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.”