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His Grace Magazine!
August 2022
Churches wiped out!
400 Baptist Churches have been wiped out in Ukraine by the Russian Invasion
T
here have been hundreds of churches in the Ukraine that have been completely wiped out since Russia invaded the country that started almost six months ago, reported by the President of the Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary. Yaroslav Pyzh said that about "400 Ukrainian Baptist congregations have been lost" since the start of the war, that began on February 24. It's not only the churches that have been leveled to the ground, but the church leadership and congregations have been lost. Yaroslav said that volunteers are helping the people that have been helping the uprooted people fix their battered homes. The real challenge in all this is to rebuild the pastoral leadership in the war battered cities. Yaroslav said, "Since the war started, six months already, we lost about 400 Baptist churches. And
so the real build is the rebuilding of leadership capacity because if you rebuild buildings and you have no pastors to lead churches, I don't think it's going to do any good. So the real challenge is not so much rebuilding walls and windows and doors." He also said, "The real challenge is similar to Nehemiah challenge, the Bible story of Nehemiah. It's not only rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, it's rebuilding the nation of Israel, of worshiping God. That's the same thing here in Ukraine." Many pastors were forced out of the areas that had all the fighting. This left many areas without "godly hope,"
Yaroslav explained. The All Ukrainian Union of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists said, before the war started, there was 2,300 Baptist congregations in the country. Yaroslav said, "Our main challenge in the future, when the war will be over, is to bridge the gap in leadership that we lost. And sadly, the longer the war goes, the more the gap's going to be. The church is not buildings. It's people leaving the place and relocating to the United States, and with people relocating to Germany, or people relocating to other places. And with those people, pastors left too."
He also said that many of their pastors have decided to stay in their communities regardless of the war, and they are helping people by giving them much needed hope. "The biggest thing the community has in these moments of being destroyed and bombed is fear; it's hopelessness. And the only one who can relief and bring hope to the hopeless are pastors, churches and Christians." Yaroslav also noted that donations for all the centers have fallen off with the war nearing the end of six months. This led to the seminaries helping the centres more. UBTS is also giving students a no cost education during the war. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is accusing Russia of "deliberately and systematically destroying Ukrainian culture and its historical heritage." Some buildings had survived the battles of World War II.