Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists of Russia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists of Russia is part of the large family of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, a Protestant evengelical movement which began in the Russian Empire, in the midst of the Orthodox establishment. It originally attracted peasants, urban artisans, lower military, ethnic minorities.

The movement had various sources. The presence of the Old Believers opened the space for different forms of Christianity in Russian society. A key moment came in 1867, when Nikita Isaevich Voronin was baptized in the Kura river in Tbilisi, Caucasus, in present-day Georgia. German Mennonites in Ukraine and Lutherans in the Baltic coast, started a revival, named "Stundist", which led to the formation of churches composed by adult-baptized believers. Vasily Pashkov, a retired army colonel in St Petersburg, introduced the evangelical message in the upper classes in the city, adhering to the principles of the Plymouth Brethren and later would emerge in the Union of the Evangelical Christians in All-Russia.

In 1944 the Union of Evangelical Christians and the Russian Baptist Union became the All-Union of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists, and later added the Pentecostals by government pressure.

The UECB is multiethnic, consisting of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, Latvians, Armenians, Georgians, Ossets, Moldavians, Chuvashes, Komi, and other nationalities. There are about 2,000 congregations and 500,000 adherents through Russia and about 100,000 sympathizer abroad.