A 69-year-old pastor with bone cancer who is receiving daily chemotherapy is refusing to leave Kherson, Ukraine, so as not to abandon his congregation and others in the city.
Sergei Synii has been urged by his daughters to travel to the USA, where they are, for safety and medical treatment.
But he insists the spiritual and physical needs of people in his war-blasted home city must come before his own.
Synii was encountered recently by a team of Christian doctors and nurses from the Slavic Gospel Association (SGA-UK) who visited a number of evangelical churches in the city. Those congregations have become centres of help and hope for its beleaguered citizens. The SGA team brought food and kitchen equipment to help the relief work, as well as medicines and drugs to treat the wounded and the sick.
Kherson was the only regional city captured by invading Russian forces, overrun in early March 2022, and then liberated by Ukrainian forces in November of that year. By that time about 80% of the Ukrainian population had left, and the remaining citizens have continued to be under constant shelling and destructive bombardment from the Russian military encamped across the frontline border of the Dnieper river.
The SGA says of its team which visited Kherson: ‘On their own admission, they were fearful, for they worked and treated patients with the sounds of heavy shelling and explosions constantly in the background. They took whatever precautions they could, often working in the relative safety of church basements, with no sense whatever of being ‘heroes’, but simply God’s servants, using their gifts for His glory and the blessing and help of the needy.
‘Arriving at one church at 6.30am there were already many people gathered at the church gates. The pastor said that every day the church prepares 250 food packages for people who are hungry, and many make sure they are early in order to receive one before the daily stock runs out. These people have no food, water, electricity or heating. The local evangelical church has become their centre of help and hope. The medical team, in fellowship with the church members, takes the opportunity to share the gospel with those they treat, and God has been pleased to bless their faithful witness, with many coming to faith in Jesus.’
When asked why he did not leave Kherson for the US in order to get better medical treatment, Sergei Synii told the team: ‘Look outside. People are waiting. Who will help them?’ Even though no food is distributed at the church on Sundays, between 300–400 people attend the services each week. Sergei also preaches daily to those who come to collect food packages.
The SGA concludes: ‘Behind the gloom and darkness of war in Kherson, and in many other locations in East Ukraine, the light of the gospel is being lifted up by faithful pastors and preachers like Sergei, who, with no regard for personal safety, are ministering to the spiritually lost, and seeing thousands of men and women repenting and turning to Christ for eternal deliverance and salvation.’
