Still around 14% of the population are displaced from their homes, and the UN estimates 17.6 million people in need of help. The missile and drone attacks on civilians continue to be a weekly occurrence in many cities, with over 21,000 civilian casualties. (All the figures come from the latest UN report)

Evangelical churches continue to be right at the forefront of bringing help to people in the neediest areas, often very sacrificially. Material support in the form of food and sanitation, accommodation, clothing and bedding, emotional support, but most importantly spiritual support, as they point people to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And gospel opportunities continue to abound as never before: churches planted in some of the neediest areas, including places like Borodianka, synonymous with wartime brutality; thousands of youngsters going on summer camps or to Bible clubs for the first time; people from Orthodox and Catholic backgrounds coming into gospel-centred churches which before they would have avoided; and numerous baptisms.

We would love to continue to support our partner evangelical churches through the coming winter. But our funds are now low, and many other charities have stopped their support altogether.

Could you help us to raise a further £50,000 to enable us to support 12 evangelical churches and organisations doing some of the most urgent work amongst Ukrainian people?

We don’t intend to launch a Christmas appeal this year, as we would like just to extend our current support. And we realise that many churches and individual Christians have already given very sacrificially to our Ukraine fund. But would you consider giving again?

‍

‍

‍

‍You will recall that in February 2022 we launched our Ukraine Appeal, which in God's amazing goodness, and thanks to the generosity of his people, has raised almost £2m. Here is a summary of how (well!) this money has been spent, along with our plea regarding this incoming winter. Please remember: 'They still need us'. Let’s not forget them

It was sobering to read Quentin Sommerville’s report on Eastern Ukraine: ‘Dying by the dozens every day’. Photos of row-upon-recently-formed-row of graves, each of them with a Ukrainian national flag fluttering alongside a black and red war flag. Tragically colourful. Our minds went to EMF colleague Vitalii Mariash, who, as military chaplain, has stood beside such burying places, comforting mostly widows, mothers, and children of fallen comrades.

At EMF, we are making every effort not to let ourselves forget Ukraine. Those pictures in our mind, and the stories we continue to hear, make us realise that human suffering and spiritual need remain acute all over the country. Winter, the second winter of the cruel full-scale invasion, is approaching. Thousands and thousands of the country’s poorest citizens will be facing hardship and danger in a state with barely any resources left to help them. As you know, evangelical churches supporting Ukrainian people have been at the forefront of meeting urgent needs. They still are; even the authorities recognise that, and we praise God for this witness to them.

You have generously helped us raise nearly £2m to support such Ukrainian churches, right from the start of the war. We sourced supplies, and trucked them in from the Netherlands and Poland to hubs like Ternopil and Uman. We were able to provide minibuses for churches to distribute supplies and take people to safety; financial help freed up church workers to devote time to helping needy people.

Later, we chose to support local economies where possible, asking them to source items within Ukraine. Bedding, boxes of medicine and Bibles for warmth, and health, and spiritual hope filled the vans; then came generators, which enabled churches to keep people fed and warm. Food items which were foreign to us provided joy and nourishment to families who had lost everything. Churches into which we  have fed funds have in turn fed and cared for displaced people like Masha and Iliya, who barely escaped with their lives from a village near Kyiv. Above all, appeal funds have helped churches share the good news of Christ crucified in this special time of gospel opportunity.

EMF’s Volodia and Oksana Kostyshyn, in spite of having an active toddler and a disabled child who needs 24/7 care, have helped coordinate our support all over Ukraine, and in particular supported aid distribution via the Ternopil warehouse, standing by its director Ivan Hontar when a Russian missile strike destroyed the hub’s operation. Liuda Mariash, in spite of missing her military-chaplain husband, carries on reaching out to displaced people, and to military wives and mums.

Our partners (a few of them here) have become dear to us. They have been a life-line to many thousands of helpless, hopeless people, delivering aid in vans purchased by appeal funds, or even on boats that looked too heavily-laden to stay afloat.

Going into areas where shells fall around them (they are still making such trips), they have also travelled into liberated but forlorn Kherson, where mines are a constant danger,or to the flooded areas around the Khakhovka dam. They have evacuated many who would have been in danger of dying. Our own missionaries and other partners are still caring for refugees in safe countries such as Poland, Moldova, and Romania. Sharing the hope of the gospel and their very lives with many who have never heard biblical truth explained to them. Never faltering.

Theirs is an ongoing work; just recently, for example, we helped support camps and summer clubs like that run by the Osnova church in Kharkiv, where dozens of children were able to escape from the war-ravaged city, listen to Bible stories they had never heard, and have the best time of their lives in fun activities that contrasted so starkly with all they have been through. Baptisms have taken place in all the churches we have helped support. Salvation has come to hundreds of people who had never heard the gospel. For example, in the Irpin Bible Church, so close to Russian attacks in the first weeks, they are still supporting displaced people through six ‘volunteer centres’, most of which have morphed into church plants!

And so it goes on.

That is the point. It really does go on. It is going on. It is ongoing. Millions of displaced people still need to be helped. Thousands of Ukrainians are hearing the gospel, and many have been converted, but ‘the labourers are few’. Heart-breakingly few.

We are writing in September 2023. But the folk we know and support in Ukraine are already preparing for the darkness and bleakness of winter 2023-2024, especially in eastern Ukraine. Their resources are depleted. The needs are still immense. We would love to be able to carry on supporting the evangelical churches as they try to meet those needs. We would be so very grateful if you could continue to stand with us as we attempt to do just that.

Thank you.

‍

‍