Upstairs, four college students sift through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery strips of wallpaper, occasionally landing on treasure; a dusty matchbox or crinkled movie poster; delicate bird skulls; a Hello Dolly vinyl; a bottle of liquor half-full. When they come across a roll of film, they hold it up to the window, angling it toward the sunlight to reveal faded images. Most of it is porn. The boys joke, “What kind of movie theatre was this place?” 

Downstairs, people of all ages are drilling holes and hauling branches into large red containers in the front yard. They are all far from home, here in Gummersbach, Germany. There are the eight Americans who signed up for a mission trip with First Baptist Church (FBC), a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee. And there are the 20-or-so Ukrainians affiliated with Almaz Church, who have shown up on this dreary grey Wednesday to help out. All are intent on transforming this abandoned, cavernous theatre – still displaying signs for Indiana Jones 4 in its ticket booth – into a church. 

Among them is Almaz Church’s leader, Pastor Nikolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. Among the wreckage, you might find him wielding an electric floor-grinder, sparks flying behind him, or else quietly circulating to ensure everyone has a task. 

He spent a year praying to find a space like this. “I believe that God gave us [a] unique opportunity to buy this cinema,” he said. 

The future church would serve the community of Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, estimated by Skopych to number 3000 individuals. This is just one of 64 Ukrainian Churches which have been “planted” in Germany since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. Overall, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe since 2022, according to Almaz’ website. 

American missionaries have played a significant role in establishing and growing these churches. Michael McClanahan, head of missions at FBC in Tennessee, expressed his hope that this mission, and those like it, will extend beyond Gummersbach. “This will be a central training hub,” he said. “It will be an opportunity, not only for Ukrainian churches to be expanded, but also, I feel that this is the beginning of a revival of Christianity in Europe.” 

Though American evangelicals have flip-flopped in their views on Ukraine, often echoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s stances, the war is transforming the relationship between Ukrainian and American evangelicals, revealing the extent to which the groups are religiously and politically intertwined. In the U.S., American evangelicals have welcomed Ukrainian refugees into their home churches; a group of American evangelical missionaries has already begun  planning for the end of the war, preparing to dramatically increase mission trips to serve Ukraine’s post-war population. At the same time, churches like Almaz in Germany are revealing that the relationship between these nationalities is not confined to their respective countries — America and Ukraine — but is now seeping into Europe, where over 6 million Ukrainian refugees have fled and resettled. 

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“EUROPE NEEDS NEW MISSIONS AND NEW CHURCHES,” reads the bolded text on a Ukrainian Missional Movement (UMM) Powerpoint. Pastor Nickolas Skopych presented it last April to the FBC congregation on his visit to Hendersonville, Tennessee, urging members to join the effort to grow and establish Baptist churches across Europe.

Pastor Nickolas grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who did not believe in God. At 18, feeling disillusioned and aimless, he stumbled across a few American evangelical missionaries on the street distributing brochures about Christianity. 

“I took [the brochures] because we didn’t have literature about Christianity. It was impossible to have the Bible, or New Testament,” Skopych explained. These brochures changed the trajectory of his life, infusing it with new meaning. “I take this brochure, and read it, and think about life. I understand that the very high meaning of life, I can only find with God,” he said. “It helped me.”

At the time, in the 1990s, American missionaries were becoming an increasingly common sight in Kyiv’s streets. Many American evangelicals, unable to speak Ukrainian or Russian, spent their holidays traveling to Ukraine, where they would publicly mime scenes from the bible. 

When Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State travelled to Ukraine for dissertation research, she pivoted topics when she realized the ubiquity of American evangelism in Ukraine. “Every single place I looked, I was sitting next to some missionary who was coming to Ukraine to engage in church planting,” she recalled. 

Church planting is the process of establishing a new Christian congregation in a community or region, typically involving evangelism and discipleship. In the 18th century, early religious movements were fueled by church planting in the United States. The term comes with a host of associations and understandings, not all of them positive. Wanner explained that during the Soviet period it was demonized as a bearer of American capitalism, but is now associated with democracy and the “valiant provision of humanitarian assistance,” Wanner said.  

This “small sea” of Evangelicals, as Wanner put it, shared a premise that “former Soviet citizens had been deprived of religion and were godless and wanted knowledge of the Bible and of God, and needed to create church communities.”

This message struck a chord with Pastor Nickolas and lasted. Decades later, having become a Pastor of the Almaz church in Ukraine, Pastor Nickolas was visiting a friend in Gummersbach. It was during that visit that Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the Skopych family stranded in Germany. Hundreds of Almaz’s congregants followed, bringing their friends and family members with them. 

In March, 2025, Skopych met Bruce Chesser, the senior pastor of FBC. Chesser was on a visit to Germany seeking a “native, German-speaking” church with which to collaborate. But when he met Skopych, he was so moved by the Ukrainian pastor’s story that he changed course. A few months later, he returned with the head of church missions, who was similarly compelled by the family’s story. And a year after that, eight Americans from FBC found themselves in Gummersbach, stripping wallpaper from the walls of an abandoned theatre, trading Indiana Jones out for a house of worship.

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