Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ary service. As is well known, Baptists did not oppose military service. The organisational pattern of a free church in its Mennonite interpreta- tion suited the Russian and Ukrainian Baptists well. Its similarity to the model of Johann Gerhard Oncken*® (although they were not identical) made it easier for Russian Baptists to finda common ground with Caucasian 2 John A. Toews, A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church: Pilgrims and Pioneers (Fresno, California: Board of Christian Literature, 1975), pp. 32-33; John B. Toews, “Baptists and Mennonite Brethren in Russia (1790-1930)’, in Paul Toews (ed), Mennonites and Baptists: a Continuing Conversation (Winnipeg: Kindred, 1993), pp. 81-96. 3 Jacob P. Bekker, Origin of The Mennonite Brethren Church: Previously Unpublished Manu- script by One of the Eighteen Founders (Hillsboro, Kansas: Mennonite Brethren Publishing House, 1973), pp. 33, 39. * Toews, A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, pp. 72-73. 42 Baptists, whose leader Vasilii Pavlov was a disciple of Oncken, including in matters related to church leadership and church order. For example, access to the pulpit in Tiflis was far more restricted than in Ukraine, and the closed church organisational meetings occurred far more often. At the same time, the development of the Russian and Ukrainian Baptist movements were different enough from the Anglo-Saxon or later German Baptists to form a distinctive branch in the world Baptist family.” Leading Russian Baptist historians acknowledge that the Russian and Ukrainian Baptist Church structure was borrowed from its “spiritual neighbours’. Russian Baptist historian Sergei Savinskii writes: “From whom could our brethren adopt organisational forms of local churches, if not from those with whom they lived as neighbours and maintained spir- itual fellowship? ... They were children of a single epoch of evangelical awakening in Russia’.*” Personal Faith in the Believers’ Church Context Where Pietism came to a stop, the believers’ church continued. In a believers’ church, personal faith is a required condition for obtaining church membership. Pietism, in contrast, omits the demand for conver- sion in confessions of faith, as shown in the example of the “Short rules of faith of Christians of the Evangelical creed called Molokans of the Don persuasion’.*® Moreover, the requirement of baptism upon profession of faith constituted an unambiguous form of confession of faith which symbolised a decisive commitment, burning all bridges behind. The non-obligatory participation in Pietist fellowship hours was changed here to the binding nature of a “promise in good conscience” [obeshchanie dobroi sovesti], as formulated in the “Rules of the confession of faith of the newly-converted *° Oncken introduced a model in which authority rested on an individual, whereas Men- nonites tended toward group leadership. See Hans Luckey, Johann Gerhard Oncken und die Anft