Author: Raphaela Gold (Page 1 of 2)

Baptists across borders: How Ukrainian and American evangelicals are reviving Christianity in Europe 

What happens to Christianity when the citizens of eastern Europe’s Bible Belt are forced to move across the globe?

GUMMERSBACH, GERMANY — In a run-down theatre in Gummersbach, a small German town on the banks of the Rhine, a group of Americans and Ukrainians might seem out of place. 

It’s an unusual cast of characters: eight Americans, who signed up for a mission trip with First Baptist Church (FBCH), a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee; and 20-or-so Ukrainians affiliated with Almaz Church, who have shown up on a dreary Wednesday to help out. They are united in their intention to transform this abandoned, cavernous theatre — still displaying signs for Indiana Jones 4 in its ticket booth — into a church. 

Upstairs, four college students sift through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery strips of wallpaper, occasionally landing on artifacts of the past: a dusty matchbox, a crinkled movie poster, a Hello Dolly vinyl, a half-full liquor bottle. Downstairs, people of all ages drill holes and haul branches into large containers in the front yard. 

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

He spent a year searching – and praying – for a sprawling space like this to replace the cramped office they had previously used. “I believe that God gave us [a] unique opportunity to buy this cinema,” he said. 

The new property, which includes the theatre and a set of apartments, will serve the community of Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, estimated by Skopych at upwards of 3,000 individuals. This is just one of 64 Ukrainian Churches which have sprung up in Germany since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. In total, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe, according to Almaz’ website. 

Now, some American missionaries are hopeful they will launch a larger religious awakening on a continent where religiosity has been declining for decades. Michael McClanahan, head of missions at FBCH, expressed his hope that the new Almaz will become “a central training hub.”

“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,” he said. 

And many see Ukraine as their biggest opportunity. American evangelicals have flip-flopped in their views on Ukraine, often echoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s America-first stances, but  some have recently become more supportive of Ukrainian independence as Ukrainian pastors appeal to their Christian sensibilities. In the U.S., American evangelicals have welcomed Ukrainian refugees into their churches. But they don’t plan to stop there at home. Some have already begun to make arrangements to dramatically up missions to Ukraine when the war ends. 

***

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

Skopych grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who, he said, did not believe in God. At 18, feeling disillusioned and aimless, he stumbled across American evangelical missionaries on the street who were 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. 

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American evangelicals had already been smuggling religious literature across the Iron Curtain and lobbying for greater religious freedom in the U.S.S.R. Ukraine is now known as the Bible belt of eastern Europe, but at the time, religion was systematically suppressed in the USSR, including in Ukraine, as it conflicted with the state’s communist-atheist ideology. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, American evangelical missionaries began appearing on the streets of cities across Ukraine. 

The brochures changed the trajectory of Skopych’s life. “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.”

When Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State travelled to Ukraine for dissertation research in the early 1990s, she pivoted topics upon realizing 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. Wanner has now published a book called Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. 

Church planting is the process of establishing a new Christian congregation in a region, often involving the physical construction of a church building with the goal that it will eventually operate independently. In the 18th century, American Baptists and Methodists engaged in church planting, fueling the growth of early religious movements in the U.S. 

Wanner described how in post-Soviet Ukraine many missionaries, unable to speak Ukrainian or Russian, spent their holidays traveling to Ukraine, where they would publicly mime scenes from the Bible. 

According to Wanner, Protestants were demonized during the Soviet period as bearers of American values and capitalism, which Soviet propaganda condemned, but there has now been a shift. “[Missionaries are] now associated with democracy and the provision of humanitarian aid,” she explained. 

The flock of Evangelicals who proselytized in Ukraine during the 1990s shared a belief that former Soviet citizens had been deprived of religion and were “godless,” Wanner said. Though the Soviet anti-religion agenda may have quashed belief in the short-term, however, it failed to achieve its atheist aims in the long-term. 

Now, an estimated two to four percent of the Ukrainian population identifies as Baptist, while the vast majority are members of the Orthodox Church. But though small in number, they are fierce. “Those 4% are very influential, very visible, and they have a significant impact on political and social policy,” Wanner noted. 

Skopych has become one of these influential Ukrainian Baptists. After graduating college with a degree in electrical engineering, he attended seminary and became a pastor of Almaz church in Ukraine, which did not have its own building, but rented space in Kyiv. It was only by chance that the new Almaz church now sits in a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. 

In February 2022, Pastor Nickolas was visiting a friend in Gummersbach. But on the TK day of this visit, Russia invaded Ukraine. Skopych and his family suddenly became stranded in Germany. 

As the war continued, hundreds of Almaz congregants joined Skopych, along with friends and family. Skopych and his family helped Ukrainian refugees gain German citizenship and settle into lives drastically different from the ones they had left behind. As a community, they faced the challenges of learning German, living in small apartments, and leaving family in Ukraine. 

“We were really tired of this immigration process,” said Martin Skopych, the pastor’s son, “But we put our life on pause and tried to help other people.”

In March, 2025, Skopych met Bruce Chesser, the senior pastor of FBCH. Chesser went to Germany seeking a “native, German-speaking church” with which to collaborate on a future mission. But when he met Skopych, he was so moved by the pastor’s story that he changed course. 

A year later, eight Americans from FBCH ended up in Gummersbach, stripping down the walls of an abandoned theatre, replacing Indiana Jones with a house of worship. Ukrainian community members joined from far and wide to aid in the effort. Liza TK and Viktoria TK, two young Ukrainian women living near Düsseldorf, found out about the mission through social media and made the two-hour journey by train that morning. “It was a great opportunity,” Liza told me. 

“For me, it’s like a miracle from God,” said Martin Skopych. “It’s encouragement that we are on [the] right way and doing everything great.”

***

One reason American evangelicals are so committed to helping their Ukrainian counterparts is that they know them, in some cases, intimately. 

Michael Bible, an FBC Hendersonville congregant who was also on the mission trip to Gummersbach, told me that he has sponsored four Ukrainians to come to America through Uniting for Ukraine (U4U), a Biden administration initiative meant to streamline the process of entering the U.S. for fleeing Ukrainians. When the Trump administration entered office in January, 2025, the program was put on pause. In August, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration services resumed processing renewal applications, but the program remains suspended for potential newcomers. 

Bible, a self-identified conservative Republican, expressed his disappointment at the Trump administration’s policy change. “The one thing that I was always very supportive of in the former administration was that their policy on Ukraine was absolutely right,” he said, adding, “It’s a different animal when you know these people.”

Bible has long had a personal connection to Ukraine. His brother-in-law, Richard Matheny had made several trips to Ukraine prior to 2022 , when he married Larysa, a Ukrainian woman.  He was waiting in a town near Kyiv for Larysa to get a visa to come to the U.S. when the war broke out. Bible helped them escape over the border to Poland from afar, following the route on Google Earth to offer updates on where Russian guards were least likely to be stationed. Richard then sponsored Larysa through U4U to come to the U.S., where they now reside. 

“When Richard got home, he was the one that said, ‘We need to start sponsoring these folks,’” Bible explained. “I said, ‘Well, I’m already up to my eyeballs in forms anyway, so let me fill them out.” 

Tetiana “Tanya” and Serhii Kravchuk became the first to join Bible and his family in Tennessee, sponsored by Richard, who had known them in Ukraine. Tanya was nearly nine months pregnant when she arrived. “I think if I hadn’t been pregnant, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she said. “I just wanted to be safe somewhere, and I didn’t have anybody in Europe.” 

Serhii and the rest of her family have since joined her. Bible sponsored Tanya’s parents, Serhii’s mother, and Tanya’s cousin. Though earlier in the war, Tanya considered returning to Ukraine, she now feels certain that she will remain in Tennessee, where her family has built a life. “We want to stay, but we just have to find a way to stay here legally,” she said.

FBCH is not the only U.S. church to have made the journey to Gummersbach. Oak Ridge Baptist Church (ORBC), based in Texas, ran a baseball camp there in the summer of 2024. Lania Cooper, Head of Missions at ORBC, explained that the church uses sports “as an introduction to the gospel of Jesus Christ.” 

Pastor Skopych visited ORBC in April 2024 and expressed his interest in bringing the baseball camp to Gummersbach. Two months later, ORBC sent 17 people to Gummersbach. 

“A lot of places kind of fall in our lap,” Cooper explained. “The Lord just kind of will navigate us to the right place where we’re supposed to be.” 

They stayed with Ukrainians in their apartments and converted a soccer field into two baseball diamonds. In the evenings, they held fellowship and bible study sessions.According to Cooper, 90 Ukrainian children in total participated in the Gummersbach baseball camp. 

Cooper also expressed a particular affiliation with the Ukrainian struggle, describing the story of one Ukrainian family which has been attending ORBC for two years. 

“They literally just walked into our church one day,” said Cooper. “It was pouring down rain. I just remember it so clearly.” Cooper described the family’s integration into ORBC as a “success story.” 

Not all Ukrainian churches in Germany have benefited from American involvement, however. Many have received significant assistance from German Churches. 

Two hours from Gummersbach, in Gensingen, Pavlo Khystov serves as a deacon at a church that was half German and half Kazakhstanian before Ukrainians began arriving in 2022. Because the Kazakhstanians speak Russian, the church now provides Russian translation via headphones for Sunday services. They also organize Ukrainian meetings five nights a week. 

Erkinzhan and Daria Rafikov, members of the Christian Bible Church in Bad Hersfeld, also integrated into a pre-existing German church when they left Ukraine. Now, Erkinzhan serves as a youth leader, preacher, and one of the founding members of the church, and Daria is the worship leader and participates in youth ministry. 

According to the Rafikovs, a translator initially interpreted for Ukrainians from German to Russian, but as the number of Ukrainian attendees increased, they began to hold independent services. They wrote to me that the Ukrainian church has 50 official members, but approximately 80 people attend Sunday service in the German Baptist church’s building. 

For the Rafikovs, the greatest challenge has been the diversity of Christian denominations with varying traditions and expectations. “This makes building something new quite difficult,” the Rafikovs wrote in an email. 

They also stressed that the impacts of the war are ongoing. “The reason for our existence as a church is rooted in the war, which continues,” they added. “This ongoing situation creates a constant burden and emotional stress from which we cannot fully escape.”

Further south, in Albstadt, Oleg Serbo serves as the second pastor in a Ukrainian church called “Revival.” The congregation rents its space from Seventh-day Adventists. Around 60-70 people typically gather for services, most of them from eastern regions of Ukraine, Serbo said. Before the full-scale invasions, Serbo lived with his wife, five biological children, and nine adopted children in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. He was a pastor in a Baptist church in Slovyansk, 15km away.

“Of course, there are certain difficulties,” he wrote me in a Whatsapp message. “We, like most Ukrainian refugees, do not have our own building for worship.” 

The congregation participates in fellowship with other recently formed Ukrainian churches in the area.

“German brothers helped us at the beginning, with paperwork and finding housing. In matters of church organization, praise the Lord, we manage with God’s help and our own efforts,” Serbo wrote. 

***

In Kaufman, Texas, Pastor Brent Gentzel is preparing for the war to end. 

[Insert Gentzel quotes]

Gentzel contacted ORBC asking if it would be one of 50 churches preparing to move into Ukraine when the war is over to evangelize and serve through missions. “They’re wanting to raise up an army of Evangelical people to be prepared for that,” Cooper said. 

As American evangelicals await a resolution to the war, their opinions on Trump’s recent approach to negotiations has varied, as reported by the Kyiv post. [Insert quote from Valerii Antonyuk]. 

However, both ORBC and FBC affiliates involved with mission planning stressed that they do not see their involvement in the Ukrainian cause as political.  

“We have no political agenda at all,” Cooper said. “We’re very Jesus-centered.”

Jeremiah Williams, the leader of FBC’s mission trip in Gummersbach, also understands missions as a strictly religious project. He cited Matthew Chapter 28, which states, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” 

Williams, who grew up the son of a missions pastor and had already spent five years on missions in Europe, was struck by the “joy in spite of the pain” he witnessed in Gummersbach. “We don’t know what that [pain] is like, unless you’ve experienced having to be a refugee yourself,” he said.  

The FBC mission remained in Gummersbach for eight days. During that time, they stripped walls, demolished floors, and cleared trash. They shared bountiful lunches during work-breaks, heaping their plates with potato salad, tomatoes and cold cuts, and finishing it all off with fresh, doughy Ukrainian cream puffs. One evening, the American college students trekked 3-miles just for McDonalds, but most of their time was spent together, in work or in prayer. 

By the end of the week, the theatre was unrecognizable from what it had been. Still, Almaz has a long way to go before it brings to life its blueprint, which boasts a grand hall, cafe, meeting room, office space, and many more miscellaneous rooms to come. It will also likely face a stringent permitting process down the line according to Bauordnungsrecht, standard German building law.

Skopych hopes that this future space, with all its bells and whistles, will allow Almaz to extend its reach beyond Ukrainians. The church runs a telegram group with 1,381 members, where it sends out Ukrainian lunch invitations far and wide and shares stories, job opportunities, and more. Though these efforts are currently focused on Ukrainian community-building, Skopych rejects insularity in the long-run.

“We share things like this,” Skopych said. “It’s not only for churches; it is for society.”

Important gaps: I’m scheduled to speak with Valerii Antonyuk this Thursday, and am trying to get a hold of Pastor Brent Gentzel, so sorry that the end is pretty messy. Once I get that stuff, I will cut some of the German church stuff to lower word count. Also, please pardon the TK’s. 

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. 

***

“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.

. ***

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?” 

The students are far from home, in Gummersbach, Germany. They are here because they signed up for a mission trip with their church — First Baptist Church (FBC), a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee. For most, it is their first time leaving the country. 

Downstairs, more American missionaries of varying ages, and around twenty Ukrainians, are drilling holes and hauling branches into large red containers in the front yard. Among them is Pastor Nikolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. In this scene of wreckage, you might find him wielding an electric floor-grinder, sparks flying behind him, or else quietly circulating to ensure everyone has a task.  It’s slow work, but everyone is focused. All are intent on transforming this abandoned, cavernous theatre – once known as Germania Lichtspieltheater and still displaying signs for Indiana Jones 4 in its ticket booth – into a church.  

The church is intended to serve as a house of worship and community hall for the upwards of 1000 Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach. It is just one of 64 Ukrainian Churches which have been “planted” in Germany since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. And these are just 64 out of 152 Ukrainian churches which have been planted across Europe. 

American missionaries have played a significant role in growing these churches, as they have throughout history. Michael McClanahan, the head of missions at FBC in Tennessee expressed his hope that this mission, and those like it, would 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 notably 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. In some ways, the war has both strained and strengthened this bond, revealing the extent to which the groups are religiously and politically intertwined. And churches like Almaz reveal that the relationship between these nationalities is not confined to their countries — America and Ukraine — but is now seeping into Europe, where millions of Ukrainian refugees have fled.

Rough Outline for Rest of Piece:

I. Context of Evangelicalism reaching Ukraine and how Pastor Nikolas came to Christianity through American evangelism in Kyiv, leading up to Pastor Nikolas’ moving to Gummersbach and founding Almaz [Interviews with Pastor Nikolas, academic experts on evangelical Christianity in Ukriane]

II. How FBC Hendersonville got involved in the mission, spreading out into the greater narrative about how American evangelicals see Ukraine including a scene with Michael Bible, and FBC member who has sponsored 8 Ukrainians through U4U and has a different relationship with Ukraine (and Trump) than most American Evangelicals [interviews with Bruce Chesser, executive pastor of FBC, Michael McClanahan, head of missions at FBC, a representative of another Baptist church in Texas which also helped out in Gummersbach, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the role of Faith Under Siege documentary, academic expert on church planting]

III.  How Church planting for Ukrainians in Europe is changing Christianity/culture in Germany more broadly (need much more reporting to pull this section off)

IV. Kicker likely circling back to Gummersbach

What do journalists mean when we say we are “making meaning” through our work? In short-form news pieces, a journalist’s job is often simply: let people know what happened. People will “make meaning” of the news, or they won’t. Our job is simply to provide them the information they need to do so. But we see long-form differently. We’re not just telling people what happened, we’re telling people a story. That story has an order, which tends to reflect the meaning that the writer has made from all of the information they have collected in their research. In the final product of a long-form piece, the reader doesn’t get all the information – that would be impossible, especially if, as Chip Scanlan puts it, that journalist sets out to “find out everything they can” at the beginning of their reporting. But what does it actually mean to “make meaning”? Can meaning be made? 

Putting together this week’s reading, and last week’s, I think what people mean when they say “make meaning” is actually “make structure.” Scanlan describes Song Yang’s death as “the byproduct of a wretched, Dickensian system.” Part of the structure – ergo meaning – of this piece is that Song Yang’s death is not just a fluke, but part of a larger system. She is a window into a world few have seen. As Barry tells Scanlan in the annotated copy, there is no precise nut graf in the story, but its “reason for being” (the best way I have heard a nut graf described) is delivered in his 12th graf “A tenth of a mile… and few in this city will take notice.” This reminded me of the “reason for being” of Senior’s assessment of why Bobby Mcilvaine’s story mattered; that in the aftermath of 9/11, we all understand the event as a whole, but our knowledge of individual stories are limited. In these cases, Barry and Senior make meaning in a very direct way: they tell us what the meaning is. 

Robert Worth accomplishes something similar in “Aleppo After the Fall,” rolling lede and nut graf into a neat narrative. In his story, we don’t quite need a directly stated “reason for being” as we might in “The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail.” It is clear that this story is tied to Bashar al-Assad’s fall, an obviously significant event. We get more contextual descriptions in graf 8 and 9, but never does Worth exactly state  a reason for being. 

There are also subtler ways of assigning meaning through structure: symbols, motifs, and recurring metaphors as one might find in a book. Song Yang’s butterflies particularly stood out to me. The image of the young girl showing iridescent pressed butterfly wings to her friends at sleepovers tied with the butterfly-adorned headband which flies off her head in her fall infuses the structure with meaning. The detail is not meaningful because it is representative of a larger system, but rather because it is unique to Song Yang – an image around which we can order her life. 

The last form of meaning-making that stood out to me comes not through structure but rather journalistic access. Whether it’s access to a place like 40th Street or access to a place like meetings regarding Ukraine in the oval office, as we get in Isabelle Khurshudyan’s piece, the settings of these pieces take on meaning because we could not get to them without the journalist’s help. Ultimately, I’m not sure journalists actually do make meaning. It’s a small and probably insignificant difference, but I think they find it where it already is, structure it, and deliver it. Part of this delivery also comes through being attentive to a reader’s likely frame of reference, as McPhee describes it. Attending to structure, frames of reference, and what we are giving our readers access to that they didn’t already have is how we illuminate meaning for our readers. Knowing that we are doing so is how we make meaning of our work to ourselves.

Upstairs, four American college students from Tennessee rifle through a pile of wooden planks and rubbery wallpaper, occasionally landing on a dusty roll of film or movie poster. One girl has been collecting trinkets for the past two days and has amassed a collection of coins and floral tiles to bring home with her. Downstairs are more Americans and around twenty Ukrainians diligently drilling holes and hauling branches into large red containers. All are intent on turning this dusty, cavernous theatre – which still shows signs for Indiana Jones 4 – into a new church and community space for the upwards of 1000 Ukrainian refugees now residing in Gummersbach, Germany. 

Among them is Pastor Nickolas Skopych, an unassuming man with a wiry salt-and-pepper beard and kind eyes. He grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, born to parents who did not believe in God. At 18, feeling young and aimless, he stumbled across a few American evangelicals on the street distributing brochures about Christianity. “I took it 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.”

Decades later, Skopych — having become a Pastor of the Almaz church in Ukraine — visited Gummersbach just before the start of the war. After Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of his congregants and friends followed, bringing their friends and family members with them. Skopych had spent the past year praying for a larger church space. Last year, Skopych met the senior pastor of First Baptist Church (FBC), a megachurch in Hendersonville Tennessee, who was visiting Germany. This pastor had been seeking a “native, German-speaking” church to collaborate with, but was so moved by Skopych’s story that he changed course. A few months later, he returned with the head of church missions, who was similarly compelled. Skopych found the theatre space. FBC paid for it. All of this culminated in 10 FBC members flying to Gummersbach on a mission to convert the theatre into a church. 

Since the start of the war in 2022, 152 Ukrainian churches have been planted across Europe, 64 of which are in Germany. When I spoke with the head of missions at FBC, he expressed a desire for the mission to extend beyond Almaz church in 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.” 

My piece will thus explore the growing connection between American evangelicals and Ukrainian refugees, with a focus on Germany, but possibly expanding to Ukrainian experiences in Tennessee as well. Why are these American evangelicals so interested in assisting Ukrainian refugees in particular? How have these 64 new Ukrainian churches across Germany been shaped by American missionaries and ideals? How do these newfound connections through Christianity impact the politics of evangelical Americans back home when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war? Is this actually reviving German/European Christianity on a larger scale? 

My reporting from Gummersbach will play a central role, supported by scenes described to me from Tennessee. I have already spoken with most members of the American mission, the head of FBC missions, as well as Pastor Nickolas, his children, and his friends. I have also spoken with one of the Ukrainian women whom a member of the American mission, Mike Bible, sponsored to come to America through U4U. I plan to support these with interviews from a few more new Ukrainian churches in Germany (contacts I can access through Pastor Nickolas), and academics who study church planting. 

I’ll contextualize my piece in reporting on how American evangelicals have lobbied to support Ukraine in the U.S. and the history of evangelical church planting. I find it an interesting connection that evangelical Christianity was disseminated to Ukraine through American missionaries in the first place, and now these Ukrainians – persecuted for their Christianity by Russians – must turn to these same American evangelicals to support their religious and communal lives in the diaspora. There has been no reporting on this topic outside of Church blogs and Christian media, so I’m hoping to get this piece published in a Tennessee news outlet or some more mainstream American media (likely combined with Miriam’s reporting on the related topic of how and why young Ukrainians have been turning to Christianity to process the war). 

In Jennifer Senior’s piece about the McIlvane family, I felt like she had taken me by the hand and was gently forcing me to walk through the lives of these grieving people, to unpack their grief alongside them, to watch as they descended from or clung to their mountains of grief, so that I would come away knowing the story of this one individual – Bobby – of so many individual 9/11 stories which have not been told. Throughout the beginning of the piece, Senior frequently signposted to remind the reader why the piece was important, providing us with a “why now”: “A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences,” she writes. “Every mourner has a very different story to tell.” A few pages later, she reminds us again of the significance of recording individual experiences: “In talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we’ve watched, we still know practically nothing about the last movements of the individual dead. It’s strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery.” 

These asides did the trick for me – I had been loath to read another 9/11 story as just one among so many which, especially we New Yorkers, have to record and understand that day and its aftermath. Senior must have predicted this, and she promises us that this piece is worth our time, that it is precisely that we have the story of the many, that the story of the one is significant, that there are still mysteries to be unravelled. And she was right. She won my trust in that moment and had it the whole way through, and it ended up being my favorite of this week’s stories, the one I could not put down. 

It was not until I read the structure pieces, particularly Stewart’s “Follow the Story” that I realized what kept me reading Senior’s piece was less the riveting content and more the highly effective structure, which was so good from the start that I completely trusted Jennifer to continue effectively telling this story. It struck me how, in both the piece about the McIlvay’s as well as the expose of Paul Skalnik and the corruption in prisoner testimony, the authors must have known every single piece of information in their stories before they started telling it. The beauty of their writing, particularly Senior’s, is her intentionality in deciding when we as readers discover each piece of information. She withholds that she knows and loves the McIlvays until a couple of pages in, but doesn’t wait so long to tell us that it feels untruthful. She introduces us to Bob McIlvane as a sympathetic person before telling us about the conspiracy theories in which he has come to believe. I want to try this more in my own writing. Often I’m so concerned with communicating the information I have that I forget to be intentional about the order in which I present it, leaning on chronology. McPhee recommends a chronological approach married with the tucking-in of themes for a stuck writer, which I agree with; a proficient reader can draw out themes on their own, but they cannot generate chronology, that’s why they need to. But I find I rely less on the chronology of events and more on the chronology in which I found things out. And when I find things out should have no bearing on when my reader finds things out. 

One thing that frustrates me a bit about McPhee’s “On Structure” is his reliance on instinct. I currently feel like I’m “on the table,” to use his metaphor, when it comes to my journalism capstone piece for the colloquium. I just have no clue where to start, and each first sentence is worse than the last. In the McPhee piece, he suddenly remembers Fred Brown and figures everything out. There he is, off the table, ready to write. My question is: what happens if you don’t have a “Fred Brown”? Or if you do, but you can’t figure out who that person is? It’s nice that McPhee got off the table, but why doesn’t he teach us how?

Two weeks before I met her at a protest in Berlin, Kübra Çinar was on her knees, hands cuffed behind her back and forehead pinned to the earth at the Ashdod port in Israel. She and over 400 other activists had just been intercepted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after six weeks aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla en route to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. Until the moment of interception, only 70 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza, the crew-members believed they would reach their destination. 

“We were so close,” said Çinar. “Even after the boat got intercepted, we still had hope that we were going to break the siege.” 

Sitting with Çinar outside a Berlin coffee shop with the dusk air biting our noses, it felt like a part of her was still on the boat, believing in the failed mission. A fierce hope burned in her warm brown eyes, which were framed by round glasses. Apart from the keffiyeh wrapped around her shoulders, though, I couldn’t have picked the 30-year-old Çinar out of a crowd of Berlin millennials. Her long hair was drawn back in a tight ponytail, her attire casual and monochrome. She told me that before becoming a full-time activist, she worked in finance. 

“But I quit my job. Well, actually, I got fired during the mission. So I’m unemployed now,” she explained. “But it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not the only one.”

Çinar often speaks like this, deflecting questions about herself to speak of the many. When the pro-Palestine movement spread across Germany in 2023, converging on Berlin, she saw it as her responsibility to call attention to the suffering in Gaza, especially as a German citizen. Çinar is of Turkish descent, but was born and raised in Berlin. She is deeply critical of Germany. “I never felt like a German,” she said. “It’s like this country never denazified.” 

Over the past two years, the pro-Palestine movement has become the center of Çinar’s life. She started attending protests soon after the Israel-Hamas war began and quickly became a leader. She has adopted the habits of the movement, referring to the IDF as the “IOF” (Israeli Occupational Forces) and constantly bringing the focus of our conversation back to Gaza. 

For this level of involvement, Çinar and her friends in the movement have been targeted by the Berlin police. One friend, Aala, who asked to go by her first name, has been particularly impacted. The 20-year-old Aala is a refugee from Syria who fled from Damascus to Germany with her family eight years ago. She still lives at home with her parents, who are originally from the Golan Heights. She says that the police have frequently come to her house looking for her.

“They come and they ring,” she explained. “They ask, ‘Is Aala here?’” Once, they gave her father a letter banning her from participating in protests for a week. Of course, Aala did not listen. “I would never sign it,” she says. “I know my rights.”

According to Çinar and Aala, the police know both of them by name and focus on them at protests to make an example of them. Aala recalls an instance when the German police removed her hijab and refused to return it to her for 20 minutes. That night, she was held in jail for saying “from the river to the sea,” which is an illegal chant in Germany. 

“It’s actually really easy to be a terrorist in Germany,” Aala joked, bitterly. “It’s enough when you wear a keffiyeh. It’s enough when you’re Arab. You don’t need to say anything.” 

On top of the frequent harassment, activists are beginning to feel that their protests are futile. Even as public sentiment in Germany has soared in support of Palestinian liberation, little has changed on a policy level. The demands of halting arms exports to Israel, recognizing Palestine as a state, and ensuring accountability for those who have committed atrocity crimes, have not been met. Germany is clinging to its longstanding commitment to support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. 

“I was tired of the activism in Berlin. We have been fighting for two years, and nothing has changed,” Çinar explained. 

Already craving change when a member of the flotilla steering committee reached out to her and invited her to join the mission, Çinar did not hesitate to accept. “As a German citizen, I feel responsible to do more than I did in the last three years, because my government is complicit. Despite the cruel past of German history, Germany is still positioning itself on the wrong side of history,” she said.

The GSF mission included 44 vessels bearing 500 volunteers, activists, and lawmakers, representing at least 43 countries. The boats carried symbolic, though still meaningful, amounts of humanitarian cargo for the region’s starved population. 

In August, Çinar found herself on the Alma, the lead ship of the GSF, which departed from the port of Spain and began making its way across the Mediterranean in late August. On the boat, a white vessel bedazzled with Palestinian flags, she found community and passionate individuals who shared her views. She enjoyed cooking meals and getting to know her shipmates, including Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. A video on Instagram shows Çinar sitting on the sunny deck beside her shipmate Tadhg Hickey. “She is the purest, most dedicated activist I think I’ve ever met in my life,” Hickey says of Çinar in the video.

Çinar also faced hardships on the Alma, ranging from the storms which might hit any fleet of boats sailing across the world to multiple drone attacks. On Sept. 9, the Alma was attacked by a drone containing an incendiary device and was damaged by the fire. The crew extinguished the flames quickly and no one was injured.

Then, on October 1 at 8pm, the Alma was intercepted by the IDF. Soldiers boarded the boat and began arresting its members on the deck. Çinar described the interception as the “worst part” of the mission, recalling the moment when Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir confronted the crew in person. 

“He just showed up,” Çinar recalled. She described Ben Gvir gathering the activists together and trying to “make his one man show” by accusing them of being “baby-killers.” He had promised to treat the flotilla crew as terrorists. When taken captive, Çinar thought he intended to follow through. 

For the next six days, Çinar and the others were held in the Ktz’iot prison in the Negev desert. For the first 50 hours, according to Çinar, they were not given food, and fresh water was withheld for the duration of their captivity. Instead, Çinar and her compatriots drank toilet water. The men were separated from the women, and some were isolated for hours or days at a time, according to Çinar. “When we got food, we got bad food,” she said. “They treated us like animals.”

She remembers eggs which the guards threw into the cells after holding them in the sun for several days, and she cannot forget their lingering smell. She also recalls being given carrots filled with maggots. “Most of us didn’t eat anything,” she said. 

On the 6th of October, the crew was released, and the next day, Çinar returned to Germany. “The six days were really hard for all of us, but it was also a reminder of reality,” Cinar said. 

The experience made her consider how little she had understood about the Palestinian experience as an outsider. “We think we know the Palestinian struggle, we are saying that we know, but I just realized we didn’t know anything,” she noted. “Being in this prison completely changed my view of how barbaric, how inhuman [the Israeli army] can be.”

Back in Berlin, Çinar is back on the protest scene. After the energetic yet uneventful demonstration near Checkpoint Charlie where I met Çinar, a group of female organizers, including Çinar and Aala, retreated to the tables outside Coffee Fellows. They debriefed the rally while savoring warm coffee and smoking seemingly endless cigarettes. 

Nestled among them, Çinar appeared satisfied, but fatigued. She told me that she missed her life on the boat and the security of believing in a specific mission. She now finds it difficult to eat, drink, and sleep, unable to shake the knowledge of the people still in prison. “We do not know how privileged we are,” she said. “Our duty is to use this privilege for those who cannot.”

The activist has been peppered with questions about the flotilla since returning to Germany. But Çinar refuses to remain in what one might expect would be a tempting limelight. “I’m trying to tell people what happened to me. But at the same time, I don’t want people to talk about me, because I am not the mission,” she explained. “I’m nothing. I’m just a human being who did what the government was supposed to do.”

These readings made me think more about the role of journalists who do not need to be experiencing the trauma and hardships of the population on which they are reporting, but choose to do so out of a sense of duty. On the one hand, it’s very brave. Cailin Doornbos refers to a “journalistic duty” she felt to travel to Ukraine and discover why Western weapons are so critical to Kyiv’s fight. I found her storytelling most effective in the description of the secret repair facilities which so few can access. This was the most unique aspect of her reporting and the images of Ukrainians caring so intently for destroyed Western weapons and “cannibalizing” really communicated the extent to which Ukraine depends on Western weapons. 

Doornbos lost me in the end, though. It was the final sentence that frustrated me: “While they still need additional military aid, the impact past donations have had on their fight is not forgotten by those whose lives depended on it. And I think that’s something we, as Americans, can take pride in.” Why is this necessary? Why not just tell us the story and let us make the judgment of whether or not to be proud as Americans of the impact our donations have had on the fight? It felt, frankly, unjournalistic and also not very interesting. What do others think about this?

Caitlin Dickerson’s Seventy Miles in Hell gripped me the whole time. I had read the piece before and am always shocked by how many nationalities are represented among the migrants in the Darien Gap. Dickerson’s immersive reporting allows her to capture nuances that would be difficult from afar: the interactions between the guides and the migrants, for example, and the role of the Indigenous Panamanians, and the bandits. While one could use reconstruction to achieve some of Dickerson’s physical descriptions, I don’t think it would be possible to communicate the moment when Maria Fernanda covers her eyes as her 7-year-old-daughter crosses the rock and says “Hold on tight, my princess!” without being there in person. 

This left me with the question: how do you know when you need to be there to report a story? Maybe, like Doornbos, you’ve been reporting on the same topic for a while. What tells you: It’s time for me to go actually embed in this place, and that’s the only way I can find out the information I need and tell the story that must be told, even if it’s dangerous?

I really appreciated Ceci’s comment about how we might practice embedding differently under constraints of time (and space) perhaps using video calls or social media. This reminded me of the most striking piece of embedded journalism I’ve encountered this year — the two episodes of This American Life featuring Banias, a 9-year-old girl in Gaza who reporter Chana Joffe-Walt has been speaking with over the phone for months. To get to know Banias, Chana just calls her on the phone, or facetimes her, for hours, allowing the child to dictate the nature of their calls. Banias gives her virtual house tours of a home once filled with nearly 80 relatives and describes her daily routine of “playing school” with other children, with the oldest taking on the role of teachers. She says things like “oh, here comes a bomb,” as casually as if she was announcing the arrival of the daily newspaper. Banias is a lens into the war so few can attain, and the medium of radio is the perfect way to introduce it to a broader audience. As a listener, I felt so embedded in her voice and her story that I needed to sit on my kitchen floor for a good few minutes after hearing the interview, the only time any piece of journalism has produced such a reaction in me.  

I have always been a bit daunted by the prospect of the profile. How do you capture a whole human being in one piece and serve them up to the world to read? It is less a fear of offending the individual in question, or failing to accurately represent them, which is no different from any kind of reporting we do. But there is something about conveying the life of an individual human that feels very delicate. I also struggle with relevance — when you’re dealing with a person, or event, rather than a widespread phenomenon, how do you get your readers to care about your subject like someone they know? Novelists do it all the time, but it feels harder in journalism, where there’s no room for making things up. 

In both Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” and Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives,” though, people and places were fully alive and relevant and interesting at all times. Part of the advantage of writing for a Western audience about elements of Egyptian culture and Syrian nightlife is that everything is novel, so simple sensory descriptions go a long way. The first for grafs of “Dancing for Their Lives” are almost purely descriptive, entirely devoid of quotes. This is often a journalism no-no, but here it really works for both introducing Um Nour as a character and the nightclub as a space. For an unfamiliar audience, the story is merely that such a person and such a place exist, and we want to understand it. 

Hessler employs a similar strategy. To understand the informal economy of the zabalen, for someone who hasn’t directly experienced it, is to be transported into a new world with unfamiliar practices and rules. The story stays interesting through physical description and the introduction of a central character. Both Deb and Hessler see many different sides of Um Nour and Sayyid, respectively. Both journalists are introduced to a new system — the system of prostitution in Syrian nightclubs, and the system of garbage pickup in Cairo — through these central characters. In some ways, they are the tour guides to their own profiles, and we only see of their lives what they show us. 

The journalist’s role then becomes to reflect on these lives in all their richness and activity, draw out significant themes (as the two Nieman and WSJ advice pieces advised), and organize them. In “Dancing for Our Lives,” the image of the women “lingering together in this comfortable female place, homesick, preparing to live off their bodies,” accomplishes this particularly well. This is the thesis in a nutshell: the women in the piece are dancing, literally, for their lives. Any outside could understand that. But only the insider, who has entered the changing room with these women and watched them prepare, could get a sense of the comfort in the shared female space, or accurately convey the homesickness of these women. Similarly, in “What the garbage man knows,” Hessler gives us insight only he, as a journalist who has truly immersed, could provide. He has gone to Sayyid’s house, gone to court with him. There was something unsatisfying in being unable to piece together what happened with Sayyid and Wahiba’s marriage. But Hessler gets us the closest a person can get. Reading these pieces helped me work through the role of a profile. There are so many people in the world the average person never gets to be close with, from politicians to celebrities sex workers to the local garbage collector — and a profile’s job is to get us the closest we can get.

By Devon Rudolph

What happens if my reporting goes unheard? This question has consumed my thoughts since our workshop with Gavin Rees, an advisor for the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma. He said that one sign of resilience in crisis reporting is a high sense of meaning in one’s work. For reporters who cover issues they find important to the functioning of society, their work holds strong meaning. Yet, it is possible to publish a story that has no societal impact. Maintaining our fundamental values when others dismiss our contributions, we discussed with Rees, is an integral element of remaining sane in the fraught profession of journalism.

Rees also compared journalists covering breaking news to doctors in an emergency room. When a catastrophe occurs, they drop everything to rush to the scene. An orderly day in the life of a journalist may quickly devolve when more pressing matters arise. It is clear from this metaphor that reporters cannot always put themselves first, and often don’t have control over their daily activities. When combined with the difficulties of reporting on a traumatic topic, journalists are exposed to stress that requires self assessment. As Rees explained, this doesn’t require an immediate withdrawal at the first sign of mental distress, but rather a recognition that everyone has limits.

Later in the day, our class had a quite different conversation with Kristin Brinker, a member of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. The focus of our course is migration, so we asked about the AfD’s anti-immigration platform. Brinker distinguished between Ukrainian and Syrian immigrants, implying that Germany welcomed Ukrainians because they accepted its “culture.” When further pressed about what it means to be German, Brinker emphasized religion, specifically “Christian Jewish.” Similar to the far-right MAGA movement, she tied religion to policy. Brinker also claimed that pro-Palestine protests are anti-German, considering the country’s history with Israel and the Holocaust. 

At the end of this day, we shared dinner and conversation with students from the Technical University of Berlin. I talked with two students about our class journalism project in Germany, which led to a discussion about the core principles of journalism. They asked: what is journalism, and how is it different from tik-tok videos? Since the umbrella for what ‘counts’ as journalism can be so broad, I defended the position that principled reporters derive their core values from fact and truth. Influencers don’t have the same moral responsibility to ensure their reporting is informed by facts. Journalists seeking to find truths must do their best to make a bullet-proof, fact-based narrative, citing sources, quoting trustworthy facts, and reporting oppositional beliefs. This type of reporting not only holds greater authority, but it just may have the potential to change minds.