I was hoping to get to bed at a decent time last night, but the thump-thump of air defense wouldn’t let me drift to sleep. Instead, our family gathered in the living room, said a prayer, and watched the cold winter sky flash orange as Russian drones attacked the city center of Odesa. I’d like to say this is a rare occasion, but it’s not. In January 2025, Russia launched a total of 2,629 Shahed-type drones into Ukrainian territory. Compare that to last month (January 2026), when Russia launched 4,442 drones. As a pastor in Ukraine, I’d like my Christian brothers and sisters around the world to understand our situation and how the church is persevering through it. Surviving the Damage An apartment building damaged the night of this writing / Courtesy of Caleb Suko Eventually, the sky went dark again, and the sputter of heavy machine-gun fire died away. We gathered ourselves and crept off to bed, tired and uncertain about what had just been destroyed in the attack. In the morning, I woke to the news that the Russian drones targeted a local market on the other end of town. Drone after drone pounded the market, destroying the sellers’ stalls, cars parked nearby, and hundreds of windows in apartment buildings surrounding the area. The powerful shock waves broke all the windows and completely smashed out the door of a local Baptist church. Surviving the Cold Denis and Mariana / Courtesy of Caleb Suko Many people in Ukraine lack heating. For example, Denis and Mariana, a young married couple, are both eagerly serving in their local church. Last summer, they moved into their first apartment and began setting it up. It was small, with just enough room for the two of them. Then winter came, but the heat didn’t come. As November turned to December, temperatures in their apartment plummeted. Some mornings, it was barely 40 degrees Fahrenheit. They tried to heat the apartment with their gas stove until they both began to get terrible headaches and realized the carbon dioxide levels had become dangerous. Finally, in January, I helped Denis and Mariana move some of their furniture to a new place that actually had heat. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the opportunity to move. How Are Churches Responding? This is the experience of millions of Ukrainians—nightly drone and missile attacks, and unbearable cold at home. Just this minute, as I’m writing, my phone began sounding the air-raid alarm for the fourth time today, and now I can hear the rumble of air defenses somewhere in the city. How does the church survive such extreme conditions? What does it look like to remain faithful to the gospel and to continue ministering when the world around you is literally exploding? Damage to the local Baptist church / Courtesy of Caleb Suko In all honesty, not all churches have fared the same. Earlier in the war, we saw many church leaders leave the country, seeking safer pasture. They found it in Western Europe or North America. That left many churches with a deficit of trained and experienced leaders. Some churches are still struggling as a result. The leaders who remained have grown somewhat used to the constant attacks; nevertheless, it’s impossible to get used to them completely. For those churches that continued and even flourished during wartime, I’ve noticed several common factors. 1. Focus on the Core Gospel Truth Debate over secondary theological issues can be healthy, but it can also distract the church from its mission. Before the full-scale invasion began four years ago, many churches were caught up in debates over everything from what kinds of clothing are allowed at church to different eschatological positions. These debates quickly took a back seat when scared and bewildered people, who had never attended a Protestant church before, began showing up. Truths such as God’s grace, forgiveness, faith in Christ, and eternal life took center stage. 2. Willingness to Serve the Real Needs of People Around Them Early in the war, there was a need for housing, and many churches responded by creating hostels for refugees and internally displaced people within their facilities. Tens of thousands of people saw the church not only as a place of worship but also as a safe, warm place to spend the night. Four years in, many churches are still regularly engaged in feeding and clothing the needy. These tend to be difficult ministries; however, churches that have chosen to serve their community in this way often see lasting fruit. 3. Simpler Approach to Ministry We’re accustomed to seeing ministries in North America bustling with tech and props. It’s easy to see these as vital to the ministry. Now imagine what would happen in your church if there were no power, no heat, no microphones, no screens, and no assurance that your facility would make it through the night? What would happen? Ministry gets a lot simpler. You find you actually need few things to carry out the Great Commission. You need a Bible, you need your voice, you need prayer, and you need a few people ready to learn from God’s Word with you. Lesson for the North American Church? As I put the finishing touches on this article, it seems the drone attack is winding down. I just clicked over to check the news in our city, and it looks like at least one Russian drone hit an apartment building. The war isn’t getting any better, but the church of God moves on. She doesn’t move in the same way she did before the war started; she moves a bit freer now, less encumbered by secondary issues and techy toys, but more concerned with real needs and gospel truth. Maybe the Ukrainian church has something she can teach her North American sister.

My high school history courses emphasized big themes and simple explanations for cause and effect. Those classes were designed to give some sense civilization formed in the Fertile Crescent, why the Roman Empire fell, and the way punitive reparations contributed to Hitler’s rise. In this model, the distance between history and our daily lives seems like an uncrossable ditch. History in textbook format can quickly become a tool for political activism that distorts the past and empowers evil. I also experienced history more personally growing up. I spent numerous summer days wandering a musty brick building, looking at glass cases of old buttons and arrowheads as my grandmother, the curator of the county historical museum, helped visitors look up where ancestors had lived and were buried. For me, history always had more to do with cemeteries and censuses than textbooks and political triumphs. That approach to history is more consistent with the messy reality of a fallen world, but it doesn’t do much to inspire grand political movements. In God and Country: Upholding Faith, History, and National Identity, John Wilsey, professor of church history and philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that a virtuous approach to history helps us love our nation while recognizing its flaws. Along the way, he shows that since Christianity is a uniquely historical religion, we should have a special interest in rightly handling history. This is an engaging and encouraging book for those seeking to faithfully navigate between political extremes. Christians as Historians History matters for Christians because our religion is uniquely historical. As Wilsey notes, “If the Bible is historically wrong, then we have nothing to rely on for the truth of Christianity but the heart” (34). This is why Christians must embrace a virtuous approach to history. For example, amid a vigorous theological debate about the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ, the Council of Nicaea zoomed in on the historical facts surrounding Jesus’s death. “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate” comes just a few lines before the declaration of Christ’s resurrection and ascension to heaven. Theologically, it doesn’t matter which Roman official ordered Jesus’s execution, yet millions of people repeat that historical fact every week as they recite the Nicene Creed in gathered worship. But facts alone aren’t the substance of history. “History is our interpretation of the past based on the artifacts that are left over,” argues Wilsey. “The facts of what happened in the past are there, but we make sense of those facts differently as time and circumstances advance” (8). Christians need to become virtuous historians. We need to apply virtues like faith, hope, love, wisdom, and justice to our treatment our neighbors from another age so we can give them the respect they deserve. Wilsey shows that, in reality, every Christian is a historian of sorts. As we wrestle with the copious evidence for Jesus’s bodily resurrection, we interpret the value of eyewitness testimony against our own uncertainty. More significantly, as we consider the facts recorded in Scripture and in extrabiblical sources, we need to come to grips with our culture’s distorted view of time. Reckon with Time Loving our ancient neighbors is often challenging because we live in a largely ahistorical age. As Sarah Irving-Stonebraker argues, “The premise underpinning the idea that our lives are a matter of self-invention is that there are no enduring stories shaping our identities and providing normative direction to public life.” We experience a timeless, eternal now filtered through the silicon rectangles in our hands. This will only get worse as AI animations of historical figure blur the boundaries between past and present. Every Christian is a historian of sorts. At the root of a Christian approach to history is recognizing the goodness of time. Time was created by God and has meaning. Wilsey observes, “God’s purpose for time was for it to be measured and that the standards for measuring time would be predictable, knowable, and permanent” (34). Thus, studying history is as much an exploration of God’s good creation as staring through a microscope. Time gives us a sense of our place in the world. One of the defining attributes of prison life is to be “sequestered from the public, outside the flow of the world’s identifying and unifying narratives” (47). When we lose a sense of time, it robs our lives of a sense of meaning. I’ve experienced this reality when living for months underwater on a submarine. Children had been born, a World Series had been won, and my wife had started a new job. Yet my memory of that time was confined to a relentless cycle of 18-hour, sunless days inside a steel tube. Those months are hard for me to fit within the rest of human history. A right understanding of time is essential for Christians because it enables us to understand the ancient truths preached from our pulpits each Sunday. Peter wasn’t just a character in the Bible; though he lived long ago, he was a real man who feared death and heartbreak of failure. The events in our Bible really happened in time and space to people who (with one exception) lived as sinners in a sinful world. Virtuous Historians As Americans recognize the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, temptations abound to fixate on the legitimate evils in American history or uncritically celebrate the Christian character of many of our founders. Wilsey is critical of both extremes. A key point of God and Country is that a virtuous approach to history helps us avoid the ahistorical perspectives of anti-American cynicism and Christian nationalism. “Being an American means being part of a great tradition,” Wilsey explains. “America is not perfect, but America is the greatest champion of human freedom in history” (155). No history, much less that of our nation, can be accurately represented by a black-and-white framing. Good history requires a biblical perspective on humanity. We all have mixed motives, a tendency to be selfish, and the potential to do great evil. One day, our lives will be summarized by the dash between the dates on our headstones. Neighbor love requires us to treat the dead—some of whom we’ll meet in eternity—as complex people living in confusing times rather than as two-dimensional caricatures. Good history requires a biblical perspective on humanity. A virtuous approach to the past requires us to “begin our reading of history by reading ourselves.” After all, Wilsey argues, “How we think about the people, events, and ideas of the past is directly connected to the kind of people we are and aspire to be” (132). That means the way we handle the sinful actions of slave-owning founding fathers needs to reflect an understanding of our status as simultaneously righteous and sinners. This book is well written and deeply personal. It’s an excellent introductory volume on the method of history, particularly for American Christians. Though graciously articulated, Wilsey’s argument is unlikely to convince deeply invested critics on either side. Nevertheless, God and Country equips Christians to love their country without worshiping it and to critique its sins without despising its gifts.

The world feels heavy with darkness, and we’re told to sit in it to prove we care. But what if God is calling you to do more than mourn, and instead to shine?

Ash Wednesday marks the start of the 40-day Lenten season.

Spiritual attacks may be invisible, but they are real. Find power in prayer, strength in Christ, and courage in God’s unshakable Word.