2024 Podcast interview Phillip and Masha Barnett, who served in Ukraine as missionaries for 26 years starting in the great revival of 1992 during the fall of communism. By the eighth night, he had 1,200 saved. How he met Masha. How Satan often tried to get Phillip out of the way; God did not allow it. He knows the future! A prayer if you may not know the Lord.
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September 2, 2025
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Podcast headlines Phillip and Masha Barnett
Introduction:
Hello everyone, welcome to the Out in the Field podcast. We’re going to be interviewing a couple, Phillip and Masha Barnett, who were missionaries to Ukraine for 26 years. And we’re going to see what God did in their lives….
Pastor Phillip Barnett: Masha is from Ukraine. I had never gotten married. I met her there, and we got married there 23 years ago.
What made you want to go to Ukraine?
Well, first I got filled with the Holy Spirit when I was 12 years old. Right after that, God called me to be a missionary when I was 12. And I remember that night, I told my mom and pastor, before I went out of the building, that I was going to be a missionary. God called me that night! And then when I was 14, God called me to preach. And so it started from there. First, I did mission work in Honduras. I lived in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in Central America for a few months. And I studied Spanish several years. And it just didn’t feel like that was where God wanted me, so I came back to America, and then later on ended up in Ukraine.
It goes back many, many years before that.
[And you can read more about the reason Phillip Barnett ended up in Ukraine here.]
God answers prayers.
So I’m there because of my grandma. I went to Ukraine; I didn’t speak a word of Russian. They spoke Russian; it was the main language there in Ukraine at the time, not Ukrainian. I didn’t know how to say yes or no or where’s the bathroom. And so I went in cold Turkey! I went into South Central Ukraine in 1992. And I went in to preach evangelization to organize the church. There basically hadn’t been any evangelists in that part of Ukraine, because they had their ICBM nuclear missile program in that area.
Six month window
In 1991, everything was pretty confused for about six months or so. And then it opened up in the middle of 1992 that you didn’t [really] need a visa to get into Ukraine. And so, in that six month window in 1992, I got into Ukraine. I just went in with a couple of friends of mine. They gave me a visa. And so I was able to get in. Just planned it for that period of time. I went for 13 days to a city called Komsomolsk. It has a new name today [Horishni Plavni]. It was just a short trip.
‘God, you called me to be a missionary.’
And I pastored in a town called Drumright [Oklahoma]. I was there nine years and I was teaching school. Six of those years I taught. And I thought, ‘When am I going to get to be a missionary?’ And the Lord told me, my third year there: ‘You are a missionary to this little town’. My thing was to be a missionary overseas, you know. So I was a missionary to Drumright. Lots of kids got saved when I was teaching school.
At the end of the year, I would go to a Christian bookstore and buy a whole bunch of Bibles. And the kids who were Christians who wanted a Bible, I would have their names printed on it.
I was hungry to get out to fulfill my ministry.
I evangelized coast to coast for two years. And I was invited in Salem, Oregon. Slavic Youth With A Mission have their Slavic ministries headquarters in Salem, Oregon. Because in about 1895, the Canadian government built a railroad across southern Canada, to bring people from east to west. But not many people lived in western Canada.
They gave an invitation to Ukraine and to that area of the world.
They said, “These people are used to the cold, and the Ukrainians are good hard workers”. So they gave an official invitation to any Ukrainians or Slavic people, who could get to Canada. They would give them a free train ticket across Canada, a piece of land in Western Canada, and seed for the first year to plant crops. So a vast amount of (especially) Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, ended up in Western Canada. Then over the decades they began to filter down….
I was very, very interested in ministering to Russian Slavic peoples!
And so I went to the Slavic offices of YWAM (Youth With A Mission), and I talked to a lady there. I met some people there. They came to the church where I was doing the evangelization and had a service. So through the YWAM in Salem, Oregon, through the pastor and his wife of that church, especially his wife…. I hadn’t seen her in many years, and we saw her in October. She was here in Oklahoma. Her name is Karen McKenzie. Her husband Ed passed away two, three years ago. Karen said:
“We need somebody to go to Ukraine to preach the revival.”
She said she and her husband were going to go. I said, “Well, I’ll go”. This was 1992. So I said, “Oh, I’m your person”, when I was there preaching. “Let’s do it!”
Time came about that fall, and I got a call….
This Karen said, “You want to go?” I said, “I want to go, but I have used every penny I’ve had that I’ve forgotten in the offerings, and I went month after month on the road every night not returning to Oklahoma. And I said, “The offerings have not been enough that I can afford a trip there”. She said, “Well, let me see what I can do”. So she called a bishop in Oklahoma, and told him the situation:
“Phillip can go; we need him, but he has no money to go.”
So he called me after a service one night. He said, “I hear that they need you to go preach a revival in Ukraine. Do you want to go?” I said, “Yes”. He said, “But you don’t have any money”. I said, “No”. He said, “How much do you need?” I said, “Well, to rent a facility, airline fare, and food for a couple of weeks, I need at least $2,000. He said, “You got it!” [Phillip wasn’t raising funds at this point.]
I was just evangelizing; every night I was preaching across America….
California, Utah, Maine, New Hampshire, everywhere, Ohio, Indiana. I was in Virginia at that time. So I said, “Yes”. And so they needed to go immediately.
It was early November….
I closed the revival. I drove back to Oklahoma, stopped at a church in Indiana, where I preached. Three days later, I ended back up in Tulsa, and a couple days later we packed my stuff. My mom got everything washed and packed. We flew to Ukraine, stopped off in Germany for a day or two. I met with some church people there, and then ended up in Ukraine, and preached the revival in Komsomolsk.
I started on Monday night, and we rented a hall….
that was organized before we got there, and I just gave money. First night – the hall seated 600 – 800, I forgot. And it was jam packed! There was no room; there were people standing. And you have to understand, these people had never heard the word of God ever in their life. They knew nothing about Jesus! They’ve been under communism.
The ministers had just been released from the gulags, the concentration camps, in Siberia!
And so they [the people] come in, and I could cry…. One of the old men, an old minister, stands up, makes the announcement. He said, “Anybody here who’s a Christian, you have to leave because there are lots of people standing, who have never heard the name Jesus. And we’ve got a place upstairs, and you’re gonna go pray that everybody who’s here can get saved”. So everybody who was a Christian left the building; there weren’t that many. They went upstairs to pray. And so their places, their seats were taken in this big hall by people, who knew nothing about God.
By the eighth night, I had 1,200 saved.
On the fifth night, which was Friday night, we had a service about the baptism of the Holy Spirit for people to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And that was the only service I didn’t preach. A minister from Latvia or Lithuania preached, a young man. And so we’re praying for people to get filled with the Holy Spirit. 50 People got filled with the Holy Spirit in that service. And I’m there standing, all over the place praying, standing and crying. And I remember….
Along with the gospel also Satanism, the occult, came in, also really strong with the new freedoms [deliverances].
And everybody was poor there. Nobody had any money under communism. So this woman, a nicely dressed woman, comes up to me, and she said:
“Would you please come and pray for my father?”
Of course I didn’t speak Russian then. “He’s demon possessed. Would you come and cast the demon out of him?” And I’m thinking, ‘Okay’. And so I go over there and I talk to this man.
His teeth are tight together. Now the Bible tells us, when you pray for the sick we lay hands on the sick, but with casting out demons, Jesus said, no, you speak to the demons; you don’t lay your hands on those people. But I was kind of dumb at that time, and I put my hand on his head. I was praying with my hand on his shoulder. I was just real close to him, and I said, “I love you Jesus”. It was like, (groaning, groaning), his teeth were gritting. He was just groaning! I rebuked the devil. And I said, “Come out of him in the name of Jesus!” And the demon came out; the man’s mouth instantly loosened. And he wasn’t gritting; his teeth weren’t growling anymore.
And his daughter was just standing with her hands together, like in prayer.
She knew nothing about God, I guess, either. She just knew this demon was in her daddy. The man was at least 50 probably. But the moment the demon came out of him, or however many demons there might have been, his mouth just loosened. His face relaxed, and I said: “Say I love You Jesus”. Tears began to flow down his cheeks. He started saying, “I love You, Jesus”. And his daughter just burst into tears.
I would go around laying hands on people to have them filled with the Holy Spirit.
And I would be getting ready to lay hands on people, and they were already speaking in tongues. They’d already gotten filled before I got around to them!
I remember I went back to the little apartment building….
[It was still Friday.] They had a little old fold-up metal chair, that we would have back 50 – 70 years ago. And I was sitting in this little metal chair in the apartment there where I was at. And I was thinking, ‘Monday, when I started this thing, they didn’t even know who Jesus was. I was here, I saw this, at least 50 were filled with the Holy Spirit, who Monday didn’t even know the name of Jesus. We had to move people out of the auditorium set, that if you know Jesus, if you’re a Christian, you have to go, because there’s a vast amount of people who cannot get into the building….’ Well….
Next day on Saturday, we moved into a bigger hall that seated maybe 1200?
Oh, it was a big hall, so that all the people could come!
The mayor of the city was there at the Sunday night service. And this became a part of something that was going to happen later in the years in the future in Kiev. Government officials, they were there to hear what’s going on with this American preacher and this evangelization.
The next day, the Orthodox priest in the city accused me of being an American spy, and closed down the evangelization.
So the people were crying and crying; it was Monday: “What are we going to do if you leave?” Because everything was through an interpreter. “They will stop us. They will stop all of us. The communists will stop all of it! If we don’t have an American here, it’s like in the days of Rome”.
It’s like Paul was a Roman. It’s like you don’t touch the Romans, okay? You don’t touch them. Paul said, you beat me, you beat us both, and we’re Roman citizens…. Well, that’s the way Americans were treated.
[So they felt like they had some leniency or clemency, and some freedom to preach the gospel, because it was an American doing the preaching.] And so they said, “If you leave, we’re destroyed. The communists will stop all of this”. It put a lot of pressure on me; I went there for 13 days.
To make a call out of Ukraine at that time….
at that part of the country anyway, you had to call the KGB, and make an appointment for the next day. The next day, the KGB would call you back. And with all their listening devices, they would say: “Okay, your call is ready”.
So we contacted the KGB and made a request to call my mom the next day.
The next day, maybe after lunch, KGB calls and says, “Your line is ready. You can call America”. Because they were listening in. So I called my mom, and I told what happened. I said, “1,200 people have gotten saved. At least 50 people got filled with the Holy Spirit. But they closed this down. They closed the evangelization. And the people are crying and begging for me to stay, or they don’t know what will happen if I leave. I’m the only American here”. And so I said, “I’m staying in Ukraine. I’m not leaving”.
Before I left [to Ukraine], I’m a musician, pianist, and singer.
So I had a whole year of evangelization. Literally every week was booked from coast to coast for an entire year. And I left the schedule and the phone numbers of every church in every town and every state on top of my piano at home. So when I called my mom back, I said, “The list of every church for the entire year, hundreds of services….” I think that year, I probably preached 250 times before I left. I said, “Call every pastor in every state, cancel my entire year. I’m staying in Ukraine. And tell the pastors, I’m sorry, but I’m staying in Ukraine. What’s going on here is really big”.
So instead of 13 days, it ended up being 26 years.
That’s how I stayed there. That’s how, and of course there are many, many, many stories.
It was January, I got kicked out of Komsomolsk.
And people didn’t know I was being kicked out! So I went to a train station, but I talked to a guy, who could speak a little bit of English to explain to him: “I’m being kicked out. And I need some…. I know nobody in Kiev. I don’t know anything what to do. But I’ll be on a train going to Kiev”. He said, “Okay. I have family in Kiev. And my sister, my brother’s sister-in-law, my wife’s sister and her husband live in Kiev. What I’ll do, if I had money….”
Nobody had money; the Soviet Union had collapsed.
I remember the food in Komsomolsk, in the bazaar. There was no food, rotten potatoes, nothing for people to eat. Soviet Union had collapsed, the food had collapsed, everything had collapsed! And so he said, “If I had a way, I could take a bus to Kiev, and I could meet you there”. He told me where I could find a hotel I could stay. So I gave him money to buy a bus ticket. And I went on the train to Kiev.
The next day he got there on a bus, and met me.
And his brother-in-law came and I moved to their apartment. I lived with them for several months and started doing street work there.
I ended up organizing a church, that’s a huge cathedral church now.
I started working in schools. Thousands and thousands of people got saved in the schools. I worked in 25 schools in Kiev. [Note: YouTube/Google AI Translate doesn’t like the word Kiev at all!] And thousands and thousands of students got saved. I mean, it was like an open door.
Then, about a year later of all the work in the schools, the government came in and said:
“No, you can’t do preaching in schools anymore. We want to be like America. America does not allow preaching in schools”. And so they cut all the preaching off in the schools. But anyway….
I’d already started organizing churches!
I was pastoring three churches in Kiev. One in Sunday morning, one in the Sunday afternoon, one in Sunday evening, and then every night of the week I was preaching somewhere different. And this went on for years like that. I would organize a church, and I pastored everything, until I found somebody to be a pastor, and set them up with pastoring. Pentecostal Union churches and non-Pentecostal Union and unregistered churches anyway.
I organized one church, where Masha got saved in that church there in Kiev.
And that particular church I stayed with the whole time. At that time we were having service there on Sunday afternoon. And I organized a church in a town called Brovary. I was living on the east side of Kiev. And so it was a town, how about 120,000 people, that was right there. And I was pastoring there on Sunday morning. It was full every Sunday morning. They would feed me at one of the houses, one of the families. And they’d take me to Kiev; I’d preach there. And then go to the other side of Kiev and preach on Sunday evenings. And then every single night different places.
So the church there is called Christ Cathedral Church.
And I stayed with that. I was still young, could learn, but I was too busy preaching, organizing churches, and building church facilities, and buying buildings to have time to go to school. So I would just learn from the young people. We would walk to church. They would point to something: “Oh Phillip, this is a дерево (tree in English)”. Okay? Everything they would teach me: the sun, sun set, moon…. they would teach me their point of things. That was how I learned through the young people teaching me.
September of 1993, I thought, ‘I need to buy an apartment here’.
I rented a three room apartment. You don’t have our American style. You don’t have a living room, a kitchen, and bedrooms. No, it’s very small, compact. You would have a one-room apartment, a two-room apartment, or a three-room. One of those rooms would be your living room, your bedroom…. and your kitchen is just like a part of that room, just about very small. So I rented a three-room apartment. That way I could have evening services there for young people in classes, besides renting facilities where I had services.
The adults would always walk me from where I was at where we’re having service home.
Well, less than a mile usually. And we would have a wonderful time on the streets even in the snow. The families, they didn’t want anything to happen to me. And so I would have 10, 15, 20 people every service, who walked me home to keep me safe, that nobody would kill this American.
The militia would be there the next day to remove me.
I got home one Sunday night, and one or two of the Ukrainian teenagers were with me. And a man was there waiting for me. He said, “Our building took a vote. We do not want an American living in this building. We’ve contacted the militia, and they will be here to remove you. And you’ll be removed from the country tomorrow”. This was 1993. Communism was still real strong then. And so I thought, ‘Oh no!’
I had my own home phone.
In Kiev, I didn’t have to call the KGB to get a line out. Anyway, I got ahold of my mom, and I told her what had happened. I said, “I have no idea, but you’ll probably see me soon. But I have found out….” I told the lady who I rented this apartment from the situation. She said, “Well, we have just passed a new law in our parliament”. Because the government owned all the houses, all the apartments. The government owned everything. Total government control! Socialism, communism….
She said:
“If you owned the apartment, if the apartment had been privatized, which we have already privatized – our apartment that you rented from, we did that the last few months – they couldn’t remove you, if you owned the apartment”. So I told my mom that. I said, “If takes six months to buy an apartment here with all the government! But if somehow I had money, I could buy this apartment”. And I had already negotiated to buy the apartment. The family wanted $45,000 for the apartment, American dollars.
I had negotiated down to $30,000, not having any idea where I would get $30,000 to buy that apartment.
And so finally they said, “Okay, you can buy”, because things kept going wrong with the apartment. The first two days I was there, it was flooded from upstairs, and all the wallpaper was coming down on the floors. And so I would call the people, it’s like, “This is your apartment”. And they got so…. I mean, the bed broke down, because everything was old. And so they finally were frustrated. They were Jewish people, and all of them, – the grandma, the children – were immigrating to Israel. They needed money to go to Israel. So she said, “If you want to give us a penny less than $30,000, just get out. We’ll sell it to somebody else”. I said, “Okay”.
I talked to real estate people, and they said, “Yeah, $30,000 is a fair price for that”.
So I told my mom: “If somehow I had $30,000 here, that I could buy this apartment from this Jewish family….” Her name was Sophia. I don’t know how I would do it because it takes six months to buy an apartment, “the KGB and the militia couldn’t come and get me tomorrow”. Well, word got around and….
Somebody called Brother David Green from church here, and David said, “Where do I send the money?”
And so I talked to Sophia. She said, “It has to go to Israel, because we’ve got to buy something to live in Israel”. The next day, David transferred $30,000 to the account in Israel. It was in Haifa, northern Israel on the coast. It was illegal to do documents, but the stock exchange had just opened in Kiev. And so the lady said, “If you had that money be sent to Israel, I have a friend. They opened the stock exchange a couple of months ago in Kiev, and they have the authority there to do a document, that you could buy this. You wouldn’t have to wait six months”. So she contacted that guy.
David sent the money that next day to a bank in Haifa.
It was confirmed in Kiev. The next morning I got up and I left, so that the militia couldn’t find me. I hid out. And then the next day….
I came back at night time to that apartment…. snuck in.
Early the next morning, I met Sophia. We went to the stock exchange and did the document. And I owned an apartment in one day; it happened in one day! It was an impossibility. It was an impossibility! But in one day, because of the generosity of brother David Green and his family, I owned that apartment. I lived in that apartment for all these years. [So Satan was really trying to get Phillip out of the way, but God did not allow it!] They couldn’t get me, because I own the apartment.
Then I went on to organize the hospice program for Ukraine.
I talked to my mom again: “Okay, I go to the hospital every week, and I pray for people and there are people who have cancer, and they’re dying in terrible, terrible pain, and I need a hospice program”. Well, she contacted people….
Doctor Steve Dyer was the one who would come, and we organized the hospice program for Ukraine, for the entire country, because people were dying by the thousands of cancer from radiation from Chernobyl.
We had 163 people who came to a meeting at a like a campground nice resort area.
Masha led the music in three languages: English, Russian, and Ukrainian.
Our little Chrystian was two years old (2005). He was the drummer for the program. Chrystian started playing drums on the stage at our church when he was 18 months. And I wouldn’t let him use sticks because he was so little. I was afraid he would fall off the chair, and one of the little sticks would jab him. So what we did? I would let him use empty water bottles, like little water bottles, and he would play with those. People would come into our church there in Kiev over the years, and they would say, “I’ve never seen this in my life!”
He’s the head drummer for here, for Southern Nazarene University [today].
The government came to me, because they knew I wanted land to build a church.
They said, “Okay, you’ve done all of these things [Life International, pro-life movements, Heartbeat International, anti-abortion movement, bringing vast amounts of medicine into Ukraine]. If you will do this one more thing, we will give you land to build a church on”. It’s like, okay, what is that thing? “We have a guy, who sent us a letter from Siberia. He’s blind. And we need him brought to Kiev. And we need somebody to buy two glass eyes to replace the glaucoma that destroyed his eyes”….
He said, “You got it”.
I had a really good doctor friend of mine who was an atheist.
His name is Sasha. He got saved. He worked with the emergency team for the Soviet Union. He had been a soldier in the army. In St. Petersburg they had their medical institute, where they trained their doctors in the military. Well, he served on the emergency team for the military.
For example, when a huge earthquake hit Armenia, and 25,000 people were killed, he was on the first plane in there. And he told me, the first three or four hours he did 23 tracheotomies for people, who were choking to death. He would just go down the hall, cut their throat, put a tube in, seal it up. He said: “The nurses were saying, this is a record. This has never been done in history”. He said, “This is what we do”. He saved so many lives!
Well, he had gotten saved.
I persuaded him that there is a God. He got saved, filled with Holy Spirit.
So anyway, I told Sasha, “I can get the land if you can go to Siberia”. He said, “I’ll go”. So I bought him a ticket. He goes to Siberia, flies over there. He takes a bus, and then he has to walk to this guy’s house in this village. He finds him. He says, “I’m here from Kiev. The Kiev government and an American friend of mine has sent me here to Siberia to bring you back to Kiev. And we’re going to do the surgeries. The Americans pay for your surgeries, particularly for your eyes”.
And so Sasha brings him back to Kiev, and they saved one of his eyes! So I bought a glass eye for just one eye, and he was I know at least the second person for the government. I did that kind of stuff for a long time. So they said, “If you’ll do that, we will give you land”.
So they gave me land….
And I had been praying and praying and praying for land, close to the subway. And I didn’t realize there’s the land right smack next to the subway! It’s called a green zone. It’s a park zone. And I was praying for God to give us land in that green zone. Well, that was illegal.
It turned out I took our church over there.
It’s like two blocks from where we were having services in a theatre, because there were no church buildings to rent, or anything like that. So we walked over there and we prayed. I said, “I want this land. I want us to pray that God will give us this land for a church”. So we prayed.
Then I found out it’s against the law for them to give park land.
But there was land straight across the subway that we could see. And I met with the director of a hospital. His name is Anatoly Vronen (?), big time alcoholic. He knew that I was looking for land. I had helped the hospital so much that he could give some land. He said, “I’ve got this little plot of land right here”. It was kind of a small area to build a small church. And I looked around, walked around the hospital complex, you know, several buildings.
I said, “Over there, there is land big enough to build a nice church”.
And he had plans. I knew he was gonna say No. I said, “I know you have the architectural plans of building this like three-story big giant building”. It’s a kitchen and complex to feed everybody in the hospital. “But if you would turn that building around the other way, and build it sideways, there would be enough land between that building and the subway, that I could build a church there”. Now the answer was No. I said, “Okay”.
I said, “God, I’ve got my land. You gave me the land next to the subway!”
We are right between, halfway between two subway stations. And on one subway, all of the tramways for all of Kiev come in. And at the other side, the buses from all over Kiev come in. It’s like everybody in that three million people city had access to our church through transportation. It was a location that was planned long time before! It was the city of Kiev probably.
And so we got the land for free.
And Masha was our praise team leader for 23 years [in this church in Kiev]. She led the worship for 23 years. [How Masha and Phillip met is another story….]
I met Masha; I was invited….
I was preaching everywhere, organizing churches, and all these people were getting saved. There was a Bible school organized, St. James Bible College. Through some people who had been kicked out, had left Ukraine before World War II. And they had come back and organized St. James Bible College. I was friends with the directors, the people. So I would go over there to classes, and help out what I could….
There was a student by the name of Volodya, and he wanted me….
because I already had organized a church there. We had services in the Kina Tata Revisti (?) movie theater. It was just a block from a subway station. He said, “I’ve got to community choir; I want you to meet and have them come and sing for your church”. I said, “Volodya, I have no time to go listen to a choir”.
And he kept after me for two or three weeks.
I kept saying, “No, every night I’m preaching, I just have no time”. So he comes to one of the Sunday afternoon services, – he’d been there before – he comes right at end, and said, “Phillip”. I said, “I know, I know what you want. Okay, okay, okay, I’ll go”.
And so on Tuesday night, in the area of Kiev coast, just north of downtown, was Kontraktova Ploshcha.
Masha Barnett: The building, it was called Slavutych, and it was like what they called a house of culture. Like a place where they would do different concerts and….
Phillip: ….music, dance, teaching young people stuff. So I went there to listen to this choir, and have them possibly come and sing at our church. Okay, you tell what happened. She was there….
Masha: I was the youngest member there. My mom sang in that choir. So I would always go with her and sing. One day she said, “We’ll have guests coming to listen to us, and so let’s go”. And I came with her, and here two guys come in, one very tall and one much shorter. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s probably an American that’s very tall, and that’s the Ukrainian guy. Anyway, it was just backwards!
Phillip: The short guy was…. The tall guy, Volodya, was the handsome Ukrainian, you know! (laughing)
Masha: Anyway, so that’s how we saw each other the first time.
Then Phillip invited our whole choir to come and sing at the service.
He gave us Christian music like Amazing Grace and How Great Thou Art. We didn’t know any of those songs, but we learned them in Russian, I believe. That’s when we came and we sang a few of those songs.
I knew nothing about God.
At the end of service, after he finished preaching, Phillip asked if anybody wanted to invite Jesus into their heart. So the whole choir went and prayed. When I came home, something inside of me, which now I know it was Holy Spirit, was calling me back. I was pretty shy, and I was like I don’t want to go by myself, but I do want to go! So I called all my friends from my school. Nobody wanted to go with me. I also had another friend. We did sailing together. I was in the sailing club for a long time.
Phillip: Masha was national yachting champion for Ukraine. And she turned it down to marry me. They won in Argentina silver medal at the Olympics, and she gave it up to marry me.
Masha: I don’t regret it.
Phillip: I said, “You have to make this decision, to follow music. Because if I tell you to not do it, it would be…. Only you have to make the decision.
Masha: All my competitions, all my races, were on Saturdays and Sundays. I had to choose God or sport. And so I made the decision to give it up, because God is important for me.
Marina, my friend, went with me to service, and I guess we prayed again.
And so ever since then, I stayed in church. She didn’t.
I started doing worship in 1994. Leading in 1995.
Phillip: I made her praising director in 1995. When I came down with salmonella poisoning, I almost died in the hospital. They gave me up for dead. My fever was 105 [40.5 degrees Celsius] in the hospital for three days. I couldn’t walk. I was dying. 10 Doctors were working on me. And finally two doctors came, and they said, “Gangrene has set up in your stomach. We had to cut you open and get it out, or you are going to die”.
I’ve been a minister all these years, pastored so many years. Well, I went there when I was 35. This is 1995. I was 37 by this time. I’ve been to hospitals many times; when people are dying, their bodies all slowing up, and they have to take the respirator off. I’m there with the families; I’ve seen it. And I’m looking at myself in that intensive care….
It’s like, now it’s me.
It’s my body all swelling up. I’m the one dying. This is the largest, most famous hospital in Ukraine, called October Hospital from the October Revolution. And these two head doctors said, “We have to cut you open”. I said, “No, I’m not gonna let you”. They argued and argued, and said, “You do not understand”. And by this time I was speaking to them in Russian. And I said, “No, you don’t understand; I’m not gonna let you cut me open. If I die, I die. Either God heals me or I die. I’m not gonna let you cut me open”. So they said, “Your blood is on your own head”, and stormed out of the room. I remember I turned my head to the window, and said:
“Lord, I just want You to know one thing. If I live or if I die, I love You the same. I love You the same.”
Well, there was a nurse who was there [in Ukraine] from Colorado, from right north of Denver, helping with my ministry. A girl named Sharon Bell.
Masha: You don’t want to have a surgery in Ukraine!
Phillip: That surgery? No. No. And they had good doctors there, but it was just like, no, I’m not gonna let it happen, I will live or die on God, and not gonna have the surgery.
And things are so bad!
They had a man in a bed next to me, who had tuberculosis. One night he threw up on the floor, and I pressed a button. This guy’s tuberculosis throws up all the floor between our beds. We were in the room by ourselves. So a nurse comes in: “Oh yeah, he threw up”. So they give him a shot to put him back to sleep. They didn’t even clean it up! This is Ukraine, okay? Back at that time. So you understand why I’m not gonna let him cut me open. It’s because I’d probably not come out from the…. I was almost dead anyway.
So at the end of the third day, Dr. Sasha, who I told you about, comes in the room….
And he has this nurse, Sharon Bell. It was a Sunday. And he said, “People from the church have come to pray for you. And we’re going to stand you up next to the window, and hold you. And you can look out the window. And when they see your face, they’ll know to pray”. It was just on some second or third floor…. old building. So they get me up out of the bed, and they hold me up. And I’m looking out the window.
Masha was in that group.
There were probably 20 or so people there. When they saw me, they joined hands and they prayed….
Instantly God healed me!
My fever went down to normal within an hour or two. And so you feel a lot stronger. They [doctors] came in, they took…. it’s like, he’s got no fever!
And I’ve been two days without fever. My body swelling was going down.
I told Sasha, “I want to go home and hire somebody to feed me every day”.
And the doctors in the hospital were like you’re insane! You got two weeks at least to survive this thing. We’re gonna move you out of intensive care in a few days, and you’ve got a minimum of two weeks. And I argued, and Sasha argued with them, and said: “No, he wants to go home. I’ll hire somebody, and I will be his personal physician every day”. And so that’s what happened. So a doctor who had a car, and Dr. Sasha, drove me home, hired a lady from our church, named Larisa.
Sasha was saved at this time, and he became our church administrator. Because there they have an assistant, you have a pastor, and you have an administrator for the government, who take care of all the finances. So Sasha was my administrator for 30 years.
I was home for about two weeks….
until I got strong enough, and got on an airplane and flew to America for five weeks, and came back.
So when I left, I put her as praising team director. I took myself outside. “You’re the praise team director, not me”. And so she stayed praise team director for 23 years.
Seven years after Masha got saved, we got married.
And we had two children, Chrystian and Cosette.
Masha: When we got married, I was 21.
Phillip: Yeah. And I remember going to her dad and mom. I said, “Without your parents’ permission, no wedding. We will only do it with the favor of your parents”. And her mom and dad were separated at the time, weren’t still together. So I went to her dad’s battalion. He said, “Oh, we were praying you would marry, you would take our daughter to marry”.
So then I met with her mother in a different place, and she said, “Oh, I have been praying that you and Masha would get married, that you would marry her”. And so I go to the window, it’s like, Masha’s down, walking, pacing back and forth in front of the building. And so it’s like, we got it! Then I said, “And also my parents have to agree”.
And so I called my mom and dad. I said, “Now you’ve never seen Masha. But what we’re going to do, you and dad and I, we’re going to fast three days. And if after three days of prayer and fasting, if you feel any check from God, I want you to tell me”. So I wanted God’s approval. After three days, I called them back. And they said:
“No, we feel that this is from God.”
And I said, “Well, I’ve felt it for a long time. Okay”. So we got married.
It was when she was younger [when Phillip felt there was something more].
And one day I was looking at her. We had praise teams, and she would go to the service helping another church. We were helping another church with their praise team. I loaned some of our people. And so three of our girls would go there, and they had meetings at seven o’clock every morning. And I would say, “No, Masha, you can’t go every morning at seven, because the rules were: if you don’t come to morning prayer, then you do not sing on the praise team.
Here in America, you can’t even get people to be on time for praise team rehearsal, let alone you come every morning at 7 o’clock! And she would have to come an hour to the morning prayer, one way from the north part of town. And so I would say, “Masha, I forbid you to spend so many days; you cannot do it”. I mean, she was all wrapped up in worshiping God. People were hungry for God back then in the former Soviet Union [Ukraine]. And so she really loved God; she was really pretty. So I said:
“Okay God, this is the girl I want for my wife. And I can’t tell; she’s too young. I can’t talk to her about it now.”
And so three years later, I told her that I was like her father. And I said, “We need to change our relationship, because I don’t feel I can live without you, because we talk on the phone. Every single day we talk. And I think we need to change our relationship to something more serious. And I’m not your father figure, your pastor”.
She thought I was totally insane!
It’s like, you’re my father. No way! I couldn’t do that! Then she refused to talk to me for three days. And then, two years later, I asked her the same question. She said, “I could never ever kiss you. No, never, it could never happen”.
Then later on, she changed her mind….
Masha: “Well, whenever I imagined that one day somebody else will be there for him, and we will never be able to have, you know, to see each other every day…. I realized that I couldn’t live without him. It’s like you love a person, not because you do the same things and you like the same things, which is important (that’s compatibility), but when you realize that you can’t live without that person that’s when you know that you love that person that much.
Phillip: And so we changed our relationship. I basically had kind of raised her, because her family was a totally dysfunctional family. Her mom lived at one place, her father at another, and so she lived with her mom. And so I said to her, “For a long period, for years in your life, I was a father figure, helping to raise you, giving you advice about boyfriends, about everything”. But anyway, I married her.
Masha: God changed me; it’s only God.
Phillip: And so we got married November 14th.
God had given me 17 dreams that we had to move.
We moved in 2018.
And I had people met me from our church…. “Please Phillip, just go take a break for a few months and come back. It’s like, no, God is moving us. I said, “If God appears to me, or if God speaks to me with an audible voice, I will stay. If not, I have to leave”.
And people kept meeting with me and asking me. I had 17 dreams. And every dream was like, I had to leave Ukraine. A 747 jet would land next to the airport. And we would walk out the door and fly to America. God said, “No. It’s time to come back to America”.
It made no sense to leave Ukraine.
I had everything. It’s like people came from all over that part of the world for my counsel. It’s like government people. Everybody in that part of the world knew who I was.
I had a guy once come from over by Hungary on the Ukrainian side of the border. He comes to my office, my secretary calls and he says, “Some man is here”.
He said, “I came, I want a double portion of your spirit”.
I said, “Why? You want to be famous? It’s not what it’s all cut out to be”. He said, “No, I want a double portion of your spirit”. And so I said, “I’ll tell you what, I will lay hands on you, and I’ll ask God to bless you. But if it’s for the wrong reason, no, it’s not going to happen, because you’re craving. You see me on TV or on wherever. It’s not about fame”. So it made no sense to leave Ukraine. It’s like you’ve reached the top.
We spent a lot of time crying.
I was scared. I had no job [not yet]. What am I going to do in America? And I would tell this phrase again and again: just because it doesn’t make any sense now, doesn’t mean that it won’t make sense later. Just because it makes no sense leaving, – our kids were born here and grew up here – it doesn’t mean that it won’t make sense later.
When we got back here, I got this job in Oklahoma City in music.
I’m only interested in teaching vocal music.
And then COVID hit and then the war in Ukraine.
And if we were still there when COVID hit, there would have been no way we could have stayed. God knew COVID was coming, and war in Ukraine was coming. I warned the people through a prophecy, called the Azovmena prophecy. Millions of people have seen it around the world. And so God got us out just before that.
So when we came out, I got the job. I worked a year…. COVID hits. We did bring out the things that were necessary, and our children were not bitter about losing everything.
God brought us here to this church, brought us to America.
And so it was hard. We cried and cried a lot the first year or two here. We missed Ukraine. She hasn’t seen her mom in almost five and a half years. But we’re in the will of God. My voice is all a mess from the last few years teaching school so much.
And I don’t really do much in ministry now. I drive and get them to the rehearsals. I move chairs before or after.
God knows the future!
Masha: God is good! He knows the future. Just like Phillip said, when things totally make no sense, one day they will. And God brought us through. He knew what we were gonna face if we didn’t leave. And just when we moved, I would tell Phillip every once in a while, it’s gotta be something else that’s gonna happen. I said, no, there’s gotta be something worse than this (COVID) that will happen. And when the war came, I knew it inside of my heart, because I needed personal confirmation! I knew all about that, I needed God just to show me that I would understand why I’m here. And now I know, because it would be horrible.
Phillip: And one other thing, my son would have been on the Russian front. He’s Ukrainian citizen. He wouldn’t have been allowed out of the country.
Masha: Because all the men from 18 to 60, they cannot leave.
Phillip: And so, God knew. And I have done a lot of eschatology preaching about the Coming of the Lord, and I have some books [The Day Of The Lord study]. And I had thousands of books printed.
My aunt, who I thought was poor as a Job’s turkey….
One day on my birthday, she called me and said, “What do you need, Phillip?” I said, “Well, we need these doors for the church”. We were building a church. “That’s about $1,000. We need this and that….” She said, “Phillip, I’m just going to give you $100,000. This woman, my mom’s sister, lived in an old broken down trailer house! $100,000! Well, I gave it all to the church, and I had a little more books printed.
The next year I came back, and I showed her all the pictures of the things in the new building, that her money did. She said:
“I’ll give you another $50,000.”
So we gave all the money to the church, and did leave. I thought, ‘Why was I so stupid? I should have kept money a little bit to live on’. But anyway, the church was finished. Oh my goodness, the greens were so wonderful. Probably a thousand weddings have taken place in that church. People come from all over Ukraine, and have weddings in that beautiful church facility.
Our children are important, but I’m not dead yet.
And I still have a way. I still want millions of people saved through my ministry, and it’s not there yet. When people are young, they’re like ‘I want to be a millionaire by the time I’m 25’. Well that was not what I prayed when I was a kid. “Lord I want a million souls. I want at least a million souls.” And so I’m on the way. And this Day of the Lord program is going all over the world.
[Note: they are working on putting the entire series on YouTube in the near future. This can take some time. I have told them that I would love to translate it into Dutch. It is the entire book of Revelation, very, very helpful!]
People all over the world know who I am.
I got calls for information yesterday from Ohio: “Phillip, what about this?” I got called this last week from Western England. People know me all over world. Nobody here [USA] knows me. Doesn’t matter. But people who have anything to do with Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, they know who I am.
So we will see what we will see; Jesus is coming soon.
God is on the move. Terrible things are going on on our border right now. But God is not through with this country [Ukraine].
A prayer if you may not know the Lord
Okay, if haven’t asked Jesus into your heart, it’s the most important thing in your life. You do not want to die without Jesus in your heart. If you would like to know this Savior, Jesus Christ the Lord, pray this simple prayer, and believe. Now I can’t help you. Only Jesus can help you, but He will hear your prayer, and He will answer, and He will come into your heart.
Repeat after me, and believe:
Lord Jesus, I’m a sinner. I don’t know everything about You, but I believe in You. I accept You into my heart as my Lord and Savior. Please come into my life. Show me that You are real.
Thank You for forgiving me. Thank You for coming into my heart. I ask for Your forgiveness.
Thank You for forgiving me. In the name of Jesus, I’m a Christian.
Amen.
https://eindtijdnieuws.com/eindtijdnieuws-websites-vertalen-op-pc-smartphone-en-tablet-in-2025/
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