Today the Global Church celebrates Pentecost, the gift of languages and the birth of global mission. As a Ukrainian Christian, I want to address the systematic assault on the Ukrainian language and identity carried out by russian propaganda under the banner of protecting traditional Christian values.
And this concerns more than Ukraine, since russian aggression has targeted the languages and cultures of dozens of peoples across the former russian and Soviet empires. The pattern stays consistent to this day: name the local language extremist, destroy its books, force the children to speak the language of the oppressor, and then call the result peace and protection.
So I am asking you, and asking myself, what if this assault on linguistic diversity amounts to a direct attack on God’s missional heart? What if defending the right to develop theology in Ukrainian, or Georgian, or Tatar, is participation in God’s eternal purpose rather than cultural nationalism?
We cannot understand Pentecost apart from Babel. The God who confused the languages in order to humble imperial pride is the same God who later redeemed languages in order to spread His love. Ukrainian, dismissed as a russian dialect, carries within itself the capacity to express aspects of God’s character that dominant languages cannot reach.
Consider creation itself: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27, NKJV). Diversity appears here as part of the imago Dei, intentionally rather than by accident. God never created uniformity; He fashioned unity in diversity, mirroring His own triune nature. So when russian propaganda, supported openly or silently by many Christians, claims that Ukrainians and russians are one people requiring one language, it echoes the imperial narrative of Babel, which God Himself dismantled and scattered.
The multiplication of languages at Babel was God’s intervention against uniformity rather than a punishment for diversity. The tower builders wanted to make a name for themselves through consolidated power and homogenized culture, and God answered by multiplying languages, scattering peoples, and ensuring that no empire would ever dominate the whole of human expression. This is why every empire eventually fails, however many centuries it lasts, and why every attempt to erase linguistic diversity repeats Babel’s sin, reversing God’s multiplication and rebuilding the tower He scattered.
But God’s response to Babel did not end with the scattering, since He then called Abraham to bless “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3, NKJV), meaning specific families and clans and linguistic communities. That calling established a mission to reach every people group in its own language, and Ukrainian Christians stand inside that tradition whenever we develop theology in our own language rather than accepting russian or English as inherently superior.
The Word became flesh in a particular place, a particular time, a particular ethnic identity and a particular linguistic community. When russian forces ban Ukrainian liturgy or demand prayer and worship in russian only, they deny that incarnational principle and claim that God can be encountered only through russian culture.
At Pentecost the Spirit’s first gift was linguistic: “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4, NKJV). Notice what happened. Each person heard the Gospel “in our own language in which we were born” (Acts 2:8, NKJV), so that every people group heard the good news in its own tongue rather than everyone understanding a single imperial one. Babel scattered languages to prevent a prideful unity, and Pentecost redeemed them to prove that cultural diversity belongs to God’s design, which means that when we worship in Ukrainian we take part in the original Pentecost miracle, and the Spirit speaks Ukrainian as fluently as He speaks any imperial language.
The commission of Jesus assumes this diversity: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19, NKJV), where the Greek ethne refers to distinct people groups identified by language and culture. God’s mission was never to eliminate those distinctions in order to build a Christian empire, but to reach each group inside its own cultural context and form them into the Body of Christ. This creates a missional imperative to develop so-called minor languages for theological expression, since if the Gospel is to reach every people group it must be translated culturally and expressed in the particular ways each people understands suffering and hope and faith and love.
Ukrainian theological development is therefore a missional necessity rather than a cultural luxury. The way Ukrainians understand suffering under an empire, resistance to oppression and hope amid devastation serves the whole Global Church, and our particular experience can only be fully expressed in Ukrainian first, and then translated for other cultures. So when russian imperialism, and the Christians who support it, attack the Ukrainian language, they attack the Church’s missional capacity.
Revelation shows us God’s ultimate purpose: “a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9, NKJV). Not former speakers of many languages unified into one dominant tongue, but representatives of every language, distinct and united in worship. That vision judges russian attempts to eliminate Ukrainian identity as a premature eschatology, one that manufactures unity through imperial domination rather than divine redemption. God’s throne is surrounded by Ukrainian voices too, along with countless others, each offering its own linguistic gift, and any attack on that vision tries to shrink the heavenly chorus by silencing voices God intends to hear.
Protecting these languages is participation in God’s mission to preserve the diversity He created, scattered at Babel, redeemed at Pentecost and will celebrate eternally around His throne, rather than cultural sentimentality. A lingua franca serves as a means of communication, and it was never designed as the goal of that mission. For Ukrainian believers none of this is academic theology, since our language faces literal fire and our cultural identity is labeled a mistake.
So when we defend theological education in Ukrainian, insist on liturgy in Ukrainian and develop Christian literature in Ukrainian, we do it as theological missionaries rather than as cultural nationalists, believing that God’s truth is too vast for any single language and too rich for any single culture, and trying to stay faithful to the God who is present among our people and who wants every language in the eternal chorus. Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit’s gift is redemptive diversity rather than imperial consolidation, and that every language matters to God, especially those the empire keeps trying to silence. Russian, a dominant imperial language with state backing and enormous global reach, faces no existential threat of the kind that Ukrainian and other suppressed languages endure. That is simply the truth, whatever anyone claims to the contrary.
“How is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born?” (Acts 2:8, NKJV). Because the God of Pentecost loves and speaks Ukrainian too.
Taras D., Ukraine
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