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

f the early Anabaptist hymnbook, the Ausbund. Book Reviews 53 Further perspectives are offered by Nathan Nettleton, who explores ritual and narrative structure in worship. Nathan Nettleton is an innovative pastor at South Yarra Community Baptist Church in Melbourne, Australia. From the USA, John D. Erickson, former pastor of the Brickyard Bible Church, Chicago, and a visiting lecturer at the Evangelical Theological Seminary, Osijek, Croatia, examines preaching as worship. Finally Tony Peck, the General Secretary of the EBF and the chair of the committee on worship and music at the BWA Congress in 2005, uses his unique position in Europe, and his considerable expertise, to look at music in European Baptist worship. His title, ‘Music which gives the heart most play’, drawn from a comment attributed to C.H. Spurgeon in which he advocated such music, in itself says something about Baptist worship. For Baptists true worship has never been a matter only of the externals; it has always had to do with the heart. Compared with a number of other denominations, Baptists have produced a rather limited amount of substantial writing on worship within our tradition. This is not because worship has been unimportant; indeed the commitment to freedom from imposed worship patterns was one of the reasons for the emergence and development of the Free Church tradition. But much Baptist worship, seen in this volume as an expression of ‘first- order theology’, has not been given sustained ‘second-order’ theological attention. Where that has been done, it has often been done only in one cultural-geographical context. It is its cross-cultural analysis of worship and its determined connecting of ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ Baptist theology in this particular area that makes this such a valuable and exciting volume. The Revd Dr Ian Randall Senior Research Fellow, IBTS Rollin G. Grams and Parush R. Parushev, eds. Towards an Understanding of European Baptist Identity: Listening to the Churches in Armenia, Bulgaria, Central Asia, Moldova, North Caucasus, Omsk Region and Poland Mapping Baptist Identity Series, Volume 2 IBTS, Prague, 196 pp. Another statistical analysis? Not quite. This work, undertaken by staff and associates of IBTS, has a clear agenda that is not centred on figures and ratios. True, a good part of the book, possibly 50%, is given over to 54 Journal of European Baptist Studies painstaking analysis of a questionnaire offered to samples of Christians, from central Europe to central Asia, all within the European Baptist Federation (EBF) catchment area. But there’s an ideological and profoundly theological reasoning behind the methodology. This is an early expression of a deliberate and exciting project, seeking to engage in theology in a way that is both Baptist and post foundational: baptistic theology. Here we find a profound confidence in the testimony of scripture at the heart o