Wise church planting needed in Ukraine

In March 2024, I spoke at a summit in Kyiv that launched an effort among Ukrainian Baptists to plant 1,000 new churches by 2036. Surveying the lay of the land there, I believe that this is an achievable vision, and that now is most certainly the right time.

Laying the matter of a full-scale invasion and war to one side, planting a church is – at the best of times - fraught with difficulties, never mind cooperatively planting 1,000. Wisdom is needed.

Not the kind of worldly wisdom that raises problems to solutions, let me be clear. Encouragingly, the people I am working with do not see the war or displacement as appropriate justification for gospel withdrawal. They recognise that there is a spiritual war to also be fought, and the war for their nation and for gospel advance sometimes overlap.

In the early days of the war, Yaroslav Pyzh, president of Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary in Lviv, reported around 400 Baptist churches that were rendered inoperable by mid‑August 2022 due to occupation and seizure or mass displacement of congregations or their leaders.

More recently, two documentaries have been released detailing abuses inflicted on Ukrainian Christians by their Russian invaders. 'A Faith Under Siege: Russia’s Hidden War on Ukraine’s Christians' and the Kyiv Independent’s investigation, 'Russia’s Crackdown on Ukrainian Christians, Unmasked' are both freely available online. Should their findings deter gospel-hearted people from planting churches? I think not.

When discussing the worst-case scenario of a complete Russian victory, one pastor told me: “We’ve been there before, and the Church did not die. Sure, maybe it will be more difficult, but we will keep going.” The wisdom that is needed is not driven by self-preservation but Saviour-proclamation. It is not a wisdom that talks the determined and the driven out of their work, but rather better informs their work.

Dan Steel’s recent book, 'Wise Church Planting: Twelve Pitfalls to Avoid in Starting New Churches', is helpful here. Although a British publication, the case studies in Wise Church Planting are from a variety of cross-cultural contexts and the pitfalls it identifies and the principles it offers for avoiding them transcend any one cultural context.

Every church planter in the world will face the internal pitfalls of character flaws, disunity, or family issues for example. Even the external pitfalls will be familiar: things like matters of planting culture, or local context, or opposition.

No, Dan doesn’t write specifically about what a church planter should do when his congregation wants him to lead services in Ukrainian although they do not really understand it because they continue to speak the language of their historic Russian colonisers. But the case study of Scripture to self-examination to successes and strategies content and flow of the book’s chapters provide a biblical framework for approaching such dilemmas.

Because of its usefulness, the Grace Baptists in Europe team of Grace Baptist Partnership has acquired the rights to translate Wise Church Planting into Ukrainian, for free distribution to the thousands of leaders and their team members who are preparing to plant churches over the next decade. I am in the closing stages of agreeing a translator and academic editors and hope that the translation will be complete and ready to launch by my next trip to Ukraine in the late autumn, Lord willing.

Your prayers are greatly appreciated! It is my hope that Ukrainian church planters will pursue and achieve their mission wisely. But never mind Ukraine. What about the UK? We do not have the distractions and hindrances of war. What is our vision? One thing is certain - wise church planting cannot mean no church planting. If you would like to know more about how you can support the Wise Church Planting Ukrainian translation project, please email gracebaptistsineurope@gmail.com.