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.