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Editor’s note: On July 10, David Nevotti, a
member of the First United Methodist Church in Sugar Land, Texas, and
Illya Onoprienko, a member of the student ministry of the University of
L’viv, were fatally injured while helping to repair a church-related facility
in L’viv, Ukraine. The Rev. David Goran, a United Methodist missionary
serving in L’viv as a student ministry director, was seriously injured
and has been transferred to a hospital in Munich. United Methodist
Communications producer Jan Snider, who stayed with the Gorans in
February 2010 while she worked on stories about their mission, reflects
on what she saw.
Commissioned as missionaries, the married couple of Shannon and the Rev.
David Goran worked in L’viv, Ukraine, with university students prior to
the accident this week that has caused them to seek medical care for
David outside the country.
UMNS photos by Jan Snider.
View in Photo Gallery
A UMNS Commentary
By Jan Snider*
5:00 P.M. ET July 13, 2012
I first experienced the passion of the “pilgrims” two years ago.
In the heart of L’viv in Ukraine is a university, and around the
corner a few blocks is the United Methodist student center. It was at
that center I witnessed the work of David and Shannon Goran, as they
shepherded a growing student ministry.
The students came up with the name “pilgrims” because they felt that
they were beginning an adventure and clearing a new path for
themselves in post-Soviet Ukraine. They gathered for Thursday evening
worship every week at the student center, and it was at one of those
gatherings that the name was suggested. “Pilgrims” stuck.
L’viv hugs the Polish border. It is a richly storied city that
received the attentions of nearly every Eastern European power, dancing
a reluctant waltz with the Austria-Hungary Empire, the Polish
Proletariat and, most recently, the Soviets. The urban fabric is woven
with elaborate Viennese-inspired architecture and dotted with simple
blocked buildings of later Soviet influence. The Orange Revolution was
born in the 1990s in L’viv as a push-back against Russian influence in a
newly independent Ukraine.
Farther away from the Russian eastern border than the capital city
of Kiev, L’viv quietly clung to its Christian roots during Communist
rule. But, the formality of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was often
experienced through passive participation of established rituals.
David Goran explained to me that the goal was not to replace the
religious identity of the students but to affirm a “real and living
faith.” Still, Ukrainian society as a whole continues to look upon
Protestant ministries with suspicion.
The Gorans understood some of these challenges when they accepted
the role as missionaries in 2009. They were stepping into a ministry
started earlier by United Methodist missionaries Stacy and Fred
Vanderwerf.
Shannon Goran was familiar with the ministry because she served as a
mission intern with the Vanderwerfs in 2003. It was after she returned
to the United States that she met David Goran while attending Asbury
Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. After they married, the
opportunity to take over the ministry was presented to them. David Goran
committed to being a missionary in Ukraine without ever having set
foot in the country. Although he didn’t know it at the time he, too,
was a “pilgrim.”
The Rev. David Goran visits an orphanage outside L’viv, Ukraine, in this 2010 file photo.
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The formal name of the student ministry is called Molod’ do Isusa,
which means “Youth to Jesus.” David Goran likens the ministry to a
Ukrainian version of a Wesley Center. It is established near campus to
be a place of refuge and a community rooted in Jesus.
The center was on the top floor of a centuries-old building. Several
times a day, the students went up and down the curved, slanted and
creaking stairs passing the Soviet-style apartments carved out of the
building. At the top floor, they were greeted with backpacks and shoes
strewn across the worn wooden entry, and they reached for a pair of
slippers from the communal pile. Nearly always, the next stop was the
small kitchen, where they would pour hot tea, often into cups provided
by the Sugar Land (Texas) United Methodist Church.
At the time, it didn’t seem all that unusual to me, but I came to
realize that this experience is what made these students “pilgrims.” It
was a sense of shalom and community and with it came a new realization
that shalom happens when God’s love is acted out.
It was unusual in this culture for a church leader to talk with the
students about their faith, their aspirations, and to challenge them to
think beyond rote teachings and more toward societal outreach. The
students loved it. Shannon Goran explained to me that it was the
long-term goal to develop the students into leaders of the ministry,
from a Ukrainian perspective, under Ukrainian leadership. “Indigenous
leadership would be so much better than having two people from the U.S.
running things. We want to put ourselves out of a job.”
As she explained this to me, I could hear raucous laughter next
door. Peeking in I noticed that after the men’s meeting, the ping-pong
table was pulled to the middle of the room. The loser of the match,
David Goran explained, became the target of the “red dot” game. This
meant the winner of the match launched a ping-pong ball, full speed
toward the offered back of the loser. David Goran laughed and said the
guys came up with the game on their own. He noted that the game seemed
to build the kind of camaraderie that was the ultimate goal.
The Gorans believe in ministry outside the walls of the church and
while this Wesylan tenant is key to United Methodism, it was an
entirely new idea to the students. Whether it was venturing outside the
city to spend a day at an orphanage or experiencing the hospitality of
the Gorans as they opened their home to share a meal and Bible study, the approach was growing the ministry. The “pilgrims” were experiencing what it was like to blaze a trail.
The skyline of L’viv, Ukraine, shows the area near the roof collapse.
L’viv will celebrate its 756th anniversary this September.
View in Photo Gallery
But the students weren’t the only ones to forge ahead into new
territory. The Gorans, themselves, were moving outside their comfort
zone. In a new country and a strange culture, they were leading and
forming future leaders of the church. They were experiencing the
barriers to innovation that exist in Eastern Europe: red tape,
Byzantine bureaucracy and a suspicion of the motives — and even the
character — of Western Protestants.
In the middle of making relationships, doing church and extending
Christ’s love to the greater community, the Gorans found themselves to
have become good, old-fashioned, situationally challenged, United
Methodist missionaries — and in this way, they found themselves
fighting the battles and taking on the responsibilities of foreign
mission just as if they had been in a forgotten corner of Africa. In
living into Christ’s calling for them, the Gorans found that they, too,
were “pilgrims.”
Now that a terrible tragedy has occurred the Gorans are in mourning
for two brave brothers who gave everything in their service to Christ.
Now comes the question, where do the “pilgrims” go from here? It is not
clear whether the Gorans will return to Ukraine, or when. For the
students, will indigenous leadership emerge? Have the seeds of ministry
been given sufficient time to take hold? For the Gorans, they will
have the additional layer of grief added to their burden. Thankfully,
they have a worldwide church to support and pray for them — but that is
not to say that it will be easy, or that their pilgrimage has not led
to heartbreak.
Even though we know better, people like me often think about the
mission field as just another ministry. But this incident reminds us
that Christian missionaries put a lot on the line to follow their
calling: their years on earth, access to their families back home,
their dreams, their hearts, and even their lives. I can’t think of any
reason someone would do that — except that they love God, they love
God’s vision, and they love and want to serve God’s children.
Pilgrims believe in this model of giving, one that started with a
single Hebrew peasant and 12 pilgrim recruits, and has trailblazed
forward ever since. It continues today, and into tomorrow. I pray for
God’s love to surround the families, friends and churches of the lost
brothers, and the two young pilgrims who set out years ago for Ukraine
to do God’s work. I pray for healing; for meaning, for hope and for
renewal. Because the world is still out there, God’s work remains to be
done, and there is no place for the pilgrim to lay his head.
*Snider is a producer for United Methodist Communications.
News media contact: Jan Snider, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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