I am on the night train from the South of Ukraine to Kyiv.. and then to Rivne after a few more meetings… My travels through the seminaries of southern Ukraine revealed the immense toll this ongoing full-scale war has taken on those charged with advancing Christian leaders and training the current and next generation of church ministers.
Everywhere I went, I saw the marks of exhaustion: emotional fatigue from comforting devastated students, employees, and faculty even as their spirits are battered by the nearness of the frontlines; mental weariness from navigating impossible dilemmas and uncertainties about the future; physical tiredness from the relief work they throw themselves into even as resources dwindle…
And yet, our work and ministry continue. Students train to be military chaplains even as they study theology (as I witnessed in Zaporizhia, a city about 15 miles from the front lines). Professors face their own hard choices about whether to send their family to safety abroad even as they stay to teach (as in Odesa). Seminary leaders carry the weight of decisions about relocating entire seminaries further west while also trying to maintain morale and a vision for the future (Kherson/Ivano-Frankivsk).
The moral clarity required now asks much of us, far beyond platitudes. Proper understanding emerges not from the comfort of a peaceful pub but in the battered seminary halls and crowded bomb shelters – in the places where and with people with whom you share the darkness and raw nearness of death. It emerges in the tired and grey eyes of professors who have sent their families away while they stay to teach through air raid sirens. In the makeshift military chaplain courses, where students balance texts on just war with pleas for protection. In the whispered questions of the grieving and traumatized and in the silent spaces where easy answers once lived.
The moral clarity we seek dwells in the margins, demanding that we join those wrestling in the fray to listen and hear it… The moral clarity comes to the dawn of new life from the shining darkness of the shared wartime night… Our Mission has not changed… Peace be with you and your families…
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Taras Dyatlik, South of Ukraine
696 days of the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine
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