Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

Siberian and Far Eastern departments were not represented and so the congress was subsequently challenged as unrepresentative.'5 The joint congress scheduled for the following year (1921) could not be held due to the imprisonment of Prokhanov and possibly to other state interference. At the January 1920 meeting of the ten-man committee to plan the unity conference, participants encountered numerous difficulties. The Civil War provided its tensions, the weather was cold, the building was insuffi- ciently heated, it was difficult to obtain transportation to Petrograd, and a number of participants failed to obtain travel permission from the state. Of those who managed to attend, only two were not Petrograd residents, and one of them, Baptist leader P. V. Pavlov, managed to get to Petrograd only on the third day of the meetings. The historian of the Evangelical Chris- tians, Wilhelm Kahle, remarked: “Such working conditions and the absence or late arrival of participants . . . are important factors in answering the question why unity negotiations took so long, and why they had to be begun anew so often, why points which had been settled by a small circle of participants re-emerged as points of discussion for others.” ! Why Unity Failed Unity was almost achieved in 1920 but failed for several reasons. In ad- dition to the fact that Prokhanov’s imprisonment in Tver hindered the planned unity congress in 1921, the Baptists suffered from internal conflicts since Mazaev supporters had circulated a letter in June 1921 which stated that in the south there were unions of Baptists who wanted nothing to do with the Baptist leadership in Moscow.!7 Prokhanov had made public the details of the union agreement in the new union newspaper that was launched, but some Baptists objected to this because the agreement still lacked official approval from the respective unions. Other Baptists felt that the points of the agreement gave Evangelical Christians the advantages. In any case, both in this agreement and in subsequent contracts regulating a Bible school and the coordination of relief work, the two groups displayed considerable distrust of each other. The reasons why earlier unity efforts failed helps to explain the nature of the union that emerged in 1944. Three theological issues were regularly A New Evangelical Union 83 discussed and appeared again as separate points in the 1944 act of union. These were the disagreements on baptism, communion, and the ordination and significance of the clerical office. Very early the Evangelical Christians, due especially to Prokhanov’s Baptist origins, came to accept believer 's bap- tism. But there was less agreement on the laying on of hands on new church members, Communion must be administered by an ordained presbyter, ac- cording to the Baptists, whereas the Evangelical Christians placed little em- phasis on the clerical office. 9 Although the articulated differences were t