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 their lives. 

 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. 

Their devotion is especially striking because many of them did not grow up Baptist, or religious at all. But since the full-scale invasion, Almaz, and Ukrainian evangelical churches across Germany, have seen a significant influx of young refugee converts who hope the faith will help them make sense of the war.

“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.

[TK three-four character grafs from Wednesday interview with Almaz-adjacent congregant who got baptized in January]

There are other reasons for this transmission. For a refugee family, evangelical churches like Almaz are sometimes the only Ukrainian cultural centers available. This is the case in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town of 50,000 people, where Almaz has put down roots to serve a growing refugee population (Gummersbach now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022). In Almaz’s Telegram, alongside posts for prayers or church events, community members also advertise couches for sale and cheer for Ukraine’s national soccer team.

These young people also have some amount of lingering resentment with the dominant Ukrainian Orthodox Church, perceiving it to be overly staid and reliant on tradition “you must be holy,” Lisa, another Ukrainian girl I met in Gummersbach, told me. But above all else, the teachings of Baptism have legitimate resonance for young Ukrainians trying to cope with the loss of their families and homes.

The small foothold of evangelical conversions among Germany’s Ukrainian refugees is notable for a country — indeed, a continent — where religiosity has been sharply declining for decades. Baptists are a significant minority in Ukraine; the official association of Ukrainian Baptist churches claims only about 120,000 members, while more than three in five Ukrainians identify with the Eastern Orthodox church.

TRANSITION?

In the United States, however, Ukrainian Baptist churches are still waiting for this wave of evangelism to hit. In the past year, the Ukrainian Baptist Convention of America has recorded only 100 new baptisms — up from previous years, said Vlad Shanava, the president of the convention’s youth ministry, but still “unimpressive.”

[TK quote from another youth leader — Vlad himself was not very worried about this lack of growth but I’d imagine others are]

The Ukrainian Baptist coalition in the United States is and has always been fragile. The convention only has 24 registered churches, half of which are clustered in southern New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs, totaling to about 3,500 adult members. The convention’s website is littered with churches that have closed their doors across the country: Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Fresno, Calif.

The churches that have survived have been kept together by successive waves of migration — missionaries from South America in the 1960s and 1970s, priests fleeing Soviet persecution in the 1990s, and now refugees from Russia’s full-scale invasion — that have required shifts in services and tactics. 

“Four years ago before the war, I feel like  … we were moving into the direction of potentially more American-centered services,” said Shanava. “But the war definitely brought us back a little bit because of the influx of refugees.”

But unlike at Almaz, where the vast majority of services and materials are in Ukrainian and German is rarely spoken, the churches in Shanava’s circles are still not wholly focused on supporting refugees. They would like to — emphasis on like — also be open to Americans Americans of any stripe, even if they’re not Ukrainian.

“The UBC’s goal is not only to be available for Ukrainian Christians,” Shanava said. “Obviously we were in America, and we’re available to all cultures, all ethnicities, and the gospel is to be preached there until, as he says in the Bible, till the end of the world.”

Despite their varying audiences, on doctrine, the German and American versions of Ukrainian Baptism are fairly similar.

“It’s clearly said that you’re not perfect. You cannot be perfect. Nobody can be perfect. But Jesus still loves you, Jesus still died for you and died for your sins,” said Viktoriia Hluschenko, who lives in Düsseldorf but often attends services at Almaz. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

“The thing that Baptist teaching specifically offers is that there’s no gimmicks,” said Shanava. “God loves you because of you, because of the value that you have as a human being.”

Threads to pursue:

  • The frosty relationship with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
  • Two more conversion stories
  • May look to restructure around the theme of “tale of two Baptist movements.” Almaz and other German churches have built really vibrant communities in a very secular country. Evangelism is alive and well in the United States, but the Baptist churches here are hanging on for dear life.