Background

24 February marks the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Around the country, church members are praying for the people of Ukraine and for the international response to their situation, showing hospitality to Ukrainians, giving to organisations that provide relief, and offering or preparing to offer a warm welcome. The need remains – please keep up your prayer, action, and giving. 

Prayer

Whether in quiet prayers of our own or in public prayers in church, we can keep the people of Ukraine, the situation in the country, those helping people who are fleeing, and the broader international response in our prayers.

The prayer points below are updated as of February 2024: we have put the most recent prayers, written around the 2nd anniversary of the war, at the top of the list.

Prayers for February 2024

Association of English Cathedrals – A Prayer for Peace on the 2nd Anniversary
Council of Churches in Canada – Prayers for Peace in Ukraine (three prayers, drawing on prayers from the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox traditions)
Methodist Church – A range of prayers and hymn suggestions, including a prayer for the 2nd anniversary of the war
Salvation Army – A Prayer for Ukraine
United Reformed Church: Ukraine – prayers for second anniversary (drawn from prayer points of young Ukrainians in the UK)

Prayer Points
The Bible Society has a very powerful video of Christians around Ukraine reading Psalm 31. View it – or if your church uses online video, download it and use it in your service.
BMS World Mission prayer points from Baptists in Ukraine (see also the BMS video marking the 10th year of conflict in Ukraine)
Tearfund prayer points and guidance
World Evangelical Alliance  suggestions for prayers (Ukraine Independence Day, 2022)

Formal prayers or liturgies
Prayers from the Baptist Union
Prayer from the Bishop of Oxford
CAFOD – Prayer for Ukraine, Intercessions for Ukraine
Christian Aid – Prayer for Ukraine
Church of England – Prayers for Ukraine (part of page on response to the war)
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland – Prayer for Ukraine 
Bishop David Hamid, Church of England Diocese in Europe – Prayer for Ukraine
Fellowship of Reconciliation – Resources on Ukraine (includes liturgy used in weekly prayers)
Mennonites in Canada
Methodist Church – A range of prayers and hymn suggestions, including a prayer for the 2nd anniversary of the war
Orthodox Church in America – statement followed by suggested intercessions
Pope Francis’ prayer for peace
United Reformed Church – Prayers for Ukraine. Collection including prayers from JPIT, the Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe (which includes the Lutheran Church in Russia and the Orthodox Church in Ukraine), the Chairs of the London District of the Methodist Church, the Northern Synod Moderator, and Inderjit Bhogal
A liturgy for grieving a national tragedy – The Rabbit Room

Praying Together

The Bible Society has an online prayer tree: you can read other people’s prayers and add your own. See here the leaves for Ukraine.

If you’d like to join with others in prayer online, take a look at the European Baptist Federation’s Wednesday prayer gatherings (last Wednesday of every month) on Zoom or join the Friday prayers hosted by a group of Christian peace organisations (find out more from Fellowship of Reconciliation)

Giving

ttacks on infrastructure are continuing and causing a great deal of need. If you would like to donate to humanitarian relief for people in and displaced from Ukraine, suggestions include:

BMS: World Mission appeal
The Bearr Trust (recommended by Quakers in Britain)
CARITAS – currently focused on helping people in conflict zones
The Diocese in Europe/USPG
Our friends at Freedom from Torture recommend also Ukrainian relief and human rights charity Vostok SOS and the Czech charity, People in Need
If you would like to donate to help Ukrainian refugees in our area, please consider donating to local refugee charities, which need our support to provide advice and assistance to Ukrainians arriving in the UK alongside their existing clients. Charities include:
Asylum Welcome
Refugee Support Group
Sanctuary Hosting, and
Slough Refugee Support

Action: Hosting and Supporting Ukrainian Refugees

The Government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme allows individuals to register to sponsor Ukrainian refugees, providing them with accommodation for at least six months. The Government has said that an unlimited number of Ukrainians can come through this route – which means that many people are able to play a role in welcoming people who have been displaced by the Russian invasion.

Whether you’re part of a church wanting to get involved, a guest looking for resources, or a host with questions about the scheme, it can be helpful to connect with others. We’ve built a map of who’s doing what: contact us for information.

Hosting - Registering, Matching, Preparing & Best Practice

A good starting place is the Government programme’s website
You might then want to look at:

– the helpful ‘information packs’ Asylum Welcome has prepared
– attending a webinar from the Sanctuary Foundation
– Reset’s Homes for Ukraine Sponsor Tookit

Hosting someone, even if it’s only six months, is a serious commitment. Before undertaking it, it’s good to think through the implications as fully as you can.

  • Sanctuary Hosting, which has been helping people in the Thames Valley host vulnerable migrants and refugees for years, has a brilliant Hosting Good Practice Guide, which includes five key questions to ask yourself before you offer to host. City of Sanctuary can also help you reflect.
  • The Diocese of Oxford also has some helpful questions to ask yourself and put together a really good briefing by video, which covers many FAQs.
  • You might want to take a look at the welcome pack from VITA (see below) – the points it raises give an idea of questions that may come up.
  • The Government lists answers to frequently asked questions relating to council tax discounts, mortgage and household insurance, tenancy agreements, leaseholders, etc. Please note that they suggest you might want to have a legal agreement in place with your guests. The Diocese of Oxford is suggesting that you not do this, as there could be consequences that would be unhelpful (take a look at this document on preparing your house or their video from about 55 minutes in).

To register your interest

  • If you’re an Anglican in the Diocese of Oxford, you can register with the Diocese of Oxford which is working with Citizens UK to help resettle Ukrainians,
  • If you’re a Baptist, you can register with the Baptist Union, which is working with Citizens UK and RESET.
  • If you’re a Methodist, you can register through Methodists for Ukraine.
  • More generally, you can register on the Government’s site or with the Sanctuary Foundation which Krish Kandiah has set up to help (they have a super video, which is worth watching and sharing).

If you have any questions about the different options, and aren’t in the Diocese of Oxford or Baptist Union, please get in touch. We’re working with the different denominations and organisations, and can answer frequently asked questions.

We recommend working through a formal programme (for example, those run by RESET, the Sanctuary Foundation, the Diocese of Oxford or the Baptist Union). If you do this, there should be help with the paperwork.

You can get a sense of the visa application by looking at the questions (in both English and Ukrainian here). If you as host or guest are concerned about visa applications, you might want also to take a look at the  advice from Reset, the Red Cross, or Ukrainian Refugee Help and watch this teach-in with the Home Office organised by the Sanctuary Foundation. Free legal advice is also available from the Ukraine Advice Project.

The Government website has full guidance on the DBS checks and inspections that will be needed.

Check with your local council for further details.There\’s also some really good advice from the specialist charity Thirty-One Eight in this video from the Sanctuary Foundation.

Vita Network has prepared a brilliant ‘welcome pack‘ for hosts to give guests. It enables you to share practical information about arrival, access to the property, wifi, what parts of the property are available to guests, kitchen/laundry/bathroom instructions, safety instructions, and house rules on a variety of topics, and information about local institutions and services.

Sanctuary Foundation has a helpful set of checklists for helping people preparing to host babies and young children. This includes a form to fill in if you need specialised baby goods. For help with schooling and special language resources, see below.

Many hosts are now at the point where they have reached or are near to reaching the end of their original six month commitment.

The Government has issued new advice for hosts who have reached the end of their six-month commitment. It gives information about options, including continued hosting. A new development is that the payments for hosts who continue to host over the longer term will receive £500 a month once their guest has been in the UK for twelve months, for a maximum of two years. It also contains information about ‘rematching’ if continued hosting isn’t an option, and about moving from hosting into a rental agreement.

Buckinghamshire Council has issued a handy guide for guests, setting out the options of staying, rematching, renting privately, and applying for social housing.

Hosting - Support for Hosts and Guests

The UK Government has a huge array of resources for guests. This includes guides for guests about applying to the scheme, finding work, accessing benefits, education and health for children and adults.

Each local authority is operating within the Government guidance (which can be found here), but it\’s worth checking their webpages for the specifics on support they are offering.

    Oxfordshire
    Buckinghamshire
    Berkshire

Settled\’s Ukraine family advice service is provided in Ukrainian, English and Russian and is completely free of charge. They can help with:

  • Reuniting family members in the UK under the Ukrainian Family Scheme
  • ‘Homes for Ukraine’ applications and complications
  • The Ukraine Extension Scheme from the 03.05.2022
  • Their level 3 immigration advisers will be happy to assist with complex issues

\Contact: Ukrainefamilyscheme@settled.org.uk
Support groups for hosts – (Oxford based) Refugee Resource and Sanctuary Hosting want to follow up the online groups they have run with a limited number of in-person groups. If you can get 10-20 hosts into a hall and would appreciate a talk from someone with time for follow-up discussions then get in touch with Asylum Welcome: ukraine@asylum-welcome.org.

Helping people have a conversation if there’s no shared language:

  • Google Translate isn’t perfect, but it will generally get the sense of things correct.
  • Take a look at the very helpful ‘Ukrainian Phrasebook for Helping Refugees’ which is available to download free (or with a donation if you want to support the team behind it) from Ukrainian Lessons. Everything is side by side in Ukrainian and English, so you could potentially have a back-and-forth pointing conversation. It’s also a great resource for learning key Ukrainian phrases.
  • Both Job Centres and the NHS are legally obliged to provide interpretation for pre-booked appointments if you make them aware that there will be a need.

Working with children?

Want support with translation of a document?

  • Get in touch with us – we may be able to find you some help.
  • Charity Translators has a list of translation services.
  • Translators for Ukraine also has a list of translators.

Want to help Ukrainian friends learn English?

  • UTAlk offers both a free app to learn Ukrainian and a free app for Ukrainian speakers to learn other languages.
  • The Diocese of Oxford has an online language-learning programme – new term is starting January 2023
  • Check on our map for groups near you that may be providing English lessons.
  • The Open University has some free online self-taught English courses
  • English with Ukrainians offers hour-long videos that can be listened to by guests and hosts families together – the lessons are bilingual. There are some useful cultural pointers – look in particular at lesson 3!
  • Sanctuary Faringdon recommends the Dorling Kindersely ‘English for Everyone Vocabulary Builder’ – you can buy copies here.
  • OCVA website lists some of the main providers of English classes in Oxfordshire.
  • The Ukrainian Institute London has free English lessons for Ukrainians displaced by the war. Their school is supported by British Land and Paddington Central, who are providing space for classes at The Storey Club in Paddington. They will be offering classes at beginners/elementary level for adults. To be added to the waiting list for English lessons, please email learnenglish@ukrainianinstitute.org.uk
  • If you are in Oxfordshire and setting up conversational language groups for Ukrainians, Asylum Welcome has some small amounts of funding available to pay for costs associated with this (tutor hire, hall hire or related costs) – email ukraine@asylum-welcome.org

Want to learn a little (or a lot of!) Ukrainian? Here are some materials that will fit different learning styles.

  • Duolingo offers a free, interactive online course. You can learn in bite-sized chunks, learning the way you would learn to speak. Really good if you’re trying to learn in the midst of other things, prefer to be computer-based, and can only give a few minutes at a time.
  • The publishers of Teach Yourself Ukrainian have made both book and audio available free of charge. This is a more traditional way of learning a language, helpful if you like structure and grammar from the outset and want to practice some offline.
  • UTAlk offers both a free app to learn Ukrainian and a free app for Ukrainian speakers to learn other languages.
  • If you have blocks of time to spare and are someone who learns more through sound than sight – and if you’re prepared to pay! – you might want to try the Pimsleur course. It\’s organised in half hour blocks and focuses on training the brain to listen and respond to the spoken language.

Many of the people who are arriving will have been dealing with significant trauma.
If you\’re a host, you may find it helpful to look at these resources Sanctuary Foundation:

Welcome Churches:

Save the Children:

GENERAL ADVICE

Welcome Churches’ Ukraine Welcome site has helpful advice on creating a CV/resume and applying for a job.

SPECIFIC OPPORTUNITIES

Oxford University Ukrainian Society has a webpage called Jobs for Ukrainians which has links to jobs in the UK and around the world. These include links to some very helpful general sites, including The Refugee Employment Network, Adecco, and JobAid
We have a running list of employment opportunities. Click here to access it.
Local opportunities are often posted on community group Facebook pages. If you\’re in the Thames Valley, go to our map to find the group nearest you.

HELP FOR THE SELF-EMPLOYED

Krystal, one of the top UK-based web hosting providers, is offering Ukrainian businesses relocating to the UK 12 months of free web hosting. More information here.

PROVISION FOR OLDER TEENS

Schooling for primary-aged children is more straightforward than for older students. Contact us if you have older teens who need more specialised education or who need to sit Ukrainian exams.

SUPPLIES

In Oxfordshire, ‘Markers for Mindfulness’ can help provide school essentials (full pencil case, maths set, calculator and notebook). Find out more on their website. This project was set up by a local Didcot teenager; you can also donate supplies to it – look on the website for details.

Is your school registered with Uniformerly? This is an \”online school marketplace that lets parents buy, sell or give away outgrown school uniform to other parents at their school\”. Take a look on their website.\

Listen to a briefing on Ukrainian Culture, History and Tradition, given by Alexandra Sevko and Mick Polleck

Other Ways to Show Support

If you, your church, school or neighbourhood are not able to offer accommodation, but would like to help welcome and support people who are sponsored to come to our area, you can also register this with the Sanctuary Foundation, the Diocese of Oxford, and/or let us know

There is plenty to do in terms of helping people arrive and settle in. Local groups need help with transport, registering people for services, translation, and many other areas. Churches are also doing special activities, like those below.

Resources for Churches

The Lord’s Prayer in Ukrainian and English:

Traditional with Doxology

Traditional without Doxology

Modern (Lead us not into temptation)

Modern (Save us from the time of trial)
We’ve prepared these for the most common versions used in different churches. Please let us know of any we’ve missed.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church generally uses the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom or, less frequently, the Divine Liturgy of St Basil the Great. There is a version of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in traditional English here and in modern English here (note that it’s put up by an American church, so the prayers for church leaders have US names. In the UK, the Eparchial Bishop is the Rt Revd Kenneth Nowakowski). There’s also a very helpful explanation of the Ukrainian Catholic Divine Liturgy here.
The Diocese of Chelmsford has produced an English-Ukrainian-Russian Anglican service liturgy.

If you want to provide translations of the Bible readings in church, a free online Ukrainian Bible is available from Bible Gateway The Bible Society is also offering free hard copies of the Bible in Ukrainian and Russian to churches that are welcoming people from Ukraine. Find out more and register your interest here

When guests are arriving in your area – or for special holidays like Christmas and Easter – you may want to offer ‘welcome gifts’. Every family’s circumstances and needs will be different, but here are some things that have been suggested by Ukrainian colleagues and community groups.

A ‘welcome basket’ for cooking

‘Home cooking\’ is a source of comfort for many. When your guests arrive you might want to give them a box of ingredients they are most likely to want to use – together with a gift card to a local food shop, so that they can top up later on. We’ve got three lists – one that a colleague at the Ukrainian School in Reading created for us, which is largely made up of foods that you can find at a large supermarket; a link to a Facebook post by Olia Hercules with a wider range of foods, some of which will primarily be available at local Polish shops; and a list that adds a few goods from Olia Hercules’ list to the basic basket.

As a church or group of churches you might want to give people a Welcome Leaflet with information about local services and details of activities you are offering.

You can adapt our Template for welcome leaflet – in Ukrainian & English – updated 07.06.22
Sample text specific to Didcot is included in grey type which you can substitute with the relevant details for your area. (The English translation is in the second half of the document, after all the Ukrainian text.)

If you are in the Didcot area you can use this ready to print version with the English text opposite the Ukrainian:Welcome leaflet – Didcot – in Ukrainian & English – updated 15.06.22\

During 2023, there will be Ukrainian masses at St Anne\’s Church, London Road, High Wycombe HP11 1ET at 2pm on the 4th Sunday of the month: 26 Feb, 26 March, 23 April, 28 May, 25 June, 23 July, etc. Check the full list here.

Welcome Churches has compiled a list of some of the suggestions, from the churches who attended their Ukraine Welcome Connect meeting, of how you can help Ukrainians.

  • Set up Whatsapp groups for hosts, where prayer and practical needs requests can be posted amongst your church community
  • Translate elements of a church service by either providing a print-out or using slides with translated text.
  • Provide opportunities for Ukrainians and their hosts to socialise. Churches talked about how beneficial it was both for Ukrainians to have a chance to chat, support each other, and to find out what\’s available in the local community. The wider community can be involved in serving food and drinks, chatting and getting to know people, which can be a great way to meet hosts from different localities outside of the church community.
  • Host-to-host support can also develop across local communities, both within and outside church communities. Consider how to support Ukrainians in accessing English classes, and how this can be followed up. One church described running a Conversation Cafe; another described providing Ukrainian lessons too for hosts!
  • Invite other agencies to social events – e.g. the Job Centre, local council, a hairdresser/ barber. Churches reported Ukrainians being shocked at the price of a haircut, so consider approaching local salons to ask if they can offer discount hair-cuts.
  • There are lots of useful resources available! Some mentioned were: translation apps such as Google Translate and SayHi ; Sanctuary Foundation ; Ukrainian and Russian Scriptures – Bible Society; Ukrainian Christian Resources. Ask your Ukrainian families what they are accessing online that they find helpful, and share this information.
  • Above all, be patient – whatever you are doing may start small, but it will grow. Don\’t underestimate the impact of what may seem like mundane physical acts.

Connect - Networking and Training

New local initiatives by groups, churches and individuals are springing up across the Thames Valley responding to the crisis in Ukraine. We can help connect you with others taking action near you – email: joanna@ccow.org.uk

Many organisations are offering training and information events for people wanting to welcome Ukrainians – see our frequently updated Events calendar for further details, or, if you’re looking for something more specific, get in touch