By Raphi Gold
10/16/2025
GUMMERSBACH— I am now in Mike Bible’s “circle of care.” This man, seated next to me on a plane five days ago by fate (he’d say God), now wants to know when Miriam and I get back safe tonight. He also wants to be my pen pal. “I’ve been getting into snail mail,” he pauses his enthusiastic drilling to tell me, “Let me write to you in New York.” I find myself promising “sure!” because saying “sure” to Mike is what got me here.
Here, in this abandoned cinema soon-to-be church in Gummersbach, Germany, the scene won’t synthesize. Everything is out of place: half-stripped walls, stray work gloves, faded mosaic tiles, a coffee machine in Ukrainian, a ticket box in disrepair. There’s no trace of Germania Lichtspieltheater online, but we can guess the year it closed by the last movie it showed: Indiana Jones 4, tickets £4.50.
The people don’t quite match either, least of all ourselves. Pastor Nickolas Skopych was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was visiting a friend in Gummersbach just before the war broke out; his two-week trip has turned into a nearly four-year stay. Hundreds of his congregants followed. Gummersbach is now home to as many as 3000 Ukrainians, according to Skopych (German Census data is unavailable past 2022). His new congregation bears the same name as its counterpart in Ukraine: Almaz, meaning “diamond.”
The Americans who have come to help convert the theatre into a church for Almaz hail from the First Baptist Church, a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee. The Ukrainians all speak at least three languages and have experienced traumatic upheaval. The Americans just speak English, and some have never left the country. Last night, the Americans walked five miles just for McDonalds. German McDonalds.. Still, they’re all evangelical Baptists; their parallel stories of finding God in times of need align perfectly.
Before we know it, they’re inviting us to lunch. We’re devouring scrumptious messy Ukrainian cream puffs, and I’m chatting with Ukrainian refugees Liza and Viktoria about American television and evangelical Valentines day traditions. I venture upstairs with five Americans including Jeremy, the mission leader who is clearly fed up with the college kids on the trip. Their work ethic leaves something to be desired. We sweep for a bit, halfheartedly, then pause to explore the attic. We tear giant sheets of rubbery wallpaper into chunks. We lower an ancient control-panel from the window, then hold some rolls of film up to the light. The boys guffaw — one of them is a porn film.
It’s time for something else. Downstairs, people load bins with wooden planks. I glimpse Miriam hoisting a massive branch. Another chat with Mike leads me to a facetime interview with his Ukrainian “daughter,” Tania, whom he sponsored via U4U. Suddenly realizing it’s 5pm, I interrupt Miriam’s conversation with trip-leader Jeremy. It turns out he has a secret he’s not quite ready for the others to find out about: he’s actually a Baptist who practices Jewish ritual and learns Torah. He wears tzizit in the Sephardi style and keeps kosher. I want to know everything.
Alas. We board the train home, which of course gets cancelled, so we pile into an Uber with a Polish couple. I write this from what I pray is our last train of the evening. With Deutsche Bahn’s fickleness, we were lucky to make it to Gummersbach in the first place. Or was it thanks to God? Either way, I know who I’m texting when we get home safe tonight.
