Personally, I enjoy spending time with my family, coding, playing the guitar, exploring my family’s genealogy, and reading. I am also keen on thought-provoking cinema, fine art, realistic (non-photoshopped) photography, heart-warming music, poetry, and profound quotes.
Theologically, I explore how the Christian message can be applied meaningfully to the lives of believers, serving as a source of healing, guidance, and transformation. I particularly focus on the intersections of theology, psychology, and ethics, examining how faith convictions can address emotional struggles, moral dilemmas, questions of identity, and personality disorders.
Short Bio
I was born in 1978 in the northern town of Labytnangi in the Soviet Union, where my father served in the military guarding a strict-regime camp. He had married my mother, who already had a son from a previous marriage. When I was barely a year old, a fire caused by a neighbor destroyed our home and forced us to leave the North, returning to my father’s hometown of Podolsk near Moscow. My younger sister was born when I was four. My grandfather’s alcoholism contributed to a heavy atmosphere at home, and my earliest memories are marked by conflict.
When I was six, my parents received a flat in Chekhov, a town in the Moscow region, where I began school. I was a shy and rather withdrawn child. At eight I was hospitalized with dysentery, which marked the beginning of years of chronic stomach problems and duodenal ulcers that often kept me out of school. Much of my childhood was marked by severe pain and long hospital stays. In the quieter intervals, I spent hours in the local library, absorbed in magazines and journals on technology and engineering.
In 1991, when I was thirteen, my family relocated to Donetsk region of Ukraine, near my mother’s parents. The Soviet Union was collapsing, the economy was in crisis, and life was difficult. Around that time my family began attending a small evangelical church, a decision that would profoundly influence me.
At seventeen I underwent major surgery in which two-thirds of my stomach was removed. A year later, on the day after my eighteenth birthday, I began working at the local fire station. Two years later I moved to Kyiv to study theology and eventually continued my education in England, where I earned both B.A. and M.A. degrees at Regents Theological College.
Returning to Ukraine, I taught systematic theology at UETS for three years, got married, and later founded a language school. My two sons were born in 2006 and 2008. Both grew up immersed in music: my elder son, Nikita, focuses on singing and was a finalist on The Voice Kids, while my younger son, Maksym Jr., developed as a drummer and appeared in commercials for a local beverage brand. In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, my family and I were forced to leave the country.