Faith under fire

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 19th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: persecution in Ukraine.

Russia’s partial occupation of Ukraine has taken a toll on the entire country. But it’s been especially hard for Christians not aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church.

REICHARD: Ukrainian evangelicals share Western values of free speech, freedom of assembly, and obedience to God before government. In Russia’s eyes, that makes them a threat to state control. And in the parts of the country Russia now occupies, they face targeted persecution.

EICHER: Many evangelical Christians who once lived near the Russian border have found refuge in western Ukraine. WORLD Correspondent Will Fleeson recently met with one pastor and his wife who fled Kharkiv as Russian tanks rolled toward the city.

AUDIO: [Sound of air raid siren]

WILL FLEESON: Around 4 a.m. on February 27th, 2022, Vasyl Agarkov and his wife Viktoria woke up to the sound of explosions.

VASYL: So and we walk out because, like, we have, like, red sky, because Russians start bombing our city, and they bombing, like near to our house and our windows and all building was shaken, yeah.

Like many other Kharkiv residents, the couple had made plans to evacuate. No one wanted to live under Russia’s thumb. But the Agarkovs had even more reason to fear.

VIKTORIA: In Ukraine we have freedom of speech, we have freedom of religion, and we have freedom of faith like but when Russia comes and when Russia occupies, they kill the pastors, especially the Protestant.

According to a report from the Christian advocacy group Mission Eurasia, Russia has killed nearly four dozen Ukrainian religious leaders since the start of the war.

Nearly half of the victims were evangelical or other Protestant believers. That’s a big number, since only two and a half percent of Ukrainians are Protestant.

Viktoria had lived through one Russian invasion already—in Crimea.

VIKTORIA: I lived there under occupation for two months, and then I decided to evacuate.

That was in 2014. What happened then taught Ukrainian Christians valuable lessons about what was to come.

VIKTORIA: If you live under Russian occupation, you need to realize that, concerning your Christian faith, you will return, like, to Soviet Union. If we stay there, we will be persecuted, like we would need to hide and we would need to decrease our ministry to minimum, because it's almost impossible.

That’s what happened in Donetsk, where Vasyl has a friend in ministry.

VASYL: And what he said, he said, Like almost all churches for now, the pastors were killed or persecuted because of the their Christianity, faith, and couple of them for now, they exist like in the early churches. They try to hide in where they meet, yeah, underground.

Even if they survived the invasion, the Agarkovs knew they probably wouldn’t be allowed to continue their ministry to university students in Kharkiv.

So the couple fled west to Lviv—along with thousands of others. A drive that normally took 13 hours stretched to 36.

VASYL: We have planned why we going to Lviv, because in Lviv we have our Presbyterian Church. So we decide to be going to the city, the farthest from the Russian border and that city, which has our church, Presbyterian Church.

Once they settled into their new home, Viktoria transitioned from student ministry to what she calls “war ministry.”

VIKTORIA: So we've been helping a lot of soldiers and people who live either close to the war zones or like at the front lines.

Vasyl began preaching and teaching.

VASYL: So I started to do this Bible study, and we have dinner together and study Psalms together, and psalms of lament and psalms of grace. And it's really helped to understand our emotional stuff and to understand how God see this war, this unjust and unfair war. So it's helped, yeah.

But the war put everything else on hold, including their plans to start a family.

VIKTORIA: For three years we've been living kind of like, oh, I wake up today. Oh, thank god. I'm gonna live this day and I'm not gonna, yeah, I'm not gonna think about tomorrow.

Finally they decided they didn’t want to wait any more.

VIKTORIA: In the beginning we were like, oh, maybe we're gonna have kids when the war is over, and now we're like, nobody knows when the war is over. Maybe it's gonna go on for 10 years, for 20.

And the number of children who need homes keeps growing.

VIKTORIA: So we were told that within these three years, the number of orphans in Ukraine doubled. And we were thinking that, you know, it's a good time to start the process.

So at the beginning of this year, they applied to adopt.

SOUND: [Agkarov children]

Five months later, the family’s apartment is full of life. Four rambunctious boys clamor for attention—and dinner.

VASYL: We believe in God who is care for orphans and widows, uh, and, we saw this evil on this war. And we think about how, what is our answer? How, how we can answer to this evil in in Ukraine?

VIKTORIA: How we can reduce people's suffering, yeah, like that was the biggest issue for us, yeah, because it's really heartbreaking.

Starting a family is one way to fight back against the evils of war. Starting churches is another.

VIKTORIA: We really want Ukraine, you know, have more churches. So people can go not only Orthodox or Catholic church, but also can go to church where they can hear the gospel and hear what the Bible says.

Right now, Ukraine has just two Reformed Presbyterian churches. Vasyl dreams of having many, all over the country.

VASYL: They try to kill and destroy Christians and destroy churches. And we think about planting churches, so it's like our response to this evil. And we believe like when gospel is proclaimed and when people became a Christian, our nations can and will be resurrected because of Jesus, Christ, and we will have hope even in dark times.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Will Fleeson in Lviv, Ukraine.

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