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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
