BEING HUMAN

“We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God,” wrote John Stott. In the shadow of that stirring call lies an uncomfortable reality: while we proclaim a global God, our global vision often stops at the borders of war zones. Indigenous churches living inside those wars face a double marginalisation, first from the violence surrounding them, very often carried out in the name of protecting Judeo-Christian traditional values, and second from the silence of the many global brothers and sisters who find it easier to look away for the sake of the global Mission of God.

Our theological frameworks, genuinely valuable in peaceful contexts, show their limits when we try to apply them to the raw reality of local churches in active war zones. From the devastation of russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine, through the tangled wars of the Middle East in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, to the prolonged struggles in Afghanistan, Congo, Myanmar and Sudan, these are immediate contexts where churches labour daily to keep a faithful witness amid violence, rather than distant crises.

When bullets pierce the walls of houses of prayer and seminary campuses, when pastors pass military checkpoints to reach their congregations, and when seminary classes continue in bomb shelters, our theological edifices reveal fundamental inadequacies rather than surface cracks. This is a pattern repeated across continents, where indigenous churches live out their faith under fire, day after day.

Each context has its own difficulties, and together they expose a common truth: our dominant and comfortable theological frameworks, built on assumptions of peace and stability, cannot carry the realities of ministry where peace is a distant hope rather than a given. The gap between our ideas and the experience of churches in war zones is a crisis of faith rather than an academic problem, and it cannot wait.

The Global Church’s reluctance to engage fully with indigenous churches in war zones shows itself in several ways. We offer prayers for peace while avoiding the complex political and social realities that sustain these wars, which is a form of selective solidarity. Our support arrives sanitised, with strings attached. And we propose conflict-resolution models developed in peacetime, forgetting that some wars resist resolution altogether.

By the Global Church’s peacetime theology I mean a carefully constructed belief system built on assumptions of stability, comfort and institutional predictability, a theology that has rarely dealt with faith under attack or hope during occupation. It shows itself in systematic theology texts that discuss evil in abstract terms while avoiding concrete military violence, in an ecclesiology that assumes functioning church buildings and uninterrupted Sunday services, in pastoral care frameworks that presuppose basic security, social services and retirement plans, and in a hermeneutic that spiritualises the biblical texts about war, occupation and resistance while ignoring their concrete political implications. It speaks eloquently of spiritual warfare while carefully avoiding actual military aggression, theorises about reconciliation without touching systemic injustice, and discusses Christian ethics from a safe distance, far from military checkpoints and missile strikes.

Consider the real lives of two people committed to their beliefs. Pastor Amjad leads a small church community amid war and destruction in Syria, and Professor Petro guides a Bible college through wartime in Ukraine. Their stories show the everyday bravery of churches inside these wars, since even as bombs reduce their buildings to rubble and scatter their communities, they persist in gathering, in basement shelters and in damaged houses of prayer, to worship and study God’s Word. Their theological reflection comes out of war itself rather than out of comfortable classrooms, and there the abstract concepts of suffering and hope become lived experience.

These leaders develop deep insight into God’s presence in suffering, into the church’s prophetic role amid military violence, and into the radical meaning of Christ-like love under bombardment. Yet when invited to share at international Christian gatherings, they meet a troubling pattern, since their raw and truthful testimony faces subtle but persistent pressure to be reshaped into something more digestible, within fifteen minutes, as part of a panel among other voices from peacetime contexts. Conference organisers gently suggest focusing publicly on uplifting stories of reconciliation rather than on the complex realities of faithful witness amid military violence. Their reflections, born of leading worship while air-raid sirens wail, of teaching seminary classes in bomb shelters, which I have done myself, and of pastoring displaced congregations, are politely sidelined in favour of simpler accounts that will not disturb listeners from peaceful contexts.

This way of presenting war zone testimony, passing over the inconvenient and dwelling on the positive, reveals more than institutional preference, since it exposes an unwillingness to face the theological questions inside the Global Church’s own structures. When we silence or reshape these voices we lose essential theological insight about God’s presence and the church’s role in a broken world, along with the stories themselves. And when peacetime theology meets war zone realities, it answers with platitudes about praying for peace, avoids the question of Christian response to military aggression, and offers templates for reconciliation without addressing just peace or the ongoing violence that makes genuine reconciliation impossible.

Perhaps most tellingly, it treats the modern peaceful context of Western Christianity as the theological norm, and war zone experience as a marginal aberration requiring special interpretative frameworks rather than as an essential perspective on God’s work in a broken world. This theology comfortably discusses the martyrs of the past while struggling to face churches meeting martyrdom today, and theorises about suffering while keeping a safe distance from those suffering under occupation now.

Living and serving in Ukraine through russia’s hybrid aggression from 2014 and its full-scale aggression from 2022 has stripped away my illusions about the Global Church’s response to war. Watching the consequences of this war, I am confronted daily with the inadequacy of that comfortable framework built on assumptions of stable societies and functioning institutions.

The Global Evangelical Church, which I understand as a transnational network of Christian ecclesial and educational communities and mission movements, united by commitments to biblical authority, personal conversion and global evangelisation, reveals its deepest contradictions in how it responds to war zones.

What troubles me most is how Global Church structures avoid strong moral language and refuse to call things by their real names. Instead come the softer, politer words: conflict, situation, crisis, unrest, complex emergency. They do not want to recognise and name war. This is a profound missiological and ethical failure rather than an innocent linguistic preference, because the word “war” demands immediate action, moral clarity and the mobilisation of real resources. It compels us to take sides, to face just war theory, and to consider the role of local churches and theological schools in war zones. Instead we choose terms that suggest temporary disruptions, manageable through standard humanitarian responses and conventional peace-building.

The pattern is most visible in what I call news cycle Christianity. The Global Church’s work with churches in war zones often looks like short news updates rather than an ongoing commitment to their mission, so that the essential work appears to be responding to crises and sharing reports. The deeper issue, in my own view, lies in the donor-dependent nature of many Global Church structures, where funding arrives with expectations attached, explicit or implicit, that shape both narrative and response, and that prefer neutral humanitarian frameworks over direct engagement with war’s theological realities. A self-perpetuating cycle forms, in which indigenous churches must frame their experience and their needs in ways palatable to distant donors, while Global Church institutions keep a safe distance from politically sensitive issues in order to preserve their more or less stable funding streams.

When indigenous churches speak profound theological truth out of their experience of proxy wars and military occupation, why do we rush to label their insight political activism rather than receive it as legitimate theological reflection forged in war’s crucible? Perhaps most troubling is our selective hearing toward churches under occupation, whose wrestling with questions of justice, resistance and survival gets dismissed as contextual theology or reduced to simplified narratives of personal forgiveness. Who gave us the authority to delegitimise their contribution to Christian thought? When did peacetime theology become the universal standard against which all other theological reflection must be measured?

The pattern turns painful in how we manage post-war narratives, since we curate which stories to amplify and which to forget, which testimonies fit our institutional comfort and donor intent, and which must be sanitised or silenced. Churches emerging from authoritarian regimes and military violence carry complex insight about faith, compromise and survival, and we edit these stories into narratives that will not disturb our donors or our frameworks. What does this managed remembering and institutional amnesia cost us? How many theological and missional insights have we lost because they came from the wrong context, from bomb shelters rather than warm offices, from military checkpoints rather than comfortable pulpits, from occupied territories rather than the free democratic world? When will we recognise that our preference for peacetime narratives is a form of theological violence and colonialism against churches whose faith has been tested by fire, and not merely an institutional choice?

The Global Church’s insistence that indigenous churches maintain more neutrality while they suffer in war zones is theological violence rather than a practical constraint. When we demand that churches under bombardment frame their experience through peacetime theology, we ask them in effect to deny their own reality, to speak of abstract peace while missiles fall on their houses of prayer, to reason about reconciliation at military checkpoints, and to keep institutional neutrality while their communities face active destruction.

This enforced neutrality creates a devastating double bind, since churches must either sanitise their testimony in order to reach the support and resources they need, or hold to prophetic truthfulness at the cost of Global Church partnership. Their pastoral responses to immediate war-related needs, whether sheltering displaced families in church buildings, conducting funerals for civilian casualties, or providing spiritual care at military checkpoints, must be reframed as non-political humanitarian assistance rather than acknowledged as essential ministry in a war.

The theological cost is heavier still. Pressed to adopt neutral frameworks disconnected from biblical justice, indigenous churches face an impossible choice between authentic witness and institutional survival, and the rich biblical traditions of lament and prophetic resistance, along with God’s action in the history of wars, become dangerous territory to avoid rather than essential resources for ministry under fire. Their insight, God’s presence known amid bombing raids and resurrection hope practised in occupied territories, must be stripped of its prophetic edge to fit acceptable peacetime parameters.

This distortion paralyses both sides. Local churches strain to keep their missional integrity while meeting donor expectations, and Global Church entities lose their capacity for prophetic engagement with what war actually does. The result is a framework that speaks elegantly about peace and stays silent about bombs, and that discusses God’s sovereignty without wrestling with what it means for churches whose houses of prayer and seminary campuses lie in rubble.

Given this, let me ask several hard questions of those who lead Global Church entities.

• Why do our missiological frameworks assume contexts of peace and stability in the first place, and what does that reveal about the underlying assumptions and privileges of Global Church structures?
• How can theological education be relevant when its curriculum is designed in peaceful contexts for peaceful contexts, and are we in fact preparing church leaders for the realities they meet daily?
• When indigenous churches in war zones develop theological perspectives shaped by their experience of violence, why are those perspectives treated as contextual while Western peaceful theology is treated as universal?
• Has our emphasis on reconciliation ministry become a way of avoiding the messy realities of ongoing wars, pushing for peace at the expense of justice, and doing so less for the sake of indigenous churches than for the sake of the Global Church’s own pacification narrative, which is often unconscious?
• If Global Church structures systematically sanitise war into situations and conflicts, are we not taking part in a form of theological violence against indigenous churches whose bodies and buildings bear the actual scars of missiles and occupation? How do we justify this linguistic betrayal of brothers and sisters who meet military violence daily with nothing but their faith and their courage?
• And why does the Global Church’s missional focus conveniently drift away from war zones exactly when indigenous churches need the most substantial and sustained support? Is our strategic planning merely a sophisticated name for institutional self-preservation that sacrifices indigenous churches on the altar of donor relationships and comfortable neutrality?

The time has come for a fundamental rethinking of how the Global Church engages with indigenous churches in war zones, and it begins with three acknowledgments. Any theology that cannot speak to the experience of churches in war zones is incomplete and inadequate for a Global Church that means the word. Theological education that does not prepare leaders for ministry in war zones fails a significant part of that church and renders our spiritual education insufficient. And prayer without action, aid without understanding, and peace without justice stop at humanitarian need, leaving our support superficial and our solidarity shallow.

Seminaries and theological education centres must therefore make the experience and the thought of churches in war zones a regular part of their core courses, as an essential element in preparing people to serve a broken world rather than an optional elective. That could mean inviting war zone church leaders as guest lecturers, incorporating their writing into required reading, and designing courses that engage the realities of faith under fire directly.

Global Church organisations must bring the voices of indigenous churches from war zones into their decision-making, which could mean restructuring boards and leadership roles for substantial representation from war-affected regions, creating protected funding pools for prophetic witness, and establishing secure channels for honest frontline reporting.

We must also examine our theological frameworks critically and stop pretending that peace is the norm and war an unfortunate exception. Both peace and war run through the whole history of the Global Church and belong to its ongoing experience, and neither one is the standard while the other is an anomaly we would rather not think about. This asks for deep engagement with a biblical witness replete with stories of God’s people living through empire, occupation and war, and for the humble recognition that our theological blind spots are shaped by our own relatively safe social location.

Finally, new structures of governance must be created for real participation and power-sharing with indigenous churches from war zones. That means networks that put power into local hands, with churches making their own decisions rather than receiving them from a distant headquarters, and war-affected churches able to reach resources and support directly, without layers of bureaucratic filtering. It also means safeguards that keep us honest, so that the old colonial pattern of outsiders deciding for insiders is not quietly rebuilt. The power structure itself has to be turned over.

These indigenous churches are drawing us toward something deeper rather than presenting the Global Church with another problem to solve. Look at what they have lived through, and how. The faith they have worked out while bombs and missiles fall, and the insight gained from passing through hell and still believing, is something the rest of us have much to learn from. Their stubborn faith in the face of violence teaches the whole church what we would never learn in comfortable settings. The question is whether we are willing to embrace a genuinely global vision, one that includes the broken and violent regions of our world alongside the comfortable and peaceful ones. Only then can we claim to serve a global God.

I must also name the exceptions, since amid these patterns certain Global Church organisations have consistently walked a different way. Scholar Leaders, Langham Partnership, Mesa Global (formerly Overseas Council–United World Mission), the Overseas Council network in Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Open Eyes, Keys Connections, Read Ministries, Connect International and other partners whom I have no space to name have long recognised and actively supported indigenous theological voices from war zones, treating them as essential contributors to global theological discourse rather than as objects of ministry. Through publishing, scholarships and leadership programmes they have carried the real theological thinking of war zones out into the world, without editing and without toning down the rough edges, and they keep funding theological education in the middle of active wars, understanding that some of the deepest theological work happens under fire.

What distinguishes them most is how they handle truth-telling. Rather than requiring indigenous partners to translate their experience into donor-friendly language, they create spaces where war zone churches and theological communities can speak plainly about military violence, occupation and resistance without fear of losing support, and rather than holding the purse strings and bending churches to donor expectations, they put indigenous leaders in charge. So these churches and seminaries can say what they think and speak prophetically without fearing that a comfortable donor will withdraw because the truth is uncomfortable, which shows that donor-driven silence is a choice rather than an inevitability. Their long view is instructive as well, since rather than shifting focus away from war zones or reducing support to humanitarian response alone, which is desperately needed too, they hold and often deepen their commitment to theological education precisely when the fighting intensifies. Other Global Church structures could rebuild their communication frameworks, their donor education and their partnership agreements around prophetic truthfulness rather than institutional stability, if they are willing to learn, since supporting these voices strengthens global Christianity rather than threatening it.

This model puts a hard question to conventional approaches. What if we saw indigenous churches in war zones as essential voices for our own theological renewal rather than as recipients of our help? What if we structured our institutions to amplify war zone narratives rather than to manage them? What if we stopped measuring our success by institutional stability and started asking whether we actually stand with churches that are being bombed?

For those of us who live inside an active war, these are not abstract theological questions but urgent matters of faithful obedience, and of the integrity of Christian character, which the experience of war bombards into fragments. The credibility of our witness, the depth of our discipleship and the authenticity of our global fellowship all hang on the answer. If we are to be a Global Church in truth, we must let our theology, our missiology and our ecclesiology be transformed by the lived realities and the hard-won insight of indigenous churches in war zones.

That transformation will be costly for those outside the war zones. We will have to own our part in systems that shut people out, release practices and assumptions we thought sacred, and offer a solidarity that amounts to more than fifteen minutes for someone’s story on a conference panel. But this is the way of the cross laid before all of us. It is the way of a God who entered fully into our world of violence and suffering, who took on flesh and dwelt among us, who bore the scars of our brokenness, and who consistently placed Himself with the marginalised and the oppressed, spoke truth to powers and empires, challenged religious hypocrisy, and called us to take up our cross and follow Him.

None of this is a call for the Global Church to abandon its commitment to peace. It is a call to recognise that true peace is the presence of justice rather than the absence of war, and to move beyond a theology of convenience that avoids the messy realities of violence toward a theology of discipleship that bears witness to the love and truth of God even in the darkest contexts.

The voices of the silenced are speaking, and they are drawing us toward transformation rather than merely asking for our attention. The question is whether we have ears to hear, hearts to be changed and hands ready to act. May we let our hearts be broken by the things that break the heart of God, and may we be transformed, by the power of the Spirit, into a church that truly reflects the global body of Christ, scarred yet hopeful, persecuted yet faithful, divided and yet united in our witness to the One who is our peace.

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras M. Dyatlik, Ukraine
18 November 2024, Monday (reviewed 17 August 2026)
999 days of the ongoing full-scale russian war