Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 7, No. 3, 2007

e are Russian-speaking and, close to the Northern border, we have a church that mostly consists of those of Latvian background. Being a small Union, it hardly makes it a more homogenous body compared to the larger unions. The smaller the association or the church, the greater seems the ambition to emphasise the distinctives. This is much evident when it comes to Sunday worship services as they—whether consciously or as the matter of accepted pattern of things—reflect the heart of congregational identity. 3 ‘The way we do things’ represents our underlying convictions which govern our individual as well as community life, 4 thus necessitating the demonstration of those convictions in specific patterns of worship. Another interesting point to note is that the churches of the same ethno/linguistic making still can be very different, even when they represent a minority group. To provide an example, a Russian-speaking congregation on the coast would have appropriated a rather different music 1 This paper was first presented in the BWA Worship and Spirituality Commission meeting during the BWA Annual Gathering in Mexico City, Mexico, July 2006. It is published here with some adaptations. 2 The best demonstration of that is the fact that the Baptist Union of Lithuania does not contain all congregations in Lithuania that call themselves Baptist or identify themselves with a Baptist movement. After the fall of the Soviet regime, as a result of the activity of missionaries from abroad, mostly from the USA, a number of Baptist churches has been established. Whereas one of those churches has joined the Baptist Union, most others keep little relationship with this body. The numbers are difficult to provide, as most of those independent Baptist churches are critical of ‘Unions’ (and thus instead have formed an informal alliance of independent Baptist congregations), but it should be safe to expect them to be up to 600. 3 See an insightful reflection of the nature and purpose of worship by David F. Ford and Daniel W. Hardy, Living in Praise: Worshipping and Knowing God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), esp. pp. 68 ff. They helpfully point out how much of the developments of the doctrines have their roots in worship, and how the later separation of the two has wrought many an illness on the body of Christ. 4 ‘Convictions’ here are employed to mean those deep-seated beliefs that serve as the grounding force for human motivations, as suggested and defined by James Wm. McClendon, Jr., and James M. Smith, Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975) (Rev. Ed. published as Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994)), chap. 4. See Glen H. Stassen and David P. Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), chap. 3, and Parush R. Parushev’s elaboration on McClendon and Smith’