“Culturally, Georgian Baptists have always been Orthodox,” writes Malkhaz Songulashvili in this pathbreaking book (191). Songulashvili, former archbishop of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia and a British-trained scholar of comparative theology, recounts here the history of the Baptist faith among Georgians—a traditionally Orthodox people and the second-oldest Christian nation in Europe. He presents a remarkable story of the emergence of a unique Georgian Baptist identity, one that incorporates many Orthodox cultural forms, including the wearing of clerical vestments, more elaborate liturgy than is typical of Baptist worship, and the use of iconography and incense. The study is based on the archives of the Evangelical Christian Baptists in Georgia, published documents of the movement, and some oral history, interpreted through the author's vast knowledge of theology and the sociology of religion, and to some extent, his personal experience. His goal is to provide “theological reflections on missiology that arise out of the historical account” (xvii).

Songulashvili traces the story of the Baptist movement in Georgia from its appearance in the 1860s to the present. This small country in the Caucasus, and especially its capital Tbilisi, had a highly multiethnic population for most of this period, and the Baptists reflected this, with Russian-, German-, Armenian-, Ossetian-, and Georgian-speaking congregations active over time. He correctly notes the cosmopolitanism of Tbilisi as a factor in that city's emergence as a center of spiritual ferment in the mid-nineteenth century. The first Baptist congregation there formed among ethnic Germans in the early 1860s, and by 1867 the first ethnic Russian Baptist was baptized. However, it was only in 1919 that the first small congregation of Georgian Baptists, who are Songulashvili's focus, was formed. Songulashvili nevertheless devotes a lengthy chapter to this period, identifying a characteristic “catholicity and apostolicity” that, he implies, would remain a feature of Baptist practice in the region over the long run (82). He rightly points to the preservation of certain practices of the Molokan tradition from which the first Russian Baptists came; he is on less firm ground when he argues, based on a draft document for reorganization of the Russian congregation in the 1890s (one that does not appear to have been implemented), that one can see a “tendency to merge Western and Eastern Christian traditions” (83).

The real heart of the study is Songulashvili's account of the development of a distinctive Georgian Baptist tradition in the Soviet and, especially, post-Soviet periods. Several important themes emerge: the pioneering work of Baptists in the drive to translate the Bible into modern Georgian, the important role of women in Georgian Baptist ministry, the emergence of tensions with Russian Baptists over the cultural expression of the Baptist faith as the ranks of ethnic Georgian Baptists grew rapidly from the late 1950s, and an openness to ecumenical dialogue with the Georgian Orthodox Church. Especially fascinating is Songulashvili's analysis of the extraordinary ecumenical dialogue and, indeed, co-operation in the translation of the Bible, initiated in the late 1970s by the Catholicos Patriarch of Georgia Ilia II. Although it was not implemented, participants in this discussion produced a unique document in Orthodox-Baptist dialogue, revealing a remarkable effort to find common ground on fundamental issues such as baptism, the Eucharist, icons, and the relationship between religion and national aspirations. Songulashvili argues that such successful dialogue was made possible by the fact that, during the formative period of the Georgian Baptist tradition (1919–1960), Georgian Baptists did not experience oppression from the dominant Orthodox Church, since all religions were oppressed by the Soviet state; thus, they did not develop the antagonism towards Orthodoxy typical of their Russian brethren and, rather, treated the Orthodox as potential allies. These Soviet-era discussions would underpin the generally remarkably friendly relationship, despite a period of nationalism in the 1990s, between Baptist and Orthodox churches in Georgia in the 2000s.

In the post-Soviet era, the Georgian Baptists, cut loose from the Russian-dominated Soviet-era Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, launched a dynamic program of evangelism centered on social missions to the underprivileged and to refugees on the one hand and on a radical reform in the liturgical life of the Baptist community on the other. Here, Songulashvili provides a valuable account of the challenges and opportunities the post-communist era has provided. He argues that Georgian Baptists' adaptation of many traditional Georgian religious practices to a Baptist theology represents a unique missiological approach, one that highlights the failure of most discussions of Christian mission to address the question of beauty and to explore the relationship between liturgy and mission in theological investigation.

For the historian, this is at once a fascinating and a frustrating book. The author's field is missiology rather than history, and the first section in particular, dealing with the emergence and development of evangelicalism in Georgia from the 1860s to the 1940s, seems to focus on a few select documents that the author uses to set up the themes of the later chapters of the book but without effectively contextualizing them, often leading to a failure to demonstrate historical connections and, indeed, to outright errors. Although he mentions competing views (for example, regarding the adoption of some Georgian cultural traditions rooted in Orthodoxy), he does not explore debates among Georgian Baptists. The lively scholarly literature in English of the past twenty years on religion in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, with its important arguments about the relationship between the state and Orthodoxy and about the condition and impact of religious dissenters, is almost completely overlooked. Similarly, he is uninterested in recent research on the nationalities issue (in particular the Soviet indigenization policy of the 1920s, a critical context for the figure of Ilia Kandelaki on whom he focuses), on evangelical Protestantism in the USSR and the post-Soviet period, and on the evolution of religious or antireligious policy during and after World War II. By contrast, the analysis comes alive in areas where his theoretical and methodological strengths lie—in questions of liturgy, mission, theology, and ecclesiology. His analysis of Baptist rituals in the Georgian space across time is particularly interesting.

The strength of this book—Songulashvili's intense personal engagement in the effort to create a Baptist church rooted in Georgian cultural identity—is thus also its weakness. Nevertheless, this is a helpful introduction to a fascinating free church tradition and an extraordinary experiment in culturally sensitive mission. A substantial appendix offering translations of seventeen interesting documents (including a couple of rare oral history transcripts) further adds to the value of this book for English-speaking students and scholars of evangelicalism, of world Christianities, religion in the Russian and Soviet empires, of religious life and politics in the post-Soviet space, or ecumenicism.