Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

evers from the main Church resembles the distance of the Lutherans (or even Anabaptists) from the Catholic Church during the Reforma- tion. From their very beginnings, Russian and Ukrainian Stundists were branded a sect, making it impossible for them to identify themselves with the Orthodox Church. The external causes urgently induced a need for Stundists’ own church structure. Well-meant advice from German Pietist pastors to remain within the Russian Orthodox Church*' simply did not take into account the fundamental differences between the structures of the two churches. In principle, Ukrainian and Russian Baptists could have assumed the structure of the Molokan communities, which was a genuine Russian model ? Volker Brecht, Zwischen Landeskirche und Freikirche: Die Suche der Gemeinschaftsbewe- gung nach einem eigenen Gemeindeverstandnis (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 2002), p. 23. *° “Vypiska iz predstavleniia Gubernatora ot 12 iiunia 1869 g”, in Golovashchenko and Reshetnikov, Istoriia evangel’ssko-baptistskogo dvizheniia v Ukraine, p. 13. *! Istoriia evangel’skikh khristian-baptistov v SSSR, p. 59. 41 of a faith community apart from the Orthodox Church. Molokans, with their denial of church hierarchy, were much nearer to the newly emerged Baptist congregations in terms of church structure. However, especially in Ukraine, the first Baptist congregations formed by people coming from the Orthodox Church did not choose the Molokan pattern. The Baptist begin- nings in the Caucasus in a Molokan environment in the 1860s constitute a different story, but this exceeds the frame of this paper. Remaining examples of church structures include the German Baptists in Ukraine, which in the 1860s strongly resembled the Mennonite Brethren, and the Mennonite Brethren themselves. In the early years, the borders between these different religious groups were fluid, and they considered themselves one body, sharing similar views, and worked closely together. The Mennonite Brethren Church, being a fruit of the seed of Pietism on traditional Mennonite soil, came into being in 1860.* The structural pattern of the church produced by the early Mennonite Brethren came from the well-established Mennonite Church order, which had a long tradition since the times of Reformation. Whereas the years before 1865 were shaped by extreme Pietistic developments,” the late 1860s and early 1870s were char- acterised by a striving for order and instruction. In this quest for stability, the Brethren were supported and even partially led by German Baptists. The recognised differences in church structure and theology between Mennonite Brethren and German Baptists were marginal at that time. The ties that bound these two movements weakened after 1869.** The Brethren did not want to lose their Mennonite identity, and increasingly emphasised their non-resistance and non-violent position, being afraid to lose their privilege of exemption from milit