Please note: This is part two of the review of Andrew Attwood’s book, “Jesus wants to train us to live his life”. Part one, “Rewriting the Gospels,” is available here. The two pieces are designed to be read together, but they can also be read separately. This piece focuses on the theological claims that underpin the practical demands of the book, while the first piece focuses on how those demands reshape the Gospels and the reader’s relationship to them.

Prologue

Most accounts of harmful practices in churches begin with a scandal. This one does not. The system documented in these pages has produced no single event of the kind that ends ministries or makes the news. It has produced something less newsworthy, and more durable.

Every Christian, at baptism, is given something the New Testament treats as non-negotiable: direct access to God through Christ, unmediated by any other human being. The curtain is torn. The Spirit is poured out. The newest convert stands on the same ground as the most experienced apostle. This is not a peripheral doctrine. It is the thing the cross secured.

The book reviewed in these pages does not deny any of this. It does not need to. It builds, on top of the access the cross opened, a structure that routes that access through someone else: a leader, a programme, a system of graded proximity. The believer’s relationship with God remains, in name, direct. In practice, it acquires a custodian.

This is a review of how that custodianship is established, what authorises it, and why it is so difficult to see from the inside.

Introduction

These pages examine what happens when a genuine hunger for discipleship meets a specific and contested framework.

A community’s theology is not only what it says it believes. It is also what its practices demonstrate. The Theological Action Research framework, developed by Helen Cameron and colleagues, distinguishes four registers in which any Christian community speaks its theology: the normative (the sources it names as authoritative, typically Scripture and tradition), the formal (the theology the wider church has worked out through scholarship, councils, and centuries of reflection), the espoused (what it publicly teaches and articulates), and the operant (what its actual patterns of behaviour reveal).¹ These four can cohere. They can also diverge, without anyone intending it. When they do, it is the operant theology that shapes the lives of those inside the community. Cameron and her colleagues note the direction of travel: given enough time, how a community behaves will reshape what it believes. Practice generates theology.

Attwood, in his own teaching to his own congregation on the practical outworking of family on mission, articulates the priority directly: “beliefs are one thing, but what we do is another.” ² On his own account, then, the level at which the church’s theology becomes real is the level of practice. The analysis that follows takes him at his word.

Following Jesus is a case in point. Breen’s discipleship model has been in operation for over thirty years. The vocabulary, the structures, the expectations of how leaders and followers should relate, all of it predates Attwood’s book by decades. Attwood reads the Gospels and finds, in Jesus’ ministry, the practices the system already prescribes. It is impossible to be certain about the direction of travel. But given that the model came first, the more likely reading is this: the book is not theology generating practice. It is practice generating theology, the operant system accounting for itself in the language of Scripture after the fact.

Breen’s methodology belongs to a wider movement whose roots trace back to John Wimber and the Vineyard in the 1980s. Its development has taken different organisational forms: Holy Trinity Brompton, working from the same inheritance, built a branded evangelism programme, Alpha, and a satellite-church architecture designed for institutional replication. Breen’s trajectory ran differently, towards a methodology for discipleship rather than a programme for evangelism, built around the shapes and rhythms this book describes and licensed through a network. In the UK, that network is Kairos Connexion, the organisational carrier of the 3DM methodology, operating within the same charismatic-evangelical landscape as HTB but with a different architecture and a different target: not the outsider at an Alpha supper, but the church member enrolled in a training programme. The two streams share more than a common ancestor. Both are structured around the conviction that a renewed church should look and feel and function differently from the inherited model, and that the methodology (whoever holds the licence) provides the mechanism of that renewal. What is under examination here is not the inheritance, which the wider church they came from shares, but what the mechanism does to those it forms. What licence does it give to leaders? What does it ask of followers? And what are the risks when a contested reading of Jesus’ ministry is applied, with the full weight of scriptural authority, to the life of an ordinary church?

We will do this by examining the specific, replicable practices of Jesus that Attwood identifies for leaders to imitate and followers to submit to. These practices come directly from a concluding list at the end of the book’s fourth chapter. This list, however, arrives only after the text has completed a significant piece of structural work. The entire preceding chapter operates as a theological engine that renders the forthcoming practices mandatory.

Before reaching that list, the chapter reframes the Gospels as operational training manuals, removes any permission for a softer alternative, and dissolves normal boundaries around family and personal struggle. By arguing that Jesus expects his precise methods to be reproduced, the text authorises the modern leader to act as the primary trainer. The reader therefore encounters these listed practices as binding operational commands. Each section that follows takes one of these practices, or a cluster of related ones, and holds it against the Gospels as understood by the wider church.

What the Cross Closed Off

Christians have argued, for two thousand years, about what the cross accomplished. The argument runs through the centre of Christian history, and serious minds have stood on each side.

One account emphasises completion. Tetelestai : it is finished. The single word Jesus spoke from the cross in John’s Gospel carries the weight of a work fully done; a debt paid, a sacrifice completed, an offering made once and unrepeatable. On this reading, the cross is the telos of the whole story: everything before it was preparation, and everything after is the reception of what happened there. The curtain tears. The access is opened. There is nothing left to accomplish.

Another account, set out most clearly in our generation by N.T. Wright in The Day the Revolution Began³, reads the cross as inauguration. Not the end of the story but its hinge. Jesus did not simply settle an account; he launched a kingdom. The powers that had held creation under their grip were confronted and defeated. What the resurrection confirmed, the cross began: a new creation breaking in, the reign of God beginning its long work of restoration.

These two accounts look like opposites. They are not. Both make the cross the event around which history turns. Both agree that what came after it is qualitatively different from what came before it. In that one respect they converge: the decisive, world-dividing character of what happened outside Jerusalem. The moment is the same moment. It is either the end, the beginning or both.

If that is granted, the same consequence follows regardless of which account you hold. The ministry Jesus conducted in the years before the cross was a specific work, and that work is done. Whether you read Good Friday as completion or as inauguration, as the hour in which everything was settled or the hour in which everything was set in motion, the question running through the sections that follow is not which account is correct. It is simpler than that. If the cross changes everything, and on any serious reading it does, how can the arrangements that preceded it simply be read as an instruction manual ?

The eight practices examined in what follows are variants of one structure. The selection, the tiered access, the shared life, the reviewing, the coaching, the imitation, the obedience: each is an instance of the same arrangement. Each preserves a feature of the bounded earthly ministry and treats it as permanent, when the cross ended the phase it belonged to. That argument made, one assessment covers all eight. Without it, each requires its own.

Movement 1: The Shapes of the Community

This movement addresses the structural architecture the framework introduces to the Christian community. It examines the practices of selecting specific individuals for an inner ring, investing in tiered concentric circles (the 3, 12, and 72), and requiring a highly integrated model of “shared life.” The following sections explore how these practices map a modern organisational hierarchy onto the Gospels. This translates the sovereign calling of Christ into a recruitment process and shifts the focus from a mutual fellowship of equals to a vertical system of managed access to a human leader.

”Selected those he wished to train and love as his close community”

Jesus did choose twelve. That is not in dispute. He did have a closer relationship with “the three.” So it is fair to say that Jesus drew some closer than others. But before drawing any conclusions about what this means for contemporary church leadership, look at what he was doing and who he called.

The choice of twelve disciples carried a specific charge for anyone steeped in Israel’s scriptures. Israel had twelve tribes; by Jesus’ day most were scattered, lost, or in exile. Jesus gathering twelve was not incidentally symbolic. It was a claim. God was reconstituting his people, and the reconstituted people would be gathered around Jesus himself rather than the temple, the land, or the Torah. N.T. Wright, in Jesus and the Victory of God, makes the case that this is among the most theologically loaded moments in Jesus’ entire ministry: the Twelve are the nucleus of a kingdom.⁴ Wright is also precise about what the kingdom’s demands on those followers actually were. The summons Jesus issued was to specific tasks bound to his own career and project. Including, at its sharpest, the call to accompany him to Jerusalem as his mission reached its climax. Wright states “the unique and unrepeatable nature of Jesus’ own sense of vocation extended to those who followed him. They were summoned to specific tasks, which had to do with his own career and project.” ⁴ A church leader who builds concentric circles of proximity and points to Jesus’ gathering of the Twelve as the warrant has not found a replicable model. The summons they are imitating was a call to walk with the Son of God to the cross. There is nowhere else to walk to.

Who did he choose?

Look at who he chose to embody this renewed Israel.

Matthew was a tax collector: a Jew who had entered the employment of Rome, extracting money from his own people on behalf of the occupying power. Simon was a zealot: a member of, or at least sympathetic to, the armed resistance movement dedicated to overthrowing that same occupation. These two men would have had every reason to despise each other. James and John were fishermen whom Jesus nicknamed Boanerges, “sons of thunder,” apparently for their temperament; these are the ones who asked whether they should call down fire on a Samaritan village (Luke 9:54). Peter was impulsive, often unreliable, and would go on to deny Jesus three times in a single night. Judas, of course, betrayed him, and Jesus knew he would, and broke bread with him anyway.

In his book, Attwood talks about selecting a close community of those “early adopters” who are “catching the vision.” By any organisational logic, by any principle of team selection, cultural fit, or receptivity to the vision, this group should have torn itself apart. Jesus was bringing forth the kingdom of God, not building a team. The renewed Israel was not defined by who responded well. It was defined by who called them.

The Gospels are honest about how it went. The Twelve misunderstood Jesus constantly. They competed for status. They fell asleep when he needed them most. After three years of intensive, daily proximity to the Son of God, they still did not understand the cross (Mark 8:31-33). When he was arrested, they ran.

Jesus’ calling of the Twelve was not a recruitment strategy . It was a sovereign calling into something the disciples themselves could not yet see: the in-breaking of God’s kingdom in the person of Jesus. Which is precisely why cultural fit was irrelevant. The summons Wright identifies was not a call to join a movement and help it grow. It was a call to accompany Jesus to Jerusalem, to witness what would happen there, and to be reconstituted by it. Selection for receptivity makes sense when you need the right people to carry a programme forward. It makes no sense at all when the programme is the cross.

The model in Attwood’s book draws on this selection to justify a practice in which leaders identify those who are “catching the vision” and draw them into an intensive inner life. In the context of churches such as Attwood’s that are in the 3DM network, this means utilising the toolkit of “Family on Mission.” Family on Mission is a book from Mike Breen that in my opinion, normalises the blurring of standard pastoral boundaries, where disciples live their lives alongside the one “discipling” them.⁵ It sets out three tiers of access to a leader, calibrated to what the “disciple” gives up. The tiered levels described by the header of this section, the 72, the 12, the 3, map closely onto the tiers Breen describes:

Friends: “people who know who Jesus is and are friendly toward him… They are also happy to serve him when they can.”
Followers: “followers submit their skills and resources to someone else’s mission.”
Family: “family are those who surrender completely, laying down their agenda fully for the agenda of Jesus.”

Arguing that a practice is sound because “Jesus did it” ignores a fundamental boundary. When a church leader demands the level of access, enmeshment, and vulnerability required to “lay down an agenda fully,” they are assuming a position of authority that belongs exclusively to Jesus. Total surrender was appropriate for Jesus because he was actively embodying Israel’s God returning in person to rescue his people and inaugurate his kingdom. When a human leader expects that same surrender to their own agenda, can that ever be appropriate? No human leader has been commissioned to be the one around whom a renewed people is gathered. That role is Christ’s alone, and it is not transferable. To accept that kind of surrender is to claim, in practice if not in words, a position that the New Testament reserves for the Son of God. The difference between recruiting compliant individuals for a strategic project and the sovereign calling of a flawed people to inherit God’s new creation cannot be overstated. The first builds a human institution. The second builds the Church. And only one of them requires the one doing the calling to be the Son of God.

The book does not leave the two-tier dynamic implicit. Chapter 9 describes a couple who left their “lovely home group” because it was “focused mainly on their own Christian needs.” The framing approves the departure. A community oriented around the members’ own growth and mutual care is presented as something healthy Christians outgrow. The in-group and out-group dynamic this site has documented as a consequence of the framework is here presented, in the book’s own voice, as a sign of maturity.

Cameron’s framework helps name what is happening here. The normative text, Jesus’ sovereign calling of twelve as the reconstitution of Israel around its Messiah, belongs to one register. The espoused teaching, “we identify those who catch the vision, as Jesus did,” claims to replicate it. What the framework’s actual behaviour reveals, in Cameron’s terms, is something else again: a congregation informally assessed for influence and receptivity, warmth, access and “investment” distributed accordingly. The three registers do not just diverge; they point in opposite directions. The normative text shows Jesus choosing people no selection programme would choose: a tax collector, a zealot, men who will misunderstand him for three years and run when it matters most. The operant practice filters for people who are most useful to the programme. What the community publicly teaches about why it works the way it does, and what it does, are not the same thing.

Don’t forget Paul

Every believer is, in Paul’s language, “in Christ.” He uses this phrase seventy-three times.⁶ and variations of it many more. It is the bedrock of his entire theology. And it means that proximity to Jesus is no longer a scarce resource that can be distributed by leaders according to receptivity or compliance. It is the birthright of every Christian, given at baptism, sustained by the Spirit, and accessible to the newest convert as fully as it was to Paul and the apostles.

If that is true, and the New Testament insists that it is , then the concentric-circles model is not just an imperfect application of Jesus’ earthly ministry. It is an attempt to reimpose a structure that the cross and resurrection fulfilled and surpassed, which we explored earlier in the ‘What the Cross Closed Off’ section. To rebuild concentric circles of graded proximity, with a human leader at the centre, controlling access, is to move in the opposite direction.

One further detail should give any proponent of this model serious pause. The most influential apostle in the history of the church, the one whose letters constitute the largest single portion of the New Testament, whose theology has helped to shape the faith, was not one of the three. He was not one of the twelve. He was not one of the seventy-two. He had never walked with Jesus during his earthly ministry. He had not sat under Jesus’ pre-crucifixion teaching in Galilee or Judea. His apostleship came not through participation in Jesus’ earthly discipleship circle, but through a revelatory encounter with the risen Christ and subsequent recognition by the church.

Paul was a persecutor and, by his own admission, “untimely born” (1 Corinthians 15:8), commissioned through an unexpected and disorienting encounter with the risen Christ rather than any graduated training process. His apostleship bypassed the concentric circles, leading to a vocation designed to break open the community and extend the gospel to the Gentiles, far beyond the boundaries of the original structure. When he finally met the Jerusalem apostles, the original inner ring, they offered mutual recognition instead of supervision, extending the right hand of fellowship (Galatians 2:9) without attempting to manage his ministry. If graded proximity to an earthly leader were the true prerequisite for spiritual fruitfulness, Paul would be a footnote. Instead, he is a central pillar of Christian theology, and the fact that God built so much of the Church’s foundation through a man who circumvented the programme completely should make us hesitate before declaring that model to be the normative pattern for all Christian discipleship.

The entire trajectory of Paul’s ministry demonstrates the breaking down of inner rings of access. We see this in the rapid expansion of the early church out of its Judean nucleus, spreading first into the Greek-speaking world and eventually across Europe. A proponent of the model will respond that the circles are temporary and reproductive: proximity for a season, formation, then release to multiply the pattern elsewhere. That reframing relocates the problem rather than resolving it. The question is not whether participants leave. It is what happens to them while they are inside, and whether a structure requiring total surrender of personal agenda becomes safe by virtue of ending in managed release. Paul’s trajectory offers no support for even the temporary version. His ministry began outside the circles entirely, through an unmediated encounter with the risen Christ, and the Jerusalem apostles responded not by supervising his deployment but by recognising his calling and extending the hand of fellowship. The actual movement of the early church ran outward across ethnic, geographic, and social boundaries, not inward toward successive tiers of proximity to a human centre. Using the New Testament as a warrant for concentric circles of access to a human leader is to read that story backwards. The cross did not create a smaller room with a more exclusive entrance. It tore the curtain down.

”Invested to different degrees in 72, 12, and especially 3”

There were seventy-two, the wider group of followers Jesus sent out ahead of him in pairs to every town he was about to enter (Luke 10). There were twelve, the inner group of disciples Jesus called to himself, named as apostles, and sent out with authority to preach and heal (Mark 3:13-19). And there were three, Peter, James, and John, the smaller group singled out at certain decisive moments, most notably the Transfiguration and Gethsemane. It would be silly to deny that Jesus spent more time with the three than the twelve, or the twelve than the seventy-two. The pattern is right there on the page.

The question is what the pattern means.

In practice, within structures like Attwood’s, the mapping runs like this. The three become the one or two people running the church alongside the senior leader: the inner executive, the ones with real access to decisions. The twelve become those in the leader’s huddle, a small discipleship group meeting regularly for formation and accountability, though in some configurations a member of the three leads this group instead. The seventy-two become everyone participating in the smaller missional communities, groups of six to eight, led by those in the huddle. The biblical numbers have become an org chart. The concentric circles of the Gospels have been transposed, layer by layer, onto a church’s leadership pipeline, and the result is presented not as a management structure but as the direct reproduction of Jesus’ own pattern.

A fair-minded reader might push back here. Large organisations are often run this way: a small executive, a wider leadership layer, a broad membership base. Many well-functioning institutions operate on exactly this principle.

Agreed. It is exactly like an org chart in a large organisation.

The Gospels are not an org chart .

As noted earlier, N.T. Wright, one of the scholars Attwood himself credits as an influence, makes a compelling case that the twelve are symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel, the reconstitution of God’s people around the Messiah⁴. The seventy-two may echo the seventy elders appointed by Moses (Numbers 11:16-17), or the seventy nations of Genesis 10, a foreshadowing of the gospel going to all peoples. And the three? Every time Peter, James, and John are singled out in the Gospels, it is to witness something: the Transfiguration, the raising of Jairus’s daughter, Gethsemane. Is this a management tier? Or are they the witnesses to the moments that matter most?

Each number carries symbolic, kingdom-inaugurating weight:

Seventy-two: the scope of God’s mission to all nations Twelve: the restoration of Israel around her true King Three: witnesses to the decisive moments of the kingdom’s arrival

These are theological statements about what God is doing in the world.

What the Three Witnessed

At the Transfiguration, they witnessed Jesus revealed in glory alongside Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets converging on the Messiah. At Gethsemane, they witnessed the agony of the Son of God facing the cross. These are not management meetings. Neither are they rewards for high performance. They are moments of revelation and anguish, kingdom-defining moments at which witnesses were required.

The three were not granted greater proximity to Jesus as an investment in their formation, so that a smaller group could receive more and multiply further. They were granted greater exposure to his suffering and his glory. The point was not to be close to Jesus for the sake of investment. The point was to stand as witnesses to what God was doing in him.

In the pages of the Gospels, closer access to Jesus meant closer exposure to what he was carrying. The three were the ones called to see the weight of the Messiah’s vocation: the glory that would vindicate it and the anguish that would purchase it. That is not a perk. It is a vocation of its own: to watch, and later to tell.

That is what the inner three received.

No parallel to this dynamic exists in ordinary church life. No church leader is being transfigured. No church leader is sweating blood in a garden before bearing the sins of the world. The moments that defined the inner three’s proximity to Jesus cannot recur; they belong to the world-altering, kingdom-defining, unrepeatable vocation of the Son of God³.

Closer to Jesus Meant Closer to the Cross

Peter, the closest of all, denied him three times. James and John asked for thrones and were rebuked: “You don’t know what you are asking” (Mark 10:38). Being closer to Jesus in the Gospels did not mean being closer to power. It meant being closer to the cross.

In the model Attwood describes, proximity to the leader is the mechanism of formation: the closer you are, the more you receive, the more you can eventually multiply. Proximity is what the structure runs on. But in the Gospels, proximity to Jesus did not function as a formation input. It functioned as witness. The inner ring got Gethsemane: the unbearable weight of watching the Son of God in agony, asked to stay awake, and failing even at that.

That is not a reward. It is a calling, given to men who had done nothing to earn it and who, at the critical moment, could not even keep their eyes open.

”Shared life and relationship deeply… defining Christian fellowship”

The instinct behind this phrase is a legitimate one. The church should be more than a Sunday gathering, and the “one another” commands in the New Testament do call believers into a depth of life together that polite acquaintance cannot satisfy. But the architecture that this tradition has built on top of that instinct is something else, and it is worth examining in its own words.

The System Behind the Phrase

Within the tradition Attwood writes from, “shared life” is not a warm aspiration. It is a specific, documented architecture.

Mike Breen’s Family on Mission, the book that provides the practical framework for the discipleship model Attwood promotes, is explicit about what “shared life” requires. Breen describes the maintenance of boundaries between a leader’s personal life and their ministry as “utterly exhausting” and “unsustainable.” His conclusion is direct: “discipleship and mission never really work unless we are able to create the texture of family on mission.” ⁵ Within this framework, I argue that healthy boundaries, the ordinary, necessary practice of maintaining some distinction between your private life and your public role, are diagnosed as the obstacle to authentic discipleship.

The solution Breen prescribes is what he calls the shift from teacher to spiritual parent. A teacher implies professional distance. A parent implies unlimited access. Under the spiritual parenting doctrine, the leader’s domestic life becomes the curriculum: followers are absorbed into the leader’s household routines (grocery shopping, laundry, childcare, household prayers) and this domestic immersion is presented as the primary vehicle for spiritual formation. Breen frames boundary dissolution not as a risk but as liberation: boundaries that are “technically ‘broken’” produce a community that is “thriving.” ⁵

The framework also includes a progression, from “Friend” to “Follower” to “Family”, in which each stage requires increasing boundary dissolution. Friends serve when they can. Followers submit their resources. Family “surrender completely, laying down their agenda fully to Jesus.” Reaching “Family” status requires what Breen describes as “abandoning their family identity” and entering the leader’s household structure.⁵ Those who maintain healthy boundaries remain in the outer circles: not quite surrendered enough, not quite available enough, never reaching the level of ministry support and “investment” reserved for those who have dissolved the distinction between their life and the leader’s.

A published framework, sold into churches, written by the architect of the movement Attwood operates within, is prescribing that the route to authentic discipleship runs through the dissolution of one’s own family identity, the abandonment of one’s own agenda, and absorption into the domestic life of another household. This is not an inference from the Gospels, nor an extrapolation from its principles. It is the system describing itself in its own voice.

The same architecture surfaces in Attwood’s own voice. In a recent address to his own congregation on the practical outworking of family on mission, Attwood describes the inherited church mode as focused on Sundays and services with small groups added on, and then articulates the inversion. The smaller gatherings, he says, are “our main thing.” The gathered church serves them: “Sunday church, events and courses… are to serve and enhance group life, not replace it. They are to be tools for the use and training of God’s family. They are a gymnasium where we train to do good group life even better.” ²

The historic understanding has run the other way. Word and sacrament are not tools for the small group; they are the means by which the church is constituted in the first place. The eucharist is not equipment for fellowship, it is the fellowship. The communion of saints is not enhanced by the gathered church, it is enacted in it. The architecture this section has been examining now has an ecclesiology to match: the small group is primary, the gathered church is its gymnasium, and the historic marks of the church have become training equipment for the programme.

A brief aside, and an acknowledged inference. I write from a eucharistic perspective, and my reading of Attwood suggests that for him the real breaking of bread is the shared meal: fellowship enacted around the leader’s table rather than the communion table . I may be wrong about this, and I won’t press it far. But if the inference is correct, a 3DM proponent would likely respond that everyone can break bread somewhere, even if not at this particular leader’s table. Which is true. It is also a statement about what is actually happening. At the communion table, the host is Christ. The invitation is his, and no human being can restrict it. At the leader’s table, the host is the leader. The invitation is theirs. If the leader’s table is where the church’s real formation happens, then the question of who is hosting the meal that actually matters has been quietly answered. It is no longer Christ.

In the same address, Attwood is also direct that the leader’s task includes selecting whom to draw close. Jesus, he tells the congregation, “especially invested in a few followers,” and the list of practices the church is to imitate includes selecting “those he wished to train and love as his close community.” ² Set this alongside the family-on-mission framing of the same talk and the architecture is plain. The family is the small group of those the leader has chosen to invest in. The leader’s investment is what constitutes the family.

This is not a metaphor stretched a little. It is a metaphor that has lost the structural feature without which the word loses its meaning. Family, in any sense the historic church would recognise, is given rather than selected. Real families are not curated by their head; their composition is not a matter of audition or chemistry or fit for the mission. A group of people a leader has chosen to invest in is many things, and may be a good thing in its own right. It is not, on any inherited definition of the word, a family. The vocabulary remains. The thing the vocabulary referred to has been replaced.

I have documented the full architecture of this system, its theological justification, its enforcement mechanisms, and its documented history, in a toolkit that explores how concerned congregants can respond to such dynamics. I would encourage any reader who recognises the dynamics described here to read that analysis in full.

What the New Testament Describes

Set that architecture alongside what the New Testament shows.

Jesus shared life deeply with the Twelve and went up a mountain alone to pray (Luke 6:12). He crossed lakes to get away from crowds (Mark 4:35). He slipped out of the house before dawn to find a solitary place (Mark 1:35). The intimacy of the Gospels is real, but it exists alongside Jesus’ own freedom to withdraw from it. He did not treat withdrawal as a failure of community; he treated it as a necessity.

The “one another” commands (bear one another’s burdens, confess to one another, encourage one another, be devoted to one another) have a structural feature that the spiritual parenting model cannot accommodate: they are mutual. The vulnerability flows in both directions. The leader bears the follower’s burdens and the follower bears the leader’s. Each is equally exposed, equally accountable, equally free to say “I need space.” That is not the architecture Family on Mission describes. What Breen describes is asymmetrical. The follower’s agenda is laid down. The follower’s family identity is abandoned. The follower enters the leader’s household. The traffic moves one way.

The New Testament’s picture of fellowship is broader than any single model. The Jerusalem community held things in common. The Corinthian churches met in houses and struggled with chaos. The believers addressed in 1 Peter were dispersed across Asia Minor, with no shared template. Paul’s churches looked nothing like each other, and he did not require them to. To define Christian fellowship through a single architecture, one specific household structure, one specific progression, one specific dissolution, is to narrow something the New Testament deliberately leaves broad.

What This System Means by Holiness

The deeper difficulty with the shared-life architecture is not simply that it misreads koinonia (the New Testament word for the shared life of equals in Christ, a fellowship freely given and mutually sustained) but that the concept of holiness it puts to work has already been reshaped by a long series of revisions before arriving here.

John Wesley understood holiness as entire sanctification : the transformation of the whole person by the Spirit, so that love of God and love of neighbour become the spring of every thought and action. Social holiness, for Wesley, was inseparable from personal holiness: the person made holy by God’s grace was also the person who fed the poor, visited the prisoner, and expressed that transformation in the fabric of daily life.⁷ The Keswick movement, which shaped the evangelical mainstream through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, narrowed this significantly. Holiness became a crisis of consecration, a dateable moment of surrender after which the Spirit’s power flowed through a “yielded” life. The slow work of character transformation receded; the moment of yielding came forward. Wesley’s social dimension withdrew.

The charismatic stream descending from Wimber compressed it further still. In this inheritance, holiness became associated with power: with spiritual gifts, with signs, with the visible movement of the Spirit in a community. A holy person was an anointed one. Holiness and effectiveness became near-synonyms, and holiness began to be measured by what the Spirit was doing through a person in mission rather than what the Spirit was doing in them. By the time this account reaches the shared-life architecture Attwood promotes, “holiness” has become functional: the quality of life produced in a person who is sufficiently open to the leader, sufficiently embedded in the household, sufficiently surrendered to the programme. Shared life on Family on Mission’s terms is presented as the vehicle for this holiness, because proximity to the leader produces the kind of formation the mission requires.⁷

Attwood articulates the thinned concept in a single line. Setting out the marks his own church should embody, he says: “Church must be holy, calling every member to live honourably before God.” ² Honourable behaviour before God is a real quality, and not a small one. It is also not what Leviticus, Wesley, or Keswick meant by holiness. It is what holiness becomes when the inheritance has thinned this far: respectability, decency, conduct that does not embarrass the church. The strong biblical word is deployed in the same sentence in which it is glossed in a register the historic tradition would not recognise.

This is not Wesley’s entire sanctification. It is not even Keswick’s yielded life, whose thinned version it has thinned still further. What the architecture produces, on examination, is not holiness in any historically recognisable sense but alignment: a person shaped to the vision, committed to the network, available to the household. To describe that as discipleship in holiness is not to deepen the concept. It is to rename something else with the concept’s weight.

The Word the New Testament Uses

That word, koinonia, carries a fuller texture than the brief gloss above can hold. It is a communion of equals, freely given, mutually sustained, and answerable not to a leader but to Christ. It is what Paul describes when he says the members of the body need one another (1 Corinthians 12); what Luke describes when he writes that the early believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship (Acts 2:42); what John describes when he says our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3).

This matters for how the book uses 1 Corinthians. Chapter 6 recruits the letter as warrant for a specific model of prophesying together, eating with unbelievers, and expecting miraculous signs. The author acknowledges that Paul is addressing “issues and problems” in Corinth, using Paul’s corrections to infer what the early church’s baseline activities looked like. However, the framework elevates this reconstructed baseline into a definitive, universal blueprint for mission and shared life, quietly turning scattered Pauline corrections into a contemporary programme.

1 Corinthians features Paul writing to contain a deeply flawed community. The prophesying he addresses in chapters 12-14 is causing such severe disorder that his response must heavily regulate the practice to ensure it builds up the church. Similarly, his discussion of eating with unbelievers in chapters 8-10 addresses the specific pastoral crisis of meat offered to idols. He asks believers to navigate these meals carefully to avoid scandalising weaker consciences, offering complex pastoral triage for a church embedded in a pagan city. The text does support a vision of a socially embodied, hospitable, and Spirit-dependent church. It does not straightforwardly prescribe the highly engineered management system of huddles, tiered access, and domestic absorption the framework promotes.

The most profound misreading occurs around the shared meal. The framework points to Corinth as evidence of a deeply shared social life, yet ignores the specific dysfunction Paul was furiously correcting. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul confronts a church where the shared meal had devolved into a system of inequality. The wealthy and influential ate well, while the poor and marginalised were humiliated. The Corinthian table was divided by status and access. Paul’s response was uncompromising: he told them that as long as they maintained these divisions, they were not actually eating the Lord’s Supper at all (1 Cor 11:20).

By establishing rings of access, the 3, the 12, the 72, or the progression from “Friends” to “Followers” to “Family”, the shared-life architecture reintroduces the very inequality Paul was trying to eradicate. It creates an economy of spiritual status where proximity to the human leader dictates who is fed and who is left on the periphery. When the framework extracts the highly contingent, problematic behaviours of Corinth to validate its own tiered architecture, it takes the symptoms Paul was desperately trying to treat and repackages them as the cure.

Movement 2: The Shapes of Formation

This movement examines the mechanics of spiritual formation and how the system utilises them to encourage organisational alignment. It reviews the practices of leaders assessing followers’ beliefs, coaching them for future suffering, and positioning themselves as the primary models for imitation. The following sections explore how this framework blurs the lines between pastoral care and structural compliance, frames the exhaustion caused by its own requirements as expected spiritual opposition, and reverses the New Testament’s pattern of self-emptying imitation.

“Reviewed and refined their beliefs and practice”

Jesus’ “reviewing” in the Gospels looks nothing like a leader sitting down with a follower to assess their readiness for mission or their alignment with the vision. It looks like parables that confuse, stories where the disciples have to ask afterwards what he meant, and sometimes still do not get it. It looks like questions that unsettle: “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29), not a review question with a marking rubric, but a question that forces the respondent to stake everything on a person they are only beginning to understand. It looks like rebukes that overturn assumptions. When the disciples argued about who was the greatest, Jesus did not correct their theology with a seminar. He put a child in front of them (Luke 9:46-48). When they tried to stop someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name because the man was not part of their group, Jesus told them to leave him alone: “whoever is not against you is for you” (Luke 9:49-50). The one time the disciples attempted to review and refine someone else’s practice, Jesus corrected them.

Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi is sometimes held up as evidence that Jesus’ training programme was working, and in a sense it was. Peter got the answer right: “You are the Messiah” (Mark 8:29). But within verses, Peter is rebuking Jesus for predicting his own death, and Jesus responds with the most devastating correction in the Gospels: “Get behind me, Satan” (Mark 8:33). The disciple who had just passed the test demonstrated that he had not understood what the answer meant. After three years of daily proximity to Jesus, the Twelve still did not grasp the cross.

They still competed for status. Thomas would still doubt. And Jesus commissioned them anyway, not because the review process had produced satisfactory results, but because the sending itself depended on the Spirit he was about to pour out on them, not on the progress they had made.

The pattern of correction in the Gospels is always towards Jesus himself, not towards a system. “Who do you say I am?” is the test, not “are you catching the vision?” and not “have you built enough relational chemistry with the one discipling you?” The goal is not theological uniformity produced by a leader’s oversight. It is encounter with the one who cannot be systematised.

Pastoral correction is a legitimate responsibility; the New Testament affirms it.

A line exists, and everything depends on where it falls.

The boundary between pastoral correction and conformity to a niche and highly programmatic reading of Scripture runs exactly through that question. Correcting someone who has departed from the faith the church confesses is one thing. Correcting someone who has departed from your novel interpretation of the faith is something else. The language here, “reviewed and refined,” does not distinguish between the two. It implies an active, ongoing, hands-on role in the inner workings of a Christian’s relationship with God and Scripture, with no stated limits on scope and no recognition that the leader’s own reading might be the one that needs refining.

A book is one thing. Pastoral practice is another …

On his church’s YouTube channel, Attwood has published his commentary on a review tool that he uses with “Core Groups”, another name for huddles. The tool invites leaders to assess themselves and their groups across four categories: “Come and Be With,” “Watch and Listen,” “Imitate and Practice,” and “Go and Share.” Each category is scored twice, first under “Understand and Trust,” and then under “Obey and Do.” That pairing matters. “Understand” might simply measure whether someone has grasped the teaching. “Trust,” however, reaches further. It asks whether the participant has internal confidence in the framework itself. In practice, the tool does not merely review behaviour; it reviews assent. Belief even.

This becomes especially significant in relation to “Imitate and Practice.” Imitation and practice are biblical themes, but here they are also named components within a particular discipleship programme. To score whether someone “understands and trusts” that category is therefore not merely to assess whether they believe Christian doctrine. It is to assess whether they have accepted the programme’s own account of how Christian formation works. That is a much more sensitive pastoral act. A participant may trust Christ, trust Scripture, and trust the church’s historic faith while remaining unconvinced by this particular training model. A healthy framework must leave room for that distinction.

When trust appears as a scored dimension of a participant’s development, low trust becomes a deficit in the participant. The tool has no corresponding mechanism for asking whether that trust has been earned. Trustworthiness belongs to the object of trust, not the subject. The object of trust is nowhere on the chart. If a participant’s score is low, the implied response is more formation: more proximity, more imitation, more investment in the programme. The mechanism for addressing low trust is greater exposure to the thing the participant does not yet trust. The loop closes from the inside. The New Testament word for trust is pistis, the word translated faith. It is directed at Christ. It is not a general disposition towards frameworks, leaders, or training systems. When confidence in a particular model of Christian formation is scored as a component of spiritual maturity, alongside obedience, imitation, and practice, something quiet has happened. The question the tool cannot ask is the one that matters most: trust in what, exactly? A participant who trusts Christ, reads Scripture carefully, and brings honest scepticism to a particular programme is, on any serious Christian account, doing what faith requires. The tool scores that scepticism as a deficit. It has placed something other than Christ in the position that Christ alone occupies.

Cameron’s framework is useful here once again. The normative voice is designed to hold a structural asymmetry: a privileged authority over both espoused and operant, speaking into the community’s life from outside it, capable of correcting both. The problem here is not that the registers have diverged, still audible to each other across the gap, but that the normative has been conscripted into the espoused register and is no longer available as a corrective. The Gospels are not functioning as an authority that challenges the system; they are functioning as the system’s self-description. In time, the espoused claim (“we are doing what the New Testament teaches”) becomes true in a sense its members cannot identify: this is simply what the New Testament, as they now encounter it, appears to say.

“Coached followers in readiness for suffering and future challenges”

Jesus did prepare the disciples for suffering. But what kind of suffering he was preparing them for requires attention.

The three Passion predictions in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34), the three occasions on which Jesus tells his disciples what is about to happen to him, are the most sustained examples of Jesus coaching his followers in readiness for what lay ahead. And in each case, the suffering he is preparing them for is his own. He is telling them what is about to happen to him: rejection, betrayal, death, and resurrection. This is not coaching in how to handle difficulty. It is the Messiah explaining the road to the cross.

When Jesus does speak of the disciples’ future suffering, the category is specific: persecution from the world because of their allegiance to him. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” (John 15:18). “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). The suffering Jesus promises is the cost of faithfulness to him in a world that rejected him. It comes from outside the community. It is the world’s response to the gospel.

That distinction, suffering for Christ versus suffering within the community, is enormous.

When the System Becomes the Suffering

The book states that there is “no discipleship-lite.” It states that Jesus’ training relationship with the Twelve is the normative pattern for all Christians, without exemption. It states that the leader’s role is to review, refine, and assess. And it states that resistance to this process is a spiritual problem in the follower rather than a structural problem in the system.

Follow that logic through. If the only real calling for a Christian is making disciples through this specific model, then a person who serves their church faithfully (leading toddler groups, serving on the worship team, running groups, visiting the sick, giving generously) but who does not participate in the programme is, within the framework, not really discipling. Their service cannot register as faithfulness, because the framework has no category for faithful Christians who serve God in ways the programme does not recognise. It only has categories for those who are in the programme and those who are not yet in the programme.

If someone steps back from the programme for any reason, whether busyness, discomfort, or honest disagreement, the framework interprets that withdrawal not as a legitimate decision but as a failure of commitment. If a parent’s capacity is taken up with raising young children, or caring for an ageing parent, or navigating a difficult season in their marriage, the framework’s logic renders that season spiritually inert, or worse, an obstacle to obedience. And because the system has already established that suffering and resistance are to be expected, the distress this produces in people is absorbed into the model as confirmation rather than as warning.

The circuit is predictable. The programme defines faithfulness narrowly. People whose faithfulness does not fit the definition feel like failures. Because the language sounds biblical, the instinct of a faithful Christian is to assume the problem must be with them. They search their consciences. They pray. They try harder. This has been documented time and again, in multiple articles I have written on this site, and by many voices on the Schooley Files website. The possibility that the framework itself might be too narrow, or that the leader’s definition of faithfulness might exclude things God values, is not available within the system. If you are struggling, the explanation is insufficient commitment. If you push back, the explanation is spiritual resistance. If you leave, the explanation offered to those who remain is that you were not willing to pay the cost, and your departure becomes evidence that the programme is on the right track, because Jesus said his followers would face opposition.

This is where the conflation of categories does its most damaging work. The suffering Jesus promised, persecution from the world for his name’s sake, has been replaced by suffering produced by the programme, for the sake of the programme. The theological language makes it almost impossible to tell the difference from the inside.

Cameron’s directional claim completes its journey within this single practice. The espoused theology correctly identifies a real category: Jesus did promise that following him would cost something. The cost is real, and for many Christians around the world, such as in Nigeria, that cost remains incredibly high. But the operant practice has relabelled that cost. Suffering produced by the programme has been described using the vocabulary of the normative category so consistently, and for long enough, that the two have become indistinguishable from the inside. The operative question Cameron’s framework asks, what does this community’s behaviour reveal about what it believes, yields a different answer from what the community would give if asked. What it believes, as demonstrated by what it does, is that the distress the programme produces is the cost Jesus promised. The normative text did not teach that. The operant practice has.

The Leader’s Suffering

One further dynamic deserves examination. Leaders in these systems often share that they are suffering too: suffering the criticism, the loneliness of unpopular decisions, the burden of vision that others cannot yet see. This suffering is real, and it deserves to be named honestly. Parish ministry is one of the hardest jobs in public life. Clergy absorb things most professionals never encounter: the grief of people at their worst, the anger of congregants who have nowhere else to direct it, the peculiar cruelty that some people reserve for those they consider safe to wound. They are paid less than the work demands, expected to be available beyond what any other role would require, and often carry the weight of a community’s spiritual life without anything resembling adequate support. The job is genuinely difficult before a single additional programmatic expectation is added. None of that is in dispute. The question that deserves to be held open, and that we will return to later, is whether the work should be costing what it is costing, and whether the model itself is producing a kind of strain on its leaders that the New Testament neither promises nor requires.

Because Paul’s model of suffering alongside his churches is instructive, because it looks nothing like this. Paul catalogues his sufferings in extraordinary detail: “in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequently, in deaths often” (2 Corinthians 11:23). His suffering was always greater than what he asked of his congregations, not less. The leader bore more. That is the cruciform pattern: authority expressed through sacrifice, flowing downward rather than demanding compliance upward.

When a leader claims to be suffering alongside their congregation, a question clarifies the picture: is the leader suffering the cost of serving others sacrificially? Or is the leader suffering the consequences of decisions that have hurt others? These are not the same thing. A leader who has spent themselves in genuine service, who has given more than they have asked, who has borne the heaviest load: that leader’s suffering follows the pattern of Christ.

A leader who is experiencing opposition because congregants are distressed by the programme’s demands, or who is watching a congregation dwindle because half of it is being pressed for more than it can give while the other half is ignored, is experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices. The leaders inside these systems are, by any fair measure, working extraordinarily hard. The sleeplessness is not a pose, and the genuine ache to see people flourish is real. The two kinds of suffering, the cruciform kind and the consequence kind, may feel identical from the inside because the work is relentless, and it is difficult to imagine, when you are so embedded in it, that the exhaustion might be pointing at the model rather than vindicating it. They are not identical from the outside.

Where Does This End?

The question this practice raises, one the book does not answer, is: where are the limits?

If a leader operates within a framework that says Jesus coached his followers in readiness for suffering, and if the contemporary leader stands in Jesus’ place, and if the demands of discipleship have no ceiling, then what can the programme not ask? Can it tell someone that their commitment to matters outside the church is displeasing to God? Can it tell someone that their years of faithful service to the church have no value unless redirected through the programme? Can it tell someone that stepping back from the programme, for any reason, however personal, disqualifies them from visible ministry? Can it redefine a person’s entire understanding of what it means to be a faithful Christian, so thoroughly that the person spends years believing they are a failure for not meeting a standard that the church’s classical traditions have not recognised?

The framework, as the book presents it, provides no boundary that would prevent any of these things. And the coaching in readiness for suffering ensures that when the programme produces exactly this kind of pain, the pain itself is interpreted as evidence of faithfulness rather than as a warning that something has gone wrong.

Jesus said: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). A system that produces weariness, burdens its people with an ever-expanding definition of what faithfulness requires, and then tells them that their exhaustion is the cost of following Jesus, has not coached them in readiness for suffering. It has become the suffering.

A Word About “Spiritual Attack”

One further pattern needs naming, because it is the pattern that makes all the others unassailable.

The book warns its readers to expect resistance, resistance that is “normal both humanly and spiritually speaking.” It frames opposition to the programme as, at least in part, the work of “dark forces that don’t want us to look like Jesus and the Twelve.” I have documented this mechanism in my Coercive Control Toolkit; the rendering of opposition as spiritual attack is one of the most reliable markers of a high-control system. It is the pattern that closes the last door. Once disagreement has been categorised as demonic, there is no form of critique that the system cannot absorb and neutralise.

But the spiritual warfare framing is not the only door-closing mechanism. Chapter 9 describes those not engaged in active pioneering as being “ten miles from the front line,” moaning about the rations, people whose discomfort with the demands of discipleship reveals a failure of nerve rather than a legitimate concern: the Israelites longing for Egypt. A third layer runs throughout the book: if the programme’s demands are producing strain, the explanation offered is that you have not yet paid the cost, that your commitment is insufficient. Three mechanisms, operating in parallel: demonic resistance, carnal nostalgia, failure of commitment. A congregant who voices concern can be absorbed by any one of them. There is no form of disagreement that all three cannot contain.

Cameron’s framework names this with particular precision. Of the four voices of theology, it is the formal voice (the theology the wider church has worked out through scholarship, councils, and centuries of reflection) that functions as the external check on any local community’s espoused and operant registers. It is the voice designed to hold both accountable to something the community did not generate for itself. The spiritual warfare mechanism does not merely close the door against individual critics. It structurally expels the formal voice from the conversation before it can speak. What has been classified as the enemy’s work is not primarily these concerns, raised by these people, at this moment. It is the entire register of externally accountable theological scrutiny: the one thing, in Cameron’s framework, that an entrenched operant theology cannot simply absorb and neutralise on its own terms.

The theological concerns raised in this review and in Rewriting the Gospels are not novel. They are not hostile. They are not the work of the enemy. They are the concerns of orthodox, evangelical, creedal Christianity. For want of a better phrase, a “family disagreement”. The Christological problems identified in this book review follow the same sort of concern the Nicene fathers addressed in the fourth century. The hermeneutical issues are the same ones that responsible New Testament scholarship has been articulating for centuries. The ecclesiological concerns, about accountability, congregational voice, and the priesthood of all believers, are foundational Protestant convictions shared across the mainstream Reformed and evangelical traditions, and they are written into the Church of England’s own formularies: the supremacy of Scripture, the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice, the rejection of any human authority that would interpose itself between the believer and the Lord.

If a framework treats that as the enemy’s work, if the considered, careful, biblically grounded theology of the historic church is filed under “dark forces” and “resistant inherited thinking,” then something has gone wrong. Not with the people raising the concerns. With the framework that cannot hear them.

John Calvin, whom Attwood cites in support of his Christology, had something to say about leaders who elevate their own interpretations to the status of divine command. In the Institutes,⁸ Calvin warns against the terrible burden placed on believers when human traditions are presented as necessary for true obedience. He observes that when “perverse legislators have usurped authority, they make no end of their commands and prohibitions until they reach the extreme of harshness” .

Calvin spent his life insisting that God alone is the lawgiver of conscience and that the Christian’s conscience is free before God. No human authority, however sincere, devout, or confident, has the right to bind it beyond what Scripture plainly commands. He would have recognised what is happening when a specific interpretation, drawn from a contested theological stream, is presented as “the command of Jesus himself,” and all objections are pre-emptively categorised as spiritual resistance.

What Calvin was diagnosing can fairly be named tyranny over conscience: Book IV, Chapter 10 of the Institutes is devoted to confronting it. He argued that when leaders enact rules pertaining to the soul and demand total surrender to their own agenda, they invade the kingdom of Christ and subvert his authority. A fair-minded objection notes that Calvin’s precise target was ecclesiastical traditions presented as necessary for salvation, and that the 3DM model makes no such explicit claim. The structural pattern, however, is what Calvin was identifying: a human reading of faithfulness elevated to the status of divine command, objection categorised as resistance to God, and no mechanism by which a follower can name the requirement as the leader’s rather than Christ’s. That shape does not require the salvation-language to be present. It requires only that the gap between the leader’s interpretation and the word of Christ has been closed by assertion. That is the shape Calvin was confronting. It is also, on a plain reading, the shape of what the book describes.

The Church has survived nearly two thousand years of genuine persecution: imprisonment, torture, martyrdom, the full weight of empires bent on its destruction. It did not survive by treating theological critique from fellow believers as spiritual warfare. It survived because it had the humility to test its own claims, the courage to correct its own errors, and the confidence that the truth does not need to be protected from scrutiny. A framework that cannot tolerate examination by the very orthodoxy it claims to represent is not under spiritual attack. It is under theological scrutiny. And if it cannot tell the difference, then something has gone seriously wrong.

“Served them as a model to imitate”

Modelling is biblical. Jesus said “follow me.” He said “I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:15); the example he was setting, at that moment, was washing feet. Paul said “follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The New Testament is clear: Christians learn partly by watching other Christians. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what happens when this principle is placed inside the system this book describes. Before getting to the concerns, a genuine confusion deserves acknowledgment: the misreading is understandable.

How the Misreading Happens

When people read Paul’s “imitate me as I imitate Christ,” they hear a sequence. A chain. Christ is the original. Paul imitates Christ. You imitate Paul. The leader imitates Christ. You imitate the leader. It sounds humble: the leader is not claiming to be Christ, just to be further along the path. In a casual reading, that is a reasonable way to hear the sentence. I suspect it is how many leaders in this tradition understand it: I am already imitating Christ, so you can save time by imitating me. But that is not what Paul wrote, and the reason becomes clear the moment you read the verse in the argument that produces it.

Reading the Verse in Its Argument

In our Bibles, “imitate me, as I imitate Christ” opens a new chapter. In Paul’s original letter, it does nothing of the kind. The chapter divisions were added by Stephen Langton in the thirteenth century, many centuries after Paul was dead. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians as a continuous argument, and 11:1 is not the start of anything. It is the closing sentence of a sustained argument that begins at 8:1 and runs unbroken for three chapters.

The argument across chapters 8, 9, and 10 is about one question: how should a Christian exercise their legitimate freedom when doing so may damage a weaker brother or sister? Chapter 8 sets up the problem. The Corinthian “strong,” believers with a correct understanding that idols are nothing, had concluded that food offered to idols was spiritually neutral and could be eaten without concern. They were not theologically wrong. But Paul’s charge against them is not that they were wrong. It is that their knowledge, technically correct, was destroying weaker believers whose consciences could not absorb the sight of Christians eating in idol temples. Paul’s verdict is unforgettable: “this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died” (1 Corinthians 8:11). The person damaged by the strong’s exercise of freedom is not incidental. He is someone over whom Christ’s blood was also specifically spilled.

Chapter 9 is Paul’s extended demonstration of the alternative. He catalogues the rights he possesses as an apostle: the right to financial support, the right to be accompanied by a wife, the right to refrain from manual labour. He announces that he has surrendered every one of these rights for the sake of the gospel and for the sake of the people he serves. He becomes all things to all people. He makes himself a servant to everyone. He lays down his legitimate freedoms one after another, not because he lacks them, but because their exercise would damage the weaker brother.

Chapter 10 warns the Corinthians against presuming on their own standing, reminds them of the incompatibility of the Lord’s table and the table of demons, and closes with a summary: “do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God. Even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved” (1 Corinthians 10:32-33).

And then, with no break in the sense: “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (11:1). The call to imitation is the closing line of this argument. It is not a general endorsement of Christian imitation. It is a specific call to imitate the pattern Paul has just spent three chapters demonstrating from his own life: the voluntary surrender of one’s legitimate freedoms for the sake of weaker brothers and sisters, because they are people for whom Christ died.

The Content of the Imitation

This changes what the verse is asking of the reader. Paul is not saying “imitate my authority.” He is not saying “imitate my personality.” He is not saying “imitate my methods.” He is saying, “imitate my willingness to lay my authority down.” Christ, who had every prerogative of deity, emptied himself and became a servant. Paul, who has every right of apostleship, waives them. The Corinthian believers are called to imitate this same movement: the movement of becoming less for the sake of others. The qualifier “as I imitate Christ” is not a floating safety clause. It specifies the direction. Imitate me in this respect: in my conformity to Christ’s self-emptying. Not in any other respect. Not in my authority, not in my correctness, not in my personality. In my willingness, modelled on Christ’s, to surrender what I have every right to hold, for the sake of the people for whom Christ died.

The Framework Has Inverted the Direction

In the framework, “imitate me, as I imitate Christ” becomes the warrant for followers to pattern their lives on the leader. The leader stands as the model. The follower watches the leader and conforms. The progression Breen describes, Friend, Follower, Family, culminates in followers who “surrender completely, laying down their agenda fully for the agenda of Jesus,” which, in practice and as the earlier sections of this review have documented, means laying down their agenda fully for the agenda of the leader. The self-emptying is required of the follower. The leader receives what the follower has surrendered.

Place that alongside what Paul is saying. In Paul’s argument, it is the one with authority who empties himself. Paul surrenders his rights for the sake of the Corinthians. Christ surrendered his prerogatives for the sake of us all. The direction of self-emptying is downward, from the stronger to the weaker. The framework reverses this. It calls the weaker to empty themselves upward, into the life of the stronger. It asks followers to lay down their agendas for the sake of a leader, rather than leaders to lay down their rights for the sake of followers.

This is not a subtle difference. It is the exact inversion of what Paul called the Corinthians to imitate.

And there is a further consequence. In Paul’s framework, the people whose consciences might be damaged by the exercise of legitimate freedom are people for whom Christ died. They are owed, by that fact alone, the protection of being spared damage. The strong are to limit themselves because the weak are beyond price. In the framework documented in this review, the people whose consciences are being destabilised by the review-and-refine, by the spiritual attack framing, by the redefinition of faithfulness, by the gated access to leadership, find their distress already named and categorised. Spiritual immaturity. Failure of commitment. Resistance to the work of the Spirit. The framework has a category for what they are experiencing, and that category places the problem inside the person experiencing it. Paul said the weak brother destroyed by the strong is a brother for whom Christ died. The framework finds the weak brother destabilised by the programme is a brother who needs to “understand and trust” better.

What Was Modelled

Neither Jesus nor Paul modelled what the framework replicates.

Jesus modelled service, sacrifice, self-emptying, and death. The foot-washing. The cross. “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The model is cruciform. It is not a leadership style to be replicated but a pattern of dying to self. When Jesus said “I have set you an example,” the example was kneeling on the floor with a towel. The imitation he calls for is of his posture, not his methods.

Paul was transparent about his own inadequacy. “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do; this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). “I was given a thorn in my flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7). Paul modelled not competence but dependence, a life that pointed through its own weakness to the sufficiency of Christ. He never said “imitate my system.” He never said “imitate my leadership style.” He said imitate me as I imitate Christ, and he made sure the congregation could see the gap between who he was and who Christ is. The transparency was the point. It kept the arrow pointing through Paul to Christ rather than terminating at Paul.

Jesus’s own diversity of approach resists the entire concept of imitation-as-replication. He was gentle with the broken and fierce with the powerful. He was patient with the confused and devastating with the self-righteous. He was silent before Pilate and volcanic in the temple. He wept at a tomb and overturned tables in a court. A “model to imitate” that produces uniformity has missed, in my opinion who Jesus is. Because during his earthly ministry, Jesus was so alive to each moment, each encounter, each human being in front of him, that he could not be systematised. You cannot put Jesus in a flowchart.

I agree that following Jesus should be our life’s calling. This is not the way to do it.

Movement 3: The Shapes of Authority

This movement examines the expansion of pastoral authority within the system. It reviews the practices of leaders providing input on a follower’s character, holiness, and life priorities, culminating in the explicit expectation of obedience. The following sections look at how this comprehensive oversight parallels the Shepherding Movement of previous decades, effectively closing the necessary gap between the authority of the incarnate Son of God and the authority of an ordinary church leader.

“Gave followers input to develop character, holiness and life priorities”

Character. Holiness. Life priorities.

Character is who you are : your inner life, your temperament, your patterns of thought and behaviour. Holiness is your relationship with God : the Spirit’s work of setting you apart, conforming you to the image of Christ. Life priorities are everything else : where you work, how you spend your time, what you give your energy to, how you structure your days, what you choose to do with the life God has given you.

This phrase lays claim to every minute of a person’s day. Not their work. Not their rest. Not their inner life. Not their relationship with God. Not the practical decisions that shape their ordinary existence. A leader given licence to provide “input” on character, holiness, and life priorities has been given licence to speak into everything. No domain falls outside the scope. At no moment is the person free to follow Jesus without the leader’s input hovering over the landscape.

I am aware that comparing this to the heavy shepherding movement of the 1970s and 80s might sound hyperbolic. So let me start by saying that this book is not advocating for heavy shepherding. But look at what is written here, and consider where the difference lies.

A Movement the Church Has Already Judged

The Shepherding Movement of the 1970s and 80s placed every believer under a personal “shepherd” with authority to speak into major life decisions: who to marry, where to live, how to spend money, where to work. It was led by Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson, Don Basham, and Ern Baxter. The language was warm: “covering,” “protection,” “spiritual fatherhood.” The vocabulary was scriptural. The fruit was devastating. Marriages were directed. Finances were supervised. Careers were redirected. Pat Robertson called it a “charismatic heresy.” Several of its own founders eventually repudiated it publicly.

Its important to discuss this not for what this earlier discipleship movement did at its worst. It is what major charismatic and evangelical critics actually repudiated. Pat Robertson and others were not principally calling for better shepherds. They were arguing that a specific category of authority should not be claimed at all: the claim that certain leaders occupy a spiritually privileged role as ongoing overseers of a believer’s obedience, maturity, and ordinary personal decision-making. The condemnation was of the warrant, not merely the execution. That distinction is the reason a “bad leaders” defence does not work. The authority claim precedes the individual who holds it, and the critique was of the claim.

This matters because the argument here is not against pastoral care, mentoring, accountability, or spiritual friendship. The church has always recognised those things. The disputed category is narrower: the structural expansion of pastoral authority into a directional, ongoing role over the whole of a believer’s life.

The vocabulary has changed since the 1970s. “Shepherd” has become “spiritual parent.” “Covering” has become “accountability.” “Submission” has become “being discipled.” The language is warmer and the methods are less directive. That difference is important and should be acknowledged.

The category of claim has not changed. A leader given licence to provide “input” on character, holiness, and life priorities is a leader claiming ongoing oversight of a believer’s inner life, spiritual life, and practical existence. Robertson’s condemnation was methodological before it was moral: he assessed what the structure produced in practice rather than accepting the espoused vocabulary at face value. He looked at operant theology. The same methodology, applied here, asks the same question: what does a claim to speak into character, holiness, and life priorities actually produce in the lives of those subject to it? That question has precedent within the same charismatic evangelical tradition this model inhabits. It is not an imposition from outside. It is how this tradition has already learned to assess itself.

The scope claimed here warrants the same scrutiny. Character is the whole inner life. Holiness is the whole spiritual life. Life priorities are everything else. Together, these constitute a claim on every domain. The Shepherding controversy established, for those who took its critics seriously, that claiming this scope is the problem. Not in every instance. Not inevitably. But as a structural feature, it creates the conditions under which the authority entrusted to a leader and the authority that belongs to Christ alone become difficult to distinguish. That difficulty is not an accident. It is the nature of the claim.

What Jesus Did

Jesus did develop character. But look at how.

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ most sustained ethical teaching, his deepest engagement with character, holiness, and the priorities of a life lived under God. And it is public. It is addressed to crowds on a hillside, not delivered in a private coaching session with selected individuals. It is available to everyone. It requires no mediator to administer it. And when Jesus does engage individuals, the rich young ruler, Zacchaeus, Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the encounters are strikingly brief. A single challenge. A visit. A night conversation. A question at a well. These are not management relationships. They are moments in which a person encounters Jesus and is changed.

Where Growth Happens

Paul’s vision of character formation locates growth somewhere very different from a leader-follower coaching dyad. “Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). Growth happens in the body. It happens through mutual truthfulness. It happens through love that flows between believers, not downward from a leader. The head directing the growth is Christ, not the pastor.

A leader can recognise the fruit of the Spirit in another believer, “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23), and can encourage its growth. That is ordinary pastoral ministry, and no serious account of Christian community disputes it. The disputed claim is narrower: that a leader holds a structural, ongoing role in assessing and managing the process that produces that fruit, and that submitting to this role is a biblical requirement rather than a personal choice. Sanctification is the Spirit’s work, visible in its fruit but hidden in its operations. A programme that positions the leader as the assessor of that hidden process has not deepened pastoral care. It has given the pastoral office a function the New Testament does not assign it. Before that claim can be examined on its own terms, the understanding of holiness it depends on deserves attention. The stream from which this model draws has inherited an account of holiness that has already passed through several compressions before reaching its current form.

Wesley’s vision of entire sanctification (the love of God filling the whole person, expressed in a transformed social life) gave way, through Keswick, to a narrower account: a crisis of consecration, followed by freedom from the “besetting sin” blocking the Spirit’s flow. What Wesley understood as a long work of transformation became a dateable event of surrender. The subsequent charismatic waves compressed it further: holiness became the quality visible in the anointed, the fruitful, the Spirit-empowered for mission. By the time Attwood’s framework inherits this account, “holiness” has come to mean something functionally specific: the kind of person the programme needs, open, available, aligned with the vision, giving generously to the mission.⁷ The Spirit’s fruit is present in the vocabulary, but the mechanism the New Testament locates between the believer and the Spirit (which Paul insists in Galatians 5 is not a programme but a person) has been replaced by structured relationships managed by another human being. The assessment of holiness, whether someone is growing in it and what is blocking it, has migrated from the Spirit’s hidden work to the leader’s visible management. To claim “input” on holiness, understood this way, is not to deepen it. It is to relocate it.

Jesus told people to seek first the kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33). He did not give them personalised life-priority frameworks administered by a leader. He pointed them to God and trusted the Spirit to do the rest. A model that inserts a human figure between the believer and that process, with authority over their character, their holiness, and the priorities of their daily life, has not deepened discipleship. It has replaced the Holy Spirit with a manager.

“Expected obedience from his close followers”

This is where the theological work of the previous sections becomes operational. Everything documented so far, the selection, the concentric circles, the reviewing, the coaching, the shared life, the modelling, culminates here. This is where the Christological question becomes a question about your actual life. The question of obedience is the question on which the framework’s claim on the believer stands or falls.

Attwood states it directly: “These principles are not options for those who might like them. These are training requirements according to the command of Jesus himself.”

Jesus did expect obedience. “If you love me, keep my commands” (John 14:15). “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46). The Gospels are unambiguous about this. Following Jesus meant doing what he said. The call to obedience is not an invention of the discipleship model. It is a feature of the Gospels themselves.

The question is not whether Jesus expected obedience. He did. The question is what made that expectation legitimate, and whether the same legitimacy transfers to a human leader, and to Attwood’s practices as described in his book.

The Foundation of the Claim

The theological foundation for Jesus’ expectation of obedience is his unique divine identity. He is the incarnate Son of God. His commands are the commands of God. When he says “follow me,” the call carries the weight of the one through whom all things were made (John 1:3), in whom all the fullness of God lives in bodily form (Colossians 2:9), who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18). The obedience he expects is the obedience a creature owes its Creator. It is not earned through competence or charisma. It is grounded in ontology: in who Jesus is.

This is why the Christological question documented in Rewriting the Gospels is not an abstract theological debate.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure. If Jesus operated as the unique divine Son of God, then his expectation of obedience is grounded in an identity that no human being shares. The practice is non-transferable: not because obedience is wrong, but because the foundation for this kind of obedience does not exist in any other person. I am perfectly able to accept Jesus’ call to follow him, whilst rejecting Andrew Attwood’s invitation to follow his practices.

If, however, Jesus operated primarily as a Spirit-empowered human being, the flattened Christology the book requires, then the gap between Jesus and the leader narrows. A Spirit-empowered leader can do what a Spirit-empowered Jesus did. And a Spirit-empowered Jesus who expected obedience becomes the precedent for a Spirit-empowered leader who expects obedience.

The entire transfer depends on that Christological flattening. Without it, there is no bridge. With it, there is no limit.

What Jesus Commanded

It is also worth looking at the content of Jesus’ commands, because they are not what a programme of organisational obedience requires.

Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbour as yourself. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Forgive, not seven times but seventy-seven times. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Believe in me. Take up your cross and follow me. Do not worry about tomorrow. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Go and make disciples of all nations.

These commands are radical. They are costly. Several of them are, by human effort alone, impossible. Every one of them is a command to orient your life towards God and towards others. Jesus did commission specific people to speak on his behalf, the apostles most clearly, but none of his commands to ordinary disciples took the form of submission to an organisational framework. His commands to his followers were commands about how to live, not about whose programme to join. Jesus addressed people already shaped by organised renewal movements, the Pharisees most prominently, each with its own structures, disciplines, and markers of faithfulness. He knew what a programme looked like, and his commands took none of those forms. Jesus commanded allegiance to himself and love for the world. He did not command allegiance to a system.

The transfer also changes the content of obedience. When “Jesus expected obedience” becomes “your leader expects obedience,” the commands shift too. The obedience is no longer to “love your neighbour” or “take up your cross.” It is to attend the huddle, follow the programme, accept the leader’s review, “understand and trust”, submit your life priorities to the leader’s input, and remain within the structure. These may or may not be good things to do. But they are not the commands of Jesus. They are the requirements of a system. The requirements of the system are enforced by appeal to the authority of Jesus’ commands.

That language, “the command of Jesus himself,” is not peripheral to the argument. It is the argument’s centre. The book’s principles, arrived at through Attwood’s reading of the Gospels, are presented as carrying the binding force of Jesus’ direct command. The gap that should run between any human leader’s interpretation and the word of Christ has been closed by assertion. What the system requires and what Jesus commands have become, on this account, the same thing.

What the Framework Permits

The framework is not abstract about which acts of Jesus are available for imitation. Appendix 8 of the book lists, explicitly, aspects of Christ’s life “to possibly imitate.” Among them: the cleansing of the temple court, the denunciation of towns that rejected his ministry, and the deliverance of a man described as demonised.

This is a list, and lists carry meaning by what they include and what they exclude. The church has always recognised a difference between what Jesus did as a human being that anyone could in principle follow (his compassion, his prayer life, his willingness to eat with people no one else would touch, his pattern of withdrawal and return) and what he did as the one person in history authorised to act as Israel’s returning Lord. When Jesus drove the traders from the temple, he was enacting what Malachi had promised: the Lord arriving suddenly at his own house. When he pronounced woe on Chorazin and Bethsaida, the weight of those words came from the fact that they had been in the presence of the one who would judge the nations. These are not acts that carry transferable authority. They belong to who Jesus was in a way that no follower, however Spirit-filled, shares. Appendix 8 places them in the same column as his prayer habits and his care for the sick.

The practical consequences of a list without distinctions deserve attention rather than assumption. The concern is not that every leader formed by this framework will read the temple cleansing as a warrant for removing those who do not belong, or will read the woes over Chorazin and Bethsaida as a model for pronouncing judgment over those who have rejected their ministry. The concern is that the list offers no reason not to. A framework that places those acts alongside prayer habits and table fellowship, without distinguishing what belonged to Jesus’ unique vocation, leaves the leader without an internal check when those possibilities present themselves.

The same caution applies to the presence of “delivered demonised man” among the imitable acts. Deliverance ministry is not outside the scope of Christian practice, but has important guardrails. The concern is not its presence but its placement: undifferentiated, alongside acts of compassion and service, in a list the book presents as straightforwardly available for imitation. The history of charismatic renewal, including the network Attwood writes from, includes serious harm arising from its misapplication. A list that provides no guidance about where particular care is required offers no protection when that care is absent.

The companion piece examined the theology that makes all of this possible: the Christological flattening that dissolves the distinction between what Christ alone could do and what any Spirit-empowered leader can do.

The Pattern of Failure

Jesus’ followers failed. Constantly. Spectacularly. And Jesus did correct them, sometimes sharply. “Get behind me, Satan” is not gentle pastoral redirection. But the correction always pointed toward restoration, not exclusion. Peter denied him three times in a single night, and Jesus restored him with a question asked three times on a beach: “Do you love me?” (John 21:15-17). Not “have you learned your lesson?” Not “are you ready to comply now?” Just: do you love me? Thomas refused to believe without evidence, and Jesus appeared to him, showed him the wounds, and said “stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27). He met the doubt with presence. The disciples fled when he was arrested. Every single one of them. And after the resurrection, he found them, commissioned them, and sent the Spirit to complete what three years of proximity had not.

The pattern is not compliance → reward, non-compliance → correction. The pattern is failure → correction-toward-restoration → commission. The relationship between Jesus and his followers was not a performance-managed one. It was a covenantal one, held together not by the disciples’ obedience but by Jesus’ faithfulness. They failed him repeatedly. He never failed them once.

Any model that claims to replicate Jesus’ expectation of obedience must also replicate this pattern of response to failure. If obedience is expected but failure is met with withdrawal of relational warmth, exclusion from visible ministry, or reclassification as spiritually immature, then whatever is being replicated, it is not the pattern of the Gospels.

The Unanswerable Question

Three movements have now documented the same pattern at three different levels. The community has been organised so that access flows through the leader. Formation has been organised so that growth flows through the leader. Authority has been organised so that the whole of the believer’s life, character, holiness, priorities, obedience, flows through the leader. At each level, the structure routes through a human being what the New Testament routes through Christ. The leader does not claim Christ’s identity. The leader simply occupies, in operant terms, the position the cross was supposed to have made structurally unique to Him.

That occupation rests, as the companion piece argues, on a Christological move that closes the gap between what Christ alone could do and what any Spirit-empowered leader can do. If that move holds, a question follows from it, not a question imposed on the framework from outside, but a question the framework has, by the shape of its own claim, made available to every disciple inside it. It is the question Jesus put to Peter at Caesarea Philippi, turned back the other way.

“Who do you say I am?” was the load-bearing question of the Gospels. Peter’s answer, “You are the Messiah” , was the hinge on which everything turned. The question worked because Jesus could answer it, and the answer he could give was the foundation on which the call to obedience, surrender, and the laying down of one’s life was warranted. The disciples could follow because they could, eventually, name the one they were following. If the leader now occupies the position from which Christ called the disciples, selecting them, reviewing them, expecting their obedience, claiming input on their character, holiness, and priorities, then the disciple is entitled to put to the leader the question that Peter answered about Christ.

Who are you ?

The question is unanswerable. Not because the leader is inadequate to it, but because the structure has placed them where no answer is available. Two answers exist. “I am the Christ” is obviously not on offer; no leader in this network would speak it, and none believes it. “I am simply your fellow disciple” is the answer most leaders would sincerely want to give, and the answer the espoused theology gives on their behalf. But it is the answer the operant structure cannot allow to stand. A fellow disciple does not select the close community. A fellow disciple does not review and refine your beliefs and practice. A fellow disciple does not expect the surrender of your agenda or provide input on the priorities of your daily life. The structure either belongs to someone with more authority than a fellow disciple, or it does not belong to anyone at all. There is no third answer.

Conclusion

Eight practices have been examined in these pages. They are not eight independent problems. Each is an instance of one structure: a discipline of attention pointed away from the centre.

That sentence will sound strange, so let me earn it.

In The Day the Revolution Began³, Tom Wright reads the human vocation through the opening chapters of Genesis. Humanity, made in God’s image, is set in the world as a kind of priesthood . The vocation is double-sided. We are to receive what the Creator gives and turn our attention towards him; we are to reflect his wisdom and care into the creation we have been given to tend. The fall, on this reading, is not chiefly the breaking of a rule. It is the abdication of the priesthood. Humanity diverted its ultimate attention away from the Creator and fixed it upon the created order. The orientation of the human heart was fundamentally fractured.³

The cross and resurrection exist to reverse this precise fracture. Christ, standing as the true and faithful one, restores the priesthood. He re-establishes the unbroken attention of the human heart on its Maker. The Christian is called to hold that attention squarely on Christ, enjoying a direct and unmediated connection with God that requires no earthly guarantor. Pentecost confirms it. The Spirit is poured out on all flesh, slave and free, male and female, newest convert and oldest disciple, and the priesthood is universal because Christ has made it so. There is no inner caste of those who attend on behalf of others. There has not been one, since the curtain tore.

Now read the eight practices through that frame.

The selection of those who ‘catch the vision’. The graded proximity of seventy-two, twelve, three. The shared life and the deep relationship. The review and refinement of belief and practice. The coaching for suffering. The imitation. The input on character and life priorities. The expectation of obedience.

Each names a stream of attention. Whose words are we listening for? Whose example are we patterning ourselves on? Whose reading of Scripture is forming our reading? Whose interpretation of our suffering are we accepting? Whose voice tells us whether we are progressing? In each case, the answer is not the one the cross gave. The cross gave us Christ, unmediated. The framework, on top of that gift, has placed someone else in the line of sight.

To place a leader or a program at the centre of a disciple’s formation is to recreate the fundamental error of the garden. It asks the believer to fix their ultimate gaze upon a creature.

This is not, in the structural sense, hyperbole. It is the description of what such a system produces, regardless of what anyone inside it intends. The disciple does not set out to give a leader the kind of attention that belongs elsewhere. The leader does not set out to receive it. But where attention is ordered, the heart follows the order. A system that channels the believer’s attention towards itself, week after week, year after year, has done a kind of work on the soul that no one’s good intention can undo.

What that work produces is the question this conclusion has to face honestly.

For the disciple under the gaze: attention given, validation received in return, an experience of belonging that has been organised around proximity to a particular person, these are the conditions under which the heart will turn. C.S. Lewis describes pride as the great sin, the spiritual cancer that eats up the possibility of love or contentment or even common sense.⁹ Its quieter cousin is the pride of being chosen: the warmth of being on the inside, the small heat that runs through the veins on hearing one’s name spoken with the right kind of weight. It rarely arrives announcing itself. It arrives as a feeling of significance. I’ve used the term inner-ring throughout this piece, because the kind of culture this kind of framework risks, or even necessitates creating, is described ever so well by Lewis¹⁰.

“Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in?”

He then describes the consequences:

“And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.”

For the leader receiving the gaze, the danger is greater still. There is no class of human being who can absorb sustained attention without being shaped by it. The older traditions of the church understood this and built whole disciplines around precisely this danger: vows of silence, the sharing of poverty, communities of equals holding strict accountability, the practices of confession and self-examination, the structured daily dying to self. These were not pious extras. They were the apparatus that made it possible for a person to occupy a position of spiritual authority without fracturing under it.

The contemporary leader inside the framework documented in these pages operates without any of these protections. Shared leadership, external accountability, the freedom of the congregation to disagree, the structures the wider church has inherited as safeguards, are absent. The leader is handed the unfiltered attention of a community of followers and expected to carry it without distortion. The human soul is not built for this. When a person is constantly deferred to, constantly imitated, and treated as the primary conduit for God’s wisdom, they are placed in a danger no good intention can outrun. The leader is asked to hold a place the New Testament reserves for the Son of God. The tragedy is that the leader often accepts the position believing they are doing God’s work, while the structure produces their gradual isolation, enclosing them in an echo chamber of their own spiritual authority.

What of those who were not selected? The framework’s silent third group. They are not under the gaze, and to that extent are spared its peculiar gravity. But they are not outside the system; they are watching it from below. When proximity to the leader is the mark of spiritual maturity, what happens to the person on the outside? Do they strive anxiously for visibility, hoping to say the right words and display the right enthusiasm to earn an invitation in? Do they shape their behaviour to catch the eye of the one who holds the keys? Do they begin to see their brothers and sisters as competitors for a scarce spiritual resource? Where is their attention and focus directed?

Or does the exclusion breed a different kind of quiet damage? Does the person on the outside grow a hard, cynical shell? Do they look at the curated inner ring and retreat into a silent superiority, certain they see what the others miss? Do they nurse a quiet contempt for the earnest striving of those further in?

Lewis would recognise both. The structure leaves no safe ground. Every position relative to the leader generates its own distinct spiritual hazard.

The shape of all this can be seen most clearly in the place where Christian community has, for two thousand years, been most concretely enacted: the table.

The Communion table is radically open. Christ is the host. Christ is the mediator. The invitation comes from him, and the ground around the table is level. The elements are given to all who are baptised, regardless of status, of usefulness to a mission, or of personal chemistry with the clergy. The Eucharist embodies the restored priesthood. It demonstrates, in physical action, that every believer holds direct and equal access to the grace of God.

The framework documented in these pages, without ever saying so, replaces this table with another. The leader’s dinner table. The domestic table, the shared meal, the evening meetup, the family-on-mission gathering becomes the site at which spiritual formation is understood to occur most deeply. Access to it is by invitation only. It requires the right cultural fit, the demonstrated readiness to submit, the explicit approval of the host. The leader decides who eats, who is welcomed into the inner life, and who remains outside. The unmediated connection with God, enacted universally in the Eucharist, becomes a gated experience curated by a human host. The locus of spiritual significance shifts from the sacrament given freely to the whole church, to the dinner party arranged by the vicar.

When Jesus died, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom. The direction is theology. From top to bottom, by God’s hand, not by any human’s. The barrier the Old Covenant could not resolve was resolved at the moment of the Son’s death. The access the cross secured is total and permanent. It cannot be mediated, managed, or restricted by any human architecture built on top of it. The newest convert , baptised yesterday, stands on the same ground as the apostle Paul. This is not evangelical flourish. It is what the cross secured, what Pentecost confirmed when the Spirit was poured out on all flesh and what the Reformation recovered.

The framework documented in these pages does not deny any of this. It does not need to. It builds, on top of the access the cross opened, a structure that gathers the believer’s attention and routes it elsewhere. A leader. A programme. A graded proximity. The relationship with God remains, in name, direct. In practice, it acquires a custodian. The curtain is torn, and a new one has been hung in its place, made of softer cloth, embroidered with our language, and explained as the deepening of discipleship rather than the reinstatement of what Christ took down.

The gospel is older than this framework, and stronger than it. The priesthood Christ restored cannot be re-laid-down by any human structure built on top of his work. Engage critically with the theology and the practices collapse. Ignore the theology and the practices reassert themselves. No matter how many leaders are replaced, no matter how many churches try to reform from inside. That is why these pages have spent so long on what might, at first glance, look like abstract theological argument. The argument is not abstract. It is the engine. And what it drives, in the end, is the question of who receives the attention that the cross set free, and what it means when that attention is not given to Christ.

The Church has a better story than the one the framework offers. It is a story in which the priesthood is fully restored, the table remains permanently open, and the Christian’s gaze can rest where it was always meant to rest: on the one whose name is above all names.

Jesus is Lord.

References

Footnotes

1. Helen Cameron, Deborah Bhatti, Catherine Duce, James Sweeney, and Clare Watkins, Talking About God in Practice: Theological Action Research and Practical Theology (Hymns Ancient & Modern, 2010), chapter 3. ↩

2. St Johns Church, Kenilworth, Family on Mission, Living Jesus’ life to the full. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Tom Wright, The Day The Revolution Began (SPCK, 2016). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (SPCK, 1996), p. 300. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Mike Breen, Family on Mission (3DM Publishing, 2014). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), chapter 1. ↩

7. Richard Moy, Discipleship Goals in the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) Network of Churches: An Exploration of the Theological Trajectories of the Movement and Their Implications for the Future of the Network (DThM thesis, Durham University, 2023). Moy argues that successive charismatic and managerial developments within the HTB network contributed to a movement away from earlier evangelical emphases on holiness and crucicentrism, drawing on David Bebbington’s framework and ethnographic interview research within HTB-network contexts. Important to note that Moy’s thesis is not a direct critique of the 3DM methodology. ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.10.13. Calvin’s broader argument in Book IV, Chapter 10 is that human traditions, however well-intentioned, must never be imposed on the conscience as though they carry divine authority. The entire chapter reads as though it were written in direct response to the dynamics documented here. [↩] ↩

9. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 1952), Book 3, Chapter 8. ↩

10. C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring, Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, in 1944 . ↩

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