#BeingHuman. Dear friends, greetings from Lviv.
Roman, Oleksandr and I are deep in the work now, going through the chapters with the authors. It is humbling to edit a book on pastoral ministry during a war while that war is still being fought around the very people writing it. Some of our authors serve in the army, and a few are writing from the front line itself, sending paragraphs between duties, in the gaps that combat leaves them. We keep that in front of us whenever we are tempted to treat any of this as merely academic. It is not. For us the desk and the trench have turned out to be closer than anyone would have wished.
One of the authors is writing the chapter on pastoral care for the families of the missing and of those held in russian captivity. As a chaplain, he has already conducted more than seven hundred funerals for the fallen.
As of 23 February 2026, the Unified Register of Persons Missing under Special Circumstances holds records on roughly 92,000 people, the most recent verified figure from Artur Dobroserdov, the commissioner for persons gone missing. The register counts children among them: 2,740 of those being searched for were minors when they disappeared. It also holds data on more than 3,200 unidentified bodies.
What unsettles me is the motion of that figure as much as its size. On 3 February 2025 the register listed 62,948 people. By 2 May 2025 it had passed 70,000. A year on, it has grown by nearly a third. Since February 2025, on average, at least seventy people have been declared missing every day. Seventy families a day crossing into a particular kind of waiting that has no natural end.
And alongside the missing are the captive. As of May 2026 around 7,000 Ukrainian servicemen are held in russian captivity, a figure President Zelensky gave in February 2026 and Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Olena Kondratiuk confirmed in May. Russia is also holding some 20,000 Ukrainian adult civilians, along with more than 19,000 abducted children.
Working through this with the author, we kept returning to a distinction that runs through much of the project.
There is a difference between grief and what these families endure. The bereaved bury someone and, however slowly, begin to mourn, since grief at least has an object and a place to start. The families of the missing have neither, because they do not know whether there is anyone to bury. Their grief cannot begin and it cannot end, so it simply continues. Any pastor who has sat with such a family knows that the usual consolations do more than fail here. They wound.
“He is in a better place” is unsayable to a mother who does not know whether her son is in a grave, in a prison cell, or on his way home. The families of the captive carry a kindred weight, since their person is most likely alive and beyond reach, beyond protection, beyond any timeline they can hold on to. The author is right to insist that this is a pastoral category of its own rather than a subset of bereavement, and that our inherited scripts, written for peacetime as so much of our pastoral tradition was, or proposed now from peaceful contexts, simply do not reach it.
I write this down because of where it leaves the church. Behind every figure in that register is a household, and a growing number of those households are sitting in our pews, or have stopped coming, because nobody knew what to say to them. As this war grinds on, our congregations are not only losing members to the front, to emigration, to the grave. They are also filling, week by week, with people who are neither widowed nor reunited, who live in the long grey middle of not knowing. Programs and formulas do not reach such families.
They are reached, if at all, by a community patient enough to wait alongside them without hurrying them toward a resolution that may never come, and able to hold lament and hope together without letting either swallow the other. That is precisely the ministry of Holy Saturday, the work of a church that still lives between cross and resurrection, although we are so often pushed toward Sunday and Monday.
If this book does one thing, I hope it helps our pastors and our churches, and pastors in global evangelicalism, should they care to read it, to keep that vigil well: to be, for the families of the missing and the captive, a place where someone stays. We stay, and usually we do not write about the cost.
Keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine
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