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

s and Stassen and Gushee’s work in ‘East and West: A Theological Conversation’, Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2000, pp. 31-44. 26 Journal of European Baptist Studies style and vocabulary of worship compared to a Russian-speaking church on the other side of the country. Ethnicity, clearly, is but a parcel of the identity that makes each church a distinct (sub)culture of its own. I have gradually learned to enjoy our diversity, especially since we started to regularly meet for the sessions of NEBIM, our Union’s Non- residential Bible School. This is where I have acquired a deeper grasp of the diversity that exists among us, hearing some of the stories and seeing students grappling with some of the shaping factors accounting for what their respective churches have grown to be. One of the issues that has kept re-emerging in our lectures and discussions is that of defining ourselves in relation to, or over against, those next to us—those with whom we share many aspects of life but not our practice of the church: our context; the society in which we live and breathe; the social order we partake of. Thus, in the following pages, I would like to take a look at some of the key aspects of Lithuanian Baptist spirituality as it relates to the calling to be the people of God. I will take for a companion a biblical text and will also employ one of the central elements of the practice of worship: that of singing . 5 My hope is that using the Lithuanian Baptist story as a case study might help trigger reflection on the contexts of the readers. Admittedly, there would be some additional dynamics involved for the Russian- and Latvian- speaking Baptists , 6 yet our context in Lithuania can still largely be defined by the social, political and identity role that the Catholic Church has played for the nation, even though it begins to change, quite rapidly, into something resembling post-Christian societies of the West. Nevertheless, for many years, our main struggle of identity has been that of our not-being-Catholic—and therefore not being properly Lithuanian. The accusation has been helped in certain ways by our reinforcing of that non-belonging. Lor instance, only a couple of the songs in our hymnal are actually of Lithuanian origin; all others have been translated, mostly from English, German, or Russian, alongside the n respective music of the original version. This is striking on two accounts. 5 Some of these reflections follow an article in which I began to explore the role of the first-order theology of songs within the European Baptist framework. ‘As Songs Turn into Life and Life into Songs: On the First-Order Theology of Baptist Hymnody’, published in Keith G. Jones and Parush R. Parushev, eds. Currents in Baptistic Theology of Worship Today (Prague: IBTS, 2007), pp. 129-141. 6 1 will concentrate here on the Baptist communities of Lithuanian ethnicity, yet would like to keep other c