Receiving the James Earl Massey Student Preaching Award was not something Vadim Kichuk ever expected. And yet, this semester, Douglas A. Sweeney, dean of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School, called with news of the award, which included an invitation for Kichuk to preach in chapel.
“Growing up, even going through Moody Bible Institute and coming to Beeson, I didn’t consider myself a preacher. I would not have imagined standing in front of people,” Kichuk said. “It’s the Lord’s faithfulness to me. God has led me in this amazing way.”
A Heart “Ignited” by God
Kichuk grew up in Utica, New York, after his parents migrated from Ukraine. Kichuk was born in 1998, the year the family arrived in the country. He grew up with eight siblings in a Christian home, attending a Russian-speaking church.
“Much of what I owe in my Christian upbringing goes back to that heritage,” Kichuk said.
The denomination Kichuk grew up in, a Slavic Pentecostal church, had been underground behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union for a long time, but was eventually able to become more public as the Soviet Union fell, Kichuk said. It was a community where people approached the faith with a serious reverence, given their background as an underground church. The church taught Kichuk to have a hunger for prayer, an abiding sense of God’s presence and nearness and to have a desire for and pursuit of holiness.
After a rough first year in community college following high school, Kichuk felt like he was “wandering without a purpose.” A friend who was attending Summit International School of Ministry in Pennsylvania invited Kichuk to visit, and while there, he felt the Lord’s leading him to the campus.
Kichuk spent two years at Summit and was exposed to an array of biblical and theological resources he never realized existed, growing in his theological vocabulary and understanding of the Gospel.
“My heart was ignited with a passion from that day forward,” Kichuk said. “That experience is what led me to want to teach the Scriptures. I fell in love with the Bible. I wanted to do for others what my teachers did for me. I wanted to teach the Gospel clearly with a passion and vitality that befits it.”
Rigorous and Rewarding
Kichuk’s next stop was Moody in Chicago, where professors strongly encouraged him to come to Beeson. He found everything he was looking for in a graduate theological program: great faculty, rigorous curriculum, and an in-person, interdenominational education.
“It’s been a wonderful ride,” Kichuk said. “Looking back, I’m still amazed at the way the Lord has led me on this journey. It was a very unexpected change of the trajectory of my life that I could have never anticipated.”
While Beeson’s curriculum is rigorous and required a commitment to hours of study each day, Kichuk said the school’s history and doctrine sequence was critical to shaping his own thoughts on theology, ministry and biblical interpretation, all in the context of serving the local church.
“Beeson has taught theology as something that is fundamentally for the church, something that occurs from within and for the church,” Kichuk said. “Theological reflection should always have a particular pastoral aim in mind.”
Beeson has also taught Kichuk to preach and teach in such a way that Christ is preeminent and where He is first presented as a gift to the Christian before He is an example for holy living.
Beeson professors who decided the preaching award recipient described Kichuk as “thoughtful and diligent,” possessing a pastor’s heart and a “razor-sharp intellect.”
“Vadim is a minister of the Word because he is a student of the Word,” said Jonathan Linebaugh, Beeson’s Anglican Chair of Divinity. “He studies, reads, listens and receives. Only then—having received—does he give what he has been given as he relates to others with compassion and care and proclaims the Gospel with depth, honesty and hope.”
No More Caves
In his sermon, “The Beauty of God’s Faithfulness,” Kichuk preached from Psalm 142, written by David while hiding in a cave.
David expresses confidence in the psalm because he knows God has always been and always will be faithful to him. Believers today can have that same confidence, Kichuk said.
“You may be overwhelmed in the midst of spiritual opposition, but we can trust that the Spirit will lead us through,” Kichuk said. “We may not know what lies ahead in our path, but the Spirit will guide our steps. Our spirit might grow faint, but the Holy Spirit will never grow faint.”
Even as we regularly dwell in caves, Kichuk said, facing opposition and pain in this life, we can have the resolve David had because of God’s faithfulness.
“At the end of every humiliation is an exultation,” Kichuk said. “And the resurrection of Christ is as alive in us as His death, bringing us out of our caves again and again. We also look over the horizon to our ultimate exultation, to the city whose builder and founder is God. In that place, we will no longer cry out to God, for He will be near to us. In that place, we will no longer lament, for God will wipe away every tear. In that place, there will be no opposition, for evil will be vanquished. In that place, there will be no isolation, for we will be surrounded by the saints. In that place, there will be no more caves.”
Serving the Church
After graduating from Beeson in December, Kichuk plans to stay involved in the Immanuel Church in Birmingham, where he and his wife Rachel are members.
“Beeson has given me a real love for the local church,” Kichuk said. “I don’t know exactly what the future holds, but whatever I do, I would always want to be involved in the local church. There is something special about seeing the Gospel transform people’s lives.”