different sources vary in the evaluation of the numerical growth of the baptistic movement, ranging from around 20,000 to 100,000 members before 1905. By 1914 the most conservative estimation is over 50,000 members, whilst others speak about 300,000 or even higher numbers.”° As indicated in the previous paragraph, regardless of the system of counting, it is clear that after 1905, in a relatively short period, the number of baptistic believers in Russia doubled or even tripled. Such rapid growth became possible thanks to a new °° Peter Waldron, “Religious Toleration in Late Imperial Russia,” in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, Clarendon, 1989), pp 103-105. See also R. Latimer, Dr. Braedek and His Apostolic Work in Russia (London, Morgan and Scott, 1908), pp 190-192. °* Coleman offers another insight into the fast spread of the Baptist movement in Russia. She notices that Baptists were giving their members a sense of belonging to a new society, escaping social unrest and economic struggles, ‘Certainly changing social identities played a part in the evangelical movement, where (mostly) lower class Russians conceived a community in which they could express themselves as individuals and find respect and opportunities for self-development and leadership. But the Baptists drew fundamentally different conclusions from similar circumstances. Although scholars are very familiar with the revolutionary narrative of self-transformation, an examination of Baptists’ personal narratives reveals how religious conversion offered itself as another means for navigat