The work was already in motion long before the framework had a name.
March 2022. Russian columns were still moving toward Kyiv. I arrived in Ukraine carrying a passport, a desire to help, and the belief that the leaders who would carry that country through what was coming were already there.
Andrew Moroz · Founder, Renewal Leadership Group
Beginnings
The work, before the language for it.
I grew up Ukrainian-American in Upstate New York. By the time I was in my twenties, I was working in pastoral and leadership formation alongside teams that were learning how to start things from very little.
Years before I had language like alignment, formation, endurance, I was sitting with leaders who needed all three and had no idea what to call them. The framework would come later.
The Arc That Forms the Practice
From 30 to over 1,300. Then three becoming one.
I helped start a church with 30 members. Over the years, we grew across two campuses and a community center, eventually serving more than 1,300 people across the region.
Along the way, we did the harder work. We merged with two historic congregations — both of them shrinking, both of them carrying decades of identity that could not simply be absorbed. Three churches became one. And that one is now actively impacting its community in ways none of the three could have done alone.
30 → 1,300+
A church started, then scaled, across two campuses and a community center.
3 → 1
Two historic congregations merged into one renewed organization. Three becoming one.
Years
Of carrying the work from the inside — not consulting on it from a distance.
That experience is the core of everything Renewal Leadership now offers. I learned what alignment work actually feels like when two groups have to become one and neither of them wants to lose what made them what they were. I learned what revitalization costs when the engine has to be rebuilt while the plane is in the air. I learned what it takes to form leaders who can carry a renewed organization without the founder holding every weight.
The Renewal Engagement is that experience made repeatable for any organization in transition — church, nonprofit, or otherwise.
The Doctoral Work
Studying faithful leadership from the life of someone who lived it.
In parallel with the church build, I pursued doctoral work in intercultural studies at Columbia International University. My research traced faithful leadership through the life of Richard Stearns, former president of World Vision US — a leader who carried a global organization through identity tension, public scrutiny, and slow institutional renewal without losing his own footing.
Beyond the credential, the research confirmed something I needed to see. The patterns I had been seeing in our own renewal work were not unique to us — they kept showing up in the lives of other leaders, in very different contexts, carrying very different organizations. Faithful leadership is a specific kind of formation, and it is rarer than people assume.
Ukraine
Four-plus years embedded with the leaders carrying a country.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. I was on the ground in March. What was supposed to be a short trip became something else entirely — a sustained relationship with chaplains, pastors, medical leaders, and nonprofit leaders who were doing the daily work of holding communities together while the country was at war.
I have been back many times since. I have led trauma-informed leadership trainings, conducted surveys, run intensives, and sat with hundreds of frontline leaders. Most of them have spoken, unprompted, about the same thing: the weight of being responsible for people you cannot fully protect, in conditions you did not choose.
Nations that endure profound suffering sometimes become the teachers the world later turns to. From “What Ukraine’s war is teaching the Middle East — and the world”, Deseret News, March 2026
That work is the foundation of the second organization in this story.
Why Two Organizations
Forming leaders and serving communities are the same work.
Renewal Leadership forms the leaders. The Renewal Initiative serves the communities those leaders are responsible for.
What I have watched in the field — in our own church, in Ukrainian villages, in struggling nonprofits, in companies under sustained pressure — is that communities are renewed at the speed of their leaders being formed. A leader formed under pressure becomes a renewing presence inside the community they carry. A community served well becomes the soil where the next generation of leaders is formed.
The two organizations exist because the two halves of that loop are real, and each needs its own dedicated work. Renewal Leadership for the formation. The Renewal Initiative for the communities.
See how the Renewal Ecosystem fits togetherFor the Record
Credentials, woven through the work.
Writing & Speaking
Selected pieces — on faith, formation, and renewal under pressure.
A short, curated list. The work is in the writing as much as it is in the engagements. If you want to read before you reach out, this is where to start.
What Ukraine’s war is teaching the Middle East — and the world.
When Russia’s war finally ends, Ukraine will not simply be a nation that endured tragedy. It will be a nation that understands how to be transformed by it.
Read the piece →Ukraine resilience is shaping global recovery and moral leadership.
A long-form weekend interview on what four years of war are teaching the rest of the world about endurance, recovery, and the kind of leadership that holds.
Read the interview →Why we must keep remembering the suffering in Ukraine.
An anniversary essay on solidarity, suffering, and what Ukrainian believers are teaching the global church about resilience and faith under sustained pressure.
Read the piece →Make Russia pay — or accept a world where power defines what is right.
An argument for moral and legal accountability — and what is at stake when nations are allowed to act without consequence.
Read the piece →Speaking topics include faithful leadership under sustained pressure, organizational renewal and merger, formation versus information, and what Ukraine has taught me about durable leadership. If a keynote, panel, or speaking engagement fits your event, start a conversation →
Begin with a
Discovery Conversation.
If any of this has put you closer to the work you are carrying, that is the right reason to reach out. Twenty to thirty minutes, unhurried, about fit. We can decide together whether the work is the right next step for you.
Or write directly: am@renewalinitiative.com
Start the conversation →