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

ccessed on 01.05.2015, from http://cvi2.org/pages/harris/harris russian baptist preaching1996. pdf. Paying tribute to the past and respecting the heritage and traditions are not sufficient reasons to neglect the importance of developing of even the most respected and valued practices of a Christian community. Development and growth begins with critical analysis, with the ability to see both strengths and weaknesses. This is a difficult process, since preaching, as it will be shown, often appears to be at the centre of a large web of convictions,® thus study and evaluation of preaching as a practice of a gathering community’, penetrates deeply held convictions of churches and individual believers. | hope it is obvious now that | do not begin this work with the presupposition that Russian preaching has failed, thus we need to change it. My primary goal is to see what preaching is understood to be in Russia, how it has developed, and how it fits into the convictions of Russian Baptists (in a way this is a question closely related to the main question of this research: What role does preaching play in making Russian Baptists who they are?). Also | want to ask whether preaching meets the expectations of people in churches and to see if it continues to develop together with the Church that has undergone great changes in recent years. | believe it is possible to draw many positive lessons from the large ecclesial heritage that Russian Baptists have accumulated and that it is important to recognise its value. Nonetheless | also believe that revision, critical assessment, acceptance of weaknesses and failures of preaching as it happens is equally important, even crucial for the Church today, when faithful 8 Speaking about “convictional web” | am using the concept developed by Nancy Murphy in Beyond Liberalism and Foundationalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Valley Forge, PA, Trinity, 1996). ° Keith Grant Jones developed the concept of a gathering believing community (as opposed to the gathered church) in his works A Believing Church: Learning From Some Contemporary Anabaptist and Baptist Perspectives (Didcot, The Baptist Union of Great Britain, 1998); “Towards a Model of Mission for Gathering, Intentional, Convictional Koinonia,” in the Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol. 4, Issue2 (January 2004), pp 5-13. Cf. Nigel G. Wright, Free Church, Free State: The Positive Baptist Vision (Carlisle, Paternoster Press, 2005), pp 51-52. For further development of the concept see Rolling G. Grams and Parush R. Parushev, eds., Towards an Understanding of European Baptist Identity: Listening to the Churches in Armenia, Bulgaria, Central Asia, Moldova, North Caucasus, Omsk and Poland (Prague, IBTS, 2006) and Parush R. Parushev, “Gathered, Gathering, Porous: Reflections on the nature of baptistic community,” in the Baptistic Theologies, Volume 5, No 1 (Spring 2013), pp 35-52. foll