The Stewards
Six ordained Stewards hold this Fellowship. Every one has walked this road themselves.
Matthew “Whiz” Buckley
Matthew grew up Irish Catholic in South Jersey and served at the altar as a boy. He is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. As a teenager he lost his sister Monica to a drunk driver, and years later his father died of a broken heart. He put God down and did not pick Him up again for forty years.
He flew F/A-18s in the Navy for fifteen years, graduated TOPGUN, and flew combat sorties over Iraq. He buried sixteen aviators lost in mishaps and four squadronmates who died by their own hand. The cost of that kind of service is cumulative, and it does not present a bill until long after the uniform comes off.
On the night of 21 May 2021 he sat in sacred ceremony for the first time. On his knees, God met him, washed away his sins, and told him six words: Matthew, I don’t make imperfect things.
What he understood in that moment was not that he had been made a leader. It was that he had been sent. He uses the word apostle in its original sense — one who goes out and points the way — and he is careful about the distinction. He is not a guru. He is not a spiritual authority. He is a Steward and a companion who walked the road, received the call, and now works to keep it clear for whoever comes next.
He founded Sacred Warrior Fellowship with his bride Suzi. He also serves as President of the No Fallen Heroes Foundation, a separate organization working on veteran suicide prevention, and speaks publicly on faith and religious liberty. The aim is the same in all of it: that nobody is turned away from God, and nobody is told they are broken.
Suzi Buckley
Suzi met Matthew in 1988 at Jacksonville University. They married in 1994 at Naval Air Station Lemoore and spent the next years moving where the Navy sent them, raising a family across duty stations. Their oldest, Matthew Jr., was born in 2000 at Miramar. She taught in private schools and on-base child development centers — the steady thing behind a life that was rarely steady.
When Matthew came home carrying what neither of them yet had words for, Suzi held the ground he could not hold. She absorbed those years with a loyalty that did not waver while the way forward stayed dark. Anyone who has been the one waiting at home knows exactly what that costs, and how little of it is ever spoken about.
When he encountered God in ceremony and began finding his way back, she watched it happen from the closest possible distance. What she saw moved her to seek God the same way herself. What came out of it made them better partners, better parents, and closer to God and to one another than at any point in their marriage.
That is what brought her to this work. Suzi has sat with the sacraments herself, and she brings that to every ceremony she stewards. Her particular care is for the spouses and the families — the people who carry the weight of someone else’s service and are almost never asked how they are doing.
She and Matthew have three children: Matthew Jr., serving on active duty in the United States Air Force; Jack, a senior at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Keeley, a freshman at Ole Miss.
Theresa Noach
Theresa grew up in southeast Florida in a two-parent home with three younger siblings. There was love in it and there was not much money, and underneath both there were generational wounds nobody in the house yet had language for. She encountered sexual trauma as a girl. She ran. What she ran toward was other people carrying the same thing, and the relationships that followed did more damage.
In her early twenties she got out of her first marriage. The night that decided it, a knife was held to her throat. In that moment she cried out to God — not for rescue, but for purpose.
What came back was a search that lasted twenty years. Poetry, music, painting. Philosophy, religion, psychology, and every mystical tradition she could get her hands on. She became a massage therapist and an ordained minister, founded a nonprofit for women, homeschooled her daughters, and built a business. She and her second husband turned toward what each of them was carrying instead of away from it.
In 2018, after a string of crises and illnesses, she left the ministry she had been ordained into. She did not leave God. She left an institution that no longer had room for the way she was being called to seek Him.
She kept searching, and eventually she was brought to sacred ceremony — and to this Fellowship, which she describes as an alignment she did not arrange.
For twenty years Theresa carried a conviction she has since named out loud: that she was God’s mistake. This church exists because a man on his knees was told the opposite. She now leads ceremony for people who arrive believing what she used to believe about herself, and she is unusually equipped to tell them the truth.
She published her first book and an EP in 2021, with more work coming. Her joy, she says, has been restored — and she believes that is available to anyone willing to reach for it.
Her own account
Unraveled: From Trauma to Transformation
Read it on Amazon
Michael Morgan
Mike served thirty years as a police officer, with the Atlanta Police Department and the Suffolk County Police Department in New York. In 2022 he was medically retired after an on-duty back injury and two surgeries.
What came next he did not expect. As he recovered, anger and rage and a darkness he could not name began surfacing. Then he watched a podcast episode where a former Navy SEAL allowed himself to be vulnerable and weep — and Mike wept with him. That was the moment he understood he had been carrying post-traumatic stress for most of his career and had never once been taught how to set it down.
He began to search. What called him was not a program or a protocol — it was sacred ceremony. In early 2024 he and his wife came to the sacrament together. What opened in him was an awareness, a peace, and a love he had never known in his life. He received it as a blessing, and he knew immediately what he was meant to do with it: go back for the people still standing where he had stood.
Today Mike serves as ordained clergy in this Fellowship. He hosts a podcast for first responders and veterans, built to do for them what that first episode did for him.
What he tells the men and women going through it is simple. What you are feeling is normal. You are not alone. Vulnerability is strength, and so is raising your hand. The armor most of us put on long before the job — often in childhood — can come off.
His own account
The Resilient Warrior
Read it on Amazon
Kat
Kat is a woman who believes in strength, purpose, faith, and the power of community. She was drawn to Sacred Warrior Fellowship because she believes that those who serve — whether through military service, protecting others, supporting their communities, or simply walking a difficult path — deserve a place where they can feel seen, supported, and understood.
For Kat, being a sacred warrior is not only about strength in battle. It is about courage in everyday life: healing, growing, standing for what is right, helping others, and continuing forward with an open heart.
She loves the ocean, horses, music, sports, cooking, and looking up at the stars. What she values is authenticity, meaningful connection, compassion, and personal growth — and she is grateful for the chance to walk alongside others who share a desire to grow spiritually, serve others, and live with purpose.
Kat serves this Fellowship with an open heart, a strong spirit, and a willingness to learn, serve, and walk alongside others on their journey.
Zoya
Zoya serves as an ordained Steward of Sacred Warrior Fellowship — a church called to wake warriors, first responders, and all those who answer, to the truth of who they are, through sacred ceremony and direct communion with God.
She believes in the ripple. Change does not stay where it starts. What moves in one person moves outward through everyone standing near them, and that conviction is what she carries into the room.
She rescues animals. She finds her solace in nature. Her particular care in this Fellowship is for the person who arrives not yet able to believe they were made whole — and she walks with them until they remember.
The teaching podcast of this church
Our founder and our Stewards sit down with members, clergy, and guests to talk about God, sacrament, service, and the long walk after ceremony. The most recent episode plays below.
Start with a conversation
Every Steward on this page was once a stranger who reached out. If something here is speaking to you, the first step is a talk — not a form.
Sacred Warrior Fellowship is a church called to remind our nation's heroes — and all those who answer — that God does not make imperfect things.
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