​By Steve Richards
With assistance from ChatGPT

On January 7, I wrote to a friend of mine in Kyiv, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest, simply to check in. I knew he was facing brain surgery, and I wanted to be sure I was praying on the right day.

I’ve been thinking about you and wondering when your surgical procedure is going to happen. Want to be sure I add into the chorus of prayers on that day and after… and before.

A few days later, he replied calmly, almost matter-of-factly. He would see his doctor the following week; a decision would be made then. He promised to keep me informed.

On January 15, the update arrived.

The doctors had made their decision. His surgery was scheduled for January 27. His Church would cover most of the expenses. So far, so good.

Then came the reality behind the reassurance.

The situation in Kyiv, he wrote, was becoming increasingly dangerous. Electricity, water, and heat were being disrupted more severely than at almost any point since the beginning of the war. Even hospitals were losing power. Lights were being turned off in places where surgeries are performed.

I replied with encouragement—and perhaps a touch of gallows humor—hoping that someone might have flashlights on hand if the power failed.

Later that night, another message arrived.

​It was already past midnight in Kyiv. He wasn’t sleeping—not because of anxiety about surgery, but because of an air alert. A missile attack was possible.

And then, almost in passing, he wrote words that stopped me cold:

“We pray – we work – we pray again – and the Lord gives us strength.”

No dramatics. No complaint. Just a sentence that captured daily life under constant threat—faith woven into endurance.

I asked if I might quote it.

His reply came not with words, but with an image: a thermometer reading –20°C. The temperature outside—and not much warmer inside Kyiv homes.

Of course, he wrote.

This is what resilience looks like.

Not speeches. Not slogans. Just prayer, work, prayer again—under air-raid sirens, amid blackouts, in freezing apartments, with brain surgery scheduled in a city at war.

It is a reminder that faith, at its most authentic, is not loud. It is steady. It shows up. And somehow, impossibly, it keeps going.
Moments like this are why I continue to return to Ukraine with a camera and a notebook—why Beyond Bucha exists at all. Not to capture destruction alone, but to bear witness to lives lived faithfully in its shadow, where prayer and perseverance are not abstractions, but daily necessities.

Please keep Fr. Roman—and Kyiv—in your prayers on January 27, and in the days before and after.

This past Sunday, January 4th, I attended the Divine Liturgy at St. Jonah Orthodox Church in Spring, Texas, just a few days before Orthodox Christmas, which this year falls today, January 7th.

While much of the Christian world has already dismantled nativity scenes and returned to ordinary time, this small Orthodox parish north of Houston was still moving toward Christmas. That sense of being out of sync—celebrating later, differently, and largely unnoticed—felt emblematic of Orthodoxy’s place within the broader American religious landscape.

St. Jonah’s describes itself as an English-language parish of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), a body formed by clergy and faithful who fled Bolshevik Russia and lived for decades apart from the Moscow Patriarchate. The parish itself began as a small mission community and gradually took shape as families gathered around a shared commitment to Orthodox life in English. That lineage matters. It situates St. Jonah’s within a Russian Orthodox tradition shaped by exile, memory, and distance from state power—even as contemporary geopolitics complicate those inherited narratives.

The 9:00 a.m. liturgy lasted nearly two hours, all of it standing. At least seven clergy in full vestments participated, processing through a modest sanctuary with deliberate precision. The service was conducted in English, yet much of it remained difficult to follow. Orthodox worship does not aim for clarity in the modern evangelical sense; it seeks immersion. Scripture, chant, incense, and ritual blended into a sung, Eucharist-centered liturgy anchored by a disciplined, well-rehearsed choir. This was not a sermon-driven service; it demanded patience and submission to form.

The congregation numbered roughly one hundred or so. Many women wore headscarves, and several families presented an aesthetic that felt closer to Mormon communities than to either mainline Protestantism or American evangelicalism. This was not a political gathering.

The pastor, John Whiteford, offered a brief sermon on Matthew 1:1–25, the genealogy and birth of Christ. Whiteford joined the parish after converting to Orthodoxy in the early 1990s and has been associated with St. Jonah’s for decades. Online, he is a controversial figure, known for sharp critiques of Western culture, outspoken political commentary, and unapologetic Orthodoxy. In person, however, the sermon was restrained and textual. Whatever controversies surround his public persona, they were not evident from the pulpit that morning.

That gap between digital reputation and physical reality matters. Whiteford’s online profile is often amplified by a broader phenomenon sometimes labeled the “ortho-bro” movement—young men drawn to Orthodoxy less through parish life than through social media, podcasts, and culture-war aesthetics. Online, that world can feel loud, combative, and far larger than life. Inside St. Jonah’s on a Sunday morning, there was little evidence of it. What existed here was not a movement, but a parish—small, multigenerational, and decidedly ordinary.

What is often overlooked in discussions about Whiteford is his religious background. He was raised in the Church of the Nazarene before converting to Orthodoxy. That detail resonated personally; I, too, was raised Nazarene in my childhood years. The Nazarene Church is an evangelical denomination widely regarded as socially and theologically conservative Christian tradition that stresses moral discipline and visibly lived faith.

This visit also connects directly to the work I’ve been doing on Beyond Bucha, which examines faith communities in Ukraine as they navigate war, occupation, and ecclesial fracture. In Ukraine, Orthodoxy is not a niche tradition; it is the religious majority, embedded in national identity and daily life under fire. The tensions playing out throughout Ukraine now echo—quietly and imperfectly—even in places like Spring, Texas.

​Orthodox Christmas in Spring, Texas arrived without spectacle. No cameras, no slogans, no audience beyond those who stood there that morning. What remained was a small community practicing an old faith—and quietly collecting support for Ukraine, directed toward the historic Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the network of parishes traditionally recognized within global Orthodoxy and long embedded in Ukrainian religious life. In an age shaped by amplification and outrage, that modest act offered a reminder that some of the most meaningful responses to global crises unfold far from the noise, where conviction is measured less by volume than by presence.