It seemed like an ordinary spring day when 12-year-old Josh Craig arrived home from school. His family was planning a party that evening and the house was already filling with the smell of food and the sound of laughter.
But on the other side of town an Odessa landmark was filling with smoke.
Josh’s mother, Rachel, said, “We had a big graduation party planned here so I was really busy getting ready. But Josh walked in the door and said, ‘Mom, when I left school, out in the street there were masked military men with big guns.’”
Josh had wandered into the middle of the May 2 political clash between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian groups that eventually turned deadly. After he caught the bus home, the demonstration escalated until Odessa’s Trades Union building burned.
The stories about what happened differ, but more than 40 people died in the fire. According to news sources, it was the worst violence in the Black Sea port since President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in February.
And the city became a “surprising” flashpoint for a nation in crisis.
Surprising, said Josh’s father, Leonard, because “Odessa prides itself as being probably the most tolerant city in Ukraine.”
Surprising, said Rachel, because even though parts of the country have been divided along Russian-Ukrainian lines since late 2013, many of her Ukrainian friends are married to Russians. They go to her church. They’re raising their families together.
“People don’t really want to get involved in politics here. Everybody wants to … enjoy their lives,” she said.
The people of Odessa are Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Jews, “just name it,” said Leonard, who along with his wife serves as a Southern Baptist representative in Odessa. “It’s such a rich mixture of cultures that manage to live peacefully and make the city what it is.”
It’s a city that loves the arts. Its opera house is world-renowned. It’s a dream city for Rachel, who was a band and orchestra director back in the United States.
“We moved here seven years ago, and I started a community orchestra because our children play string instruments,” she said.
But nothing could prepare her family for how the quiet people of Odessa — or the Church — would respond in the wake of the May 2 fire.
Odessans hold wildly varied views of what happened that day in the center of the city. The burned-out union building is full of homemade memorials and unanswered questions.
Opposing sides
“There was violence,” Leonard said, with the crowd throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at each other while others were believed to be shooting guns. “Some say they were on the pro-Russian side, others said they were on the pro-Ukrainian side,” he explained.
Either way the local police were overwhelmed. Grief over the deaths drove Leonard to tears. The initial reaction on the street was staggering in a different way, he said.
“Some of the hardest things for me have been to talk to people or to hear comments when they say, ‘But these guys were traitors, you know? They’re traitors, so they got what they deserved,’” Leonard said.
It was a popular opinion — even for church members, said Leonard’s pastor, Alex.
“The first reaction from the church, a lot of whom are pro-Ukrainian — it was almost elation,” Alex said. “It was like, ‘Well, they finally got what they deserved.’ They didn’t know the full scale of the tragedy at that point, but they knew that people had died and burned.”
But it was not long before things got personal.
People began getting phone calls letting them know that their neighbors, their friends’ sons, their cousins’ daughters were among the dead.
One of the people who died in the fire — a pro-Russian — was the dad of a young girl who attended Alex’s church. Another church member, a pro-Ukrainian, was seriously injured by shrapnel that lodged in his lung.
When reality started to sink in, church members “realized it was a tragedy, and people started changing their views and the way they felt about it,” Alex said.
They felt a shameful shock, Leonard said. The whole city did.
“Your heart breaks because no matter how much you disagree with someone, burning them down is never an option,” he said. “We are Christians. We can’t condone this.”
A lull fell over the city and potentially controversial elections came and went uneventfully. It seemed nobody dared move, else they disrupt the peaceful balance Odessa had slipped back into, Leonard said. “It was like everybody said, ‘That’s enough. Too many people have died already.’”
But that didn’t stop church members from struggling to control their political fervor, a firestorm that threatened to overshadow the gospel in a time of extreme openness, he said.
Churchgoers divided themselves along political lines. Pastors preached sermons with blatant political overtones. Those who didn’t agree stopped going.
“This is kind of the hardest thing to deal with. You see it in the culture everywhere, that the culture is very divided, politicized, polarized. But to see that in the Church, it is quite disturbing,” Leonard said.
Shook to the core
It disturbed Alex to his core. He began to re-evaluate his relationship with Christ and his responsibility to his church.
“I am pretty pro-Ukrainian,” he said. “But when this tragedy happened, in the church there were such contrasting views. I realized it was important to preach only the love of Christ and keep the peace rather than say or do anything as a minister that would create conflict in the church.”
And as he did, the church began to stir.
“It woke up the church,” Alex said. “People realized that there were more important things than just doing church business as usual. People are much more aware of the need of prayer for the government, for peace, for needs other than their own.”
And, he said, they are more aware of a need to share the peace only Jesus Christ can bring.
“This fear causes a lot of questions,” Alex said. “They (the people of Odessa) are anxious. They want to know what’s happening. They are asking eternal questions. In a way, yes, they are in fear but in a way the political trouble also has helped people wake up to spiritual realities.”
Leonard agreed.
“I think all this is an open wound,” he said. “It needs nursing — spiritual nursing — and because of that there is great opportunity. Where there is a wound, where there is a tremendous need, there is an openness to the gospel. I think that out of this tragedy, this is one of the good things we’ve seen.”
On the night of the graduation party, 30 of the Craigs’ friends were gathered around a bonfire in the backyard when they started getting text messages letting them know about the fire and that people were dying.
The celebration melted into a gathering of heavy hearts.
“We had a prayer meeting for a good half hour or so,” Leonard said. “Everybody was praying, and there is this wonderful song about we’re praying for Ukraine — everybody knows that song in Ukraine. So we prayed that song as well, and all the neighbors could hear it.”
He hopes the neighbors hear their message of peace from the fire for a long, long time to come.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names have been changed for security reasons.
Share with others: