One Polish church in the southern city of Krakow has experienced remarkable growth over the last two years in surprising circumstances: the Covid-19 pandemic and warfare, writes Tim Thornborough.
Christ the Saviour Presbyterian Church (CSPC) currently meets in a converted bank and, as we entered, we were handed headsets to enable us to listen to the live translation of the service from Polish to English. Others picked up the headsets marked ‘Ukrainian’. My main contact in Krakow is Sashko – a Ukrainian from Lviv, just over the border from Poland – who is the assistant minister at the church.
He says: ‘Our church doubled in size during the pandemic and, when the war started, it almost doubled in size again. Because of Krakow’s location, the city has been serving as a gateway to safety because Krakow is one of the first large cities you arrive at once you have crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border.
‘We were given an incredible opportunity and privilege to serve those who were fleeing from cities that were under the Russian attack in Ukraine, and we primarily served women with children. We rented shelters, we organised meals for the refugees, offered legal help with paperwork, and we ran a ten-week-long Vacation Bible School (VBS) with two shifts morning and afternoon for younger and older kids respectively. We started a teen ministry, women’s groups, collected food and clothes for the displaced people and distributed it.
‘We also organised a large literature project where we printed over 20,000 books in Ukrainian, and offered them to other churches in Poland, thus equipping them to serve Ukrainians that came to their towns and cities. I like to compare what our church did to what the apostles had to do during Jesus’ miracles of feeding the multitude with just a few loaves of bread and fish. We were a church of 40 people on a Sunday, that didn’t have any resources of our own and yet thanks to an incredible response of the Christian church across the globe, God took care of all these needs by using us and by giving us a task of distributing whatever belonged to Him to those in need, just like the apostles had to distribute bread.”
It is thought that over 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled to Poland, placing significant strains on government services, and both the Catholic and Protestant churches have played a significant role in caring for them.
Poland has been largely neglected as a mission field over the years. It is dominated spiritually by the strong Catholic church, with a smaller Orthodox church being the second largest. Pope John Paul II came from Krakow, and his image is everywhere as you drive around the city. The Lutheran Church is the largest Protestant denomination, and Evangelical churches are few and far between. Over a decade ago, someone created a map of Poland where the country was split into small counties, and only the counties that had some Protestant presence were marked red or pink. Sasho says: ‘This little map had a tremendous influence on me because it was pretty much white and blank. Sometimes you have to drive for 100 miles before you hit another Evangelical church. And when you do, there is no guarantee that the teaching in it will be sound and orthodox. I knew immediately that Poland needed more gospel-preaching churches. And I knew that we have to start in big cities because this is how ideas travel.’
Christ the Saviour Church struggles to connect with locals who are suspicious of anything that does not meet in a formal church building. To avoid the appearance of being a cult, they work hard at the trappings of a formal church service – robes, liturgy, and a formal setting for Holy Communion. This suspicion has also made life difficult for them to rent suitable places to gather and worship. The lease on the bank ends soon, and, like the many Ukrainians they are caring for, they are looking for a more permanent home. Front page picture: The Wahel Dragon Statue in Krakow. The dragon is a famous creature in Polish mythology.
