“Over the last year we have visited 170 dioceses and met 50 bishops”
"We are gathered on the last day of the outgoing year and are celebrating the new year with a wonderful prayer that carries unfading intonations of joy, thanksgiving, and hope. In the hymns, we hear words about deliverance and about how the Lord preserves us all," noted the first vice-rector of SFI, Dmitry Gasak. "Today, we have much to thank God for and something and someone to hope for in anticipation of a new period in history. The mission of all Christ's disciples is witness and evangelism. Christ called His apostles—and therefore all of us—to just such word and action. May the Gospel always inspire us so that no darkness, grayness, division, or contradiction of life can ever extinguish the fire of faith, hope, and love, and so that our life, word, and action might always serve as a witness to Christ, His word, and His Life."
As has become our tradition, the first Rector and Founder of SFI, Fr Georgy Kochetkov, summed up the results of the outgoing year in the life of the institute and the Transfiguration Brotherhood.
"First of all, I would like to recall that in response to our petition, we received a resolution from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill on making changes to the charter of SFI and on the approval of the rector by the patriarch. This is important for us, as it will give us the opportunity to enter not only state but also church higher education, while preserving our freedom and independence, which is unique within our church," stated Father Georgy. "I cannot fail to mention the developing relations of our Institute with the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its chairman, Father Maxim Kozlov, recently met with the SFI corporation and gave a lecture on spiritual education in the 20th-21st centuries. This year, with the blessing of Patriarch Kirill, SFI was congratulated by the deputy chairman of the Educational Committee, Hegumen Dionysius (Shlyonov) of St Andrew's Men's Stavropegial Monastery, in Moscow."
In the outgoing year, SFI participated in the regional 34th annual Christmas Lectures: an exhibition and roundtable were organized in the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery for the centenary of the repose of Saint Tikhon (Bellavin), Patriarch of Moscow. Over the year, this same exhibition visited 13 cities across Russia and 21 exhibition venues, including the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, in Moscow.
"It was a great joy for us to witness the candidate's dissertation defence of our teacher Zoya Mikhailovna Dashevskaya, as well as SFI Rector Alexander Mikhailovich Kopirovsky's completion of his doctoral dissertation, and Dmitry Sergeevich Gasak's completion of labours on his candidate's dissertation. We are all looking forward to the completion of this process," emphasized Father Georgy.
During 2025, the Transfiguration Brotherhood considered the communal-fraternal tradition with special intensity and focused on understanding personhood as a new quality of the Church and the ministry of the faithful as the foundation of church gathering. The culmination of this reflection was an SFI conference on “Sobornal Orthodox Ecclesiology Today: Faith in the Church, Knowledge and Perception of the Church, and the Ordering of Church Life”, which was timed to coincide with the Fr Georgy's 75th birthday. Also this year, a three-volume set of works on ecclesiology by Fr Georgy was published, as was a collection of testimonies from the life of various Transfiguration Brotherhood communities.
During 2025, 169 people who had fully completed preparation for entry into the Church were received at Christmas, Easter, and on the Feast of Apostles Peter and Paul. The year also saw the development and presentation of various projects for catechesis amongst the public and at church parishes.
There has been ongoing and intensive work in the fields of liturgy, prayer, and the translation of liturgical texts into Russian: translations of selected hymns from the Lenten and Pentecostarion Triodions into Russian were prepared for printing and published, while our translations of selected hymns from the Menaion are in preparation for publication.
"Nor can I fail to mention the wonderful pilgrimages organized this year by members of the Transfiguration Brotherhood. We visited more than 170 dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church and met with 50 bishops. Now we can say definitively that a large number of bishops perceive the Brotherhood precisely as a brotherhood, a state of affairs which seemed nearly impossible in the past," emphasized Father Georgy.
"This was the year of the Transfiguration Brotherhood's 35th anniversary. 35 years is already quite a period, and I have had the opportunity to begin writing memoirs, so that no one forgets what we went through. The Lord has given us a very unique experience of life in the church, society, our country, and among the people at all levels - both before 1990 and afterwards, when the Transfiguration Brotherhood was born. Work on the first volume of my memoirs, which I have entitled Refusing Self-Censorship, has already been completed. I hope that this volume will be published very soon," added Fr Georgy.
"Let us always, with gratitude to God and our loved ones, actualize our memory which though oriented towards the past has enormous significance for the present and the future. In the outgoing year, much that was of import and interest took place. I hope that the Lord will also grant us such opportunities in the coming year. I wish all of you, dear brothers and sisters, a joyful, bright, Christian life: a life of more than just individual personhood – based in transpersonal-sobornal personhood – is achievable in our time. For our Church, for our people, this is now the most important issue. God grant that we not stumble and err, God grant that we would always live with inspiration, creativity, joy, and thanksgiving. Happy New Year!"
On the last day of the year, both before and after the thanksgiving prayer service, there was a charity fair at SFI. The fair featured products made by SFI students and members of the Transfiguration Brotherhood. Also at this year's fair the products of the "Nikolskaya Workshop" were featured, as organized by Fr Vasily Orekhov. The "Nikolskaya Workshop" is the workplace of 22 people with disabilities, aged from 20 to 40. The same fair was also open at SFI on January 6, from 17:00 to 20:30.
