Author: Miriam Waldvogel (Page 1 of 2)

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 aren’t even German; they’re Ukrainians who have fled the full-scale invasion, and in youth group, the teens and 20-somethings might swap stories of this relative or that cousin who had been saved from a drone or a missile strike thanks to God’s hand.

Almaz is one of at least 60 Ukrainian Baptist congregations that have sprung up since 2022 in Germany, the largest single destination in the world for refugees of the full-scale invasion. In an increasingly secular country, the churches and their gospel teachings have become a cultural and spiritual lifeline for young Ukrainians seeking to make sense of Russia’s war. 

Martin Skopych, one of Almaz’s youth group leaders, grew up going to services run by his father, a pastor, in Almaz’s original location in Kyiv. But for most of his life, Skopych had resisted accepting his family’s faith, feeling that he did not truly believe the gospel. 

In February 2022, the Skopyches were visiting friends in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town just east of Cologne. Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion, and their short vacation turned into an indefinite stay; Skopych had just a backpack of clothes with him. Having to start from zero allowed him to take the leap and decide to get baptized.

“It was [a] period of hard times where you can see miracles,” Skopych said. “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.” 

The wave of young evangelical conversions also extends to the United States, which has admitted at least 270,000 Ukrainian refugees since 2022. In any evangelical church, the name of the game is proselytization: spreading the sound of the gospel to as many people as possible. But the American and German versions of the Ukrainian Baptist movements have taken surprisingly different approaches to their divine mission. While Almaz and its peers in Germany have focused on the Ukrainian refugees continuing to enter the country, Ukrainian Baptist churches in the United States are increasingly looking to non-Ukrainians to support historically fragile congregations.

“The UBC’s goal is not only to be available for Ukrainian Christians,” said Vlad Shanava, the president of youth ministry of the Ukrainian Baptist Convention of America. “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.”

***

Almaz never had a permanent building until it came to Gummersbach. Before the full-scale invasion, the church rented from place to place in Kyiv. This summer, a Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn., helped them acquire an abandoned movie theater to transform into a worship space. 

The renovations are no small task. The property appears to have been neglected for nearly two decades; its last showing was the fourth Indiana Jones movie in 2008. Almaz has stripped it down to the bones, ripping down tiles and knocking down walls on a recent visit. In addition to the main cinema space, the theater also has several small apartments that need serious fixing-up and a debris-filled backyard. 

The renovations are slapdash in nature — many of the tile removals, for instance, were conducted with sledgehammers and little protective equipment for the resulting dust besides gloves (there’s no telling how they will fare with German fire, electrical, and gas inspections). Still, they’ve generated real enthusiasm beyond Almaz’s congregation, with Ukrainians traveling from hours away in western Germany to assist with the construction. The construction has also caught the eye of American churches, including the Hendersonville congregation, which sent a week-long mission in October. Relying on such volunteer help, the Skopyches are optimistic the renovations will take a year.

For now, Almaz is still using space from a nearby German evangelical congregation. The church can attract some 200 people at a Sunday service from a variety of religious backgrounds, with services held in Ukrainian. Skopych estimated that as many as 60 young people show up to his groups every week. 

In part due to Almaz’s vigorous efforts to assist Ukrainian refugees, the town of 50,000  now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022. Some of the church’s liveliness might be a matter of convenience; Almaz is the nearest Ukrainian cultural institution around, with the next Ukrainian church 30 miles away. But there also appears to be specific resonance in Baptist teachings, which emphasize the idea of God’s and Jesus’ unconditional love.

“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. She grew up going to Ukrainian Orthodox services with her grandmother but was not embedded in a particular religious tradition until she came to Germany. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

Anastasia Omelchenko, who fled with her family from Mariupol, had an awakening on the last day of a small summer camp for Ukrainian teens for Germany. 

“We were watching a video about … how we are never alone, because Jesus is always with us or something like that. And at that moment, I thought about my whole life, and suddenly I understood that I was never alone, actually, and Jesus was always beside me,” she said.

“I just couldn’t stop crying,” Omelchenko added. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like when the Holy Spirit touches your heart.” She was baptized the next summer when she came back as a camp counselor.

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 in some way with the Eastern Orthodox church. 

“When I go to Orthodox Church, I don’t understand what happens here,” said Lisa TK, who also attends services at Almaz. “When I go to my church, I understand what my pastor says … these people try to be like Jesus. It’s really good for me.”

Baptism and other evangelical denominations are unique in practicing a so-called believers’ baptism: the church only baptizes those who have publicly and consciously accepted Christ, as opposed to automatically accepting children of families in the congregation.

“The only requirement is for you to repent and to be saved by the faith,” said David Pavlyuk, a youth minister at the Church of New Hope near Charlotte, N.C. “That’s not something that we can judge about one another. When you repent, we believe that that’s a completely personal experience.”

Despite thousands of miles of distance, these Ukrainian churches in the United States and Germany adhere closely to the Baptist tradition. The scenes at a 12 p.m. service at the Church of New Hope or any Sunday at Almaz are strikingly similar: singing in Ukrainian to off-key worship, hands of the performers and congregation raised in swaying prayer. Better description TK. In the wake of the full-scale invasion, these churches have also worked to assist Ukrainian refugees in the practical aspects of moving to a new country, helping them find apartments, obtain drivers’ licenses, and furnish their new housing. 

“It’s definitely a melting pot,” said Pavyluk. “We have people who come from different Protestant denominations: Pentecostals, different types of Baptists. We have people who come from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. We have people who went to Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. And obviously we have people who never attended church.”

While many of Germany’s Ukrainian churches have popped up in the last three years, the Ukrainian Baptist coalition in the United States stretches back about 80 years, beginning with a group of Ukrainian Baptists in Chester, Pa. seeking to support refugees from the so-called Bible Belt of the Soviet Union. Since then, these churches’ congregations have been bolstered by successive waves of migration: missionaries from South America in the 1960s and 1970s, priests and Christians escaping Soviet thaw in the 1990s. 

But the community has not always been stable. The Ukrainian Baptist Convention’s website is littered with churches across the country that have merged closed their doors: Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Fresno, Calif. Many of the now-defunct congregations overly focused on traditional services, said Pavyluk, an obstacle when trying to retain American children of Ukrainian immigrants, who could more easily jump to another Baptist church.

“There have been cases where churches have stopped existing because they just weren’t able to assimilate — not so much into their culture, but so much into their time period,” he said. 

“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.”

The Ukrainian Baptist Convention currently 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 full-scale invasion has brought them another wave of refugee members. The Church of New Hope’s congregation has doubled in size, Pavyluk estimated, with their youth population tripling. 

No longer able to fit all its parishioners for a single sermon, the church has started offering an additional English-language service in addition to the usual Ukrainian. This new service attracts Ukrainian-Americans as well as Ukrainian refugees looking to improve their English, on average 50–100 people compared to well over 200 for a Ukrainian-language service.

“There is a lot of immigrants that came within the past three years,” said Yuriy Rudnitsky, who leads the church’s English ministry. “Their kids, being immersed in American culture, are already learning English very, very quickly. And so they go, ‘Okay, I’m starting to attend this, one, to help my own English out … and then I’m bringing my kid’ because they already understand English at a level that vastly outpaces their own.”  

“It is somewhat familiar, but speaking English,” he added.

Not every church has been as successful as New Hope. In the past year, the Ukrainian Baptist Convention has recorded only 100 new baptisms nationwide — up from previous years, said Shanava, the president of the convention’s youth ministry, but still “unimpressive.” 

The foothold of evangelical conversions among Germany’s Ukrainian refugees is not universal, either. Omelchenko recalled feeling alienated from other Ukrainian teens in her school in Wesel, a small town in the west.

“I looked at them and I see that I’m not like them,” she said. “They’re interested only in, like, drinking, and having parties and stuff like that.” Not having many friends was one of the factors that pushed her to seek out the church, she said.

Still, the movement is notable for a country — indeed, a continent — where religiosity has been sharply declining for decades, including among youth. Now, refugee churches like Almaz — many of whom are still getting settled in Germany — are already looking to engage in missionary work. Skopych’s family, for instance, considered going back to Kyiv to proselytize. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Baptist churches in the United States are increasingly looking to expand their congregations outside of Ukrainians.

“There is community around us that isn’t Ukrainian, that also requires the gospel to be preached to them,” said Shanava of the Ukrainian Baptist Convention. “I believe there’s a revival going on in America. A lot of people are coming back to Christ. A lot of people are coming back to religion.”

At New Hope, this has meant engaging in the local community — working with charities, holding a fall festival, evangelizing on the street — as churches do, Ukrainian or otherwise. Many of the church’s refugees have started to give back in this manner. The English-language service has also been a major step in its outreach efforts, allowing congregants to easily bring their friends without worrying about a language barrier.

“We have a lot of young people, or even college age kids, that go, ‘Oh, yeah, I can invite my friend.’ And they do,” Rudnitsky said.

New Hope has also attracted a smaller number of Americans with no social connection to the church but who want to support Ukraine. [I want to talk to one of these guys so bad and am still working on it]. Rudnitsky cited a U.S. military veteran who had reached out to him looking for a way to get involved in Ukraine. The man now attends New Hope’s men’s group regularly. 

The efforts of New Hope and Ukrainian Baptist churches come as Baptists in the United States have navigated increasingly unstable congregations. The Southern Baptist Convention reported in April that its membership had hit a 50-year low, while also baptizing 250,000 people, up 10 percent from the previous year. In Germany, Baptists number only about 73,000, and the number of Protestants and Catholics has continued to shrink. An April survey by the research group Fowid estimated that, for the first time ever, a plurality of Germans had no religious affiliation.

So the Baptists do what they can. Skopych, for instance, has become a vigorous street evangelist in addition to his leadership in Almaz’s youth groups. 

“Even in Germany, for example, I see big opportunity in Cologne to work with students, and to share gospel. I think for me, it’s possible to do something bigger,” Skopych said. 

“All you have to do is believe and come to Christ. He’s done all the hard work,” Shanava said. “I just think it’s the truth.”

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. 

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.

Does John McPhee not have an editor? I, too, have spent afternoons agonizing over how I could possibly start or continue or finish a piece. Luckily, I’ve editors who I can consult and who sometimes know the inside of my brain better than I do. Or maybe this is a consequence of McPhee’s antipathy towards a nutgraf — something that I have always found to be a useful exercise, even if it does not remain in the final form of the piece.

I, for one, found his description of structure totally incomprehensible. Clearly, he has found a consistent way to do things, but I think Ceci is correct to say that this is more a look inside his head than applicable advice for us other human beings. I felt similarly with Rosenthal’s napkin drawings. Are the lines meant to indicate rising tension, or the story “coming back,” or something else?

In my experience, structure is intimately tied to the content of the reporting. I feel that McPhee and Rosenthal really gloss over this (Stewart feels slightly better). Sometimes, the narrative is obvious: X happened and then Y happened which shows Z. A scene might be so arresting and strongly reported that it can stand entirely on its own, the connections to the rest of the story so obvious they don’t need to be drawn out. Others might require popping in and out of the narrative to explain to the reader what exactly is happening. You don’t know what the story requires until you get down to the ground-level details.

I take the position, then, that the reporting comes first, and then the structure. Following a story requires chasing threads and conducting interviews that might end up being dead ends; naturally, those do not go in the piece. I think reporters generally have an instinct that, for their story, they need a central character or anecdote, some contextual information, and a thesis, and they will keep reporting until they have found all of those components. That’s not structure, which is much more intimate. I see that as much closer to gathering the basic ingredients for a story. I suppose the process of structuring can reveal deficiencies in reporting: you really need another scene, or don’t quite have the correct contextual quote, or some other crucial building block. But I guess I still don’t see that as structure guiding the reporting. Yes, you know that you need something specific to plug the hole; but you only know that specific thing exists and is sourceable because you’ve spent all that time reporting in the first place.

I am surprised that McPhee seems to skip over another essential component of the structuring process: deciding what doesn’t go in. “When I was through studying, separating, defining, and coding the whole body of notes, I had thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with two or three code words representing a component of the story. All I had to do was put them in order,” he writes. The presumption at the beginning of the writing process that it will all fit is astonishing. I have never once found that to be the case in my writing.

In Gummersbach, I met a dozen young Ukrainians who had come to evangelical Christianity after fleeing the war. They spoke at length about how the teachings of Baptism had helped them think through the trauma of losing family and the uncertainty of navigating refugee life — and how they felt the Orthodox church couldn’t provide those answers. My piece seeks to answer how faith became transmitted to these young people. Are they entirely reliant on evangelical communities already present in the places where they fled? Are there particularly prominent online influencers? And how prominent is this movement? Is it powerful enough to ruffle feathers with the Orthodox Church? My day in Gummersbach will be one scene in this.

I’ll be speaking to:
– Friends of the young Ukrainian churches I met in Gummersbach, who represented multiple churches in western Germany, including in Essen and Dusseldorf
– Ukrainian church leaders and their young congregants in the United States

I am presently considering any evangelical movement, not just Ukrainian Baptists; I am interested, for instance, in talking to Sunday Adelaja, a Nigerian-born Pentacostal preacher who ran a megachurch in Kyiv before the war. I am also keeping an eye for influences from American evangelicalism; there is not a single obvious Ukrainian who has emerged as a particularly prominent voice for conversion.

It took a full-scale invasion to convince Martin Skopych, the son of a Ukrainian Baptist pastor, to become a Christian. Or, at least, to allow himself to be considered one.

“It’s not like, [if] you’re born and raised in a Christian family, it means that you’re a Christian,” he told me. “Real Christianity is not just visiting church once a week.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, 19-year-old Skopych and his family have lived in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town of 50,000 people just east of Cologne. While he had wrestled with whether to become a Christian for several years prior, the shock of war and displacement pushed him to take the leap.

“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,” Skopych said.

Skopych is one of an unknown number of young Ukrainians who have chosen to move closer to evangelical Christianity after fleeing the war. In Gummersbach, he has slowly emerged as one of the growing Ukrainian community’s most prominent young spiritual leaders, holding youth group meetings as often as three times a week and ready to speak earnestly about his connection to Jesus at any given moment.

Meanwhile, Almaz, the congregation headed by his father, Nickolay Skopych, is starting to put down roots in Gummersbach. With the help of a Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn., Almaz recently acquired an old movie theater in Gummersbach to renovate into a worship space (the church currently borrows space from another evangelical church in the small town outside of Cologne). It will be Almaz’s first-ever permanent building; even before the war, the church rented from place to place in Kyiv.

On a recent visit, Skopych became my tour guide to the construction site, bounding around the gutted space with brisk confidence. There he was, helping me rip out an old wire fence buried in rotting leaves in the church’s backyard or foisting giant tree branches into an overflowing dumpster. I’d wander around upstairs and see him emerge from a gaping hole in the wall wearing a respirator and safety glasses, covered in dust after chiseling old tiles from the walls. 

Some of Skopych’s self-assuredness naturally comes from Nickolay, his father and the pastor, who is a constant presence in the church and has helped attract dozens, if not hundreds, of Ukrainians to Gummersbach. The predominant church in Ukraine is the Ukrainian Orthodox church, but the Skopychs are Baptist, a denomination that the Baptist World Alliance estimates accounts for about 112,000 Ukrainian members.

“Maybe, my family is a special family. We don’t, like, fear about war,” Skopych said, adding that he had considered going back to Ukraine to be a missionary. “I don’t stress that, if I will come to Ukraine, they will take me to army. If they take me to army, I’m going to serve,” he added, almost nonchalantly.

Gummersbach now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022. Almaz can attract some 200 people at a Sunday service from a variety of religious backgrounds, with services held in Ukrainian. 

Skopych estimated that as many as 60 young people show up to his groups every week. But he admitted that being a pastor’s son could be difficult, with the constant attention and expectation from parishioners.

“Some people don’t understand that pastor’s children are not saved,” he said. At one point, he said, he asked his parents not to help him with the question of whether to become Christian — although he had already bought into a belief in God. 

“I need to see to believe,” he said. “I [spent] a lot of time praying to God and asking, ‘are you really existing?’ And if it’s Christianity, or Islamic, or it’s just science … I spent a lot of time to study this question.”

Other religions, however, didn’t have the answers he was seeking.

“I watched a lot of videos about Islam, about other religions. And I didn’t find like that structure that had Christianity. I didn’t find enough proofs for me is that it can be real,” he said.

Skopych’s family was in Gummersbach visiting friends when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Their vacation has turned into a stay of three and a half years. Skopych had to quite literally start from zero, with only a backpack of clothes with him for what he thought would be a short trip. That time ended up being spiritually transformative — although he was very reluctant to get into the details.

“It was period of hard times where you can see miracles,” he said.

Several of the young Ukrainian Baptists I interviewed in Gummersbach spoke that same way: with an intense evangelical devotion, but without being able to articulate what exactly got them there beyond their favorite scripture passages.

“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 had come for the day from Düsseldorf to help Almaz with the renovations. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

While many of the younger Ukrainians told me they felt alienated by the tradition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — “you must be holy,” Lisa, another Ukrainian girl, told me with an eye roll — Skopych grew up in and around his father’s church.

Nickolay Skopych didn’t respond to repeated messages and calls for an interview about his son. However, he has blogged about his children’s relationship to the church, including some revealing passages from Barnabas Piper, the son of prominent Baptist preacher John Piper.

“PKs [pastor’s kids] live in a fishbowl, or at least it feels that way. Everyone in the church knows the names and faces of the pastor’s children. There is never the safety of anonymity,” Barnabas Piper wrote in 2012. “It is mighty hard to live a life surrounded by people knowing your every move, romantic interest, misbehavior, athletic triumph (or failure), college choice, and seemingly every other personal detail.”

Skopych, however, doesn’t seem to mind the fishbowl now. With some prodding in conversation, he can conjure up stories of trying to preach the gospel to complete strangers: an Italian businessman sitting next to him on a flight, a retired Cuban professor in a hotel in San Diego. His favorite Bible verse is 1 Timothy 4:12–16, which begins: “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” He’s now considering becoming a minister to help Almaz grow other churches in Germany.

“Even in Germany, for example, I see big opportunity in Cologne to work with students, and to share gospel. I think for me, it’s possible to do something bigger,” he said. 

That would require giving up on a job offer at DVAG, a German financial services company that Skopych claimed could make him $65–75,000 his first year. However, the firm seems to be closer to a multi-level marketing scheme, according to an investigation by Jan Böhmermann, a comedic TV journalist akin to a German John Oliver — a helpful reminder that, for all his wise-seeming spirituality, Skopych is also a 19-year-old boy. Thankfully, God also seems suspicious of DVAG.

“I don’t think that it’s really good life,” Skopych said. “I don’t think it’s where God wants me to be.”

I really appreciated Raphi’s question about how to determine whether embedding is necessary. My instinct in my very short reporting life is that it is always, always better. It may not be strictly necessary — many stories you can do a perfectly fine job from afar — but the color and depth it adds is so, so important for an in-depth story. While Raphi and I’s trip to Gummersbach, for example, was just a day, we both came away with scenes and detail that would have been nearly impossible to reconstruct otherwise. Video does not capture the smell of a stripped-out movie theater or the sheer amount of dust in the air. Being there physically is also huge for trust. In Gummersbach, I connected with sources by eating lunch with them and helping them rip fence debris out of the ground, building far more meaningful relationships in just a few hours than I could have done virtually. You can just talk to so many more people when you’re physically there. I find the phone deeply frustrating in that sense; you are constrained by annoying things like schedules and your international cell connection.

As a counterpoint, a couple years ago I spent more than six months reporting a story about a Princeton-run research center in Kenya, examining the center’s colonial history and the living conditions of the locals employed there. I had visual descriptions and photos of their huts, which didn’t have running water or electricity, and plenty of in-depth descriptions of the property’s colonial-era ranch house, still with some of the old British Empire trappings. My editors contemplated sending me there and we even went so far as to draw up travel plans. We ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the expense. My story turned out well, but it was missing the texture and feeling of just being there. I think that’s especially relevant to visiting a site of trauma, whether recent or historical. There is something about seeing it for yourself that is the ultimate gut-check to any reporting done virtually: yes, it really was that bad. Embedding for a lower-stakes story does not have the same payoff, even if it does make the reporting richer in the ways I’ve outlined.

I would also say that embedding is especially necessary for a so-called top-down pitch: you have a sense of a trend, but do not yet have characters and scenes to fill it out. This is what Caitlin Dickerson so masterfully does in her own reporting, for instance, but that also works on smaller scales. If you’re writing about contentious school board meetings, obviously you should go to the meetings, see it for yourself, and meet the widest array of people involved. Reporting virtually relies far more on person-to-person networks, which can be tricky when trying to get the full story.

For Deb, I’d be interested in the story of how the Jonestown documentary came about. Did you think about going there while you were working on it? If you’ve been, did it enrich your understanding in a useful way?

The biggest challenge I have found in writing a profile is not so much finding a character as finding a “so what.” I’m in journalism because I think people everywhere are very interesting; most people, given enough poking and prodding, will yield sufficiently compelling life stories or internal contradictions that you would be able to regurgitate in, say, a dinner party setting. Follow someone around for a little bit and sprinkle richly written details about their life — how they drink their coffee, how they do their nails, how they move about in the world — and you appear to have a character.

How do you convince a reader that this person deserves a story of their own? You could try to connect their story to a broader narrative, as Deb and Hessler do. But this also has limitations, especially where the market of stories is saturated. I could, for example, go profile a tech CEO and describe breathlessly how they wake up really early in the morning, are always on their phone, and terrorize/encourage/manage their dedicated employees in a messy startup house in San Francisco. This could be interesting writing, but “Tech CEO works hard and wants to build a crazy product” is not a novel thing. Sometimes, a new angle just isn’t there.

I also think one thing that the Ragan and Nieman guides missed is the importance of interviews with people that are not the subject of the profile. They can provide important color and balance against whatever picture of themselves the subject is trying to paint to you. I recently reread Patrick Radden Keefe’s fantastic profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, which rests heavily on interviews with other movers and shakers in the art world about Gagosian’s career. While Radden Keefe does get significant interview time with his subject, which is revealing in its own right, his most interesting insights come from other people who have observed Gagosian for years. I suppose whether or not you’re able to do this depends on your subject. Deb’s nightclub girls and Hessler’s trash people are not people of renown, and their own authorial observations provide more than enough framing and commentary to draw out the story for the reader.

But I think one thing that’s easy to slip into in a profile — you see a lot of this in sports writing — is excessive deference to the subject. This happens for totally understandable reasons. You might feel a certain amount of gratitude to a subject that takes time to talk to you and invites you into your home, especially if they’re not a person of means. You are definitionally invested in hearing their story in full detail. But some of the best profiles are adversarial — perhaps so much so that the writer can’t get an interview with the subject. I think of NYMag’s profile of John Fetterman in May, which laid out the senator’s mental health struggles in devastating detail, or The Atlantic’s study in April of Trump 2.0. Both subjects did not give a fully honest retelling of their story.

Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority from 2007 to 2013, was “not very happy” to hear that some of the West’s most powerful countries wanted to recognize a Palestinian state.

“Nothing has been settled by ‘we recognize you,’” said Fayyad. “Somewhere, someone needs to do something to make it happen. And that someone, somewhere is Israel.”

In late September, France, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom recognized a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly. The moves were meant to keep the possibility of a two-state solution alive and quickly drew backlash from Israeli officials.

“Your disgraceful decision will encourage terrorism against Jews and against innocent people everywhere. It will be a mark of shame on all of you,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech at the UN.

The timing of the recognitions signals a desire for Western nations to put increasing pressure on Israel and on Netanyahu’s government over the war in Gaza. But as a largely symbolic move, recognition of a Palestinian state is unlikely to produce much without a real peace process, said former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer.

“I think absent a process of negotiation, of involvement of the two sides in some interactions, the politics of this are not going to work for a long time,” Kurtzer said. 

With the recognitions by France and the United Kingdom, the United States is the only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council that opposes Palestinian statehood. The current Palestinian state, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, is currently a non-voting observer state (status on par with the Vatican). Admitting Palestine as a full member of the United Nations requires the assent of the Security Council, where the United States has veto power.

But American recognition of a Palestinian state is unlikely any time soon. Under the Biden administration in 2024, the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution to admit a Palestinian state. At the most recent U.N. General Assembly in September, President Trump called recognition a “reward” for Hamas. Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, couldn’t even be in New York to deliver his speech in-person after the Trump administration revoked his visa.

“Will it [recognition] come at some point? I hope to be able to live to 120, maybe in that period,” Kurtzer said with a chuckle. “But I’m not sure that’s the case.”

Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza outlined a shaky pathway towards potentially recognizing a Palestinian state, when “Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out.” But Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly shot down the possibility in a Sunday interview on MSNBC.

“In order for that aspiration to even be credible, it has to be realistic. We can’t have a Palestinian state that’s governed by Hamas or by some terrorist organization whose stated purpose for existence is the destruction of the Jewish state,” he said.

As a technocrat in Palestinian government from 2002 to 2013, Fayyad’s view was that statehood would be achieved by building the state itself, with security forces, public infrastructure, and a strong economy — not simply by declaration. He criticized recognition as encouraging complacency among Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, who called for additional countries to recognize a Palestinian state in his address at the U.N.

“Unless we assume full agency, nothing’s going to happen,” he said. “The mindset is, ‘it is going to happen for us.’”

Instead, Fayyad proposed having the U.N. Security Council recognize the right of the Palestinian people to a state — as opposed to just recognizing the state itself — as a way to open up negotiations. 

“Our right does not mean I am not prepared to negotiate borders. I am prepared, but I need to know that I have [the] right to this whole thing,” he said. 

Kurtzer acknowledged that such an approach could be more palatable once the Trump administration has figured out the war in Gaza.

“A creative idea could be, all right, you’re not going to recognize the state of Palestine, but start with recognizing Palestinian self-determination. And then after you’ve recognized Palestinian self-determination, you can include including the right to create their own state,” he said. That could help incrementally build a peace process for now, he said.

Public opinion in Israel, however, is not optimistic about a peace or a two-state solution. Two years after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, only one in five Israelis think permanent peace can be achieved, according to a Gallup poll. Nearly two-thirds of Israelis said they opposed a two-state solution.

“I’m a realist. There is no prime minister in Israel, not Netanyahu, anyone, within the next, maybe, 20–30 years, who is going to be able to tell his colleagues, ‘let’s do that,’” Fayyad said. “But why not really try to get this through the Security Council?”

It was interesting to watch the characters figure out how to establish a legal basis to prosecute the Nazis. You quite literally saw the court being constructed from wartime reunions. I was particularly struck by a scene early on where someone asks what laws the Nazis broke in carrying out the Holocaust. There’s a pause, and someone remarks that crimes perpetuated during a war had never really been considered crimes. Eventually someone says that they broke the law when they invaded other countries. This being the primary basis for the prosecution was really fascinating. Obviously, you would want international law to prosecute war crimes regardless of whether they had been committed in the context of a “just” war. To my understanding, the Nuremberg prosecution also left open the question of what to do with crimes committed against one’s own citizens. Relatedly, I also don’t think the word “genocide” was ever used. The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin a few years prior but was clearly not yet in the zeitgeist. Nuremberg also predates the Genocide Convention, which has been used in more recent prosecution of war crimes and has filled some of the holes in the Nuremberg precedents.

I also think it’s interesting to think about the idea of legitimacy of an international prosecution in today’s legal context. The Nuremberg prosecutors were very, very careful to ensure that their case was perceived as legitimate. I see two ways they did this. First, they tried to adhere to existing legal standards in the well-respected traditions of the four countries. But second, and perhaps most importantly, they had Nazis in their custody and could do whatever they wanted with them (think of the scene where Alec Baldwin challenges the Soviets to host their own trial).

Today, we have international courts and juries that try to proceed thoughtfully and carefully in accordance with codified international law. But they’re not widely seen as legitimate. The U.S. has simply decided not to “opt in” to the International Criminal Court, which means decrees like the arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu have no bearing. It’s hard to imagine what would even happen if one of the ICC signatories, like France or the UK, actually decided to carry out the warrant. Maybe Netanyahu would actually be tried and sentenced; probably, Israel and the United States would protest furiously and call it a sham trial and attempt to smear the ICC every which way. On one hand, this is exactly the kind of outcome Nuremberg sought to avoid. On the other, isn’t that just a consequence of carrying out the law? And what does that do to the historical memory of crimes against humanity?