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

re: how are we to be good witnesses in our own land? Or, to use the way the Northumbria community poses the question, ‘How do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ 28 Our hymnal has recently grown as an appendix has been added. The selection of the songs will reflect more of the Lithuanian heritage as well as the gifts of brothers and sisters from around the world, from countries we are little familiar with. I am delighted that some buds of targetting the 27 ‘Dieve, prasom, Tu palaimink mus’ (original text P. Strauch), in Giesmin vainikas. No. 235. 28 This is one of the key concerns of the Northumbria Community. See their website, http://www.northumbriacommunity.org/. On Being Called-out Strangers in the Land 33 concrete ways of being the called-out people of God are present, such as in the song below which has been kindly given to us by the Iona Community: If I call you by name, will you help the blind to see? Will you help me to set a prisoner free? Will your heart dare even to kiss a lepper for healing, Even when no-one will see? Will you accept yourself as you are, if I call you by name? Will you see how precious and valuable you are to me? Will you share that which you believe So that others around you might be touched by my word and my look? 29 Answers to these, and other, questions will have to be found by each community itself, but I would hope that this from 1 Peter can be remembered: it will require a deep sense of being a chosen nation of strangers who live doing good so that God may be glorified. Then worship, being at the heart of any instance of the gathering of God’s people, will be about living out the future into which God calls them. Lina Andronoviene is Director of the Non-Residential Bible School of the Baptist Union of Lithuania, Course Leader in Applied Theology at IBTS and a member of the BWA Worship and Spirituality Commission. 29 Translation into Lithuanian by Nijole Latuziene. Original version ‘Will you come and follow me’, Words by Iona Community (John Bell and Graham Maule), can be found in many sources, e.g.. Baptist Praise and Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), No. 363. 34 Journal of European Baptist Studies Penetration of the Baptists into the Russian Empire in the Nineteenth Century At the mid-nineteenth century, Russia, covering almost eight million square miles and a population of seventy-three million, was a world empire. Its territory stretched in Europe from Poland and territories on the Baltic Sea, eastward across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, and then on to Alaska in North America. It also extended from the Arctic Sea in the north to the Black Sea and the Caucasus in the south. At this time the continental European Baptist movement was very young. Johann Gerhard Oncken (1800-1884), the father of Continental Baptists, established his first church in Hamburg, Germany, in 1834. The Oncken movement, in spite of p