Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

pport from a Southern Baptist mission office located in the new Russian Baptist Union office throughout the 1990s,” the ability of the central union, now a mere Euro-Asiatic Federation, to shape local or regional ministries through financial support was now very limited. At the least, leaders still tried to retain a common Euro- Asiatic vision. Much more prominent during the 1990s were the variety of new ideas imported by two major streams of Western missionaries. On the one hand were individual Baptist or Pentecostal mission initiatives conducted together with the new national unions. As a result, for example, Pentecostal ministries in the Vladivostok region grew dramatically. In Ukraine, the John MacArthur ministries and those of Josh McDowell established numerous church planting initiatives and popular Bible institutes, enabling a few senior presbyters (regional superintendents) to link their own outreach programmes with such missionaries. The other major initiative came to be known as CoMission. Although it involved well established faith missions known for responsible mission work around the world, in the CoMission project in Russia and Ukraine, its army of short term workers very seldom worked with evangelical churches, and the sophisticated missiology learned elsewhere was rarely applied. Some of the new converts through CoMission became active in the formation of several new evangelical missionary asso- ciations in Krasnodar and eastern Ukraine. Elsewhere, little of the evange- lism effort and expense resulted in organised congregations linked to one of the unions.” So far I am not aware of studies reviewing the history of the ” The Southern Baptist Convention had long related to the AUCECB through a mission board worker, usually based in Riischlikon, Switzerland, at the European Baptist Seminary. As the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC proceeded, that seminary, having moved to Prague to become the International Baptist Theological Seminary, came under the owner- ship of the European Baptist Federation. The SBC sent new workers to support the Rus- sian Baptist Union, financing the purchase and remodelling of a new office on Varshavskoe Shosse in Moscow. A further change to SBC mission policy resulted in placement of mis- sionaries in Central Asia to plant SBC churches. This story is best caught in Perry L. Glanzer, The Quest for Russia’s Soul: Evangelicals and Moral Education in Post-Communist Russia (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2002), together with some extensive assessment and critique in Donald Fairbairn, review of The Quest for Russia’s Soul, by Perry L. Glanzer, Religion in Eastern Europe, vol. 23, no. 5 (October 2003), pp. 51-58. 199 many independent churches established as church plants from America with American church models. To what extent did they attract primarily those believers whose profound disenchantment with the Soviet experi- ment led them to copy the West as uncritic