‘Everyone was touched by this war.’ Community gathers for prayer vigil at Ukrainian church
Pastor Yaroslav “Jerry” Boyechko, who leads the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church, had just one request when asked what Central Kentuckians can do to help the Ukrainian community.
“Pray,” he said, for “God almighty to stop this war.”
Scores of people gathered outside the church on Brannon Road in Nicholasville at a public vigil Friday night to do that.
They prayed for peace, rescue for the vulnerable, wisdom for leaders and courage for the church in Ukraine.
“Thwart the dark machinations of evil men,” Beverly Johnson-Miller, a member of St. Luke United Methodist Church who helped organize the vigil, said in a responsive prayer.
Boyechko said the church has about 1,100 members, not counting all the children and teens. The majority of them are from Ukraine.
“Most people from our congregation has a relative there,” he said. “Everyone was touched by this war.”
Ukrainian families from all over the country have moved to the Lexington area to attend the church, and a close-knit, supportive community has developed, said Mary Cobb, director of Kentucky Refugee Ministries in Lexington.
Cobb said the Ukrainian population in the area has also grown as about 150 families from Ukraine have been reunited with their relatives in Central Kentucky over the past few years through a reunification program for religious minorities who have historically suffered persecution, some dating back to the Soviet Union era.
“It really is a thriving community here,” Cobb said. “Once people come, they end up being very quickly successful,” she said, because of family and church support.
For as many families as have been reunited in Central Kentucky over the past few years, Cobb said there at least as many still in Ukraine waiting to come here. She said the process usually takes a few years.
“Refugees don’t just get here that quickly, ever,” she said. The civil unrest makes their prospects even more uncertain.
“Some of them were on the way,” she said. “They were about to be reunited and see them very soon.”
Cobb said she knows of two families in Ukraine who were supposed to have arrived in Central Kentucky March 2. They already had plane tickets in hand.
Now, she said, “They’re talking to their families. They’re deciding whether it’s safe to try to make it to the border. Can they make it anywhere once they get to the border? They don’t know.”
At least one of the families has an infant.
“We will just have to be waiting and hoping for their safety,” Cobb said.
Johnson-Miller said her Sunday School class at St. Luke United Methodist Church has been praying for Ukraine every week.
Last Saturday night, she said, she struggled with sleep. Scrolling through Facebook, she said she had seen an image that she just couldn’t stop thinking about. It was a photo of Ukrainian women kneeling in the snow to pray.
“We need to do something to let the Ukrainian community know that we ... care deeply about this crisis,” Johnson-Miller, a retired Asbury Seminary professor, said she thought. By Tuesday, before the Russian attack, Friday night’s prayer vigil was in the works.
“It grieves my heart that this has gone forward,” she said of the escalation of the conflict.
Johnson-Miller said she was overwhelmed by the community’s response in attending the event.
“We love you, and we stand with you,” she said at the vigil.
Liana Shramorych was one of a group of young people from the church who sang what she described as a song of prayer in Ukrainian after the event.
She said she has been living in the United States for two years. Her sister is still in Ukraine.
“We just pray for her,” she said. “I know God will help us.”
Boyechko said he and his wife came to the United States in 1989 as refugees from the Soviet Union, and he said his children have grown up here.
“We have two doctors, two teachers. We have a financial person and a computer person,” he said of his children.
He and his wife moved to Lexington in 2002.
“It’s a very great country, the United States of America,” Boyechko told attendees at the vigil. “You all need to cherish this and thank God for what you have.”
He told the crowd that many Ukrainians were watching the prayer vigil via YouTube.
“I am very thankful that we can pray to the same God,” he told the crowd. “He has always heard our prayers. He is still hearing our prayers.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 9:24 PM.
