Introduction

Scrutinising what is presented as a raw and painful journey of repentance is a difficult decision. It risks appearing cynical or cruel, particularly to those who rightly value grace and restoration. When I first read Mike Breen’s public ‘Letters to the Reader’, I felt this tension keenly. Something did feel ‘off’, but I was hesitant to unpack what was framed as a broken man’s path to healing. I had questions about the language, what was omitted, and I was uncomfortable about how this ‘restoration team’ was structured (this is discussed in Part 2). Before proceeding, I wanted to find a lens that could help me fairly understand what it was that I was reading. I turned to Breen’s own published works, hoping his perspective could illuminate his process. It was only when I read Mike Breen’s Speak Out (2019) that I began to understand the letters in a completely different light. I realized they were not just a confessional; they were a sophisticated communication artefact that could be mapped directly onto the persuasion techniques Breen himself teaches. This discovery shifted the focus of this investigation from questions over what is framed as a heartfelt apology, to asking questions about whether the entire document is an exercise in public relations and narrative control, and whether this is a foundational idea within Breenism.

‘Breenism’

As I worked through this analysis, I ran into a practical problem. Breen’s own language, centred on building a ‘discipling culture’, makes it difficult to critique his specific model without appearing to critique the entire Christian tradition of discipleship. Therefore, for the sake of clarity, I have termed his specific, highly packaged system of communication, organisation and discipleship as Breenism . This allows us to analyse the tools and frameworks Breen promotes and uses without causing unintended collateral damage to the broader concept of discipleship.

It is crucial to set this analysis against the official findings that prompted the letters. According to a statement from 3DMovements (3DM), an independent investigation hired by Apex Church found that “Mike Breen carried on an extended sexual affair with a vulnerable member of (Apex) church, which he has been leading”. Mike Breen resigned after the investigation was completed. The investigation also separately “found evidence that Mike also abused his power through bullying and intimidation, along with a reluctance, and sometimes a refusal, to seek reconciliation”. The 3DM Board Chair confirmed this conduct constituted “adult clergy sexual abuse”. Breen’s letters do not mention these specific findings of abuse, bullying, or intimidation.

The Hero’s Journey: The Roadmap from Misconduct to Ministry?

In Speak Out, Breen provides comprehensive instruction on Hero’s Journey methodology, drawing from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey (1998), and Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (2009). His approach is sophisticated, offering specific techniques for what he calls moving audiences “from content to context to conversion”.

Breen explicitly teaches readers to “map out your own Hero’s Journey” using his framework. He describes the Hero’s Journey as “the connecting idea between all the heroic stories we find in the Bible” and provides detailed instruction on how communicators can use this structure to “catalyze the process of conversion within our audiences that leads to a change in their lives”.

The fundamental question is this. Has Breen used these ideas, originally designed to help church leaders with “practical gospel communication”, as a kind of Restoration Roadmap ?

Running the Playbook: Putting the Hero’s Journey to use?

Mike Breen’s textbook on persuasion, Speak Out, is built around a promise: “if we can put this code of the hero’s journey to use, we can catalyse the process of conversion within our audiences that leads to a change in their lives that really matters”.

The code is precise. First, the audience must watch a protagonist travel from Call through Challenge to Completion, “down and then up”. Second, the communicator equips that arc with three persuasive power-ups:

1. Broken-hero relatability – “Broken heroes are the heroes we actually resonate with most… because we want them to be like us”.
2. Memes that stick – packets that are “simple, transferrable, and repeatable” so the message rides out of the room with the listener.
3. Bible-story audience bridges – “connect our journey to the heroic stories of Scripture… These bridges of resonance become natural entry points into the lives of people who need good news, and they enable us to connect to the individuals to whom we speak.”.

1 | The Call and the ‘Broken Hero’ vs. Shame

The Hero’s Journey, as taught in Speak Out, begins when an individual encounters an “inciting moment of challenge, change, or crisis that takes them on a journey”. This journey is presented not as a simple choice but as a compelling summons. Letter 1 meticulously constructs this opening stage by defining both the crisis that precipitates the call and the nature of the call itself.

• The Call: Breen frames the “inciting moment” not as the sexual misconduct itself, but as a preceding state of being “harassed and helpless”, overwhelmed by unresolved trauma. The misconduct thus becomes a symptom of this pre-existing crisis, rather than its source. Breen instructs his audience to connect their message with the reader. In his letter, he states clearly that “fortunately for me I’m not ‘a sheep without a shepherd.’ I, like you, have a wonderfully caring and compassionate Shepherd who understands my frailty and is able to meet me in my need” – This is an example of using the Bible as an audience connection bridge, a technique Breen describes in his work. The call, therefore, is not simply to repent but to embark on a specific, noble-sounding mission. Breen defines this mission as a “quest for a deeper understanding of my inner life”, which he pursues through two concrete actions: a “doctoral research program into the intersection of neuroscience, communication, and spiritual formation” and seeking “therapeutic solutions”. This framing immediately positions his journey as a structured, intellectual, and therapeutic undertaking, aligning with his manual’s advice to map the journey clearly for the audience.
• The ‘Broken Hero’ vs. The Antagonist of Shame: The framework requires the hero to be a “Broken Hero”, relatable in their “checkered pasts and troubled histories”, because audiences “need them this way” to find hope. Crucially, Breen teaches that this narrative’s primary purpose is to defeat the internal antagonist of Shame, which he defines as the “core struggle that disqualifies people”. The letter executes this perfectly. It presents his weaknesses not as moral failings but as sympathetic, clinical symptoms: “abandonment, rejection, and isolation” and inexplicable physical phenomena. By foregrounding these struggles, the narrative transforms his failures from sources of shame into “examples of what God can do with failures like us”. In this framing, he is not a perpetrator, but a victim of circumstance. This is a powerful strategic move that Breen’s manual explicitly teaches: it reframes personal inadequacy from a disqualifier into a prerequisite for the heroic journey.

In this opening letter, Breen perfectly executes the initial moves of his own playbook. He has defined the crisis, articulated a noble call, and established his credentials as a “broken hero”. By presenting his failures through a lens of trauma and sickness, he has strategically neutralised what his own framework calls the primary antagonist of shame, positioning his inadequacy as the very qualification for the journey to come.

2 | The Valley: Forging a Message and Finding an Oikos

In Speak Out, the hero’s descent into “The Valley” is not merely a trial to be endured; it is the essential stage where “the source and process of discipleship is embraced”. It is the forge where the hero confronts their enemy, clarifies their message, and finds the divinely provided support system necessary for survival. Letter 2 and the introduction of the “Restoration Team” serve as a masterclass in executing this stage of the playbook, constructing the Valley as a therapeutic space where Breen finds both his enemy and his “Oikos”.

The Enemy & The Excavation: The Breen framework requires the hero to confront an “Enemy” in the valley, which is often an internal one, such as “the flesh or our old selves”. The letter frames this enemy not as a moral failing but as a clinical diagnosis: “Anxious Attachment”. This internal antagonist is made understandable through a memorable, non-theological meme: a “psychodrama” where a sheet demonstrates his rational brain being “cut off” by trauma. This powerful image makes a complex idea “simple, transferrable, and repeatable”, a key goal of Breen’s communication method. The therapeutic work is thus presented as an act of “excavation”, the process Breen teaches for the desert/valley phase, where the hero must “keep digging” to “find the gold you can share with others”. The narrative effect is to shift the locus of the problem from his moral will to his traumatized brain, framing his actions as something that happened to him.

Surrender and the Scriptural Conclusion: According to Breen’s manual, the key to victory in the valley is surrender. It is at this point of broken self-reliance that the hero finally “admit[s] to ourselves that we need help”. The letter’s theological climax performs this exact move. By aligning his story with the progression from Romans 7 to Romans 8, Breen casts his struggle in the most universally recognized Christian terms of helplessness. His adoption of Paul’s cry, “What a wretched man I am!” is the textbook moment of surrender. This act of surrender is what unlocks the pivot to grace. The immediate claim of Romans 8, “There is now no condemnation” is presented as the direct result of this surrender. This move powerfully leverages “Bible-story resonance” to frame his personal story within the Church’s universal story of redemption, to connect with the audience, yes, but also to make it difficult to question his narrative without seeming to question the Gospel itself.

The ‘Oikos’ as the Engine of Restoration: Breen’s framework is unequivocal: “You cannot complete your hero’s journey alone”. Survival in the valley is structurally impossible without a divinely ordained support system composed of Mentors (experienced guides) and Friends; a community Breen defines by the Greek term Oikos. The introduction of the “Restoration Team” is the real-world deployment of this critical component. They are presented as the very Mentor/Oikos structure his manual claims is indispensable. This is not just a group of supportive friends; they are a required mechanical element in the narrative. Breen teaches that the oikos was the “principal reason” for the explosive growth of the early Church, positioning it as the “indispensable engine of mission”. By publicly showcasing his own oikos, Breen engages in a simulation of accountability, performing his own success formula by presenting a small group of allies as the strategic vehicle that makes his own restoration, and eventual return to ministry, possible.

3 | The Completion: Returning with ‘Bounties’

The final phase of the framework is “The Completion” a stage Breen defines not as an end, but as a generative starting point. The hero emerges from the valley with “Bounties”, spoils won through surrender, and is driven by gratitude to share them, which in turn fuels the next journey. Letter 3 and the supporting letter from the Restoration Team meticulously execute this final, crucial act of the playbook.

The ‘Bounty’: From Personal Grief to Public Axiom. In Letter 3, the narrative presents the prize won from the valley. This is not just an insight, but what Breen’s framework calls a “Bounty”. The discovery is prompted by another powerful meme: the death of his dog, which reveals he was suffering from compounded loss. From this ordeal, he extracts his bounty: the axiom that “grief heals trauma”. This therapeutic wisdom allows the narrative to retroactively frame his misconduct as a tragic search for an “anaesthetic to the pain”. This perfectly enacts the ultimate payoff of Breen’s model: it is at the point of greatest weakness and surrender that God’s power is perfected, and a powerful message is forged. The place of greatest inadequacy is transformed into the source of his most valuable bounty.

The Return Driven by ‘Gratitude’: Sharing the Spoils. According to Breen, a hero’s journey is only truly completed in the act of giving away the received blessings. The emotional engine driving this is “Gratitude”. The letter from the Restoration Team executes this final stage. The team’s validation, with a stated goal to frame his journey as “a pathway for future growth and healing for the entire body of Christ”. This is the ultimate return. The bounty he brings back is a new model for ministry, and the act of sharing it fulfils the framework’s core instruction: “Freely you have received; freely give”. By having a team of allies present his story this way, the narrative completes a perfect, self-replicating loop: the journey produced a bounty, which is shared out of supposed gratitude, which in turn justifies and fuels the next heroic journey, the publication of a new book and the return to ministry.

What the Hero’s Journey Hides

This brings us back to the initial feeling of discomfort with the letters. But what, precisely, is the problem? The Hero’s Journey is the bedrock of beloved stories from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars. It isn’t inherently unethical. So why does its use feel so unsettling in this context?

The answer is that the Hero’s Journey is a persuasion blueprint. Its ethical nature depends entirely on the job it’s being asked to do. When deployed in an accountability narrative for clergy abuse, it performs specific rhetorical jobs on the reader. It works by systematically obscuring one reality and replacing it with another, more palatable narrative. An examination of Breen’s letters reveals exactly how this substitution works.

1. The Job of Centring the Protagonist

• The Reality Obscured: The documented harm to a specific person. The investigation found Breen engaged in “adult clergy sexual abuse” with a “vulnerable member” of his church. The victim in this case has remained silent, and her perspective is unknown. Her experience is an empty space at the centre of the story.

• The Narrative You’re Shown: You are invited into a story focused entirely on the leader’s internal world. His pain, his therapy, his spiritual struggle. The reader is positioned to empathize with the suffering of the protagonist, because his is the only suffering the narrative allows you to see.

2. The Job of Reframing the Consequence

• The Reality Obscured: An accountability process is a necessary and just consequence of causing harm. It is a debt owed to the victim and the community whose trust was violated.
• The Narrative You’re Shown: You are shown a reluctant hero undertaking a noble but difficult quest. You are positioned to admire his resilience for enduring this “ordeal” rather than to see it as the minimum requirement of justice.

3. The Job of Simulating Independent Validation

• The Reality Obscured: Genuine accountability requires impartial, independent oversight, especially from those who prioritise the victim’s welfare and the community’s safety.
• The Narrative You’re Shown: You are presented with a “Restoration Team” hand-picked by the protagonist, whose members provide glowing endorsements of his transformation. You are persuaded to view this as authentic community validation, overlooking the inherent conflicts of interest.

4. The Job of Justifying a Return to Power

• The Reality Obscured: An abuse of pastoral power is a fundamental disqualification from that power.
• The Narrative You’re Shown: You are told a story where the ordeal itself becomes the hero’s primary qualification for future return to leadership. He is presented as having gained a unique ‘bounty’ of wisdom from his suffering, which now paradoxically makes him more equipped to guide others.

This returns us to the most difficult question: is it truly fair to dissect what is presented as a man’s heartfelt journey of repentance?

If these were just private letters, the answer might be no. But they are a public communication artefact, crafted by an expert in persuasion, designed to persuade the reader that he is ready to return to his ministry of discipling leaders. Breen himself teaches that the goal of such communication is to “catalyse the process of conversion within our audiences”. The job of this narrative is to convert the reader - from scepticism to belief, from seeing an abuse of power to seeing a broken hero.

And we know what the hero’s “bounty” is. The letters were published to coincide with the launch of a new book edition, and relaunch of his digital platform. The “bounty” he returns with is not just wisdom; it is the justification for his return to a public platform and to launch or continue ministry. The journey, therefore, is not merely a confession. It is an architecture of persuasion, built to achieve a specific, tangible outcome. As an exercise in marketing, it is masterful. This effect becomes a profound misappropriation when viewed in the full context of his published material and the abuse allegations.

The Language of Breenism : Memes as Narrative Control

If the Hero’s Journey provides the overall architecture of persuasion, the specific words Breen chooses are the bricks and mortar. The journey’s tangible outcome, a justification for his return to a public platform and ministry, is secured not just by the story’s shape, but by its language. This is where Breen’s expertise in what he calls “memes” becomes critical.

He defines memes as deliberately constructed “simple, transferrable, and repeatable” packets of information designed to be memorable and persuasive. This is not just about telling a story; it is about engineering the very vocabulary the audience uses to understand it. In his letters, Breen engages in what can be seen as a battle of the memes. The initial reporting on the independent investigation created its own set of powerful, reality-grounding phrases - the memes of accountability. Terms like “adult clergy sexual abuse”, “vulnerable member” and “bullying and intimidation” are concise, transferable, and designed to define a situation according to established safeguarding principles.

Breen’s letters, however, do not engage with this vocabulary. Instead, they deploy a competing set of memes. Some important questions: are the memes Breen chooses designed to obscure, or even overwrite, the original language of the investigation? An examination of his most foundational substitution provides the answer.

1. The Foundational Meme: An “Affair”

Christianity Today wrote this in June 2024 regarding Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse:

“If a victim of adult clergy sexual abuse comes forward, there’s a strong likelihood that that person is going to be blamed as somebody who is ruining the pastor’s career and [told] this is something that is purely an ‘affair,’ ” said Boz Tchividjian, an advocate and attorney … “The question is, if a pastor or a faith leader uses their spiritual position to identify, groom, and ultimately sexualize a relationship with a person under their care or supervision, is that really a consensual relationship?”

• The Original Meme: Reports detailing Breen’s misconduct stated that Breen engaged in “adult clergy sexual abuse” involving an “extended sexual affair with a vulnerable member” of the church he was leading. These terms “abuse”, “vulnerable” “clergy” - are precise. They describe a violation of professional ethics and a profound power imbalance.
• Breen’s Substitute Meme: Breen consistently refers to the event as an “affair” or a “relationship”. The word “affair” is a powerful meme that implies a relationship between equals, obscuring the documented power dynamics and the finding of vulnerability. This single word choice does more work than any other to reframe the entire story, shifting it from a case of professional misconduct to a more common and relatable story of personal moral failure.

2. Supporting Meme: The “Drowning Man”

• The Original Meme: The agency and decisions made by a leader in a position of trust.
• Breen’s Substitute Meme: A passive victim of circumstance. The narrative states, “I was offered an illicit relationship”, a passive construction that removes his role as an initiator. He then “embraced [it] like a drowning man grasping at anything to stay afloat”. This meme transforms a series of choices into a single, involuntary survival instinct, inviting sympathy rather than scrutiny of a pursuit of a sexual relationship with a member of a church that he was leading.

3. Supporting Meme: “Grief Heals Trauma”

• The Original Meme: The need for a justice-oriented accountability process that centres the victim and the safety of the community.
• Breen’s Substitute Meme: A therapeutic journey centred on the leader’s own healing. The axiom “grief heals trauma” becomes the guiding principle of the restoration. This meme replaces the external demands of justice with the internal goal of personal wellness and removal of shame, making his own healing the primary measure of success.

What emerges is a complete narrative architecture where the vocabulary of accountability is systematically overwritten. The official findings of “abuse”, “vulnerable” and “bullying” are never mentioned. Instead, the reader is given emotionally compelling and sticky alternatives. As a Narrative Architect , Breen’s genius is not just in the story he tells, but in the words, he makes it difficult for others to use in return.

The Language of Dissolved Agency

Breen’s account incorporates extensive therapeutic vocabulary: descriptions of “compounded loss”, reflections on “Anxious Attachment”, and detailed explanations of how trauma affects decision-making. These elements may well reflect genuine therapeutic work and authentic self-discovery undertaken during his restoration process.

However, within a public accountability context, this language serves dual purposes. It demonstrates cultivated self-awareness while also providing an interpretive framework that reframes misconduct as trauma response rather than abuse of power. The effect is not to clarify harm, but to recontextualize it - inviting readers to view abuse through the lens of Breen’s personal suffering rather than the institutional dynamics that enabled it.

This reframing coincides with a systematic pattern of language that shifts agency away from Breen’s decisions and toward external forces. It is not what he did, but what happened to him.

The most striking example appears in Letter 3:

“I was offered an illicit relationship which I foolishly and wholeheartedly embraced like a drowning man grasping at anything to stay afloat”.

Here, the passive construction “offered” performs crucial rhetorical work - it casts the pastor not as a perpetrator, but as the recipient of temptation. Given the documented power imbalance with a “vulnerable member” of his church, this framing is especially troubling. His role was to protect, not receive. Reframing clergy abuse as a kind of involuntary survival gesture fundamentally inverts the victim-perpetrator dynamic.

This language recurs throughout the letters. In Letter 2, Breen writes:

“It wasn’t a rational or even a conscious decision; it was something that happened as an unexpected response to what I understand now to be overwhelming circumstances”.

The phrase “something that happened” dissolves agency entirely. Abuse becomes an event Breen experienced, not a decision he made. Clinical vocabulary - “unexpected response”, “overwhelming circumstances” and a brain “cut off from rational thought” - transforms exploitative behaviour into a neurochemical inevitability.

Even euphemisms like “I found myself struggling with such a sense of loss and abandonment that I looked outside of my marriage for comfort and security” minimize and blur. That “outside”. Was it a neutral place? No, it was a relationship with a vulnerable congregant under his pastoral care. Breen names neither the role nor the context.

What emerges is a complete narrative architecture: minimal agency in the abuse, maximal agency in the recovery. Trauma, grief, brain chemistry, and circumstance all explain his behaviour. The result is not accountability but its simulation, a framework in which a more palatable harm is explained, but the real harms are not named and certainly not owned.

Breen’s Blueprint: A Dashboard View

Now that we’ve looked at how Breen might have constructed his letters using the hero’s journey, I thought it would be valuable to review how his own ‘Communication Dashboard’ looks, when taken in combination with the linguistic choices that might have been made. “use this dashboard as you fulfill your calling as a communicator, and as you seek to awaken the heroes in your context to find their own gospels and embark on their own journeys”

Conclusion

To understand Mike Breen’s “Letters to the Reader” they must be viewed not as a raw confession, but as what, in this author’s opinion, is a deliberate application of The Breenism Communication Framework as described in ‘Speak Out’. Breen, an author on narrative persuasion, possesses a deep expertise in audience conversion architecture, using the bible as context. To treat his public letters as spontaneous would be to ignore his documented skill in constructing narratives designed to achieve specific outcomes.

The alignment between the letters and this framework is systematic. The narrative arc meticulously follows the Hero’s Journey template as he describes it. Its persuasive power is then amplified by The Language of Breenism, where carefully selected Memes, like “grief heals trauma” and the “drowning man”, function as tools for Narrative Control, systematically replacing the vocabulary of accountability with the language of therapy.

The strategic nature of these documents is further underscored by their timing. The letters were published to coincide with the launch of Breen’s new digital platform, disciplingculture.com, which invites readers to “join this movement” and offering “accessible tools, inspiring teaching, and ongoing support”. When documents that function as a defence against past misconduct simultaneously serve as a marketing tool for a new venture, they cease to be purely personal. They become PR.

This is not to question the sincerity of Breen’s personal trauma or his desire for restoration. Rather, it is to insist that when a leader’s accountability process so perfectly mirrors a professional persuasion framework, he himself has designed, scrutiny is firmly in the public interest. The problem is not the existence of a communication strategy. The problem is that The Breenism Communication Framework was used for a specific purpose: to obscure the findings of abuse, to centre the perpetrator’s journey, and to create a public relations asset for his ministry relaunch. That is the architecture of this narrative. It is a Restoration Roadmap. But the playbook Breen has run is not limited to his own letters. The very mechanics of his leadership model, the defensive strategies deployed by his supporters, and the institutional risks his return now poses all demand closer examination. In the following parts of this series, we will continue this analysis:

• Part 2: Mike Breen - The Architect of Coercive Control deconstructs Breen’s signature “Huddle” methodology, arguing that its core techniques function as a form of psychological conditioning that makes genuine accountability structurally impossible.

• Part 3: The Arsenal of Defence will examine how the voices of family, friends, and even God are weaponized within the letters to create a protective shield against scrutiny.

• Part 4: The Institutional Risk will assess the present-day safeguarding concerns that emerge from Breen operating outside of formal church oversight in the UK.

Understanding the playbook is the first step. Understanding the machine that built it comes next.

About Daniel Caerwyn

Daniel Caerwyn is a pseudonym - Writer focused on systemic causes of organisational dysfunction. Writes with love from and for the Church and the people in it.

Expertise:

Breenism Church Structures Clergy Abuse