‘Very sharp and full of... questions’

There are 1.5 million Ukrainians living in Germany. This is approximately 25% of those who have officially left Ukraine since the beginning of the recent conflict there.

The German government have been generous in their welcome and support for Ukrainians seeking to find a safe place to settle down. The generous financial safety net is helpful, but some have found themselves stuck on benefits, with their working lives on hold. For many Ukrainians their main western European language is English, which makes learning German yet another hoop to jump through to establish themselves.

Amongst this 1.5 million are tens of thousands of Christians who have gathered in churches. It was my privilege to connect with some of these Christians on the last weekend of June 2024.

Some Ukrainian church planters in Germany reached out to Victor Petrenko, the Director of the Latvian Biblical Centre asking for training for its preachers. The first gathering was in Kehl, a city in southern Germany on the Rhine, just a brief tram ride from Strasbourg in France.

There were three components to the weekend:

A one-day preaching conference offering the teaching from the first weekend of the School of Preachers training programme in Latvia. 40-50 attended from at least four churches in a 120-kilometre radius. It was a full day of teaching from 10-5, with 1.5 hours of lively Q and A to follow. We are now in discussion with the two main leaders, Timothy and Roman, about rolling out the whole two-year eight-part School of Preachers programme over the coming 18 months or so.

Sunday morning began with a breakfast gathering for ten leaders to talk more about the practicalities of preaching, and preaching training. It was impressive to find that these young men were very sharp and full of interesting questions.

On Sunday afternoon I preached at the Ukrainian Church, which meets in a German Free Evangelical Church in Kehl. One of the moving features of this service was a period of prayer that focused on seeking peace in Ukraine. Not all Ukrainian Christians are agreed on their attitude to the war or their readiness to drop everything and fight. As always with these situations life on the ground is always more complicated than it at first appears.