On November 10, 2009, Donetsk Christian University held a seminar on the history of the Russian Baptist movement. The participants of the seminar listened to and discussed the paper of history teacher Mary Raber on the theme of money taken from the pages of Baptist magazine for the period from 1905-1914.

Baptist was the first magazine of the Baptist Union, which was published even before the beginning of Soviet times. Dei Mazayev was its publisher. He was also the leader of the Russian Baptist Union and a very wealthy person of his time. The duration of its publication embraced the period from the first Russian revolution to the beginning of the First World War.

This period was a relatively peaceful time for the Baptist denomination as well as the time of its intensive formation in the eastern Slavic region. At that time, churches and unions were formed, churches were actively being built, and many social and charitable projects were initiated. It wasn’t surprising that the main motivation in regard to the issue of money and its usage was the importance of giving. The calls to offer money for different church and social needs often appeared in Baptist.

These offerings were supposed to bring unity to all the believers in the country and give them guidance, independent from the West, in establishing their own churches. In the pages of Baptist, we find edifying appeals of rich Christian women who rush to give away money for charitable purposes, since money would not do them any good in eternity anyway. From today’s perspective, these claims can be treated both as specific moral and spiritual instruction and they were remarkably forward-looking in light of the historical catastrophe that struck the Russian empire after 1917 when the wealthy in fact lost all of their riches.

Mary Raber’s paper encouraged many interesting questions about priorities in giving, tithing, “pure” and “impure” money and about the power relationships between givers and receivers both in churches and in the society as a whole. All these topics showed how much the issue of money remains important today. This is a very important issue in the spiritual life of the Christian. To understand better what’s going on now, we need to keep turning to the historical experience of our ancestors.

The materials of the seminar are in the process of publication by DCU.