Transformations of the Ukrainian Baptist Movement in the Face of Societal Changes and Upheav als This article focuses on the development of the Ukrainian Baptist movement after the dissolution of the USSR. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it marks and examines two reasons for the rapid transformation of the Baptist movement, namely the uneasy political situation and the involvement of local evangelicals in the social services. The article investigates the specificity of the context of the post-Soviet Baptist movement in Ukraine: how a particular conservative tradition subsequently comes under increasing pressure from open-style Baptists. Key words: Baptists, Ukraine, the Bible, transformation, tradition.

In this article, I analyze the particular perception of the world Baptists start to learn during their conversion which I call the three‐dimensional perception of reality. This concept refers to the ability to incorporate narratives from the Bible into everyday life events and interpret both personal stories and world events accordingly, thereby making the Bible ever relevant. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how events from the believers' daily lives are perceived and explained in the light of biblical stories. Regardless of the fact that the two are separated in time and in space, the biblical story is still seen as a proto‐event to the current one. No matter how diverse the believers' experiences, they are capable of finding an equivalent episode in the Bible. The scripture, therefore, is ever present in the believers' lives, as a source of meaning and interpretation.

From the late 1980s, foreign—primarily American—missionaries started to travel to Ukraine in large numbers. This article is concerned with the impact of American Baptist missionaries and how their influence was perceived locally in 2016, the time of my fieldwork. When I set out to conduct my fieldwork research among Baptist believers in Lviv, I was surprised that local believers denied the impact of foreign missionaries on their communities and worship style. Moreover, many local Baptist churchgoers I met claimed they had never encountered an American missionary and insisted that foreign missionaries had not played any significant role in the development and transformation of Ukrainian Baptism. In this article, I present the data from the fieldwork and analyze the Ukrainian Baptists’ reasons for minimizing the influence through the perspective of religioscapes, and glocalization as the dialectic process between homogeneity and heterogeneity.