In September 2024 Jim Brown, our chief executive, began travelling to Ukraine to meet with our partners in the region, training young leaders and supporting pastors. We sat down to chat about his visits, and he reflected on the tragedy of broken families, communities and churches due to conscription and mass emigration.
How have your experiences been, travelling into a country under war?
What hits me most when crossing the border is the absence of smiles. Fear and anxiety covers the area like a cloud.
Frequent roadblocks are a brutal reminder of conscription, as the military looks for men between the ages of 20 and 60. If I didn’t have an Irish passport I might have been taken away right there to be trained and sent to war. This is a reality many men are living with daily.
During one visit, 200 soldiers came into the town to conscript. Throughout my time there I would sit in a coffee shop, by myself, no men nearby. I was told many hide in forests and wear women’s clothing to avoid being caught by drones. The future feels very uncertain.
Could you tell us more about some of the work the CEE team is doing to support church leaders in Ukraine?
We give thanks that over £30,000 was raised by Exodus when the war first started! This went to practical help such as setting up kitchens, food supplies, a minibus for the church and financial support to orphanages. At the start those practical needs were high and that was a priority. Now, as the war continues we are prioritising training young leaders and pastors.
Even though travelling carries risk for the men, we had 25 youth leaders on a training weekend with us. There is a hunger for biblical teaching. The girls from the group will be heading to Sutor for our international week where they will join with other young leaders from Hungary, Latvia and Romania. Please pray for this team and the experiences they will have.
We train and support Ukrainian Pastors as well. We have run our Legacy program for the pastors with families so they might be fed and ministered to. The pastors we met with carry the weight of pastoral care for those remaining in the congregation. There has been a decimation of churches: two thirds of the village I visited have left their homes, which means two thirds of the church congregation have also left too. The needs are many, and the workers are few.
Do you have any memorable moments from your trip you’d like to share?
One day I sat to have breakfast and heard a bomb go off less than a mile away. It actually brought me back to those times in Northern Ireland when that was a familiar sight in our own country. And similar to home, in the midst of troubles there is still the blessing of warm hospitality and times spent sharing meals around a table. The people we’ve met deeply appreciate the sacrifice taken to travel into a war zone. They don’t want to be forgotten. It’s a worry for many of them, to be a forgotten people.
I was also struck by the dedication of the young leaders. They came to the training despite taking many risks to get there. During our training session we offered to stop for breaks but they told us, “keep going, don’t stop, you’re here and we want to use this time we have with you. We don’t need breaks.”
How can we pray for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine?
Pray for families, especially those with absent fathers.
Pray for the pastors to lead their churches faithfully through this very difficult season.
Pray for an end to the war and a chance to rebuild.
You are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of it.
1 Corinthians 12:27
* Some answers have been edited for length.