Women – Jayson Casper

What Ukraine’s Evangelical Women Want Known About Russia’s War

Image: Edits by Christianity Today / Source Images: NurPhoto / Jeff J Mitchell / Getty

Of Ukraine’s more than 4 million refugees, 90 percent are women and children. Of the 6.5 million internally displaced Ukrainians, 54 percent of adults are women. Men ages 18-60 are required to stay and resist the Russian invasion. And thus it is men who usually tell the public tales of war.

Women are often kept to private forums, such as their journals. Including:

32 days of war.

Fall asleep while checking the news on your phone.

See nightmares about concentration camps, bombing, dead people.

Wake up from a nightmare and remember it is not just a bad dream.

Check your phone with the thought: I hope everyone I love is alive.

Kiss a sleeping husband thinking about the fragility of life.

Wash your face. Put your clothes on.

Go to work. Wear a smile as a mask. Distance your emotions from pain. Physically hear pain turn into white noise in your head.

Check on your family during a 15-minute break at work. Cry on your break.

Six seconds: breathe in. Eight seconds: breathe out.

Feel grateful for being away from your phone eight hours a day at work. Feel helpless about being away from your phone eight hours a day at work.

So began the March 27 entry of Tetiana Dyatlik Dalrymple, suffering vicariously from afar in Washington, DC. Her father, Taras, sensed that such female perspectives have been missing from coverage of the war.

As regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia for Overseas Council, he recruited six Ukrainian women leaders who could tell their story. In partnership with the Eastern European Institute of Theology, ScholarLeaders International, and four affiliated seminaries, they sought to correct the critical observation of Svitlana Alexievich, a Belarussian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015.

“All that we know of war,” she said, “is told by men’s voices.”

Too few international supporters care to notice. The theological educators’ second webinar, The Russia-Ukraine War: Women Voices, drew only about 200 registrations yesterday, less than half of the first by male seminary leaders.

Marina Ashikhmina, vice rector for educational work at Tavriski Christian Institute, said the distinction is patently unfair. Women in war have a “double responsibility.” Underappreciated in society is…

This article was originally published by Christianity Today, on April 1, 2022. Please click here to read the full text.

God’s Word Is Like Manna in the Middle East

Image: Illustration by Sarah Gordon / Photo Courtesy of Anne Zaki

Anne Zaki is assistant professor of preaching and practical theology at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo. Raised in a Presbyterian home in Cairo, at age 16 she left the Middle East to travel alone to a progressive boarding school on Vancouver Island, Canada.

In 2000, she married a Syrian-Canadian pastor, and as a mother of four, she completed her master of divinity degree from Calvin Theological Seminary in 2009. Zaki was always confident she would return to Cairo, and the family relocated there nine months into the chaos of Egypt’s 2011 revolution.

CT spoke with Zaki about the transformative power of Scripture in her own life and in the Egyptian church.

How did Scripture shape your early faith?

I grew up in an environment that was saturated with Scripture. My father was a pastor. My grandfather was a pastor. After retirement, my grandfather came to live with us. I would wake up every morning to hymns and Scripture being read out loud. His prayers were incredible, almost as if he was echoing God’s words back to him.

Eight months before going to Canada, I had an experience of personal encounter with Jesus. I knew I was different. Even my family noticed the change.

But in my new school, for the first time I was being exposed to religions other than Christianity and Islam. And it wasn’t just exposure. It was a school that was set up to appreciate and promote diversity. I had my first big spiritual crisis. I had to ask myself: Why do I believe what I believe? Is it just because I grew up in it?

I sort of made a deal with God. I told him, If you really are who I have known you to be, who they told me that you are, then prove it to me through your Word without the influence of anyone else. So for me that meant no church, no youth group—not even Christian music. And during that period of six months, God’s Word was sufficient to reveal himself, to prove himself, to be his witness.

How did you sense God revealing himself to you through his Word? Can you explain further?

Every day, I would read a certain portion of Scripture, meditate on it, and pray it back to God. The things that didn’t make sense I would throw back at him, and we’d have a debate about them. Usually…

This article was originally published in the special September print edition on women’s voices in scripture engagement. Please click here to read the full text, where you can download the entire issue for free.

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