Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

years. Presently a new generation of scholars focusing on this topic is emerging. As to - more specifically - Evangelical Christian and Baptist history and identity, scholars from the Baptist Theological Seminary in Odessa, as well as St Petersburg Christian University and other institutions in the former Soviet Union, have begun the important work of collecting sources, analysing this material and publishing the results. In addition to Istoriia evangelskikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR [History of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR], published in Moscow in 1989, valuable material has been published in Russian in recent years by Marina Karetnikova, Sergei Savinskii, Iurii Reshetnikov, Sergei Sannikov and others. The Euro-Asian Accrediting Association has undertaken an important project of transferring primary sources on Slavic Baptists onto a series of CDs. Significant books and articles have been published in English by scholars from Eastern Europe and the West, also covering some areas beyond Russian or Ukrainian-speaking Eastern Europe, such as the Baltics or the former Yugoslavia. As to the history of Baptists in the former Soviet Union, volumes by Walter Sawatsky and Michael Bourdeaux remain clas- sics. However, a considerable number of books in this field have recently been published in Germany, both in Russian and in German. In this growing interest in the Eastern European Baptist story, the Inter- national Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague, Czech Republic, has played a significant role. Since the mid-1990s, the Baptist and Anabap- tist Studies Department has counted as one of its main research aims to support and encourage the writing of local Baptist histories, especially in 5 the regions of continental Europe where this research was hindered for so long due to political and atheistic pressures. Some results of these recent research efforts have been published in the Journal of European Baptist Studies, as well as other publications, written both by the academic team and students of IBTS. More of this quality of research is available in the IBTS library in the form of student dissertations. This volume is based on papers delivered at the conference “Baptist Histories in Eastern Europe’, which took place 25-29 May 2005 on the IBTS campus in Prague. As the papers in this volume demonstrate, confer- ence attendees and presenters discussed the impact of the socio-political background on Eastern European Baptist life, as well as Baptist theological distinctives. As different cultural contexts have shaped Baptist churches in different countries, the conference deliberately had a plural form for its title: “Baptist histories’. Every generation needs to rewrite its history and the same events need to be analysed from different angles. In addi- tion, Baptist history in Eastern Europe is a mosaic. Many stories together form a wider picture. The conference in Prague offered an opportunit