Church as God’s People

CRITICAL: церква is an acutely live, politically contested term in contemporary Ukraine, not merely a default-institutional-reading risk. Since 2022 the historically Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church has faced intense public distrust and legal scrutiny, while the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Greek Catholic Church are widely seen as aligned with national identity. Romans’ sense of church as the universal people of God, not any one jurisdiction, must be framed with explicit care; use громада (local assembly/community) as a clarifying synonym that sidesteps jurisdictional questions.