Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

trum within clearly evangelical limits, but so far there have not been the theological wars that shook up American Protestant seminaries during the first half of the twentieth century. Coinciding with the birth of the schools was the launching of a project to collect oral histories of persons from the Slavic evangelical world, in which students and admin- istrators from the schools in Donetsk, Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa were active, a number of the interviewers now working as teachers and scholars. This was intended as a resource to guide the work of contextu- alising theology and rooting future leaders in the church’s rich legacy of suffering and witness. Mission and Missionary Associations When Ivan Gnida of Moscow preached to the presbyter’s conference of Kazakhstan in February of 1988, he urged them to claim the emerging opportunities to witness to the Gospel, then in private told me that Baptists had forgotten their early missionary zeal and now needed to be prodded to get off their backsides. Indeed, their missionary character was a feature that caused Soviet authorities to regularly attack the evangelicals, and the 1929 Law on Religion forbad missionary work outright. Nevertheless, one feature of the explosion of mission and evangelism after 1988 for a half-dozen years was the path-breaking work of indigenous missions. One of the earliest initiatives was an inter-denominational Latvian mission, in which the Avtonomnyi churches were primary leaders. Soon Svet Evangeliia emerged out of Rovno in Ukraine, with mission projects in northern Siberia and the Far East. Svet Evangeliia formed a school of mission studies by 1991, then formed links with Denver Baptist Seminary, a decade later organising Donetsk Christian University with three-year and one-year degree and certificate programmes. In regions of eastern Russia 203 S and western Siberia, groups of churches had developed into a de facto denomination of Svet Evangeliia churches.” Within the ECB unions, true also for Pentecostal unions in Russia and Ukraine, the primary missions pattern that emerged since 1990 is a series of projects specific to national unions, often linked with foreign funds. Within the Russian Federation, some of the church planting activity spon- sored by the Peter Deyneka Russian Ministries (Association for Spiritual Renewal) programme in the Caucasus and southeast Russian regions were eventually absorbed into regional ECB councils.** Licht im Osten mission (Germany) worked closely with certain senior presbyters in Ukraine and Central Asia (especially Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) to sponsor local evangelistic activities.** These two western organisations, as well as the re-organised Slavic Gospel Association, tended to assist with publication of literature, underwrite radio work, and subsidise the salaries of transla- tors, teachers and pastors/evangelists.* Yet another pattern was the strong ties between German im