Laity, Friendship, and Fragile Structures: Ecumenical Life before the War in Ukraine

From 2009 to 2022, my life was deeply shaped by a form of ecumenical work in Ukraine that now feels both very near and very far. Preparing this talk, I looked through photographs from 2009–2020 and felt how sharply my life is divided into “before” and “after” the full-scale invasion. Those images brought joy and pain together. I realised how much I had been suppressing my earlier experience of church work simply not to feel the wound of something that was there and is no longer, even though some of it continues in different forms.

For many years I worked at the Spirit and Letter Research and Publishing Association and at St Clement’s Centre: Communion and Dialogue of Cultures—two interconnected NGOs linked with the European Humanities Research Centre of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Their work was inspired and organised by Constantin Sigov. Most of my colleagues then belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

Our aims were threefold: to facilitate academic and informal ecumenical dialogue; to foster dialogue between church and culture, church and academia; and to offer informal theological education for all. My roles included project coordination and management, translation and editing of books, and occasionally fundraising and reporting.

Ecumenical activity unfolded in three main areas. First, we published and translated books in modern Catholic theology (especially the Bibliotheca Clementina series) and on ecumenical dialogue. Second, we organised annual two-week international Summer Theological Institutes at a parish of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the village of Lyshnia in Kyiv region. These were not only scholarly but also liturgical, cultural, and deeply rooted in the natural setting. Some years we had up to 80 participants over two weeks, with clergy and laity from different countries and traditions, as well as Orthodox and Catholic seminarians. A special Children’s Academy, which I coordinated, added warmth and a sense of shared life. For many, these institutes were a formative experience.

Third, we held an annual three- to four-day international ecumenical conference, the Assumption (Dormition) Readings, organised since 2001. It was more academic, but open to lay and monastic participants from different countries. We cooperated with Catholic seminaries and theological faculties in Italy and France, the communities of Taizé and Bose, and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, and lay scholars took part. The topics of our books, summer institutes, and conferences were interconnected and always oriented toward what unites rather than divides: not only churches among themselves, but also church and culture. They were often not strictly theological: Friendship; Memory and Hope; Forgiveness and Reconciliation; the Gifts of Childhood; Community; Festival and Festivity; later Freedom and Dignity, which became especially relevant after the Revolution of Dignity. These themes created a welcoming space for theology, liturgy, hymnography, church history, and personal experience to meet in living dialogue.

This work was more than internal Ukrainian ecumenism; it became a unique global cultural, ecclesial, and academic event in Ukraine over almost twenty years. Alongside it, we organised seminars, webinars, conferences, and exchanges, created the ETHOS web platform, and launched the Dialogue in Action project, which built bridges between faith-based and secular initiatives.

I loved this work. Spirit and Letter and St Clement’s Centre were unique in Orthodox Ukraine in allowing me to connect what I believed and longed for with my daily tasks. Many Orthodox institutions were indifferent or hostile to ecumenism of the heart. I remember proposing a Taizé workshop in an Orthodox monastery in Kyiv famous for its social initiatives in 2009 and being told: “There will be no Taizé here ever” (which proved wrong in a few years). Ukraine is multiconfessional and comparatively open, but coexistence does not automatically mean a desire to grow closer.

Spirit and Letter and St Clement’s Centre were also a shared way of life—church, academia, and family intertwined—which built trust. This was largely due to Constantin Sigov and a team convinced that the two lungs of Europe, Orthodox and Catholic, must breathe together at both institutional and personal levels.

Yet this informality had its challenges. The boundary between life and work was often blurred, leading to misunderstood expectations. Financially, we depended on international Catholic and Protestant partners, as book sales could not sustain salaries. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine was poorer and rarely interested in funding ecumenical education; at best it offered moral support and blessings.

Our cooperation with church structures was often fragile. We worked only with the UOC MP, while the UOC KP was considered schismatic, and I shared that prejudice. The hierarchy could be an unpredictable partner. Under Metropolitan Volodymyr, the atmosphere was pro-ecumenical; bishops gladly participated in our events, and he himself spoke at the Assumption Readings even when very ill. With Metropolitan Onuphriy, a silent policy of avoiding ecumenism emerged. Bishops withdrew, and even the parish priest in Lyshnia, where we held our summer institutes, gradually distanced himself from our activities.

Later, when most members of Spirit and Letter joined the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, we could no longer use that parish. In 2019 and 2020, the Summer Institutes moved to the Dominican St Thomas Aquinas Institute in Kyiv; in 2021 they did not take place. We hoped to build cooperation with the new OCU, but in 2022 the full-scale Russian invasion halted this work. Ecumenical initiatives by laity continue in Ukraine, but they are now often shaped by war-related needs rather than dialogue as such. Spirit and Letter still publishes books, but far fewer.

Having since lived in Germany and the UK, I have not seen anything comparable in Orthodox circles there. In the diaspora, Orthodox communities often emphasise distinctiveness, especially among converts, rather than seeking common ground with Catholics. This is the opposite of what I expected when leaving Ukraine. In this light, the experience we had in Kyiv appears even more unique: a fragile, imperfect, but real space where laity, clergy, and scholars tried to breathe together across confessional lines, and where friendship and shared life became a form of theology in practice.

Dr. Lidiya Lozova