It was a windy, cool, rainy Sunday morning, though you wouldn’t know it inside the incense-filled Christ The King church in Jamaica Plain, where mass was underway. As the service is each week at this time, it’s mainly sung, and entirely in Ukrainian.

Ukrainian Americans have been gathering on Sundays for church services like these in the Boston area for well over a century, and in this building since 1972.

The parish is one of a few gathering places for Boston’s small but vibrant Ukrainian American community, said Nick Stefantsiv, who immigrated from western Ukraine and now lives in Norwood with his wife, Vicky.

"The first day when I came to the States, this is where I came," he said. "And that’s what most Ukrainians do. They go to the church because that’s where the community is."

Stefantsiv and his wife Vicky came to Norwood from Kolomyya, a nearly 800-year-old city of more than 60,000 in the western part of Ukraine.

"Beautiful country," he said of Ukraine. "There’s a lot of awesome places to see: the mountains, the sea. [There's] a lot of spiritual history and cultural history."

The Stefantsivs offered to walk me to the rectory for a Sunday luncheon, which is a big draw here every week. Last Sunday was the parish’s annual feast day, so it was especially lively. Some 200 people were spread over three function rooms, from octogenarians replenishing the abundant buffet, to toddlers toddling.

Some of those gathered are the decedents of Ukrainian immigrants, like Alexandra Liteplo, whose four grandparents came to America in the 1940s, following World War II.

"I have three little kids and we raised them speaking Ukrainian," she said. "When we were growing up, the message was hammered into us that Ukraine is under the Soviet Union. People there aren’t allowed to speak Ukrainian, so we’re the ones who have to carry the torch and keep the identity, the customs, the tradition, the language over here."

But the vast majority of the more than 200 families who are part of the church's community are more recent immigrants, born in Ukraine — mainly the European-leaning west — like Roman Bokhenik, who was born in Lviv and lives in Watertown.

"It’s a little bit surreal that Ukraine [is] in the news so much," he said of the recent headlines.

Indeed, the politics of the moment — both American and Ukrainian — were reverberating here, where copies of Ukrainian Weekly, an English language newspaper in publication since the 1930s, were being liberally distributed.

"This is the place to share all the news that’s going on," said Irene Kowal, who was born to Ukrainian parents in Germany. An author and playwright, Kowal lived in Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, for 14 years in the heady period following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Some of us like the president that Ukraine voted in and some of us don’t," she said. "The future of Ukraine — Trump and Ukraine — I mean, there’s endless topics here."

While opinions varied, nearly everyone seemed to agree that Ukraine is being used as something of a pawn on both the American political and geopolitical stages, and that for Ukraine, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

"If you look at the news, there’s only one word that you read, which is 'corruption,'" said Ivan Bereznicki, an architect born in Austria to Ukrainian parents who’s designed buildings in the U.S. and in Ukraine. "And what you don’t read is that there really is a groundswell of wanting to create a true democratic country and a civic society."

Still, many were happy to steer the conversation away from politics, including Ostap Nalysnyk, the son of the parish priest, who was eager to tell me about the Ukrainian Boston Facebook group he manages for some 2,500 active members.

“The main purpose of the Facebook page and group is to promote all Ukrainian events in the greater Boston community,” he said.

Those events include regular concerts, folk dance performances, lectures, and a big Independence Day festival each August, as well as joint celebrations organized by this church and St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox church down the road.

And Ukrainian culture is something that Dr. Lubomyr Hajda, recently retired from Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, said has long contributed to the American story.

"It’s a very interesting and largely unknown part of the story," he said. "It would be very instructive, I think, for Americans of other backgrounds to learn about this."

Hajda said there’s no shortage of resources for those interested in learning more. But he suggested that the best education is available in real time in our own backyard. And all are welcome.

"Our American brothers and sisters can come and see with their own eyes what Ukrainians look like, what their customs are like and then they may discover some very interesting and unknown things," he said.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the date of the annual Ukrainian independence day celebration. It is held in August, not May. It also mistakenly referred to nearby Ukrainian orthodox church as Russian orthodox.

Correction: A previous version of this article included an outdated misspelling of Ukraine’s capital city. Earlier this year, The U.S. Board on Geographic Names eliminated “Kiev” as a conventional spelling, recognizing “Kyiv” as the correct spelling for Ukraine’s capital city.