Constant Change, Always The Same

This week I am in Ukraine teaching cross-cultural communication to pastors and church leaders with Craig Ludick and Christian Leadership Development International (CLDI.org). Since my initial visit to Riga, Latvia in 1991 I have visited several former Soviet Union countries including an eight-week field course I conducted in Moscow in 1994. In some ways it doesn’t seem possible that eighteen years have passed since I looked over the polluted beaches of the Baltic. In other ways, it seems like another lifetime ago.

No matter how much things change over time, it’s equally amazing to me to observe what hasn’t changed in this part of the world. Polyester tracksuits are still very popular for everyday wear for both men and women. Street vendors, selling everything from vegetables to DVD’s to Vodka, are still a common sight, though now outside major supermarkets. Young slender women in tight mini-skirts and high heels walking on the same streets as old fat babushka’s (grandmothers) wearing flats, long black skirts carrying shopping bags. The tall massive apartment complexes, where most people live, still speak of a bleak existence.

As I take my afternoon walks in Kiev, I’m surprised by the most common practices here; behavior that would be unheard of in my country of America and certainly in India, where I spend a great deal of time. Though I didn’t actually take a survey, it seems that three out every five men I passed on the street were carrying a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Beer carrying women bottles was probably one out of five. Apparently drinking beer in Ukraine is a bit like drinking Coke in America - it’s for refreshment, a mere matter of preference and taste. One person told me that beer is not considered drinking alcohol. People who “drink” are those who consume vodka.

In a country where there is high unemployment, a spirit of fatalism, which is a hangover of Soviet Communism and the disillusionment of failed Western capitalism, leaves a culture with little hope. Premarital sex, abortion as a form of birth control and alcoholism is all a by-product of failed human systems. The church in Ukraine, like the church in many parts of the world, struggles for legitimacy in a culture of acedia. The church, for the most part, is irrelevant because their message is not pertinent to a population that is more interested in things they will never have (nice home, car, clothes) rather than the state of their soul existence today. The church compounds their irrelevance, in my opinion, through their own culture of restraint and legalism, which creates barriers for those outside the faith in having an opportunity to hear about the marvelous love of Christ. It is a constant tension among the church leadership…how to create a climate of holiness and spiritual growth, while at the same time be a body of believers that, like Jesus, are a friend of sinners?

Culture, the church, behavior, fatalism, hope, all is a part of the human experience. Dynamic in its present form, yet unchanging in its historical context. No matter how much things change it seems to remain the same.