'Baptist Heritage in the New Millennium'
 

Who are the Baptists?
 

Germany and Eastern Europe
 

Both British and American influences assisted in Baptist expansion in Europe. Both eighteenth-century Pietism, which had attracted many people on the European continent, and the nineteenth-century Awakening stressed a more personal, devotional, Bible-centered life. The result was Bible study and prayer groups that traveling Baptist evangelists discovered or gathered together.

The most influential Continental evangelist was Johann Gerhard Oncken. Born in Germany and apprenticed to a Scottish merchant who took him to Britain, he was converted in a Methodist chapel. Then the Continental Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge sent him to Hamburg, Germany, to engage in evangelism and tract distribution.

Dissatisfied with conditions in the established Lutheran church, he considered the idea of a church comprised only of believers and found this to be biblical. Oncken contacted Bamas Sears, an American Baptist theological professor in Germany on study leave, who came to Hamburg, baptized him and six others in the Elbe River in 1834, and ordained him the pastor of a new Baptist church.

Oncken quickly established ties with the Triennial Convention, which appointed him as its agent and provided him with funds to support other workers in Germany. He traveled incessantly in his country and elsewhere and gathered born-again Christians into congregations based on believer’s baptism. He also journeyed to England and America on fund-raising trips.
Oncken’s missionary understanding of the priesthood of all believers impacted European Baptists. His famous phrase, “Every Baptist a missionary,” challenged many young men to follow his example. After he had won numerous skilled craftsmen to Christ, they traveled around Europe as journeymen working in their trades and spreading the gospel. Soon, several congregations existed in Germany and Denmark, and Oncken formed a Baptist union in 1849. He also created in Hamburg a training institute for lay evangelists which evolved into a seminary.

As evangelists went out from Germany, churches were formed in Switzerland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Although always under pressure, the churches in these countries grew and survived, even under Communist dictatorships. The German Baptists also thrived, but the Nazi regime (1933—1945) pressured them to unite with other small bodies to form the Union of Evangelical Free Churches, which remains their formal title.

American influence was strong in Sweden. Frederick 0. Nilsson was a Swedish sailor who became a Christian in New York and returned to his native land as a missionary of the Seamen’s Friend Society. In Goteborg, he met a sailor who won him to the Baptist position. Oncken baptized Nilsson in Hamburg, and he formed the first Baptist congregation in Sweden in 1848. Nilsson baptized Anders Wiberg, who later became the great Swedish Baptist leader. After Wiberg went to the United States and worked for the ABPS, he returned in 1855 with ABPS support, pastored the Baptist church in Stockholm, and wrote the first Swedish Baptist confession of faith.

In Russia and Ukraine, the Tsarist government allowed German-speaking evangelists to preach and form congregations among the Germans who had settled there and granted their churches legal recognition in 1879.

They maintained close ties with Hamburg; Oncken even visited them twice. But the authorities regarded ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians as Russian Orthodox and strictly prohibited their conversion to other confessions.
In spite of official opposition, an evangelical movement developed in the Ukraine, and in 1868—1870 the first ethnic Ukrainians were baptized. In 1863, in Tiflis, Georgia (Caucasus region), a German Baptist won to Christ the Russian merchant Nikita Voronin, who, in turn, formed a congregation. Voronin’s leading convert was Vassily Pavlov, whom he baptized and sent to Hamburg for training and ordination. Through Pavlov’s missionary work, the Baptists grew in numbers despite persecution, and the movements in the Ukraine and Caucasus joined together in 1884 as the Russian Baptist Union. Meanwhile, Ivan Prokhanov, an engineer in St. Petersburg, became a Baptist and founded the Union of Evangelical Christians in 1908, but the two bodies could not get together.

The Soviet government in the 1930s so persecuted all churches that Baptists almost disappeared, but Josef Stalin, wanting their support in the war against Nazi Germany, permitted those surviving in the two bodies to merge in 1944 as the Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. The freedom granted was very limited, and the Baptists split over whether to cooperate with the government by registering their churches. Since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Baptists in the successor states have formed separate unions and are vigorously evangelizing.
 

From: We Baptists by Study and Research Division, Baptist World Alliance, (Franklin Tn, Providence House Pub., 1999) pp 11-13.
 

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