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

dox liturgy, the education and training of missionaries, pastors and lay preachers gained paramount importance. It was a thorny way of laying foundations for theological education (and particularly preachers’ training). Its proponents needed to overcome barriers set by the authorities (both tsarist and later communistic), and significant resistance of those pastors and lay members, who perceived education (and especially theological studies) as a way to distance people from God and church, as a deviation to the simple way of Christ.“°° However, when most of these problems were overcome and those few schools began to function (with significant contribution from England, Germany, the USA and some other European countries), churches started to appreciate and welcomed their ministry. Congregations grew, various ministries developed, and new churches were planted. 105 E.g. Mazaev received a letter from a preacher, who insisted that theological education would only mess with young preachers’ minds, thus affecting their potential for ministry and making them useless for local churches (“O Dukhovnikh Seminariakh” [“About Spiritual Seminaries”] in Gost (1912), Vol. 4, p 18). Such views can be observed even in today’s Baptist Churches, when young people who received theological training are often looked down and preference is given to home-grown talents. 80 Of course, it would be naive to expect that a short, although intensive, period when a few hundred people received some sort of theological training could have completely changed the way preaching was understood and practiced in Russia. Yet it was a beginning of something big that had the potential to transform both the baptistic movement and, perhaps, the whole country. Unfortunately, another change of government’s policy brought the era of fast growth, relative prosperity, freedom, and high hopes for the future’’° to a sudden stop. 3.4 Trials and tribulations: living in a spiritual desert, 1929-1987 From the moment Bolsheviks gained power in 1917, they openly supported and promoted atheism. However, until 1929, atheistic propaganda was done in a fairly peaceful fashion. It can be compared to a new religious movement that entered the Russian religious scene, aggressively competing with the established players, and particularly the Orthodox Church. Of course, the competition was never fair, since the new “religion” received extensive support from the communistic authorities. Nonetheless, as Prokhanov noted, such rivalry allowed baptistic churches to work more efficiently. In 1929 the government introduced new legislation, clearly aiming at elimination of all religious organisation, more than that, at the destruction of all faiths. Most of the churches, monasteries, mosques, synagogues, and missionary centres were either destroyed or converted into cinemas, shops, warehouses. Pastors, priests, and other religious leaders were arrested and sent to l