Phil Wagler of Kelowna, B.C., is global director of the World Evangelical Alliance Peace and Reconciliation Network. He shares what he learned on a fall trip to a country at war.
In December 2024 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its 34th month. Conflicts and distractions – some understandable and others trivial – in other parts of the world and our lives have pushed the war in Eastern Europe down the newsfeeds and out of the minds of many. Meanwhile, the intensity of the war escalates.
In August Ukraine made a bold incursion into Russian territory for the first time. In September Western political leaders discussed giving Ukraine the right to use Western long-range weapons for attacks inside Russia, and former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev dauntingly speculated about the use of nuclear weapons on Kyiv.
In September I traveled to Kyiv. As global director of the World Evangelical Alliance’s Peace and Reconciliation Network (PRN) I had been invited to meet with leaders of Ukraine’s theological training institutions and denominational leaders to listen, learn, lament and discern how a global network like PRN could help strengthen the transformative mission Ukrainian Christians are already living and the complex journey toward peace and reconciliation they navigate now and into the years ahead.
Many of us have some awareness of what happened in Ukraine in February 2022 when the pandemic was happily waning, and we were all starting to relax. Many of us probably know a Russian friend or a displaced Ukrainian residing among us whose lives are intertwined with political machinations designed in Moscow, Kyiv, Washington and London.
The tragedies of Eastern Europe are once again making waves everywhere, but whenever wars linger – like this one or in Israel – polarizations intensify, violence becomes normalized, and the masses become desensitized. We adapt to the prevailing darkness, get hardened in our positions, tune-out and miss that it is precisely when darkness invades everything that light shines even more brightly and the clarion call of heaven rings for those tired of the cacophony of chaos.
This is the contrarian nature of our life-giving God in a corrupt world and the mystery of the incarnation: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome (or understood) it” (John 1:5). People of faith look to God in times like this in hope because He assures, “When the earth totters, and all its inhabitants, it is I who keep steady its pillars” (Psalm 75:3). This truth of the steadying hand of a benevolent, sovereign King of kings in the face of arrogance, aggression and wanton destruction is also most clearly seen when we’re closest to where things seem to be teetering the most.
As my trip to Kyiv becomes memory and the war roars on, the hope of Heaven’s light and the truth of God holding firm the pillars are surer in my soul. Can you believe such good news? I invite you to consider these vignettes of Ukraine to steady your soul too.
Dancing with bombs
It was a beautiful Kyiv September Sunday afternoon. In the sundrenched park at the east end of Khreshchatyk Street, overlooking the Dnieper River steadily flowing south toward the heaviest of fighting, children and their parents and hand in hand lovers strolled enjoying the waning days of a third summer of war.
A group of bubbly teenage girls choreographed a dance beneath the ironically named People’s Friendship Arch. It could have been anywhere. It could have been your town or city. It was teenagers doing teenage things – laughing, hugging, dancing it out and then doing it all over again when the “take” wasn’t what they hoped for. That was the scene looking west toward Kyiv’s downtown.
But then there was east. Spinning on the same spot I peered out across the wide Dnieper, past the forest of Soviet-era block apartments that dotted the left bank, and beyond to a city in the distance visible across the flat steppe. “There,” pointed my pastor host, “do you see?” Plumes of smoke were rising, darkening the blue sky and reminding those who bothered to look up from their Sunday afternoon in the park that destruction and dancing are partners here.
How does the normalization of war shape a people? Is dancing with bombs in the distance defiance, indifference, resignation or a dog’s breakfast of all three? War is normal in Ukraine, and that is deeply lamentable, particularly for its impact on the young. Most Ukrainian children over the last few years, said one Christian leader, “have spent more time in bomb shelters than outside or in school.”
The generational trajectory of such a norm is staggering, not to mention the fact that recent reports say 54% of Ukrainians suffer from PTSD. But laughter, friendship and learning of a different kind exist here as well, and this is deeply hopeful.
Death stares you in the face in downtown Kyiv – the long outdoor wall of St. Michael's Cathedral and Monastery just a short walk from that park is wallpapered in small photos of an increasingly disappearing generation. But teenage dancers, the playfulness of children and the joy of friendship on a Sunday afternoon remind us that life is not easily extinguished but to be lived, no matter what is nearby or off in the distance.
Perhaps, in another of life’s great ironies, Ukrainians are more awake and alive then many who dwell in “peace?” Perhaps it’s not they, but the rest of us, who have forgotten what normal life is really like and that death must be confronted with life?
“So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 8:15).
Tree of life
On a tree-lined Ukrainian city street a row of townhouses, just a few years old, now look like ruins from grainy video footage of World War 2. People carefully built these. People worked to buy them. Families made them home and lived the rhythms of eating and sleeping, working and playing, as they built a future.
Then war came. In the basements of some of these homes people were held hostage for days by occupying troops. Home became a prison. Shells and battles set these streets afire, the warmth of caretakers decimated by invaders who didn’t care. The street is a sorrowful reminder of the contradictions of being human. Love and hate. Build and destroy. Bustling and empty. Life and death.
In front of this charred and abandoned row of houses, a tree fights back. In contrast to the destruction behind it, its full green leaves defy and redefine the landscape. The knowledge of good and evil taken into our own hands has defiled us, but the tree of life is hope and healing. A Ukrainian leader of a community development organization grabbed my arm. “Do you see that? That tree – that's the sign of the Kingdom.”
A few days later, the tree and its leaves in mind, I spoke at a small church meeting in one of those Kyiv high-rise apartments that can’t hide from Russian missiles. A woman playing the piano approached me and said, “Before the war I knew nothing of God nor cared. Then everything changed and my life was turmoil. This church stayed with us. They were present, they provided food, they cared for us and didn’t leave. I was baptized a few weeks ago. Without the war I wouldn’t know Jesus.”
One Ukrainian pastor had been a colonel in the military. After February 2022 a general called and asked him to return to his post. He refused. The work of praying for God’s intervention and mobilizing the church were too vital. The general paused. “You’re right,” he said. “Actually, stay where you are and keep your people praying because things are happening because of Above.” Click.
God plants his Kingdom. Jesus grows His church. His church is a tree of life.
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2).
Church with scars
Bucha. In February and March 2022 this pine-tree laden suburb came under Russian control as Putin sought a lightning-quick occupation and capitulation of Kyiv.
Bucha is beautiful. In the days of the Soviet Union communist party members retreated and treated themselves there. You’d like Bucha; you’d want to raise your kids in a place like that. In 2022, however, Bucha became hell. For 28 days under occupation more than 400 of Bucha’s residents including children were tortured and killed.
“Don’t Avert Your Gaze” reads the sign outside the Church of the Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called on a Bucha side-street. Behind the church building the bodies of 117 civilians – from age 6 to 90 – are buried. Now, two years later, a memorial somberly names each neighbour, friend or family member who was and is no more. Perhaps you recall the footage of political leaders and UN investigators overlooking mass graves in Ukraine? It was here. It is real. It’s easy to want to avert your gaze.
It’s hard to know what to feel, think or do on such holy ground. I stood in that locale of lament with pastors who have been faithfully serving to the edge of weariness. They admit their trauma and that war has changed them. Some experienced those horrific days in Bucha and others have seen similar atrocities in other parts of their homeland. There will be more exposed and exhumed. What was I to say to them as someone able to return to my comfortable home? How do we pray?
We lingered, then walked back toward where Don’t Avert Your Gaze challenged us again. We turned to look at the towering church, its high dome surrounded halo-like by the setting sun. There were scars. The sparkling white walls are speckled with bullet and shell pockmarks. My Ukrainian friend, an evangelical leader who lives in Bucha and endured those days, said, “I hope they don’t fix those.”
The church with scars is who the Church is. Like Andrew, we have been called and we don’t always know what that will mean. Like our Lord, the Body of Christ bears the marks of the suffering, sin and rebellion of the world. Incarnation means we don’t avert our gaze or surrender responsibility. The Church takes hits, but it will not crumble. The Church exists because of resurrection and is a resurrection people, but it doesn’t always appear that way. And we’re tempted to patch the pockmarks.
Disciples in both countries involved in this war bear scars. Politics has scarred Russians as aggressors and Ukrainians with the burden of victimhood. Is there any hope that the Russian and Ukrainian Body of Christ may lead the way in healing the deep wounds being created? A Church that moves forward with scars may be the only hope.
Our common confession and ministry are a wall against violence and evil. We not only preach that we’ll rise again, we have the same Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead to live that hope now. When the world quakes and the city gates fall, Jesus has His Church, His body, His voice, His hands and feet, scars and all.
“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see” (Luke 24:39).
A mom on a bus
A haggard mom and her chatty toddling daughter sat in front of me on the bus leaving Kyiv. I don’t know why or who they were leaving, I don’t know where they were heading, and I couldn’t speak with them because of language barriers. But for 18 hours I sat behind them as we rumbled along rough highways and weaved through military checkpoints heading west – away from sirens, bomb shelters, abnormal normalcy and perhaps all they know and love. I was to them a silent foreigner; they were to me a megaphone.
It was night. The bus rolled along. People coughed, shuffled and stirred. It’s hard finding a comfortable position to sleep in such circumstances and tossed about by such roads. I had drifted off briefly but shook awake when the bus shuddered over a series of potholes. I blinked, my eyes struggling, my back complaining, and there she was – that mom on the bus.
She had surrendered both seats to her little girl who was resting contentedly in the fetal position, covered in a thin blanket and breathing peacefully the sleep of dreams. Mom, on the other hand, was perched awkwardly on a narrow sliver of seat. She was leaning like an elongated, italicized letter “r,” her head bouncing and teetering on an outstretched arm, in a position bound to cause numbness of the extremities and aches in places she was only about to discover she had.
It was the restless sleep of love. Love for the other. Selflessness embodied. A universal signpost of a mother’s heart for her children. War is dark and displacing, but even in these unjust circumstances love – sacrificial, self-giving, self-denying love – exists and will prevail. It is a protest against the evil that tempts us to think there are other ways to overcome.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37).
The World Evangelical Alliance Peace & Reconciliation Network
does its work through the generosity of donors. Connect with the PRN or donate. Invite Canadian director Joel Zantingh of Guelph, Ont., or global director Phil Wagler of Kelowna, B.C., as a speaker. Read more of these blog posts at FaithToday.ca/AllThingsReconciled. Photos courtesy Phil Wagler.