The city of Opole is 275 miles from Poland’s eastern border. But Ukraine never feels that far away.
And at Ostoja Church, a Pentecostal congregation that has served the city of 130,000 since 1952, that presence is palpable, particularly during Sunday-morning prayers.
The church’s pastor, Mariusz Muszczyński, said that every Sunday since the beginning of the war, the church has prayed for peace in Ukraine—in Ukrainian and Polish.
“We never skip it,” he said, “it’s become part of who we are.”
It’s not only the church’s prayers that have changed since the war began. The people have as well.
“From one day to the next, our church transformed from a middle-class Polish-descent church into a messy, missional, giving, caring, international community,” Muszczyński told CT. “It revolutionized our church overnight. Three years down the road, we are in a totally different place than we used to be.”
Even before 2022, there were more 8,000 economic migrants from Ukraine living in Opole, the capital of Upper Silesia in Poland’s southwest. But in February of that year, when Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds—and later thousands—arrived seeking shelter and safety. In the first 18 months after the invasion, the Polish government granted temporary protected status to 22,000 people in Opole.
Muszczyński’s church was on the frontlines of dramatic change.