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.”

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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.”