BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #PeopleOfTheBridge… Fifty days. March and April 2022… That is all this is, so far… When the full-scale Russian invasion began, no one called a meeting to found a network. There was no name for it and no plan behind it. No budget line anywhere. There were seminaries, places built for lectures and the slow, unhurried work of study, that suddenly found themselves standing in the path of millions of people fleeing the fighting. And there were doors. So, we opened them. What follows is our first report, covering those fifty days, and nearly every line of it was improvised under fire.

Scripture keeps a strange calendar. Fifty days after the Passover, Lamb was killed, the Church was born… not in a moment of strength, but in a locked room full of frightened people, who were then driven out into the streets by wind and fire… The echo is hard to miss. Something was born here too, fifty days into the war, that none of us had designed. Schools of theology became shelters. Professors who had spent their careers in seminar rooms were now driving evacuation vans and cooking meals, and students carried the elderly and disabled to the shelters while the sirens and explosions sounded. Pentecost did not wait for the disciples to feel ready. Neither did any of this…

We learned something in those weeks. Faithfulness is rarely a decision reached in calm; more often it is simply what your hands are already doing before your mind has caught up. Here is what those first fifty days held:

• 310 volunteers stepped forward to serve the fleeing, many of them displaced or in danger themselves;
• 9,500 people were evacuated from areas under shelling and advancing Russian forces;
• 1,390 displaced people received ongoing shelter and accommodation on seminary campuses, where they could sleep and eat in safety;
• 16,219 people passed through our hubs in transit as they moved toward safer ground;
• 63,200 food boxes and packages reached families who had left everything behind;
• 560 tons of food and humanitarian supplies were carried to where the need was greatest.

We do not yet know what this will become. At fifty days you cannot see the shape of the thing you are building; you can only keep answering the door. But we have already seen enough to say one thing plainly: the Gospel is not a message shouted from a safe distance. It is a weight you pick up and carry, sometimes literally, up a flight of stairs. If you would walk these first fifty days with us, you can stand alongside these hubs here:

• Ukraine: Refugees Assistance (through our seminary hubs): https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/48505
• Ukraine: Bibles for refugees and military: https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/65548
• Ukraine: Mental Health and Well-Being Care: https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/45809

Our report comes from twelve communities that chose to become refugee hubs. None of them was built for it… All of them said – “yes”:

1. Chernivtsi Bible Seminary
2. Dialogue in Action (Peacebuilding group)
3. Eastern European Institute of Theology
4. Evangel Theological University (Zaporizhzhia)
5. Kremenchuk Evangelical Seminary
6. Lviv Theological Seminary
7. Odesa Theological Seminary
8. Tavriskii Christian Institute (Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk)
9. Transcarpathian Christian Institute (Khust)
10. Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary
11. University Divitia Gratia (Moldova)
12. Zaporizhzhia Bible Seminary

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war, Taras D (project manager in Ukraine for the “People of the Bridge”), on behalf of the Coordination Group: Roman Soloviy (Langham, EEIT), Olga Marchak (Mesa Global), Ivan Rusyn (UETS), Oleksandr Geychenko (OTS), Kseniya Trofymchuk (EEIT), Kateryna Shutko (EEIT), Scott Cunningham (Mesa Global), Evan Hunter (Scholar Leaders), Valentin Siniy (TCI)