It is hard to disagree that the global Pentecostal movement has its own local streams that are unlike anything else. This is what gives it its complexity and variety of forms. Below are a few words about the Ukrainian context of the genealogy of Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement.
To begin with, we are talking about numerous Protestant denominations that occupy a significant place in the religious market of Ukraine which knows different forms of Christianity. The classical Pentecostal movement in the modern Ukraine is represented by two church associations with slightly different histories, that, however, are already a hundred years old - the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church and the United Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith. In both cases, we are talking about church unions that grew out of the activities of Ukrainian migrants to the United States, who learned the teachings of the Assemblies of God while working, and then returned home as missionaries in the early 1920s. This "home" at that time was the Ukrainian lands within the Soviet Union and Poland. At that time, the unification of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, and German Pentecostal churches in what was then Poland was being formalized into the Polish Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith, created in 1929 under the leadership of Arthur Berholz. A little earlier, in 1925, the Ukrainian Union of Christians of the Evangelical Faith was founded in the Ukrainian territories controlled by the USSR under the leadership of Ivan Voronayev.
The Second World War and the first postwar years changed the borders of Europe, in particular when it came to the all Ukrainian territories, which from that moment on belonged to the USSR. These changes did not bring anything good to Pentecostals, only accusations of counterrevolutionary, anti-state activities, repression, executions, exile, and imprisonment. In August 1945, the Soviet authorities, under the threat of new repressions, proposed to Pentecostals union with Baptists. This artificial merger stipulated that Pentecostals should abandon the practice of Holy Spirit baptism and glossalalia as atrocious. In the 1940s and 1960s, there were several attempts to appeal to the Soviet authorities to restore a separate Pentecostal union in the USSR, and Ukrainian Pentecostals were actively involved in this activity. These attempts resulted in new repressions, prison terms, and exile.
As of 1968, Pentecostals in Ukraine did not have a single church brotherhood, but were divided. Some of them continued to belong to the union with the Baptists, while others were included in unregistered Pentecostal communities. The third group were Pentecostals registered outside the union with the Baptists, who were granted this right by the Soviet authorities. All of them had separate leadership centers and had different attitudes toward the relationship between their churches and the state, as well as toward the phenomenon of the late 1970s Tallinn Awakening, the first manifestation of the charismatic movement in the Soviet Union.
The younger generation of unregistered Pentecostals was the most open to the charismatic movement. It was they who took an active part in its spread in the 1980s and 1990s, but not only they. It was a kind of "rebellion of the young" who wanted more liberal orders in their churches in terms of appearance, genres of worship music, and emotionality. No less important were the theological foundations, in particular the preaching of "health and prosperity" (this topic gained particular importance during the collapse of the USSR and the first years of Ukraine's independence, a time of deep economic crisis). For quite some time, local scholars have classified the evangelical charismatic movement in Ukraine as a new religious movement. A deeper and more detailed study has shown that it has its own specific ties to local Pentecostalism. It should be noted that that when we speak of the Charismatic movement in the Ukrainian context, we are actually talking about the Evangelical Charismatic movement, not any other, Catholic or Anglican.
The beginning of the mass Charismatic movement in Ukraine coincides with the moment when this country gained independence and actual, not nominal, freedom of conscience. Another important moment was the opening of the borders to all comers, which greatly facilitated the work of foreign missionaries from the United States, Sweden, South Korea, England, and others, whose goal was to promote awakening in ex-Soviet countries. Kenneth Hagin, Ulf Ekman, Benny Hinn, David Hathaway, David Jongi Cho - all of them visited Ukraine at one time or another with sermons and large-scale open-air evangelism, and contributed to the emergence of many new churches. The New Generation Church movement, the Word of Life church movement affiliated with Swedish evangelist Ulf Ekman, the Embassy of God Church, headed by Nigerian-born Sunday Adelaja, and a number of other smaller ones shaped the landscape of the Ukrainian Charismatic movement for some time. All of them experienced their ups and downs, transformed or disappeared. Today, both Ukrainian Pentecostals and Ukrainian Charismatics are undergoing a difficult test by war and forced migration. They will have to think about unpopular and uncomfortable questions and give their theological and practical answers to them.
Author: Ganna Tregub