As air raid sirens blared down the hallways, Tetiana Garkun hurried her middle school students outside the My Horizons Christian School campus into the designated bomb shelter.
Located in Khmelnytsky, 200 miles southwest of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, the college’s children moved in orderly fashion—an indication of how accustomed they’ve develop into to Russian missiles targeting military installations in nearby Lviv.
They prayed, waited for the all-clear signal, and returned to their Bible class.
Garkun’s own children, daughters aged 16 and 17, were similarly composed. Confident high schoolers who only a number of years earlier were sharing their faith in Ukraine’s secular education system, they follow after their great-grandfather, a Pentecostal pastor sentenced to death by magistrates within the Soviet Union.
Times have modified, as have education authorities.
“The government encourages us to show our students how you can be Christians and live godly lives,” said Garkun. “They see that we’re needed in these horrible days.”
She had earlier led the scholars in a discussion prompted by the official state health education curriculum: What helps us live an extended life?
Model answers included a superb weight loss program, avoiding smoking, and participation in sports. But amid war, these answers not apply, she said, and even her prepared integration of Christian material hardly satisfied her own soul. In years past, she recited Ecclesiastes 7:17: “Do not be overwicked, and don’t be a idiot—why die before your time?”
However, she pondered, what about when the righteous are killed by Russian evil?
“When we follow God’s rules and truth, we lead happier and healthier lives,” Garkun said. “But I’m honest. I even have doubts. And I let the kids understand it is okay—we will be sincere with God.”
Daily devotions, regular chapel, and close-knit relations have helped sustain a teaching staff struggling to administer massive disruptions to work and family life. Garkun said her best friend, an Orthodox Ukrainian, has grown deeper in her faith since she joined the Christian school.
But across the nation, 54 percent of teachers state they need psychological support, while 61 percent of youngsters show symptoms of severe stress. Over 3,000 schools have been damaged, with greater than 400 destroyed.
Only 28 percent of scholars remain in full-time, in-person education.
My Horizons provides counselors and is in a position to remain open due to its readily accessible bomb shelter. Schools lacking such safety are required to show online, said Tatiana Chumakova, director of the International Alliance for the Development of Christian Education (known by its Ukrainian acronym, MAPXO in Cyrillic characters or MARHO in English). So are all schools in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions, closer to the frontlines.
But to this point, God has protected the burgeoning Ukrainian Christian school movement, she added. Despite being in nearly every big city, not one in all her alliance’s 40 institutions has joined the tallies of physical damage.
But this isn’t true of the war’s human toll.
Countless students have been displaced, with many reenrolling in MAPXO schools within the west. The director of Word of Life School in Lviv was killed on the frontlines while serving as a paramedic. And Chumakova’s own story is shrouded in trauma, dating back to 2014.
While working then at Gloria Christian School in Donetsk, she said, Russian soldiers stormed the campus and gave everyone 20 minutes to depart. The facilities were then given to the local separatist movement and was a military base.
For the following eight years, the civil conflict divided the nation along a mostly stable line of contact, until Russia’s February 2022 invasion exploded hostilities once more. Today, she said, nearly 10 percent of Ukraine’s greater than 15,000 schools are positioned in occupied territory.
And the remainder hear constant air raid sirens.
“It is difficult to conduct school activities when there are constant rocket attacks,” Chumakova said. “Our only desire is that the Russians leave, and stop killing the civilian population of Ukraine.”
Having relocated to Kyiv, in 2016 she was invited to steer MAPXO. It formed partly because one 12 months earlier the European branch of the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) was pushed by the conflict to shut its headquarters within the Ukrainian capital, shifting as a substitute to Budapest.
At that point, Christian schools existed but couldn’t be referred to as religious. Keeping a secular system after its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s law of education allowed for the establishment of personal schools but was subject to the separation of church and state.
Wiggle room developed in 2005, when Ukraine allowed public schools to show morals and faith in a curriculum designed with the assistance of the Orthodox church. But in 2015, education that was specifically Christian in character received a lift after authorities decided it was discriminatory to permit secular residents the appropriate to form schools but to disclaim the identical right to spiritual residents.
The education law was amended, and Ukrainian evangelicals took advantage.
By 2021, of 89 specifically religious institutions, 70 were run by Baptists.
“The law was an actual miracle of God,” Chumakova said. “But it seems that it’s the pastors and parishioners of evangelical churches who think more concerning the Christian education of their children.”
The MAPXO website advises parents across the interdenominational spectrum. Its statement of religion is orthodox yet broad, while members are asked to be mindful of divisive theological positions. Eight of its schools are run by Greek Catholics, and the organization coordinates a yearly conference where all are welcome.
“Given the pressures and chaos of contemporary life, and the constant clash of worldviews and values,” the alliance states, “your desire to guard your kids is totally justified.”
For Pride month, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, and a number of other leading Ukrainian corporations adapted their logos with rainbow colours.
“In Christian schools we seek to live based on God’s Word,” said Iryna Sidliarenko, director of the River of Life school in Kyiv. “We check the curriculum, and teach our students to tell apart good from evil.”
Additionally, said Garkun, many believing parents dislike pre-Christian folklore traditions that enter into secular education.
For example, Didukh is a harvest gathering where people stitch wheat stalks into dolls, understood to host the spirits of ancestors. Kupala Night is a summer solstice wreath-making festival with hints of witchcraft, she said. And even St. Andrew’s Day, celebrating the apostle who brought the gospel to Ukraine, accommodates traditions that involve divination.
But when CT asked why interest in Christian education is growing, Ukrainian sources didn’t list such culture-war topics distinguished amongst parent motivations. Alongside believers’ desire for biblical integration, they cited their schools’ focused individual instruction, close cooperation with teachers, and an environment of affection and respect.
Many parents enroll after their children suffer bullying elsewhere.
Founded in 1998, River of Life is a K–12 school with grades ranging between 5–15 students. My Horizons has 250 students, capping each class at 18. But the geography of war is pushing their enrollment in opposite directions. Amid widespread displacement, the Kyiv school’s student body is down about 30 percent, while this 12 months the Khmelnytsky campus added 70 children.
Coming from private schools in Kherson, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, recent students buttress revenue. My Horizons, said Garkun, has the very best repute in her city, attracting many especially with its strong emphasis on English language instruction.
But while her husband maintains his construction work as a tile layer, her brother needed to return his children to public school when his business failed. With a median tuition of $150 per 30 days, Christian education was reasonably priced to the pre-war middle class. Now, many are struggling.
Help got here from West Virginia.
After hearing concerning the conflict in Ukraine, the second-grade class at Wood County Christian School in Williamstown raised $1,000 by collecting quarters. It has contributed to an overall collection of $136,000 donated by ACSI, allowing 5,000 students in over 50 Ukrainian schools to proceed their education.
Others provide in-kind help. My Horizons received digital learning tools from Grace Christian School in Raleigh, North Carolina. And by September, MAPXO anticipates receiving Ukrainian-language access to the ACSI Europe Christian School Improvement Platform, value $5,000 in development expenses.
“God is faithful,” Sidliarenko said. “We keep praying, and see his miracles.”
Two recent schools were established throughout the war. But the blessings have come amid great loss.
Over 450 Ukrainian children have been killed because the war began, with nearly 1,000 injured. Two-thirds of youngsters have been displaced by the war, 1 in 5 of whom have some form of disability.
Concern for such children entered Garkun’s grammar lesson. The curriculum called just for teaching the modal verb can, so she included those that can’t—as in cannot walk, run, or think as the opposite children in the category.
What can we do to assist them now? she asked. For in heaven, all of them again can.
Service projects at the college have included teachers visiting wounded soldiers within the hospital, as students prepare care packages. And inside the constraints of their parents’ poverty, they raised money to supply look after a neighborhood girl with cancer. And in some way, amid all of the national suffering, the coed worship team continues its praise.
Garkun’s own daughters named “love” as My Horizon’s distinguishing feature.
“We are blessed as a family to have our youngsters in such a faculty,” she said, “to see God in every single place, in every part.”
