Vitaliy Filip is from a small town called Sambir in Ukraine. He serves in his local church and works at the Lviv Theological Seminary as a youth pastor and also teaches at the seminary. When the war broke out in 2022, his church and seminary began a ministry serving refugees through practical support and prayer.
He shares the impact of the war, “It was this singular moment that completely changed the entirety of our lives, our church, and life at the seminary. I don’t think we even fully realise its impact on us. We woke up and got up, and realised that there was a war. And we realised we didn’t know how to act during the war. We did not know what to do first and what to do at all…this war directed us and the Church to the right kind of ministry, to serve people.”
Being the hands and feet of Jesus
“The first thing we started to do was when we realised that there was a long queue at the border, and we were close to the border, we had no ample resources and no special knowledge, but we took tea and sandwiches and brought them to the border. At first, they didn’t even let us through. There were huge lines. We were supplying tea for a stretch of ten kilometres long, or even longer. One volunteer team was distributing it, and the other was boiling water. And so we were constantly taking turns. And we worked in the church until the evening.”
“The seminary was a resource because refugees from all over Ukraine were traveling through Lviv to Europe. And here were classrooms, here were rooms, here was a place to live. At first, it was through friends and relatives who came here. And then it so happened that it became one of the centres for accepting refugees. And in the first weeks, there were so many refugees that they were everywhere; they were in the rooms, they were in the church buildings, they were in the classrooms, they were in my office, where I work, they were living, just in the hallways, where there was any place where you could take them in, people were sleeping.”
“We pretty much started doing whatever we could and with whatever we had. People from our church who had transportation picked up people, and ferried them to the border. They would come to the train station, pick up people, and take them to the border. We started doing everything we could right away. Later, the authorities asked us to take in children here, and hundreds of children were brought here by bus and fed. They could get some basic necessities covered here.”
“The local church began to take in refugees, feeding refugees. These people need this because the state helps them only with money for housing; sometimes, it is not enough for housing, and the food boxes really help them survive. We pray for people all the time, pray with people, and help them directly. If we see that a family has just moved, we provide for their most urgent needs.”
“More than six thousand people have lived in the seminary, some long-term, some just for a period of time. And approximately sixteen thousand people went through the seminary, perhaps even more when people came and went by bus…The seminary did everything during this period. Families were brought here; elderly people were brought from the train; people who were paralyzed, who had to be fed, dressed, washed, and who needed assistance with everything. There were people who spent their last days here. They had to be buried. Pregnant women who came and gave birth here in Lviv were also provided for.”
The Church united
“The fact that God allowed us to serve so much is a huge blessing. I compare it to this story from the New Testament of a boy who had five loaves of bread and two fish. God fed thousands of people from all this. And probably it’s the same for us because we had no resources. We had no resources here, and we had no resources in our church.”
“At the beginning of the war, all we could do was send a food box per family for our church. And we never even thought about it and never dreamed that it would end up being thousands of people…Finding housing, finding a job, restoring documents, and reuniting families is actually a tremendous job that students, some churches, and our church did. It’s all united; it’s one mechanism. Sometimes it was a chain where a church in Mariupol contacted a church somewhere abroad; that church found food, let’s say, then found another church that delivered the food to the border. Another church ferried from the border to Lviv, and another from Lviv further out. So, if you look at it, this is an excellent cooperation of churches that all did an extensive and fantastic job.”
Blessed resources
Langham Partnership supports contextual resources and published the Slavic Bible Commentary. Vitaliy shares, “I really value biblical commentaries. One of the classes I teach is the Epistle to the Hebrews. So it requires high quality, good commentaries in order to understand the passages, to understand the message. The Slavic Commentary is special because it is a collective work, and it is the work of the people who live here, it is in our context, our understanding.
“I’ve seen out there personal commentaries, and people sometimes have a particular subject which they understand, and they are good. But so it happens that their bubble of expertise doesn’t cover something, and yet they comment on it anyway, out of their ignorance. Sometimes I find that students using such commentaries can misunderstand something…the Slavic Commentary is a must for our classes. I think that if there were more of such books, it would be extremely useful for us so that we could have commentaries tackling different viewpoints and different focuses. We don’t have a lot of them.”
“The translation of commentaries would also be very helpful for us because there are not a lot of them here, and we know that there are good commentaries in other languages. And we would be delighted if we could add these commentaries to our library. The books that we have and the languages in which they are written, many are written in Russian. In our seminary library right now, most of the books that are available or generally available from publishers and in Ukraine, they’re in Russian.”
“At the beginning of the seminary’s existence we had no problems with this since most of the students understood Russian and read the Bible in Russian. Before the war, we faced the problem that not all of our students could read in Russian or could write papers using books in Russian. They did not study it. They don’t know theological lingo, they know very simple phrases in the spoken language, and that’s where their knowledge of Russian ends. And every year, it becomes harder and harder. And we realise that now, during the war, for some people, it is even a moral issue. They just can’t read that. They have completely abandoned the Russian language and just can’t do it. We try to buy everything that’s available, that we get our hands on in Ukrainian, but it’s a small number of books.”
“It would be so precious to us if commentaries and theological literature were available in Ukrainian. The ones that we could use for our classes. It would really help our teaching, and students would read them much faster…theological literature and Ukrainian commentaries would provide us with exactly what we need right now.”
Langham Partnership understands the need for literature to be published in local contexts and languages, which is why we partner with in-country scholars and theologians to produce literature that is relevant. If you would like to support this important work, you can make a tax-deductible gift here.
Prayer Points
- Thank God for Vitaliy and the local church and seminary supporting refugees. Thank God for the staff and volunteers that have served thousands of people in need both physically and spiritually.
- Pray that people in Ukraine will find their hope in Jesus and for the war to end.
- Thank God for Langham Partnership publishing the Slavic Bible Commentary and for the blessing it has been. Pray for more resources to be available in Ukraine to grow faithful and mature disciples.