Leo Regheta led 160 pastors and their families for a weeklong retreat in prayer and a peaceful time with God along the Black Sea in Odesa, Ukraine.
The group was aware of the war taking place to the east, describing how at night hundreds of drones would cover the skies “like swarms of flies.”
All the pastors, their wives and children were from the front lines of Ukraine.
During the retreat, worship — led by young adults — included prayer gatherings for men, art therapy, storytelling for women, seminars on healing and programs for children and teenagers.
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Conversations on anxiety, fear and loss created an environment of sharing, praying and encouragement during the retreat.
“Some of them came up to us and said they have never vacationed on the beach their whole lives,” Regheta said.
“All of them came from the frontline zones. All of them came from the daily experience of hearing sirens and watching things get bombed.
“One pastor was looking down as he said: ‘I’ve seen things in my life that no human being should have seen. I have picked up bodies of young soldiers, so young, they didn’t have a mustache growing on their lips.’ So, people were traumatized.”
Another account was of a family of refugees who escaped with all their documents packed, saying, “We are not sure there will be a home for us to go back to.”
The inspiration for trauma healing care
Regheta and his team at Hope International Missions are familiar with the dangers that come with visiting and serving in the region and caring for refugees of the war in Ukraine.
“Our ministry has been doing mostly summer camps and leadership training for over 25 years,” Regheta said.
“A couple of years before the [2022] wars started, we were invited to Ukraine. We were already there doing camps and leadership training,” he continued.
“When the war happened, things broke loose. We got requests for gas money from our church partners as they were taking people to safety. They were taking people to the border. Other people were picking up from the border.”
A team of female volunteers was sent to Krakow and Warsaw, Poland, to meet incoming trains with women and children during the first weeks of the war.
The team met a director of a refugee center who served many of the men, women and children who fled. The connection birthed an opportunity for Hope International Missions to create a summer camp for children suffering from trauma from the war.
“You could see that they are still processing the trauma,” Regheta said.
A few weeks after working with kids, the discussion to include trauma healing for women began. Female refugees said they were struggling with their mental health and were in as much need as their children.
“God has put our organization in touch with Christian psychologists, trauma therapists and other Christian leaders who are doing those very things,” Regheta said.
“We did 10 conferences for women and trauma healing in Poland, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Latvia and then Ukraine. Our organization has been inside Ukraine seven or eight times since the war started.”
Regheta is going back to Ukraine in October with Hope International Missions to host two major trauma healing conferences for women in Kharkiv and Odesa. They are expecting 600 women throughout Ukraine to attend the weekend conferences. The event also will include partners from Ukraine and a trauma healing practitioner from the United States.
A local connection
In Plano, Texas, where Regheta serves as pastor of River of Life Church and connects with refugees from Ukraine weekly, he knows firsthand how the trauma of the war has affected the youngest of his congregants.
“I met a couple of families here in North Texas that are still recovering, and their children are still recovering,” Regheta said.
“One family came to our church and their older daughter, who must have been 6 or 7 at the time — that was two years ago — she was grabbing onto her mom’s skirt, hiding behind, and I said: ‘Hello, little princess. How are you?’
“The youngest one came out and gave me a high-five. The older one kept hiding. The mom says, ‘She’s still recovering from what happened in Kyiv.’ Those kinds of observations and experiences gave us the first face-to-face understanding of how bad the trauma is.”
In April, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson phoned Regheta to inform him the city of Dallas would become a sister city to Kharkiv. The city officially signed a memorandum and in March, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov came to Dallas by invitation of the city, where he also had a chance to meet volunteers and leaders of Texans on Mission.
The Dallas mayor’s office is working with the mayor of Kharkiv and Hope International Missions to set up a trauma healing center in Kharkiv, locally run by residents in Kharkiv.
“We realized to help people more long term, we need to really invest into trauma healing for them. And our organization, being a Christ-centered, biblically based organization, we understand the real transformation comes from the Lord,” Regheta said.
“The real healing only comes from Jesus. He is not just putting a bandage on something that hurts. He is healing from the inside.”
But Hope International Missions still is looking for support from churches and individuals.
Regheta added that they are grateful for the support they have received from individuals, churches, ministries like the Baptist General Convention of Texas and others.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Kendall Lyons and originally published by Baptist Standard.
