Moving to a new place and finding a new church can be difficult for anyone, let alone us foreigners in Ukraine. However, we are happy to say that we have now found a church that we call home. There are no Mennonite churches in Donetsk, so we attended a variety of churches in the first couple months, and have settled on a Ukrainian church with Baptist affiliations. The people at our new church, Light of the Gospel, make us feel quite welcome. Even on our first visit we were greeted with many hearty handshakes (for Dave) and kisses from babushkas (for me) along with “Privyetstoyu,” the traditional Baptist greeting. Our church located in the nearby town of Makeevka and it takes us about 45 min. to get there by bus. I would guess that there are about 150 people who attend the morning service, a good mix of young and old, and quite a few familiar faces from DCU. We meet in a square, two-story, gray building with green trim around the windows that doesn’t look much like a traditional church from the outside.
Of the churches we visited, this is one is the most traditional with the least American influence, which can be both good and bad. That means that the entire service is always conducted in Russian, and few people attending the church speak any English. It’s hard to understand now, but good for our Russian practice. We sing from a songbook (hymn-like songs) and accompanied by the piano most of the time, but sometimes will sing more contemporary songs, some of which are familiar, but only the melodies. All songs are in sung in Russian. A choir sings every Sunday, and there’s usually at least three other individual “special music” solos throughout the service. Usually soloists accompany themselves on the guitar and sing songs in a folksy style. Dave and my favorite soloists, Andrei and Tanya, sing duets while Andrei plays guitar and sometimes harmonica. We’d like a recording of their music. Music is definitely the highlight of church at this point, although poetry recitations also make the service interesting. Many Ukrainians are amateur poets, and several recite their original poetry each Sunday, or sometimes a memorized chapter of the Bible or two. Sermons at Light of the Gospel are long and generally unintelligible to us, and there are usually at least two during the two to two and half hour morning service. Recently we’ve been catching a few more things, since one of Dave’s Saturday English students, Oleg, attends our church and sits next to Dave to translate now and then throughout the service. Before Oleg was there, Lyuda, Oleg’s mother and the secretary at DCU, would help us out from the choir loft. Whenever the hymn number was called out, she would not very inconspicuously hold up her fingers to show the correct hymn number. We felt like dumb foreigners, but what else is new? We really appreciated it.
Laura
