Jesus Wants to Train Us to Live His Life

Introduction

The two articles that follow examine a single published book: Andrew Attwood’s Jesus Wants to Train Us to Live His Life. I take it seriously rather than treating it as a curiosity or an occasion for theological point-scoring, because it gives permanent, accessible form to a set of ideas usually transmitted only in private: in vestries, leadership retreats, and invitation-only discipleship groups, where they resist careful examination. A book fixes the argument in the author’s own words. That is what makes this review possible.

This is not a personal critique of Andrew Attwood. His character, his motives, and the integrity of his faith are not my subject. He is, by any reasonable account, a sincere and committed Christian who has given his adult life to building communities of disciples. The framework he has articulated draws on real scholarship, engages genuine questions about the nature of the Gospels and the demands of discipleship, and arises from an authentic hunger for a more costly and more fruitful Christian life than much of the inherited church has managed to sustain. The articles that follow try to take that seriously.

My subject is the framework itself: the theological structure the book constructs, and the practical architecture that structure makes possible. Frameworks can carry assumptions invisible from inside them and produce consequences nobody anticipated. My concern throughout has been with what the argument does, not what the author means by it. Those are different questions.

To the best of my knowledge, the book is not widely read, and I say so without disrespect. It was written as a study book for communities and leaders already oriented towards the 3DM discipleship methodology developed by Mike Breen, a movement that has operated in the UK charismatic-evangelical landscape, and beyond it, for more than three decades. Its significance lies not in its circulation. It represents, in publicly available form, a theological account of practices that have shaped many communities. The ideas circulate further and faster than the book itself, passed on verbally, qualified when challenged, reasserted when the challenge passes. Having them on paper makes this review worth writing.

My method throughout has been close reading. Where the book makes a theological claim, I have examined it on its own terms: asking what it says, whether the evidence supports the conclusion, and whether the scholars cited would recognise how their work has been used. Where the book appeals to Scripture, I have gone back to the text in its context. Where it appeals to Calvin, Owen, Burridge, Bauckham, or N.T. Wright, I have consulted those sources to establish what they actually argued. The second article also draws on the Theological Action Research framework developed by Helen Cameron and colleagues, which maps the gap between what a community says it believes, what it publicly teaches, and what its actual patterns of behaviour reveal. That gap is one of the most important features of the system under review.

The investigation runs in two connected movements. The first article, Rewriting the Gospels: Manuals, Prototype, and Blindspots, examines the theological foundations: three shifts the book makes before placing a single practical demand on the reader. Each looks modest in isolation. Together, they reshape what kind of document the reader holds when they open the New Testament, who they take to be at the centre of their faith, and what they can draw on to test the framework from outside. The second article, The Theology the Practices Demand, traces what those foundations make possible, working through the specific practices the book advocates: the structures of community, the mechanics of formation, the scope of pastoral authority.

The first concern is Christological. The book reads Jesus’ ministry as flowing not from his being the divine Son of God but from the Holy Spirit empowering him as a human being: a Spirit-empowered prototype, the first edition of what every sufficiently-yielded Christian could become. This is a minority, contested theological position, presented here as settled and self-evident. The difference matters beyond doctrine. A Jesus whose active divinity has been placed “in repose” is a Jesus whose authority carries no qualitative ceiling above any human leader who is sufficiently Spirit-filled. The first article also identifies what it calls narrative ventriloquism: the framework’s proprietary vocabulary appears inside imaginative first-person retellings of Gospel scenes and is then read back out of them as textual evidence. The clearest instance is the rewriting of Gethsemane. The Jesus who sweats blood and pleads with the Father is replaced, on the page, by a serene programme director whose interior life is untouched by what he is about to bear.

The second concern is hermeneutical. The book reclassifies the Gospels from theological narratives into procedural training manuals and, in a later chapter, into something closer to the Highway Code: a binding code of conduct, tested for compliance, applied without exemption. The reclassification has a specific effect. A narrative draws the reader into an encounter with a person who resists systematisation. A manual requires an administrator and places interpretive control in the hands of whoever determines what the manual demands. The book says interpreting it requires “common sense,” but what it presents as common sense is a specific and undefended interpretive tradition dressed in familiar clothing. The question of who holds the examiner’s role, and what happens to those who fail, is never answered. The framework answers it before the question arrives.

The third concern is the most structurally consequential. Chapter 8 attributes the entire inherited shape of post-apostolic Christianity, from Roman Catholics to charismatics, from the Reformed to the liberal, to what the book calls “a key satanic strategy for centuries.” This is not a criticism of specific abuses. It is a blanket structural diagnosis applied to every tradition in the Christian inheritance without exception. The formal theological tradition that built the creeds: dismissed. The Reformers: set aside. The Anglican inheritance, the evangelical mainstream, the charismatic movement itself: diagnosed as compromised before any of their arguments can be heard. The book leaves the reader with the framework and the tradition behind it, a tradition presented as tradition-free but with identifiable architects, a documented genealogy, conferences, consultancies, training materials, and licensed practitioners. The reader cannot see this, because every other tradition has been named as inadmissible before they arrive. The book’s own tradition becomes invisible in the process.

The three shifts work as a system. Each clears ground for the next, and none announces itself as controversial. By the time the practical demands arrive, the theological tools that might have measured them are gone. The Gospels have become a manual to be administered. The divine Son has become a replicable prototype. The accumulated reasoning of the wider church has been disqualified as the fruit of satanic strategy. The second article documents what leaders look like when operating inside a structure built on those three foundations, and what the people formed by them are asked to give up.

A word on scope. The target of these articles is a specific framework, not the broader instincts behind it. Demanding discipleship, genuine Christian community, the charismatic stream, church planting, small missional communities: I have no case against any of these. The Christological concerns raised here are the concerns that scholarship published in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, one of the most robustly conservative evangelical academic publications in the world, has raised about functionally similar frameworks. The critique of graded access to a human leader echoes the concerns that drove major charismatic leaders, including Pat Robertson, to repudiate the Shepherding Movement of the 1970s and 80s. This is a disagreement within the family, conducted in language the family shares.

The conclusion is not that the book is malicious, and not that communities formed by these ideas have been cynically deceived. Many such communities contain people of genuine faith who have experienced real growth. The concern is structural. The framework creates conditions under which authority that belongs to Christ alone can migrate, by degrees, to a human leader. Many people do see this, and they leave, often in numbers. But the framework has a ready category for people who leave: they were unwilling to pay the cost. Their departure becomes evidence of the framework’s fidelity rather than its failure, and those who remain find any dissent already named and absorbed. By the time the full picture is clear enough to act on, real harm has been done: to faith, to relationships, to how people understand themselves before God. Making that process visible is the purpose of these articles.

The two articles can be read on their own. Together, they tell the whole story. If you would prefer to read in order, start with Rewriting the Gospels.