Mike Ray is following developments in Ukraine with a special intensity.
The director of missions mobilization at the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board and his family served as missionaries in Dniprotrovsk, Ukraine, with the International Mission Board from 1995 to 2014.
While serving in Ukraine, the Rays — Mike and his wife, Linda, and daughters Rebekah and Hannah — worked under a religious visa at the invitation of the Baptists there, which gave them the freedom to conduct their missions activities even though they aroused suspicion with some in the country where Ukrainian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox are the predominant Christian faith groups.
Cultural views
“The political people didn’t really receive us well,” Ray said. “They thought Baptists were a cult, like all the other evangelical groups. If you aren’t Orthodox, you’re a cult, so people such as the mayor, people in political office … didn’t look favorably on you.”
In the early 1920s, Ukraine became a state in the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Independence
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Ukraine declared independence but has always been a prize in the eye of Putin, the former head of the feared KGB security directorate who has publicly expressed his desire to restore the Soviet Union to its glory days.
Ray likened Putin to a chess player, “always five moves ahead.”
“There are a lot of churches we were involved in planting that if Putin takes over, those churches will be severely limited — if they stay open,” Ray said.
“I’m not saying they wouldn’t be able to meet at all, but they’d be very restricted in comparison to what they’ve been able to do all these years,” he said. “That’s discouraging. … Ukraine might not be the same after this.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was originally published by The Baptist Record, newsjournal of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board.
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