Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

m. Baron Korf tried to get the participants to recognize that “unity is not uniformity. It can also exist in diversity, similar to our body.” . A unity conference with more restricted representation met in the village of Novo-Vasil'evka in the Ukraine a few weeks later. Participants at this conference of 1884 at least managed to agree on the embryo for the subsequent Russian Baptist Union. At its second meeting in 1886, the first president, Johann Wieler, who had been forced to flee to Romania, was re- placed by Dei Mazaev, who became the dominant Baptist figure for the next thirty years. These events illustrate the nature of the problem preventing unity. For the entire pre-Revolutionary period the organizational structure of the evangelicals remained fluid and the unity conferences that did occur were made to seem more significant and representative by the later AUCECB of- ficials than they were at the time. One of the primary points of difference was that the Baptists under Mazaev’s leadership were a strict lot who had emphasized full adherence to Baptist ordinances, whereas other groups who eventually found themselves in the Evangelical Christian Union took an open attitude toward points of disagreement. Thus the Baptists determined the specific agenda for unity discussions. Theological differences, or more accurately differences in dogmatic practice, were: (1) whether the ceremony of laying on of hands on the newly baptized should be performed; (2) whether presbyters and deacons must be ordained; and (3) whether only an ordained presbyter was entitled Beginnings and Patterns 45 to conduct communion. The Evangelical Christians regarded all these practices as unnecessary. Baptists internationally also were not entirely agreed, since German Baptists emphasized the laying on of hands whereas the Evangelical Christians discovered that British Baptists did not follow this practice.*6 The leadership of the evangelicals was divided on organizational ques- tions. Ivan Prokhanov of the Evangelical Christians worked hard to unite Baptists and Evangelical Christians into one single union. Others felt that Prokhanov wanted to lead and dominate such a union and resisted. Baptist leaders, on the other hand, could not agree among themselves whether to have a centralized union or a federal structure which would allow much greater autonomy to the regional unions. In 1920 at the Baptist congress whose validity was challenged soon after, a reorganization of the Baptist Union was approved which introduced a centralized collegial leadership similar to that employed by the Communist Party. But the last Baptist congress in 1926 introduced a new constitution whereby the Baptists adopted a federated structure consisting of ten unions linked by a federal council. ®7 Although a unity agreement was reached in 1920 and signed by spokesmen from both sides, relations degenerated soon thereafter. By 1923 the