Resource Review · Orthodox Website
Ancient Faith Ministries
The largest English-language Orthodox publishing and podcast network, sitting almost alone on a vertical the rest of the Christian internet barely covers — and quietly serving as the de facto front door to Orthodoxy online.
- Editor rating
- 4.6 / 5
- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web · iOS · Android · Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Smart Speakers
- Developer
- Ancient Faith Ministries
- Launched
- 2004
The verdict
If you are exploring or practicing Orthodox Christianity in English, this is effectively the website. The radio stream, podcast network, and publishing house together form an ecosystem nobody else has built — and probably nobody else will.
Try Ancient Faith Ministries ↗Opens ancientfaith.com
Ancient Faith Ministries has quietly become the favorite of English-speaking Orthodox Christians who want to hear someone who sounds like their priest when their priest is not around. It started in 2004 as a single internet radio station out of Chesterton, Indiana — Ancient Faith Radio, 24/7 Orthodox liturgical music and talk — and grew into the publishing house, podcast network, and blog platform that now anchors the Orthodox internet in the English-speaking world.
It is not flashy. It does not chase viral video. It does not run a $40 million app push. What it does — and what almost nobody else does — is sit on the Orthodox Christian vertical and produce a steady, decades-long stream of long-form audio, books, and writing that priests, monks, theologians, converts, and cradle Orthodox actually use. The home page looks like a parish bulletin board from 2012 and that is not really a criticism — the people who go there know exactly what they came for.
For Orthodox readers this site is essentially infrastructure. For Catholic, Protestant, or Latter-day Saint readers it is a window into a tradition that the rest of the Christian internet covers thinly at best — Orthodox theology, patristic sources, the Divine Liturgy, the Jesus Prayer, fasting and feasting, monastic spirituality, the Church Fathers. You will encounter content firmly outside your tradition. You will also encounter, if you stay a while, some of the most thoughtful long-form religious audio anywhere on the internet.
✓ The good
- Owns a vertical almost nobody else covers — the Orthodox Christian internet in English is small, and Ancient Faith is most of it
- Ancient Faith Radio is genuinely 24/7 — Orthodox chant, hymnody, and talk you can leave running in a parish hall or your kitchen
- 200+ podcasts across every Orthodox jurisdiction — Greek, Antiochian, OCA, Russian, Serbian voices all under one roof
- Pan-Orthodox by design — does not pick sides between Old Calendarists and New Calendarists, jurisdictions, or schools
- Ancient Faith Publishing is a real publishing house — the print catalog is what English-speaking Orthodox parishes actually stock
- Father Thomas Hopko's lectures and Father Stephen Freeman's blog are free and basically a working catechumenate
- Free tier is unusually generous — radio, podcasts, blogs, and most reference content cost nothing
✗ Watch out
- The site UX is dated — discovery is hard, search is rough, mobile is functional but not lovely
- No first-party mobile app worth the install (yet) — most listeners use Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the radio stream directly
- Catalog is sprawling and uncurated — new visitors often cannot tell where to start without a friend pointing them
- No structured reading plan or catechumenate flow — the content is there, but the on-ramp is "browse and figure it out"
- Editorial voice varies by host — a few podcasts feel like 2008-era talk radio while others are seminary-grade
Best for
- Inquirers exploring Orthodox Christianity in English
- Catechumens and converts already in a parish
- Cradle Orthodox who want their tradition in their headphones
- Pastors and scholars researching Orthodox theology
Avoid if
- You want a polished, app-first experience like Hallow or YouVersion
- You want a single curated reading plan to walk through
- You want Catholic, Protestant, or LDS framing of doctrine
- You expect short-form, social-style content
What Ancient Faith Ministries is
Ancient Faith Ministries is the umbrella over four things: Ancient Faith Radio (a 24/7 internet radio stream of Orthodox liturgical music and talk), the Ancient Faith podcast network (more than 200 ongoing and archived shows), the blog platform (dozens of writers, most notably Father Stephen Freeman's Glory to God for All Things), and Ancient Faith Publishing (the print and ebook house). It is based in Chesterton, Indiana, and operates as a department of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America — but the content is pan-Orthodox by editorial intent, not Antiochian-only.
The audience is mostly English-speaking Orthodox Christians and a long tail of inquirers, but priests, seminarians, and academics use it too. The 24/7 radio is the front door for a lot of new listeners; the podcasts and books are where people live once they stick around. Almost everything that is not a physical book is free.
Why Orthodox Christians use Ancient Faith
The single biggest practical difference between Ancient Faith and the rest of the Christian internet is scope of coverage. Catholic Christians have Word on Fire, Catholic Answers, Hallow, EWTN, Ascension. Protestant Christians have BibleProject, Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, Ligonier, RightNow Media, and dozens more. Latter-day Saints have the first-party Gospel Library and Scripture Central. Orthodox Christians have Ancient Faith — and a handful of jurisdictional sites (OCA.org, GOARCH.org, the Antiochian Archdiocese site) that are mostly administrative.
That asymmetry is the whole story. Because the English-language Orthodox vertical online is comparatively small, Ancient Faith functions as the radio station, the podcast network, the blog platform, the publishing house, and the unofficial catechumenate — all at once. Nobody else has the breadth, nobody else has the back catalog, and nobody else is positioned to. The site is what an entire denominational media ecosystem looks like when one ministry has been quietly building it for twenty years.
Ancient Faith Radio: the 24/7 stream that started it all
Ancient Faith Radio is the original product — two internet streams (a music stream and a talk stream) that run continuously. The music stream rotates through Byzantine chant, Russian choral music, Greek and Slavic liturgical hymnody, Western Rite Orthodox settings, and contemporary Orthodox composers. The talk stream cycles sermons, podcasts, and live broadcasts from feast-day services. Both run on standard streaming protocols, so they show up in every major podcast and radio app, plus smart speakers — "Alexa, play Ancient Faith Radio" works on the first try.
This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is the reason parishes leave a laptop running in the church hall and the reason commuters keep it in the car on long drives. There is no Spotify station that does this. There is no Apple Music genre that does this. For Orthodox Christians who want their tradition in their ears the way evangelicals have K-LOVE, this is the only thing that exists at this scale in English — and it has been running, uninterrupted, since 2004.
The podcast network: 200+ shows, every Orthodox voice that matters in English
The Ancient Faith podcast network is the part that scholars and converts actually live in. The current and archived catalog runs past 200 shows. The headline names are familiar to anyone in Orthodox circles: Father Stephen Freeman (Glory to God for All Things, in podcast form alongside the blog), Frederica Mathewes-Green (At the Corner of East and Now), the full lecture archive of the late Father Thomas Hopko — including the legendary 55-part Speaking the Truth in Love series and the famous "55 Maxims" lectures, which on their own constitute a working introduction to Orthodox spiritual life. There are catechetical shows for inquirers, deep-cut patristics shows for the seminary crowd, parenting shows, fiction-and-faith shows, jurisdiction-specific shows, monastery interviews, and a handful of shows in languages other than English.
Why it matters: there is no other catalog like this anywhere in English-language Christianity for the Orthodox tradition. If you want to hear an actual Orthodox priest, deacon, monastic, or theologian explain something — fasting, icons, the Divine Liturgy, the Jesus Prayer, theosis, the lives of the saints, an obscure question about the Typikon — somebody on this network has almost certainly already done it. The discovery UX is bad. The catalog itself is irreplaceable.
Ancient Faith Publishing: the print catalog Orthodox parishes actually stock
Ancient Faith Publishing is the press side of the ministry — and at this point the largest English-language Orthodox publisher in North America. The catalog runs from translations of patristic texts and prayer books, to contemporary Orthodox writers like Frederica Mathewes-Green and Father Stephen Freeman, to academic theology, to a sizeable line of Orthodox children's books, to the increasingly popular Orthodox fiction list. Prices are typical for trade publishing — most paperbacks $14 to $25, hardcovers and study editions higher. Ebooks are available for most current titles.
For parish bookstores, this is just the catalog. The shelf at coffee hour after Liturgy is, in the average English-speaking Orthodox parish in the US or Canada, mostly Ancient Faith Publishing with a few St. Vladimir's Seminary Press and Holy Cross titles mixed in. For an inquirer trying to read their way toward understanding Orthodox Christianity, the publishing arm — together with the free blog and podcast content — is the closest thing to a coordinated catechetical resource the tradition has online in English.
Pricing
Free
$0
Ancient Faith Radio 24/7 stream, the full podcast network, every blog on the platform, and most reference reading. The vast majority of what people come for sits here.
Ancient Faith Publishing — paperbacks
Most titles $14 – $25
Books from the publishing arm — patristic editions, prayer books, contemporary Orthodox writers, fiction, and academic theology. Bought one book at a time from the store.
Ancient Faith Publishing — hardcovers & study editions
Around $30 – $60
Liturgical books, study Bibles, gift editions, and larger reference works. Priced like trade hardcovers anywhere.
Donor / supporter
Pay-what-you-want
Optional recurring donations keep the radio stream and podcast hosting running. No paywall behind it — listeners give because the rest is free.
Almost everything Ancient Faith makes is free. The radio stream, the entire podcast network, the blogs, and most reference reading do not cost anything and are not behind a wall. Most users do not need to spend a cent unless they want to buy a book.
The paid product is the publishing house. Books are priced like any other trade publisher — paperbacks generally $14 to $25, hardcovers and larger study editions higher. Ebooks of most current titles are available. There is no streaming or subscription product around the books — you buy the ones you want.
There is a donor / supporter pathway for listeners who want to keep the radio and podcast infrastructure running. It is recurring giving, not a subscription — there is no paywall content sitting behind it. Listeners who give do so because the rest is genuinely free.
If you are weighing the value: a beginner exploring Orthodox Christianity can spend literally zero dollars and listen to several hundred hours of catechetical content and patristic commentary. That is the unusual part. There is no other Christian publishing house at this scale where the cost-of-entry for the substantive content is "open the website."
Where Ancient Faith Ministries falls behind
No serious mobile app. The Ancient Faith app exists but is light, and most listeners default to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the radio stream directly in a browser. There is no equivalent of Hallow's or YouVersion's app polish here — the team has chosen to ship audio and let third-party players carry it.
Discovery is rough. With 200+ podcasts and a deep blog archive, a new visitor genuinely cannot tell where to start. There is no "begin here" flow, no structured catechumenate, no recommended-listening pathway baked into the site. Friends and priests do this work offline — the site itself does not.
Search is dated. The on-site search returns inconsistent results across podcasts, blogs, and books, and there is no semantic / AI-style search of the audio catalog yet. For a back catalog this rich, that is a real loss — a lot of treasure is buried.
Editorial voice is uneven. Because the podcast network is a network, the production quality and tone vary from show to show. Some episodes are seminary-grade lectures with clean audio. Some are 2008-era talk radio with the original room tone. New listeners need to be willing to skip around.
Visual design is a generation behind. The site has been updated, but it still reads as a long-running ministry website rather than a modern content platform. None of this gets in the way of using it, but it is part of why first-time visitors sometimes leave before they realize what is actually on the shelves.
Ancient Faith vs. OCA.org vs. OrthoChristian
These are the three sites English-speaking Orthodox readers most often land on. Different strengths. Ancient Faith is the media network — radio, podcasts, books, blogs. OCA.org is the official site of the Orthodox Church in America — primarily administrative, jurisdictional, and pastoral, with a useful Lives of the Saints reference and the daily lectionary. OrthoChristian (pravoslavie.ru's English portal) is the news and translation operation — articles, translations of Russian and Greek pieces, and a steady feed of feature writing from the Orthodox world abroad.
If you want to listen, Ancient Faith. If you want jurisdictional news, parish locators, calendars, and saints-of-the-day for an OCA parish, OCA.org. If you want articles, news, and translation of writing from Russian and Greek Orthodox sources, OrthoChristian. None of them really overlaps the others. Most committed Orthodox readers in English use all three for different things, and Ancient Faith is the one that runs in the background while the other two get checked on demand.
For someone outside the Orthodox tradition — a Catholic, Protestant, or Latter-day Saint reader curious about what Orthodox Christians actually believe and practice — Ancient Faith is the cleanest entry point of the three. The other two assume you are already on the inside. Ancient Faith does not, quite. It is still pan-Orthodox content with no concessions to outside readers, but the podcasts in particular were partly built to answer the questions inquirers ask, and you can hear that in the catalog.
The bottom line
Ancient Faith Ministries is not the right choice for everyone — if you want a slick app, a guided plan, or content framed for your own tradition, you will be happier elsewhere. But if you are Orthodox in English, or curious about what Orthodox Christians believe, this site is essentially the medium. Twenty years of radio, 200+ podcasts, a serious publishing house, and almost all of it free. The discovery UX is rough and the design is dated, but the catalog itself is the kind of thing nobody is going to build twice. Real gaps, but worth knowing about going in rather than dealbreakers.
Alternatives to Ancient Faith Ministries
Word on Fire
Bishop Robert Barron's Catholic media ministry — high-production video, books, and the Word on Fire Bible. The Catholic counterpart in production polish.
Catholic Answers
The largest Catholic apologetics ministry online — radio show, encyclopedic Q&A library, and a deep podcast catalog answering doctrinal questions.
Desiring God
John Piper's teaching ministry — thousands of free articles, sermons, books, and the Ask Pastor John podcast from a Reformed evangelical perspective.
BibleProject
Animated explainer videos, classroom-grade theology courses, and the daily reading podcast — non-denominational and the most-shared Bible content online.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Ancient Faith Ministries free?
- Yes — the radio stream, the entire podcast network, and the blog platform are all free with no paywall. The only paid product is the books from Ancient Faith Publishing, which are priced like any trade publisher (most paperbacks $14 to $25). Optional donations help fund the infrastructure but do not unlock anything.
- What jurisdiction is Ancient Faith affiliated with?
- Ancient Faith Ministries operates as a department of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, but the content is intentionally pan-Orthodox. Greek, Antiochian, OCA, Russian, Serbian, and other Orthodox voices appear across the podcast network, and the publishing house carries writers from across the jurisdictions.
- Where should I start if I am new to Orthodox Christianity?
- A common on-ramp is Father Thomas Hopko's lecture series and his "55 Maxims" talks, plus Father Stephen Freeman's blog Glory to God for All Things. From the publishing side, Frederica Mathewes-Green's Welcome to the Orthodox Church is widely recommended for inquirers. The site itself does not have a built-in "start here" flow, so most newcomers ask a priest or friend for a few first picks.
- How do I listen to Ancient Faith Radio?
- The two streams — music and talk — run 24/7. You can listen on the Ancient Faith website, in Apple Podcasts and Spotify, on smart speakers ("Alexa, play Ancient Faith Radio"), or in any standard internet radio app by adding the stream URL. The streams have been running continuously since 2004.
- Is there an Ancient Faith mobile app?
- There is a basic Ancient Faith app for iOS and Android that streams the radio and surfaces podcasts, but it is not the focus of the ministry. Most regular listeners use Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the radio stream in a browser. The app is functional, not a marquee product.
- How is Ancient Faith different from OCA.org or OrthoChristian?
- Ancient Faith is the media network — radio, podcasts, books, blogs. OCA.org is the official site of the Orthodox Church in America and is mostly administrative, with a useful Lives of the Saints and daily lectionary. OrthoChristian is the English portal of pravoslavie.ru and focuses on news and translation. Most English-speaking Orthodox readers use all three for different things.
- Is Ancient Faith Publishing the only Orthodox publisher in English?
- No, but it is the largest. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press and Holy Cross Orthodox Press are the other major English-language Orthodox publishers, and several smaller monastery presses also publish in English. Most parish bookstores in North America carry mostly Ancient Faith Publishing with a few SVS and Holy Cross titles mixed in.