From Chernobyl to Fukushima

A full circle. That's how I feel.

The Chernobyl Museum was built largely with donations from Japanese people who shared similar suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 40 years prior to the Chernobyl disaster. Today, people of Chernobyl share their resilience with people of Fukushima.

I also have a few things to share from my short trip to Ukraine to people of Fukushima as I prepare for my third trip to the Land of Good News (福島). 

• First of all, truth matters. People suffered great deal in Chernobyl. Physical harm, loss of homes, loss of work and community, that's what people remember from their suffering. People also remember with anger and bitterness about being lied to, and being hidden from the truth of what happened. 
• Second, because of the way information was handled and communication was controlled, people generally showed a low level of trust on their governments, both the old and the new. This is where local churches filled the gap and rose as the source of trust, hope and community.  
• Third, the work of local churches always vary according to each unique context. The mystery of God works both in the church local and the church global. In 1986 when the Chernobyl explosion happened, the church in Ukraine existed largely underground - under the persecution. But in 1988, the millennium celebration of the Church in Ukraine brought much needed attention from the outside world - the Church Global. And Soon after that the USSR collapsed and the Church Local began to fill the gap in remarkable ways to care for the poor and the needy in Ukrainian society. 

What role do we specifically play as the Church local, wherever you are, and the Church global, to wherever brothers and sisters are hurting because of disasters, oppression, poverty, injustice, anything else in our deeply broken world? 

I will probably bring more questions than answers to Fukushima on this upcoming visit from Monday. My listening ears must go closer and closer to the ground where ordinary, small, quiet churches began to take big steps of faith and action.

Anatoliy Glukhovski is the Principal of the Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, where my visit to Ukraine was initially planned for. He shares his testimony of churches working together globally after the Chernobyl disaster, and this time, with churches in Fukushima.