At first glance, a youth group in Almaz Church looks like any other gathering of young evangelicals: teenagers in flannels and hoodies lounging around a table, snacking on chips and discussing how God has touched them in their lives. Almaz’s services, too, have a familiar bent, with off-key worship music and hands raised in swaying prayer.
But these are not ordinary evangelicals. Almaz is a Baptist congregation in Germany, a country where the denomination accounts for only about 1 percent of the population. The congregants are Ukrainians who have fled the full-scale invasion, and in youth group, the teens and 20-somethings swap stories of this relative or that cousin had been saved from a drone or a missile strike thanks to God’s hand.
Almaz is located in Gummersbach, an unassuming town of 50,000 in Western Germany home to a steadily growing population of Ukrainian refugees (about 3,000, I was told repeatedly on a recent visit, although the town has not released official census figures since 2022). Since the full-scale invasion, the church, and other evangelical Ukrainian congregations in the United States and Germany, have seen a significant influx of young people into the faith.
The reasons for this religious transmission vary. For a refugee family, evangelical churches like Almaz are sometimes the only Ukrainian cultural centers available. There’s also some amount of lingering resentment with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, perceived to be overly staid and reliant on tradition. But above all else, the teachings of Baptism and other evangelical denominations have legitimate resonance for young Ukrainians trying to make sense of the war and their displacement.
“It was helpful for me to believe that God [could] control a situation in my country, in my city, my family, in my church, in my life,” said Martin Skopych, one of Almaz’s youth group leaders and the son of the church’s pastor.
