Faith under fire

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, February 24th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a pastor who stayed.

Today marks four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

When Moscow’s forces crossed the border in 2022, many local pastors fled and didn’t return. But today, the story of a pastor who stayed—even as Russian forces advanced on his town.

EICHER: Here’s WORLD correspondent Caleb Welde with a story on an evangelical church in Romny, just 60 miles from the front.

CALEB WELDE: Yoryslav Yaroshenko knows he’s a special target.

YAROSHENKO: History said that from 2014, the first people who was killed by Russian soldiers, it was, it was pastors and their children.

Still, the morning of the 2022 invasion, the first thing the pastor did was drive towards Russia. 

Yoryslav’s brothers, their wives, and their children lived just 20 miles from the Russian border in a town called Sumy.

YAROSHENKO: And when we go out from Sumy, like, maybe 10 or 15 kilometers, my friends called me from Sumy and say that Russian troops are in Sumy, and they fighting inside the town.

The Russians were presumably ten minutes behind them. Pastor Yoryslav brought his brothers to Romny—just sixty miles west of Sumy. He needed to get them and 32 members of his church further west.

YAROSHENKO: We call all our church members and say them what to do, and say them that you have time to evacuate right now.

Yorysalv’s wife Ira spent hours that morning trying to withdraw cash from an ATM to pay for gas and anything else the church members might need.

YAROSHENKO: Because we understand that this is the time when we need to serve people more than anyone else.

Amid the sound of more explosions, Yoryslav asks his wife Ira to evacuate too.

YAROSHENKO: But she said, "I'm your wife, and if you choose to stay here, and suffer for the people of the church, I will still, I will stay with you. I will not leave you."

He said this remains the most powerful moment in their relationship.

YAROSHENKO: And in that moment I feel like big warm inside of me, because I know that she will not leave me alone. We will be together in good or bad situation, in peace or in war we are together, and she is with me.

Eight members of the congregation decided to stay in Romny. Their decision had implications.

YAROSHENKO: If I can't evacuated all people from the church and from my town, I can't leave it, because this is my responsibility.

But Yoryslav says their decision was understandable. That it was incredibly stressful and hard to make big decisions in that moment. Plus, several of the church members were older and had only ever lived in Romny.

YAROSHENKO: …to find new place, to find new people without friends on the western Ukraine, so you can come on the place you don't know, with no money, to the people you don't know. You even don't know, will someone receive you or not? Will someone help you or not?

That first night in Romney, in every direction around Yoryslav and Ira, the sky was lit up orange from fires and explosions. The couple decided it’d be safer to move into the church. It had thicker walls and was further from the main road. 

By 7 the next morning, it was clear the window to leave had closed.

YAROSHENKO: There was 28 tanks, eight helicopters…

By 10, the town was surrounded.

YAROSHENKO: They put checkpoint there and there.

News spread fast about the checkpoints.

YAROSHENKO: They just killing people on the checkpoints. Just stop them and kill them. Even on this point that I will show you right now, they stopped a taxi and killed the driver. Without reason. Just, just, just killed her.

With the town locked down, the food they’d stored up was the food they had. But then, people began asking for the food and spreading the word the pastor was sharing. 

But Pastor Yoryslav says it wasn’t really a question whether or not they’d share.

YAROSHENKO: We believe that God will provide us in every situation. That's why we share with them all we have.

Five people also move into the church with them.

YAROSHENKO: We was lived in one, in only in one room, all together, because it was safety, it was emotionally easy, because you understand that some people are around you, and also because we have cameras on our church and the screen in in this room so we can see outside, what, what is happening outside.

But food is running out. Three weeks in, they’re down to a few pounds of flour and some buckwheat. They have no idea that while they pray, a church hundreds of miles west of them is filling jars with ready to eat borscht and meat and buckwheat. 

They also don’t know a Christian man has decided to try to get through the Russian checkpoints to deliver the food.

YAROSHENKO: So we eat everything, and the next day, first humanitarian aid came to our church.

It’d be another month before troops liberated Romny. And still today the war continues outside Yoryslav’s doorstep. Many of the four-hundred pound drones headed for Kyiv fly low over his house. Also, much of his own town is hostile to him because he’s an evangelical. The Soviets saw evangelicals as a dangerous cult and many people in Romny still believe them. 

The weekend I’m there, there’s machine gun fire out the window at night and Sunday morning, explosions during church.

YAROSHENKO: As for me, when I will come to the heaven, I want to see Jesus Christ, who will say, "I know him."

Until then, Pastor Yorysalv says his job is to stay at his post.

For WORLD, I’m Caleb Welde.

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