Rebuilding & Pioneering Under Fire: A Report from Ukraine

By the SL Ukraine Team

The first explosion makes the 25-story hotel shake. And it’s just the first. Without any preliminary, the next message in the chat is also from Taras: “Are you fine? There will be more, more missiles are coming in.” Over the next four hours, the missiles come in waves: ballistic missiles, which make a bone-snapping crack over a brain-bursting thud; cruise missiles, which cause Taras to message, “You may want to get on the floor on the other side of window”; cassette missiles, which detonate into many metal balls to execute maximum damage; and, of course, drones—the insinuating purr just above the window, just on the edge of hearing, just loud enough to make the skin crawl and just soft enough to make one wonder if it’s real. But it is. Machine guns crack as Ukrainian brigades try to shoot them down, and the noise of traffic in the street below accelerates—not Ubers or late-night revelers returning home, of course, but the mobile brigades trying to keep us all alive. “Machine gunners missed it, it passed further,” Taras messages.

The above paragraph retells one of the nights the SL team – Taras Dyatlik, Christopher Hays, Evan Hunter, and Evelyn Reynolds – endured in Kyiv in August. It was just one night for the three of us who are U.S.-based but a horribly common experience for our Ukrainian friends. 

We had traveled to Ukraine to spend a week listening to how our partners there are living with Gospel hope during days and nights like the one described above. Our time began with the heads of the three applied research projects that SL has supported for two-and-a-half years. Addressing the concerns of the Ukrainian Church during the full-scale Russian war – Citizenship, Reconciliation, and Disability – these research groups are equipping Ukrainian Christians to think about how to be good citizens of a nation at war, how to pursue forgiveness, and how to care for the wounded. 

The extraordinary productivity achieved by these scholars has, astonishingly, resulted in their institutions being stronger now than they were before the war. In fact, they are collaborating to launch the first evangelical PhD program in Eastern Europe, based at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary but drawing on the faculty of Odessa Theological Seminary and the Eastern European Institute of Theology. They aim to begin the program in 2026. We are thrilled to partner with them so that, for the first time, Eastern European evangelicalism will be able to sustain the entire lifecycle of Christian formation, from lay training to the development of professors who will raise up the next generations of pastors, chaplains, and Christian counselors.

The execution of this ambitious dream depends on the tenacity of Ukrainians to continue to rebuild not only the hearts of those traumatized by war but also the physical fabric of their communities. One example of this rebuilding is the new theological library at Tavriski Christian Institute, which SL shipped across the ocean to enable TCI to replace the library that the Russians burned when they occupied Kherson in February 2022. At the end of our visit, we were overjoyed to see 25,000 + books now filling the shelves of TCI’s new library in Kyiv.

Our Ukrainian friends have done incredibly fruitful work as they labor with heroic faithfulness in the context of outrageous evil, and we look forward to continuing to walk with them as they seek not only to restore what was damaged but to pursue what has never been achieved before. We trust that God’s presence continues to shine in the midst of this darkness.