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

for Baptist work at Tilsit and for Mollersvard’s baptism but was also the year of the conversion of Gottfried Alf (1831-1898), the founder of the Baptist work in the Kingdom of 3 For references to the Memel church as an ‘Antioch’, see Der Sendbote, 13 January 1892, p. 2, and A.H. Newman, A Century of Baptist Achievement (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1901), p. 128. 4 Baptist Missionary Magazine, July 1853, p. 307. Missionsblatt, August 1859, p. 130. 5 Baptist Missionary Magazine, September 1855, pp. 403-404. Evangelical Christendom, April 1855, p. 118. Alwar Sundell, De Borjade—Vi Fortsdtter: Baptismen I Finland 100 Ar, 1856-1956 (Vasa: Facklans Forlag, 1956), pp. 7-12. 6 Sundell, De Borjade, pp. 13-14. Baptist Work in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden (Stockholm: Baptistmissionens Bokforlag, 1947), pp. 28-32. Penetration of the Baptists into the Russian Empire of the Nineteenth Century 37 Poland, known also as Congress Poland. 7 8 Alf was twenty-two, a Lutheran of German extraction, and a school teacher, who in the absence of the parish pastor led the worship services. Without outside influence but through scripture and prayer, he came to trust fully by faith in Christ’s redemption. He began to preach, but the Lutheran authorities forbade his continued activity, which led to the loss of his teaching position and being banishment from his home, forcing him to leave with his wife and a baby son. Fortunately his father gave him land to make a living. He began to undertake mission trips and on one of them was seized and imprisoned for three days. Because of persecution from the Lutheran Church, he felt he must leave it, but where would he go? A settler from East Prussia told Alf about the Baptists in East Prussia, a denomination of which Alf knew nothing. After initial resistance, Alf was finally convinced of believer’s baptism and decided to become a Baptist. As a result, his father now took away the land he had given him, thus losing his livelihood a second time. He now moved to Adamowo, a small village north east of Warsaw. In November 1858, Wilhelm Weist from East Prussia crossed the border into Russia and baptized Alf and twenty-five others, and before his departure conducted several more baptisms. The believers in Adamowo were constituted as a station of the Stolzenberg Baptist Church in East Prussia but became an independent congregation in 1861, the first Baptist Church in Congress Poland. A second church at Kicin followed three weeks later. With the hope that he would not return, the authorities in 1859 granted Alf permission to study at Oncken’s mission school in Hamburg, Germany. Here he stayed for several months and was ordained, becoming the first ordained Baptist minister in the Russian Empire. Alf continued his work as an itinerant evangelist, holding meetings with Pentecostal fervour. He reached out primarily to the German minority, mostly composed of Luth