It is happening more and more.

You are in a conversation with someone you know. Someone intelligent. Someone you have disagreed with before, productively, without any major drama. But this time, something is different. You raise a question about what they said, and something suddenly changed behind their eyes. Not disagreement, but something faster than the speed of thought.

Their vocabulary shifts and slogans appear where their sentences used to be. They can’t define the terms they deploy or the ones you then ask them about. They cannot tolerate your good-faith questions. Any. Then they say they feel ‘unsafe’. They withdraw, attack, or sometimes, both.

You leave deeply unsettled and perturbed. Not because you lost a robust argument, but because you never got to have one. And the strangest part is that you remember when they were different, when the ability to disagree and learn from each other used to be possible.

This is our post-truth, post-science world marked by conspiracy thinking, psychological fragmentation, and something like a collective mood disorder. Yet what has captured us is not merely confusion or ideology. It is closer to a spiritual enthralment, a collective possession in which perception, reason, and the capacity for honest conversation have become captive.

What we are witnessing resembles a cultic fundamentalism: emotionally totalising, hostile to scrutiny, incapable of reasoned engagement, sustained by rituals of outrage, purity, and belonging. It functions less like rational conviction and more like therapeutic superstition. Feelings have become sacred, and disagreement becomes harm, while dissent is not something to answer to but is something to silence and extirpate.

We have well-worn vocabulary for this now. Polarisation. Radicalisation. Cognitive dissonance. Identity Politics. These words are clinically, psychologically, and sociologically accurate, as far as they go.

But they do not go far enough.

They describe symptoms without naming the real condition of things, of what passes between two people when a shared common reality has vanished. The deeper why of what is happening…

…We need different words and terms to name this emerging human experience, which is, in fact, not new but very ancient.

There is an older term for this condition.

Bewitched.1

We stopped using it because we thought ourselves too sophisticated for it. It is the word of fairy tales and superstition, cooky TV series and movies. But perhaps we abandoned its real meaning too quickly. Perhaps it survived as long as it did precisely because it names something psychologically and spiritually real that modern language keeps fumbling around to re-diagnose.

To be bewitched, in the old sense, was not simply to be wrong. It was to be enthralled. Where your perception has been captured. Your judgment clouded. Your imagination colonised. Your agency quietly dismantled. And the enchantment worked gradually, through suggestion and whispering and fear, until the bewitched person rarely knew it had happened.

That is what made it dangerous. That is what makes the word useful again now. To name this moment and the danger before us now.

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Tolkien Saw It Coming

Tolkien understood this before most of us did.

When we first encounter King Théoden in The Lord of the Rings, he is not in chains. He is not imprisoned. He is bent. Passive. Spiritually depleted. Unable to perceive reality clearly, suspicious of the people trying to reach him, watching his kingdom deteriorate around him and finding himself incapable of an active and rational response.

Always beside him, close enough to whisper, stands Gríma Wormtongue.

Gríma never overpowers Théoden by force. Instead, he colonises his perception. He tells the king who to fear, who to distrust, why action is futile and why hope is naïve. He interprets every incoming piece of reality through a filter Théoden does not perceive. The king believes he is thinking. He is not thinking.

He is being thought through.

The judgments feel like his. The fears feel like his. But the source is somewhere else entirely.

This is a term to diagnose our age and moment. Because we live surrounded by digital Wormtongues.

The feed whispers. The algorithm whispers. The outrage cycle, the partisan commentator, the sociopathic online influence/commentator who has literally sold their soul for engagement, coupled with the carefully curated emotional atmosphere of whatever platform you last opened: all of it is whispering, minute by minute, hour after hour, month after month and now year after year, shaping what feels true before conscious thought can even begin.

The result is not merely bad opinions. It is something closer to what Théoden had. A pre-processed relationship to reality. People no longer evaluate information freely. They react to it, on cue, predictably, according to a script they did not write and cannot see.

Like Théoden we are being thought through by a source from somewhere else.

The spell speaks first. The person speaks second. And the person thinks they are thinking.

The Spell That Looks Like Enlightenment

We flatter ourselves that modern people are too rational to be bewitched. But modern enchantment is more sophisticated than the old kind, precisely because it never presents itself as enchantment. It presents itself as compassion. As justice. As safety. It offers identity and belonging and the solidarity of shared outrage, and because secular people no longer believe in spiritual enthralment, they have almost no defences against its psychological equivalent.

The enchantment works affectively. Identity becomes fused to ideology. Belonging becomes conditional on conformity. Dissent becomes psychologically costly and self policed. Then rationality eventually collapses completely.

This is why facts increasingly fail to convince or move the bewitched. The problem is not fundamentally intellectual. It is liturgical. People are being continuously formed by repeated rituals of emotional conditioning, doomscrolling, public shaming, and identity reinforcement. They are being catechised. The only question is who is doing the catechising and toward what end.

And so we arrive at what others have called epistemic fragility. The inability to encounter a genuinely hard question without something close to psychological collapse. When identity fuses with ideology, contradiction feels like self-annihilation. So instead of engaging with evidence, people protect themselves through fury, withdrawal or accusation.

“I feel unsafe in this conversation” functions not as an emotional statement but as an attempt to terminate reality-testing itself. The conversation must be stopped to protect the fragile self.

The spell of bewitchment protects itself. That is what spells do.

Dark Enchantment: This Is Not a Metaphor

Tolkien knew where the spell ultimately comes from, like the spells bewitching us today.

Behind Wormtongue stands Saruman. And behind Tolkien’s imagination stands the Christian account of evil itself.

Scripture does not describe Satan primarily as a brute-force destroyer. It describes him as a deceiver. The father of lies. The accuser. The whisperer. “Did God really say?” Notice this method. Reality is not denied outright at first; instead, it is subtly reframed. Trust is destabilised, perception distorted, and then identity collapses into confusion. The enemy works through suggestion, accusation, and the slow manufacture of deception.

This is why Christians should take bewitchment seriously. Not superstitiously, not in a way that becomes some Christian conspiracy theory, but in an apprehension of the supernatural at work. Human beings can become spiritually and psychologically enthralled by systems of lies repeated often enough and tied deeply enough to identity and belonging.

Bewitchment is not a metaphor for something else. It is a description of what is actually happening to people we know. And we are all in danger of falling under the spell ourselves.

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The Practices of Disenthralment

The pivotal scene from Tolkien is not a debate or psychological intervention. Gandalf does not arrive with better counter-information and coping mechanisms. He does not engage Wormtongue’s arguments.

He breaks the enchantment.

He calls Théoden back into reality, into clarity, into courage, into memory, into himself and his true identity.

Tolkien makes something crucial clear. Théoden cannot recover while remaining immersed in Wormtongue’s presence. Disenthralment requires distance. Separation from the source of the enchantment.

That may be the most important thing to understand about our moment of bewitchment.

Many of us cannot think clearly because we never step outside the whispering. We are never not in the flow of the feed. Our emotional atmosphere is never not being curated around us and for us. What is needed to break free is not primarily a better argument.

It is disenthralment.

And for the Christian, that is a word with a long history of practice behind it. The liberation from bondage and servitude, to what holds someone in mental or physical subjection.

What are the spell-breaking practices of Christianity for disenthralment? If we wish to break from and stay free from bewitchment, what are our tools and practices to draw on as Christians have done for two thousand years?

Silence breaks the whispering in the ear, the eye, the heart, the soul, and the mind. Prayer reorients the self toward reality rather than toward the tribe. Deep reading of old books rebuilds attention that the algorithm has systematically destroyed. Letting scripture speak our sacred story and identity back to us. Actual embodied community - being in a room, and staying in the room with people who disagree, remains one of the few environments where genuine thought still has space to occur. These are not aesthetic choices. They are acts of epistemic resistance and spiritual warfare.

These practices are not new. They are not novel responses to a digital age. They are what the Church has always known to be necessary, precisely because the forces of enchantment have always been present. The question is simply whether we are engaging in them. Not theoretically. Actually. Because if we are not, something else is already forming us.

Breaking the Spell: Coming Back to Our Right Minds

Gandalf does not counsel Théoden from a safe distance. He stands in the room. He speaks with authority. He calls the king by name. And something in that naming, that direct address to the person still buried beneath the enchantment, begins to draw the poison out.

“I will draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound.”

Théoden recovers not because he receives better information, but because someone refuses to stop believing the real person is still in there.

This is closer to what Jesus does.

The King Who Could Not Think Was Not the Only One

Bewitchment ultimately does not merely distort what a person thinks. It dismantles who a person is.

The symptom we should be paying attention to is not only the rage or the rigidity. It is the question underneath both. Who am I? The oldest poisoned wound. And the most exploited one. The systems of enchantment that surround us are built to keep that question open and dependent on their answer.

Identity then becomes a project with no completion. The self spirals inward, searching, finding only more mirrors, more tribes, more performance, more fear. Like with Théoden, the goal is not merely compliance. It is a total loss of self. A person so hollowed out that they no longer know what has been taken from them.

This is anti-creation. The father of lies not only deceives. He unmakes. He works against the grain of the one who spoke persons into being, who knit them together, who called them by name before they knew their own. Bewitchment is the unravelling of the soul from its source. The scattering of what God gathered. The silencing of the name that heaven knows.

Then there is Jesus.

The man in Mark 5 is living among the tombs. He cannot be restrained. He does not know who he is. When Jesus asks his name, the answer that comes back is not a name at all. Legion. Many.

A self so colonised it can no longer speak in the singular. There is no longer an I but a we and they.

Jesus does not engage the legion. He does not debate it or reason with it or attempt to understand its grievances. He addresses the person beneath it. And when the townspeople arrive, they find the man sitting, clothed, in his right mind.

That phrase is worth pausing over. His right mind. Not a new mind. Not a reconstructed identity or a therapeutic breakthrough. His own mind returned to him. The self that was always there, beneath what had taken hold of him.

This is the opposite of bewitchment. Bewitchment multiplies and scatters. It replaces our name and identity with the noise. It answers the question who am I with an endless, restless, borrowed legion of answers that never settle and never satisfy. What Jesus does is the inverse. He is the Lord of creation, moving against anti-creation with recreation. He silences the legion and speaks to the person. He restores the singular. He gives the man back to himself.

Speak to the Person. Not to What Has Hold of Them.

Leaders in this moment will need psychology. They will need to understand identity collapse, the sociology of capture, and the patient work of human care. None of that should be dismissed, for it is vital. But there are people in our communities who are not merely confused, wounded, or politically lost. T

They are bewitched.

Wearing an identity assembled by forces that do not love them. Unable to find their way back to themselves. Formed not into the image of the one who made them but into the image of whatever ideology has captured them. Deformed. Their self is not lost but overwritten, occupied, turned against its own deepest nature.

And this is where it all becomes urgent for us. Because the bewitched do not stay still. They speak. They recruit. They carry the enchantment into rooms and relationships and institutions, whispering what was whispered to them, passing on the distortion as though it were revelation. The captive becomes the captor.

The enthralled become the enthralling.

What was done to them, they now do to others, and they experience it not as harm but as love, not as conquest but as liberation. This is how enchantments spread. Not by force. By contagion. One Wormtongue becomes many. One captured imagination seeds others. And the circle of those who can no longer find their way back to themselves quietly, steadily grows.

Until someone stands in the room and refuses to pretend this is normal. Until someone looks past what holds them and speaks to the person beneath.

The spell insists that the person is gone. It is lying. That is what spells do.

Speak to who people are. Not to what has hold of them. We have to learn to speak to the person beneath the bewitching.

Not to the legion. Not to the ideology. The enchantment is too strong for that. To engage it on its own terms is to lose before you begin. And not to the performance of the captured person, the outragfe and offence, not in condemnation of what they have become or what they are saying or what they have done in the grip of what has hold of them.

But in love. In forgiveness. In the stubborn clarity of faith that sees past the distortion to who this person was always meant to be. The image of God, still present, still buried in there, and worth speaking to. To learn to speak to the person beneath the bewitching.

To look past what has hold of them, and say it plainly.

I see you. I know your true name. Come forth!

A like tells me it helped you and landed well. A comment means we get to think about this together. And a share means the conversation gets wider, and a chance to break the spells of bewitchment.

Church leadership has changed.

The noise is relentless. The complexity keeps increasing, and many leaders are carrying levels of pressure, exhaustion, and overwhelm that no amount of strategy or resilience training seems to resolve.

Because the issue is no longer just what is happening around you, it is what that pressure is doing within you.

And if you are honest, you can feel it too.

New Podcast

Over the coming months, with Dr MaryJo Burchard, we are releasing a limited podcast series: Leadership in an Age of Chaos

At the heart of it is a simple but pressing question:

How do leaders remain internally stable in an age of chaos?

To explore this, we have brought together a small group of voices those working at depth across leadership, organisational life, and theological formation

Voices formed by work in:

• Leadership and organisational systems under pressure

• The cultural forces shaping leaders today

• Church leadership in complex, fast-moving environments

Conversations include contributions from people such as Karise Hutchinson, Eve Poole, Simon Walker, and Glynn Barrett, not as headline names, but as practitioners and thinkers helping us engage this question at depth.

Together, we explore:

• The defended and undefended self

• Power under pressure

• Affect, attention, and emotional regulation

• Identity, meaning, and participation in Christ

Not abstract theory. But an exploration of what is happening inside leaders right now
and of a way of leading already given in Christ, waiting to be recovered, activated, and lived. Not something new to add. But something to encounter and to be released into.

The kind of leader you were drawn to become in the first place

Subscribe to receive the first episodes as they are released.

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But insight on its own is not enough. At some point, this work has to be done in you. So alongside this, I will be hosting a one-day, in-person experience:

Saturday 19th September: Waverley Abbey, 20 places only

This is not a conference. It is not content delivery.

Led by Dr MaryJo Burchard and me, this day at Waverley Abbey is designed to meet leaders at the level where leadership is now being formed, the inner life.

A deeply practical and experiential day of formation where what God has already placed within you is drawn together, integrated, stabilised, and activated, so you can return to your life and leadership able to lead from that place in partnership with Christ

You will be guided to:

• Map and better understand the chaos you are facing, and understand its impact

• Recognise how you respond under pressure

• Recover a deeper sense of who you are in God

• Begin to lead from that place

• Draw together your insights, experiences, and calling into a coherent map you can live and lead from

To bring together what you have learned about yourself over the years, so all that can work at a deeper level in your identity, faith, and calling that this moment requires, and you long for.

This is not about adding more.

It is about uncovering and releasing what God has already placed within you

You won’t leave with more to manage. You will leave with clarity, integration, and a grounded stability you can carry back into the reality of your leadership.

If this does not just feel interesting, but necessary, then stay close.

Subscribe to the Affective Leadership newsletter for first access to the podcast and priority invitation to the September gathering

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Because this moment requires something different, and something in you already knows it and longs for it.

Most leaders who struggle with control don’t think of themselves as controlling. They think of themselves as thorough. Responsible. High-standard.

They don’t feel controlling. They feel necessary and what is required in an unpredictable, chaotic, and high-risk world.

That’s the thing about control. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly takes over, right when the pressure is strongest, and the stakes are highest. And in the current climate, where more critical things are on the line, the pressure to control is stronger than ever. The toll of that — on others and on us — is escalating and cascading in a kind of perverse feedback loop.

So how do we understand it and break free from it?

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Defence: Control Is a Symptom

Simon P. Walker’s work in The Undefended Leader unpacks the nature of control and explains why it is a symptom.1 That control isn’t fundamentally a behaviour problem. It’s a defence mechanism. It develops when something deeper in the leader feels at risk and when the self needs protection, and controlling behaviour becomes protective armour.

That’s such an important insight. It shifts the question from What are you doing? to what is happening inside you?

But I want to go a level further in with this. This is hard to hear if control has worked for you. And it probably has up to a point. And it is hard to hear if you cannot conceive of control as something other than a character and competence issue.

But explore with me and see what you think.

Because when I map Walker’s insight alongside the Affective Leadership framework I’ve been building across this series, something becomes very clear:

Control is not simply a defence. It is what happens when the core capacities of leadership begin to fragment under pressure.

Those capacities are four:

• Identity — who you are when the situation challenges you

• Attention — what you perceive when the noise increases

• Regulation — how your nervous system responds to threat

• Presence — the quality of relational space you create around you

When these are integrated, a leader can stay grounded, open, and clear in the middle of complexity.

When they fragment, control takes over. Here’s how each one breaks down.

1. Identity → Control as Self-Protection

The pressure arrives!

Maybe it’s a difficult email. A meeting that went sideways. A plan that starts to unravel. Deadlines are being missed due to a lack of ownership. A colleague who pushes back harder than expected with vague accusations.

For many leaders, something beneath our surface tightens up. It’s not just the situation that feels threatening.

Our self feels threatened.

Walker is precise here: control protects the leader from exposure—especially the exposure of inadequacy, failure, or loss of status. When identity becomes contingent on being right, being respected, and being seen as competent, then any disruption to those things becomes a crisis of self.

So the leader moves quickly and often subconsciously to:

- Set the record and narrative straight

- Reassert their position

- Regain lost ground

What appears to be decisiveness is actually an identity defence, and it's here that the self begins to crack. And once identity is ungrounded, everything else follows in a knock-on effect.

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2. Attention → Control as Narrowing

A controlled identity cannot afford to stay open. Openness is too risky. It might encounter something that confirms the fears around it.

So attention narrows.

Instead of noticing, remaining curious, and staying perceptive, the leader begins to fixate. Interprets too quickly. Moves toward resolution. Their field of awareness is now contracting.

We stop listening, and we start managing.

Walker frames it this way: control reduces complexity. It takes what is nuanced and makes it manageable. That feels helpful, but it comes at a major cost.

When our attention narrows, we stop seeing people clearly. We stop reading the room. We miss what matters most, not because we’re unintelligent, but because our attention has already closed around a conclusion.

Control is what happens when attention can no longer remain open under pressure.

3. Regulation → Control as Nervous System Strategy

Here’s where the neuroscience becomes impossible to ignore.

The amygdala fires. The nervous system moves to high alert. The body—your body and mine—starts scanning even more for safety.

Control becomes the strategy it lands on:

- Create predictability

- Reduce uncertainty

- Limit exposure

- Manage the variables

And it works. Briefly.

The internal noise quiets down. The system we are in stabilises. The leader feels calmer because they feel in charge and in control.

But the cost is high, because there is now:

- Reduced flexibility

- Reduced empathy

- Reduced discernment

The important thing to understand here is that this is not a choice. Control is not chosen at this level. I’ll say that again. Control is not chosen at this level.

It is enacted by a dysregulated system trying to feel safe. Which means the solution is not willpower.

It never was.

4. Presence → Control as Relational Diminishment

This is the one most leaders miss. And it is perhaps the most damaging.

By the time identity has become defensive, attention has narrowed, the body has been regulated through control, and the relational world around the leader has already shifted.

Their presence is now compromised.

Instead of creating space, holding tension, and allowing others to be, the leader begins to direct more and more. To constrain. And this subtly dominates the emotional field around them.

Others often feel it before they can name it.

There is less freedom around them: less openness and more pressure.

Walker puts it plainly: control distances the leader from others. Not intentionally. Not cruelly. But inevitably. The leader is still physically present. But presence—the kind that makes people feel seen, held, safe and free—has been replaced by controlling management.

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The Formation Question

Let’s recap the four key things that happen when control takes over.

Identity becomes threatened → Attention narrows to protect it → The body regulates through control → Presence is diminished.

Each one triggers the next. Each one makes the others worse.

And so we can say this:

Control is what leadership becomes when the self can no longer remain present to reality.

This is where I want to take Walker’s insight further. He names the nature of control as defence. You cannot change what you cannot name and see.

But how do we get beyond naming the problem? This question is one of formation.

And the answer is not:

> Try harder to control less.

That adds a performance pressure to an already dysregulated system.

The actual path we need to take begins with:

• Grounding identity beyond performance — Stop tying your sense of self to how well you’re doing. If your identity depends on succeeding, then any challenge seems like a personal attack. This is about knowing who you are, regardless of outcomes.

• Training our attention to remain open — Under pressure, most people narrow their focus and get defensive or rigid. This is about practising the ability to stay genuinely curious rather than reactive when things get hard.

• Developing regulation under pressure — This isn’t about controlling your environment or managing how things look. It’s about building real capacity in your body and nervous system to handle stress — so you’re not just coping, you’re actually stable.

• Cultivate presence that can hold complexity — When situations are messy or contradictory, most people do one of three things: simplify the problem, avoid it, or try to dominate it. This is about being able to sit with complexity without needing to resolve it prematurely.

You can't just read about control, attend a workshop, or understand it intellectually and then have it down pat. Forming a capacity means it has to be lived, practised, and embodied over time.

A Summary

So control is what happens when identity is threatened, attention collapses, the body seeks safety, and presence is lost. Four fractures with one symptom. And I have been prone to all of them as a leader, as have all leaders.

Leading with accountability, responsibility, goals, and ownership is essential. All too easily, people unwilling to carry these see any review of them as controlling, which it is not. But when an organisation is under pressure — and so is the leader — control creeps in, and these vital things easily become tools of control.

So how can our attention remain open under pressure?

Next: what it actually looks like to train attention under pressure—and why most leadership development misses this entirely.

Most leaders know this meeting.

You walk in with a clear purpose. A project that matters, already stalled long enough, and today is finally the day to move it forward. Then something changes.

One person makes a comment that lands just slightly off — passive aggression at its most effective. Before you’ve processed that, someone else comes in harder. Direct hostility, not bothering to disguise anything. Two people, two very different tactics, and within minutes, the meeting has stopped being about the project entirely.

You scan the room. Silence.

Everyone is waiting. Watching you. As if the fact that the meeting broke down is somehow your responsibility to fix. Which, at that instant, it is.

This is what nobody teaches you about leadership.

When things come apart, the emotional load doesn’t distribute itself fairly. It lands on the leader. You absorb the passive resistance from one side, the open hostility from the other, and underneath all of it, the discomfort of everyone who has gone quiet and is hoping you’ll sort it out. It’s a lot to hold while you’re also trying to think straight.

And so you do what leaders do. You take charge. You speak with more authority. You narrow the options and pull the room back toward you. It feels like leadership.

But at some point in that meeting, you stopped leading and started reacting.

A whiff of exposure. A moment where control slipped, just slightly. Your instinct kicks in — immediate, practised, and entirely understandable. Stabilise. Move toward clarity. Reassert the frame.

Except that what’s driving things isn’t only the needs of the agenda. It’s also yours. The move toward control isn’t purely strategic — it’s also, quietly, a way of managing your own discomfort under the guise of managing the meeting.

This is not a criticism. It’s a pattern that shows up in the best leaders, not only the struggling ones. Still, it raises a question worth facing now, in the room, in the moment itself:

What am I using power for right now?

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Strategies of Defence

Simon Walker has a precise name for what just happened in that room.

In The Undefended Leader, in a chapter he calls “Strategies of Defence II: Power,” Walker makes an observation that is simple, uncomfortable, and difficult to argue with: leaders don’t only use power to lead. They use power to defendthemselves.

Power, in its proper form, is plain enough — the capacity to act, to decide, to influence. But Walker’s insight is that power shifts its purpose depending on the internal state of the person wielding it. When a leader feels exposed, uncertain, or suddenly out of control, the power is still being exercised but no longer primarily in service of the task.

It is in the service of the self.

Not consciously. Not cynically. But the move toward control, toward narrowing the options, toward speaking with greater authority than the moment perhaps requires — these are not only leadership responses. They are, Walker argues, defensive ones. Ways of restoring an internal equilibrium that has been quietly threatened.

Which reframes everything that happened in that meeting. The question is no longer simply whether you handled the room well. The question is: what, underneath the handling, were you actually trying to protect?

Power Isn’t the Problem

Walker is careful here, and it’s worth us being careful, too.

Power itself is not the issue. Walker identifies five forms of power every leader carries into every room: personality, resources, experience, expertise, and position. You cannot lead without them. They are the tools of leadership.

The real issue is what your power is doing for you — because under pressure, each of these modes shifts. Quietly, and often invisibly.

Your personality — your presence, your relational influence — acts as a tool for emotional control when you need others’ responses to stabilise you. Your resources become leverage when you use them to secure outcomes that also secure you. Your experience hardens into rigidity the moment you stop genuinely listening. Your expertise becomes a need to be right. And your positional authority tips into domination — what people more bluntly call pulling rank.

None of this declares itself so that you can immediately consider it. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to catch. All these movements feel like leadership.

Walker doesn’t soften the blow. When power is used defensively, trust erodes. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily. People in the room sense it, even when they can’t name it. They comply, but something in them disengages. The discussion continues, but genuine thinking stops. Creativity, which depends on a particular kind of safety, quietly evaporates.

And here is Walker’s keenest observation: the more you reach for power to secure yourself, the less real authority you actually carry. The two move in opposite directions. Positional power can be asserted indefinitely — the title remains, the decisions stick. But authority, the kind that sincerely moves and motivates people, drains away in direct proportion to how power is used defensively.

You can hold the people in the room. But you may have lost something in that mode of holding.

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Why Things Are Getting Worse

The conditions Walker described have worsened considerably since he wrote.

What we face now is not the occasional difficult meeting, the periodic loss of control. The challenge is that instability has become the baseline for us. Cultural fragmentation, relational breakdown, information arriving faster than it can be processed, pressure that is constant but rarely accompanied by clarity — these are no longer exceptional circumstances. They are our day-to-day environment.

Chaos is no longer something that intrudes from the outside. It is ambient. It is the atmosphere we now lead in.

And that changes everything Walker identified, because the triggers he described — exposure, uncertainty, loss of control — are no longer occasional. They are continuous. Which means the defensive use of power is no longer a response to particular moments of pressure. For many leaders, it has become their default mode. Their resting state. The water they swim in without noticing.

This is not a failure of character. It is a predictable human response to a perpetually hostile environment and is far from harmless.

The Affective Layer

What Walker mapped behaviourally, neuroscience now describes from the inside.

Under sustained pressure, our nervous systems shift into a protective state. Our bodies tighten up. Peripheral awareness narrows. Our capacity for openness, curiosity, and genuine responsiveness contracts, and the drive toward control increases. Not as a conscious choice, but as an automatic response to a system that has registered a threat and is trying to restore some sense of equilibrium.

Which means that when you see a leader becoming more controlling under pressure, i.e sharper, more directive, less willing to hear dissent, you may not be seeing strength. You may be seeing a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when they feel unsafe.

Defensive power is not only a strategic or psychological pattern. It is an affective regulation strategy. The reaching for control, the narrowing of options, the reassertion of authority, are, in part, the body’s attempt to manage an internal state that has become too difficult to bear.

The leader who dominates the room may be doing so not because they have too much confidence, but because something in them is working very hard not to fall apart.

Once you see this, you cannot unsee it. And once you name the pattern, its cruelty becomes visible:

Chaos → Anxiety → Control → Distance → More Chaos.

Every intervention designed to reduce instability actually increases it. The harder the leaders grip, the more the system strains. The more control is exerted, the more the relationships that might genuinely stabilise things are quietly eroded. All of which raises the anxiety, which tightens the grip again.

Most leaders have lived in this cycle so long that it no longer feels like one. It feels like reality. Like the unavoidable texture of leadership in difficult times.

The pattern cannot be broken from within itself. Which means the first move is simply this: to see it for what it is.

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The Real Issue

The assumption, when leadership goes wrong, is usually that someone misused power — too aggressive, too self-interested, too willing to override others for personal gain. And sometimes that is true.

But Walker points us to something more subtle, and considerably more common.

The deeper issue is not the misuse of power. It is the need for it. The moment a leader can no longer remain genuinely present — open, attentive, willing to not know — without first securing themselves, power steps in to fill the gap. It becomes what makes the anxious presence of others bearable. The mechanism by which a leader manages their own internal state well enough to stay in the room with everyone else.

Which means the problem is not, at root, behavioural. It is a problem of interiority.

This is a reversal that changes everything. We have been asking the wrong question. The question is not how leaders use power. Rather, it is what they need power to do for them. Because the moment power becomes what makes you feel safe enough to function, authority has quietly become your coping strategy. And no amount of leadership development that addresses only surface behaviour will touch what is actually driving it.

Power becomes dangerous not when people reach for it out of ambition. It becomes dangerous when they reach for it out of need and protection.

So let’s get specific and move beyond leadership in the abstract, to yours, right now.

Where are you tightening your grip? Where are you needing to be right — not because the evidence demands it, but because something in you does? Where are you leaning on your role, your expertise, your experience, in ways that are closing down the room rather than opening it? Where are you, quietly, making yourself harder to reach?

These are not comfortable questions. They are not meant to be.

But they’re not questions of judgement either. The pattern we have been tracing is not a character flaw. Underneath every place where the grip has tightened, there is something that feels at risk — your credibility, your sense of competence, your ability to hold things together. Or something older than your current role, something perhaps you learned long ago: that control is safer than vulnerability.

Whatever it is, it is worth naming. Not to dismantle or undo you, to make your impossible situation even worse. But because you cannot lead well, and you cannot be well from a place you refuse to look at.

What feels at risk in you right now?

The Jesus Way: The Power of Noticing

Here is where the Christian understanding of leadership parts ways, quietly but radically, with almost everything else on offer.

Christ does not lead by securing himself. He does not manage his exposure or protect his position. He does not reach for control when the room turns against him — and it does turn against him, repeatedly, in every way imaginable. He remains present. In misunderstanding, in instability, in apparent failure, in the kind of loss that looks, from the outside, like total collapse.

And he does not stand outside our instability and call us toward him. He enters it, in his life, in his suffering, in the fullness of what it means to be human under pressure without withdrawing into self-protection. And he continues to enter it now, through his body in the world.

Which means the invitation to the Christian leader is not what we might expect. You are not asked to stabilise yourself before you lead. You are not asked to resolve your anxiety, master your nervous system, and then show up. You are invited to remain present — with him, within it — in the unresolved, uncomfortable, destabilised reality of the room as it actually is.

This is not a technique. But it does have a practice.

In your next moment of pressure, before your grip tightens — notice what is happening in your body. Name what you are feeling. Ask which form of power you are about to reach for, and why. Then pause — just a few seconds — and turn: Christ, be present with me here. Then choose to stay open one moment longer than feels safe. Ask instead of assert. Listen instead of closing.

It is a small movement. But it interrupts the cycle. And over time, it forms something.

Because the most dangerous leaders are not, in the end, the most powerful — they are the most anxious. And the most trustworthy, the ones people will genuinely follow through genuine difficulty, are those who no longer need power to feel safe.

That is not a leadership competency. It is a kind of freedom.

But power is only one of the ways we defend ourselves. In the next piece unpacking The Undefended Leader, we follow Simon Walker into another of his insights — and it may be the one that hits closest to home.

How control becomes a strategy of defence—

and why it is often even harder to recognise than power.

You’ve probably had this experience online.

You make a clear point in a discussion. At first, it seems simple enough. But within a few replies, something curious happens. The subject shifts. Counter-claims appear that only loosely relate to what you actually said. Before long, the conversation is no longer about your point at all.

Instead, your motives are questioned. Your tone becomes the issue. An unrelated example is introduced as though it settles the matter. Soon enough come the familiar rituals: a little name-calling here, a moral insinuation there.

What began as a discussion about an idea quickly becomes something else — a discussion about you: your character, your intentions, your supposed moral standing. The original point quietly disappears beneath a flurry of reactions.

It can feel like trying to hold a bar of soap. No matter how carefully you state your case, the argument slips away. Just when you think you have grasped the issue, it moves again. Before long, you realise you are wrestling in the mud of insinuation and accusation. And as the old saying goes, when you wrestle a pig, you both get dirty — though the pig, of course, rather enjoys it.

So what can you do? Opt out of any online conversations. It’s what many do. Or fall prey to a kind of digital Stockholm Syndrome, and become like our kidnappers, using the rhetorical devices that captured us in the first place.

I’ve been trying something different. Reviewing these conversations more carefully and looking back at exchanges after the dust had settled, I noticed the same rhetorical sleights of hand appear.

What feels chaotic in the moment turns out, on examination, to follow surprisingly familiar patterns and actually be rather predictable.

And once you begin to recognise those patterns, something important changes. You are far less likely to be pulled into them, and there are effective ways to respond.

What follows, then, is not a guide to “winning arguments.” It is something more modest, I hope, and more useful: a map of the most common ways online conversations get hijacked — and a few simple ways to bring them back to the point.

Take a look and see which ones you recognise, and let me know which ones you think are missing.

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The Ultimate Logical Fallacy Cheat Sheet

1. Ad Hominem (”To the Person”)

• The Trick: Attacking your character or traits instead of your argument.

• Typical Line: “You’re just being point-scoring/ignorant/ideological.”

• The Redirect: “That’s a comment about me rather than the point I made, which was...”

2. Whataboutism (”The Deflection”)

• The Trick: Shifting the focus to someone else’s wrongdoing to avoid criticism.

• Typical Line: “But what about the Conservatives / Labour / the other side?”

• The Redirect: “That may be a separate issue, but it doesn’t change the facts of the point I raised here.”

3. Straw Man (”The Fake Version”)

• The Trick: Misrepresenting your position to make it easier to attack.

• Typical Line: “So what you’re really saying is...” (followed by an extreme version of your point).

• The Redirect: “That is a distortion of my position. My actual claim was...”

4. Motte-and-Bailey (”The Retreat”)

• The Trick: Making a wild claim, then retreating to a “safe” claim when challenged.

• Typical Line: “I only meant that nuance matters.” (after saying something radical).

• The Redirect: “That’s a different, much milder claim than the one you originally made. Can we go back to the first one?”

5. Tone Policing (”The Style Critique”)

• The Trick: Focusing on how you said something to avoid discussing what you said.

• Typical Line: “You’re being far too combative/argumentative right now.”

• The Redirect: “We can disagree about my tone, but the core issue itself still needs to be addressed.”

6. False Equivalence (”The False Balance”)

• The Trick: Claiming two things are the same when they differ wildly in scale or evidence.

• Typical Line: “Well, both sides do it,” or “This is no different from [X].”

• The Redirect: “Those situations aren’t logically equivalent. Similarity in one small respect doesn’t make them the same.”

7. Gish Gallop (”The Blizzard”)

• The Trick: Drowning you in a rapid series of many weak claims so you can’t answer them all.

• Typical Line: “Here are ten reasons why you’re wrong...” (followed by a wall of text).

• The Redirect: “That’s a lot of separate claims at once. Let’s take them one at a time—which one is your strongest?”

8. Appeal to Motive (”The Mind Reader”)

• The Trick: Dismissing an argument by claiming to know your “hidden” agenda.

• Typical Line: “You’re only saying that because you’re [conservative/progressive/privileged].”

• The Redirect: “My motives don’t determine whether the facts are true. Can you address the argument itself?”

9. Moving the Goalposts (”The Goal-Shifter”)

• The Trick: Demanding new or higher levels of evidence after you’ve already provided proof.

• Typical Line: “Well, that still doesn’t prove it. I need to see [new requirement].”

• The Redirect: “That’s a different standard than we agreed on at the start. Why is the previous evidence insufficient?”

10. Loaded Language (”The Framing Trap”)

• The Trick: Using emotional or judgmental words to bias the audience before the facts are out.

• Typical Line: “Anyone who supports this dangerous/extremist/cruel policy is...”

• The Redirect: “Those are strong labels, but they don’t explain why the policy is wrong. Let’s look at the data.”

11. Argument from Authority (”The Expert Shield”)

• The Trick: Insisting something is true purely because an “expert” said so, without explaining why.

• Typical Line: “The experts/institutions all agree on this, so you’re wrong.”

• The Redirect: “Expertise is valuable, but the reasoning behind their conclusion is what matters. What is that reasoning?”

Some Help For You

Whilst the above may be helpful, it can feel a little overwhelming to remember all these tactics, let alone identify them quickly in the middle of an online exchange.

So instead, I’ve created a simple AI prompt to help, which you can download here.

If you copy and paste the prompt in this document into your AI chat tool of choice, it will ask you to paste in the comment you want to analyse. The tool will then identify the logical fallacies or rhetorical tactics being used, explain what is happening in the exchange, and suggest a calm way you might respond.

In other words, it gives you a quick way to diagnose the rhetorical moves someone may be using against you — and offers a clear response you can use to bring the conversation back to the actual issue.

I’d love to know which logical fallacies you most commonly encounter, which ones frustrate you the most, and how you’ve learned/are learning to respond when they appear.

Something is taking out leaders. Not burnout. Not busyness. But something much deeper.

In my last piece, drawing on Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader, I named the systems taking out leaders. In this article, we go further — into the mechanisms beneath the surface that quietly give rise to those systems. This is where it gets uncomfortable.

Most leaders intuitively understand the difference between their front stage and back stage. On the front stage, we are composed. Capable, measured, and clear. We preach, present, lead meetings, post online, cast vision, and manage conflict.

On the backstage, it is rather different.

We doubt. We second-guess and feel exposed. We replay conversations. We fear irrelevance and suffer imposter syndrome. We feel the sting of criticism. We wonder if we are enough.

Simon Walker, in The Undefended Leader, uses the front/backstage metaphor to describe how leaders defend themselves in a hostile world. Simon Walker didn’t stumble onto the front stage/back stage idea. It’s grounded in serious intellectual work — specifically Erving Goffman’s social theory on how human beings perform their way through social life.1 Walker takes that framework and applies it with care to the world of leadership. This isn’t a borrowed metaphor dressed up to sound clever. It’s a modality that has been rigorously tested and has earned its place in the real world.

What it shows us is not flattering.

If we are honest, so much of what we call leadership today is really a sophisticated form of performance and image management. We curate competence. We protect reputation. We manage perception with care and precision. We work hard to ensure that what is visible publicly is strong, coherent, decisive, and high-impact. We learn how to speak with clarity even when we feel uncertain. We project steadiness even when we are stretched thin. The front stage must hold firm against a hostile world.

Meanwhile, backstage can feel very different.

Things are not always as secure as they appear. We are often running on adrenaline and calling it resilience. Self-doubt lingers in the background, even when affirmation comes to us. There is anger and disappointment that we quietly spiritualise. There is grief too — grief for what leadership was meant to be, grief for what it has actually cost, grief for versions of ourselves that seem to have slipped away somewhere in the passing of time and our past.

We carry unmet expectations like splinters under the skin—a thousand paper cuts. Some are ours. Some belong to others but lodge themselves in us, turning septic. We feel the pressure to be visionary and pastoral, strategic and available, decisive and endlessly patient. And there is rarely a place to hold the complexity of what this does to us internally.

The front stage does not readily accommodate fragility. It has no obvious category for confusion, fatigue, or quiet resentment. So we carry it, normalise it, telling ourselves this is simply the weight of responsibility, and a season that will pass—until it doesn’t.

Underneath all of it sits a quiet fear that the gap between who we seem to be and who we actually are is widening. Not because we are fraudulent, but because we are so very tired. Because we are human. Because the cost of maintaining the performance slowly erodes our soul. And there is always that subtle anxiety that one day the gap will be exposed — that someone will see behind the curtain and realise how much effort it has taken to hold everything together.

And we have all watched what happens when the backstage is exposed.

I don’t just mean the truly egregious cases — the abusive, manipulative, predatory leaders whose behaviour is indefensible and must be named plainly. I mean the more tragic ones. The leader who is just overwhelmed. The one carrying unprocessed grief. The one running too long on adrenaline and too little on rest. The one whose exhaustion clouds judgment. Not evil or monstrous. Just depleted and running on empty.

When their backstage becomes visible, the response is often swift. They are removed, transitioned, and sidelined. Sometimes gently. Sometimes brutally. But often with a certain institutional efficiency. The system protects itself as the platform stabilises and the narrative is managed.

And the rest of us watch.

We may not say it out loud, but we absorb the lesson: do not let them see backstage. Don’t let the fatigue show. Don’t admit to confusion. Don’t reveal how close you are to the edge. Keep the front stage polished and keep performing.

So we double down on preservation. We manage ourselves even more tightly. We protect perception with greater vigilance. We convince ourselves this is wisdom, just until this season—which is never-ending—has passed.

Even when we are in environments that are, objectively, safe — where there are trusted friends, wise supervisors, spiritual directors, and overseers who would likely respond with grace — we often cannot see that it is safe. The internal narrative is louder than the external reality. The fear of losing credibility, influence, or trust distorts our vision. So we stay silent.

And then we wait too long.

We tell ourselves we need one more period, one more season, one more event, one more crisis navigated. We struggle on. We push through. We defer the conversations that might actually save us. By the time we finally name what’s happening backstage, the strain has already compounded. Boundaries have been crossed and the real options open to us have narrowed.

The energy that once went into vocation slowly diverts into concealment. The fear of exposure becomes a quiet hum in the background. We grow more isolated, more defended, less porous. And in trying not to become the “tragic” leader who unravels publicly, we edge toward a different precipice.

Because it is precisely this prolonged hiddenness — this refusal or inability to let our backstage be known, accompanied, and held — that has preceded so many of the catastrophic implosions we rightly fear. The worst explosions rarely begin with cartoonish villainy. They begin with isolation. With unmanaged grief and fatigue disguised as faithfulness. With a role that has grown larger than the human soul inhabiting it.

So in protecting ourselves from being discarded, we risk hardening ourselves instead.

Leaders do not collapse because they are human. They collapse because they try not to be for too long, and often alone.

The backstage leaks — through personality, defensiveness, overreaction, and control. And if it is not faced, it eventually explodes. Burnout, in this sense, is not simply overwork; it is the strain of sustaining a divided self. Suppression is not integration and is not a long-term survival strategy.

I spent years living with chronic anxiety. I thought that if I named how pressured I felt — how uncertain, how stretched — it would be the end of me as a leader. So I carried it privately. I became increasingly competent on the front stage and increasingly compressed backstage. Nothing dramatic happened. But the cost accumulated until I had a breakdown and was forced to start admitting the gap between my front and back stage.

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Sociopathic Leaders

And these are the good leaders — the ones trying to carry something heavy with integrity. The ones who feel the strain of the front stage and know, at least vaguely, that there is a backstage that needs tending.

Some leaders are acutely aware of that tension. They know they are managing perception. They feel the gap between public strength and private fragility. Painful as that awareness is, it creates the possibility of confession, recalibration, and integration.

But there are others who do not even realise the dilemma they are inhabiting.

They have so internalised the role that the front stage no longer feels like a performance. It feels like their identity. Competence, clarity, decisiveness, spiritual authority — these have fused with their self. They are not consciously hiding backstage; they just cannot see it. Self-protection becomes instinctive and natural to them. Feedback feels like a threat because it is.

These leaders do not anxiously manage the gap between appearance and reality. It is merely unexamined. And unexamined gaps are the most dangerous of all.

But we must also speak about an entirely different category. The sociopath.

Some leaders relish the front stage. For them, performance is not exhausting; it is energising. They intuitively grasp power, narrative, and influence. They are adept at reading a room, shaping perception, and controlling optics. The front stage is not a burden to endure but a platform to master.

In such cases, there may be a backstage — but it is not a place of tension. It is simply completely private. There is no internal conflict about presenting one version publicly and inhabiting another privately. Concealment does not trouble their conscience; it is their natural identity strategy.

Research over the past two decades has increasingly observed that individuals with high levels of narcissistic and psychopathic traits — what organisational psychologists sometimes call the “dark triad” (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) — are disproportionately represented in senior leadership roles, particularly in politics, finance, and high-pressure corporate environments. These individuals often display charm, boldness under pressure, high risk tolerance, and emotional detachment — traits that can look like resilience in turbulent contexts.

In unstable, crisis-driven cultures, such traits are often rewarded. When the world feels volatile, decisive dominance can be mistaken for strength. Emotional detachment can be misread as clarity. Moral flexibility can be reframed as a needed pragmatism. Studies have shown that such personalities often rise more quickly in competitive systems precisely because they are less encumbered by anxiety, empathy, or self-doubt.

And we are living in an increasingly turbulent world — politically polarised, economically unstable, and all digitally amplified. Systems under stress often select for those who can survive chaos without being internally destabilised by it.

But surviving turbulence and leading humanely through it are not the same thing.

• The fatigued and divided leader needs accompaniment and integration.

• The unaware but fused leader needs awakening and reflective formation.

• But the sociopathic or highly narcissistic leader is not merely difficult; they are dangerous.

The danger lies not in charisma or unconventionality, but in the diminished internal restraints that ordinarily protect others — empathy, remorse, proportionality, the capacity to receive correction.

When those checks are weak or absent, harm is not accidental but deliberate. In parts of the Christian world, sociopathic leaders can thrive precisely because communities are often reluctant to set firm boundaries around visibly “anointed” or successful figures, mistaking accountability for disloyalty and charisma for character.

Without deliberate practices of reflection, supervision, spiritual direction, and courageous institutional oversight, leadership roles will almost always colonise the person. For some, this results in exhaustion and fragmentation. For others, it results in inflation and impunity.

By the time something cracks, it can feel sudden. But it rarely is. It is usually the long erosion of interior honesty — or the long absence of it. The tragedy is not only that leaders collapse. It is that systems sometimes reward the very traits that make collapse — moral, relational, institutional — more likely.

The invitation, then, is not to abandon leadership.

It is to cultivate leaders who are deeply human: self-aware, accountable, accompanied, and, where necessary, structurally constrained. In a turbulent age, that may be the most radical thing of all.

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Why We Defend

Walker is not just psychologically on the money; he is pastorally on it too. He names what most leaders feel but rarely admit. Leadership is inherently evaluative. You are watched, assessed, interpreted. Everything about you is analysed. Decisions are scrutinised and your motives assigned.

Authority is always slightly fragile. Institutions — especially churches — are anxious systems: risk-averse, reputation-conscious, fearful of decline. Add in social media, and any protective membrane between the public and private has dissolved. The front-stage is now continuous, permanent, and algorithmically amplified.

So, of course, we defend.

We curate, we manage, and we clarify perceptions. We pre-empt criticism. In our current climate, not defending would almost be abnormal. It is, after all, how everyone survives.

But the Christian tradition has never been naïve about hiding. It traces concealment not to modern media, but to the Garden of Eden. And here we can extend Walker theologically.

“Adam and his wife hid themselves…”

The defended self did not begin with social media. It began with fear — the fear that exposure means rejection, that being seen means being cast out, that nakedness is no longer safe.

Front-stage and back-stage are not merely sociological and psychological categories. They are symptoms of ontological insecurity — insecurity at the level of being itself, brought into existence by the fall.

When identity rests on performance, competence, reputation, or approval, criticism feels like diminishment, failure like collapse, misunderstanding like erasure. We defend not simply to protect our image, but to protect our very existence. Without a deeper assurance that our identity is received rather than constructed and validated by others, exposure can feel like annihilation.

Defensiveness is rarely arrogance. It is fragility trying to prevent the collapse of the self.

The book of Genesis sees this clearly. Adam hides not because he failed a task, but because he is unsure of his standing. “I was afraid.” Shame here is not merely moral; it is ontological. Nakedness, once safe, now feels utterly dangerous.

Modern leadership intensifies this ancient condition that we all suffer from.

We construct a front stage because we are unsure whether we are held. We manage perceptions because we are unsure we belong. If I am what I perform, failure is a kind of extinction. If I am what others affirm, criticism is obliteration—literally.

And here Walker opens a door that theology must walk through to understand Christian leadership.

Christian faith does not offer thicker skin, better image management, or the development of unlimited resilience. It proclaims a prior holding — an identity given to us to claim, and not be achieved. A self that precedes success, survives failure, and cannot be erased by any misunderstanding.

If leaders are defending, the first question is not moral but is in fact metaphysical:

What, finally, holds them? What is actually holding leaders up inside — what are they really standing on?

Until that is answered, the front stage will stay crowded, the back stage guarded, and criticism will continue to feel like the death of self.

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Participation Not Performance

The New Testament does not primarily invite leaders to become more authentic. It announces something far more destabilising.

“Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

That is not advice, a skill, or a competency. It is ontology. Before Jesus performs a miracle, gathers a crowd, or enters conflict, he hears:

“You are my beloved Son.”

Identity precedes ministry. Belovedness precedes effectiveness.

If this is true, the split between front stage and back stage is not healed by improved self-disclosure. It is healed by participation. I’ll say that again:

The split between front stage and back stage is NOT healed by improved self-disclosure. It is healed by participation.

Participation means my being and identity are not self-generated. They are received. It is grounded in the Son’s relation to the Father. It is not constructed through approval, and criticism does not undo it.

Without this, undefendedness is merely bravery. With it, true undefendedness becomes possible; I am no longer defending a constructed self. I am living from one given by God.

Metabolising Pain

Leadership hurts. Let’s not romanticise or minimise it.

Christian leaders live in an age of accelerated complexity: institutional decline, polarised congregations, perpetual visibility, algorithmic outrage, drama triangles, identity politics that turn pastors into symbols and red meat for tribal battles.

Everything about a leader is scrutinised and judged. And in carrying all this, there is almost no backstage remaining. Even prayer can become performative.

So what happens when the pain from all this manifests?

If my identity depends on the front stage, pain must be managed, neutralised, or projected. Defensiveness is instinctive, and self-protection is necessary for survival.

But in participation with Christ, pain is not denied. It is metabolised.

The Cross is not an inspirational image of vulnerability. It is not a divine TED Talk about authenticity. It is the place where shame is absorbed into divine life. At Golgotha, humiliation is not curated or managed; it is entered into and transfigured. Christ does not control the narrative with a marketing plan. He entrusts himself to the Father — not as a coping strategy, but as ontological truth. The Father holds his being.

This is not theatre. It is participation.

And this is where Theosis — that ancient, neglected doctrine and experience — must be recovered. Theosis is not self-improvement or intensified spirituality. It is the slow reconstitution of the self in Christ. Through participation in his life, death, and resurrection, our being is relocated. This is not a call to perform vulnerability. It is an invitation into ontological change.

This is the Christified life. And it begins with our backstage.

To be Christified means to be so united with Christ that your identity, desires, reactions, and life patterns are progressively shaped by participation in his life, death, and resurrection. It is stronger than “inspired by Jesus.” It is deeper than “imitating Jesus.”

To be Christified is to live from a self that no longer needs defending, because it is already hidden and named in Christ.

A Christified backstage is life lived coram Christo — before the face of Christ — when no one else is watching. It is where hidden reactions are surrendered rather than justified, where defensiveness is exposed to grace. Here, the anxious, self-constructing ego is gradually crucified, and a self rooted in belovedness is received.

But when the backstage is surrendered, the front stage is transformed.

A Christified front stage is marked not by charisma but by congruence. The public self is no longer a mask but becomes the source of our public manifestation. Authority then flows from surrender rather than insecurity. Public visibility neither inflates nor diminishes identity because identity no longer depends on visibility.

From this, we can see that:

• A strong front stage with an unhealed backstage produces charisma without durability.

• A cultivated inner life without public courage produces safety without any influence. Inflating both produces a performative spirituality.

• But when both stages are Christified, something rare emerges: an integrated authority.

Integrated authority does not dominate, collapse under criticism, or hunger secretly for applause and affirmation from others. It can bear weight because it is no longer self-generated.

The undefended leader is not without weakness. They are those whose hidden life has been surrendered into Christ’s death and whose public life flows from his resurrection. Their ego is no longer enthroned and in control. Their self is not erased but now re-membered in Christ.

As this mode of being deepens, the backstage finally grows quieter. The leader’s inner commentary softens. Prayer can now deepen. The compulsion to manage public perception can loosen. And the front-stage now becomes lighter — still important but no longer an ultimate marker of identity.

The goal here is not perfection. It is coherence: the closing of the fracture between who we are when we are watched and who we are when alone.

When our life is hidden with Christ in God, his life becomes our origin, his death our liberation from our false self, his resurrection our new mode of being. Participation means that what is true of him becomes, by grace, true of us — not metaphorically, but in reality.

This is why exposure need not annihilate us. The self that required constant defence has already been crucified. This is why criticism need not erase us. Identity is not generated by others’ approval. This is why loss need not destroy us. Resurrection is not an idea; it is a life we share with Christ.

Theosis is the patient undoing of the anxious, self-securing ego and the awakening of a self held in Christ.

Not curated, not defended, but re-membered.

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The End of the Defended Leader

Christian leaders do not need more performance strategies. We don’t need sharper messaging or another competency framework to stay visible and effective. And we certainly cannot build enough resilience to repair what is most deeply fractured in us and in our world.

What we need is reconstitution.

Much of contemporary leadership culture assumes that the solution to pressure is endurance. If the demands on us are relentless, we are told to become more resilient. If scrutiny increases, we must become more robust. If the emotional toll rises, we must strengthen our coping mechanisms. But resilience, while not unimportant, is insufficient.

You cannot reinforce a divided self into wholeness.

The problem is not simply that our “front stage” and “back stage” require better management. It is not that we need more sophisticated techniques for integrating public leadership with private life. The deeper issue is that something in us created the split in the first place.

Somewhere along the way, we learned that visibility required armour. That leadership required performance. That authority required projection. We constructed a self capable of standing under lights — articulate, competent, composed. And quietly, often unconsciously, we hid the more fragile parts of ourselves backstage.

If we focus only on building resilience, we merely strengthen that architecture. We make the performing self more durable. We increase its stamina. But we do not address the wound that necessitated it in the first place.

Christian leadership dares to go deeper than durability, capacity and resilience.

It calls us to withdraw, deliberately, from the permanent front stage — not to abandon vocation, but to recover our hiddenness. It invites us to allow our wounds to be processed in Christ rather than projected outward onto congregations, colleagues, or causes. It asks us to refuse the subtle seduction of ideology as identity, and instead to anchor our authority not in applause, alignment, or tribe, but in participation in Christ.

We must stop trying to be resilient without being remade.

The real question is not how we can manage the split more effectively, but what caused it. What fear shaped it? What shame hardened it? What ambition or insecurity forged the defended self we now inhabit so fluently?

Until that root is addressed, resilience only helps the divided self function more efficiently.

There is a deeper vision — a larger and louder vision — of Christian leadership. It is not about collapsing the stage or abandoning leadership. The gospel does not call us to retreat from responsibility. Nor does it sanctify fragility for its own sake.

Instead, it heals by relocating the self.

It meets us in the place where the division began and reconstitutes us there. In Christ, the defended self is no longer necessary. In participation in the crucified and risen Lord, we discover that our identity is received, not constructed—self-made.

We are invited to inhabit the stage as a self that no longer needs defending because that self has already been received. Already named and already held by God.

And hidden. With Christ.

A Gen Z Substack writer recently announced that she had just realised the importance of critical thinking. This, she declared, was her breakthrough moment.

Given the current alarming decline in critical thinking, I was drawn in—hopeful that a countercultural recovery movement might begin with her post.

What followed was over 1,500 words of unexamined assumptions, borrowed phrases, algorithm-approved moral signals, and precisely zero evidence that she had actually done any critical thinking at all. Ever. Yet the comments lauded the author for making a huge, much-needed breakthrough for their generation.

It was strangely perfect.

Because we now live in a moment when talking about thinking is often mistaken for thinking itself. And that confusion is everywhere about everything.

Illusions: When Talking Replaces Doing

We have drifted into a world where naming something feels equivalent to actually doing it. We speak about justice, leadership, courage, deconstruction and “doing the work”. And somehow, the vocabulary, just saying the words, becomes a substitute for the actual thing itself.

Psychologically, the reason for this faulty process is disarmingly simple. Speaking feels like doing. When we articulate a value, commit to a principle, or declare an intention, our brains release a small hit of satisfaction—the same neurochemical reward we’d get from actual accomplishment. We announce our gym membership and feel virtuous without ever stepping on a treadmill. We post about critical thinking and present ourselves as intellectually rigorous, yet we never engage in any actual critical thinking.

Language now creates the illusion of action. In our current ecosystem of performative social media, the illusion has become more valuable than the reality. Identity signalling replaces genuine intellectual formation, and performance is mistaken for substance. But there is a deeper problem: critical thinking itself has been reframed as suspect. Even when we want to practise it, we have been subtly disabled and trained away from it.

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Circular Thinking and Epistemic Closure

Universities, once the foremost places for teaching and practising critical thinking, have increasingly become incubators of ideological capture—and worse, sites of intellectual lobotomising that actively disable the very capacity they were meant to cultivate. They increasingly reward fluency in approved language over any rigorous argument. Schools teach students what to think about, not how to think.

Here is a recent example that reveals the poverty of critical thinking within a university: the near-total ideological capture of thought, and the deeper problem it creates—the impossibility of thinking itself when circular reasoning, embedded within modern ideologies, is institutionalised and endlessly reinforced by the university.

When people are trained—subtly or overtly—to distrust independent evidence, or simply lose the habit of seeking it, they enter a kind of epistemic closure. At that point, reality is no longer something to be examined but something to be defended. Truth becomes secondary to their emotional allegiance. Their denial hardens into a kind of denialism, where any evidence is immediately dismissed, distorted, or attacked—not because it has been carefully evaluated, but because it threatens the existing position people hold. Reason itself becomes compromised, and displaced by emotional certainty.

Beliefs fuse with identity, so that admitting error feels less like intellectual growth - and intellectual growth is no longer a desired pursuit - and more like the personal collapse of identity and being. This whole process activates powerful defensive instincts that kick in to defend the self by preserving beliefs no matter how false they are.

And we now have whole ecosystems designed to perfect this where critical thinking does not simply atrophy. It becomes dangerous. Because real thinking always carries the risk of discovering you were wrong. And when belief is fused with identity, being wrong no longer feels like learning. It feels like losing yourself.

Over time, this also reshapes a persons moral perception. Those who disagree are no longer seen simply as mistaken, but as suspect or even less than human. We see this in the extreme name calling of people to denigrate and describe their inhumanity. It explains how everyone who disagrees with someone is now is a right wing, nazi facist or similar.

Neurologically, the brain filters out opposing arguments altogether, making genuine engagement increasingly difficult. People retreat into echo chambers that reinforce what they already believe and inoculate them against any correction. The result is not merely disagreement, but the formation of a post-truth consciousness—where certainty replaces truth, emotional resolution of cognitive dissonance replaces rational coherence, and meaningful dialogue becomes practically impossible.

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What We Lose When Critical Thinking Dies

Tragically as critically thinking atrophies, major pathologies manifest in society and culture.

We become easier to control. Whether by governments, corporations, algorithms, or activists, people who can’t think critically are people who can be led by their noses. They’ll believe whatever confirms their existing biases, reject whatever challenges them, and never notice they’re doing it.

We fragment into warring tribes. Without the ability to evaluate evidence, adjudicate between competing claims, or even agree on what constitutes a good argument, we retreat into ideological bunkers. Everyone becomes partisan, and truth becomes whatever your side says it is.

We lose the capacity for self-correction. Individuals and societies only improve when they can recognise their mistakes. Critical thinking is the immune system of the mind—it identifies errors, fights off bad ideas, and keeps the organism healthy. Without it, we’re defenseless against our own stupidity and ignorance.

We stop being able to solve actual problems. The world is complex. Climate change, economic inequality, mental health crises, geopolitical instability—none of these yield to slogans or wishful thinking. They require clear-minded analysis, uncomfortable trade-offs, and the humility to admit when our first answer was wrong.

We need critical thinking not because it makes us sound smart in social interactions or on tick-tock videos but because reality doesn’t care about our feelings.

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What Critical Thinking Actually Is (And How to Reclaim It)

So what is critical thinking? It’s simpler than we might think—and harder than we’d like.

Critical thinking is the practice of questioning your own beliefs as rigorously as you question others’. It’s intellectual honesty. It’s the willingness to say “I don’t know” and to mean it. It’s the discipline, the practice of asking “What would change my mind?” and then genuinely looking for answers. And it has to start with even wanting that in the first place and to know why thinking better is vital for your well being and others.

Here’s some basics on how to recover it for yourself:

1. Steelman, don’t strawman. Before you dismiss an argument, make the strongest possible version of it. If you can’t articulate your opponent’s position in a way they’d recognise, you don’t understand it well enough to reject it. Can you imagine how just this practice would revolutionise our world?

2. Seek out disconfirming evidence. Don’t just Google things that prove you right. Actively hunt for information that challenges your beliefs. Read the best version of the other side’s argument, not the worst.

3. Distinguish between what you believe and what you can demonstrate. You’re entitled to your beliefs. You’re not entitled to present them as facts unless you can back them up. Learn to say: “I believe X, but I could be wrong” or “The evidence suggests Y, but it’s not conclusive.”

4. Practice intellectual humility. The smartest people in history got massive things wrong. So will you. So will I. That’s not a reason to stop thinking; it’s a reason to think more carefully. If you find yourself consumed by anger and offence with your instinct to existentially scream at someone as your sole response to their beliefs you are probably suffering epistemic closure and ideological imprisonment. Notice it and in others.

5. Engage with people who disagree with you—charitably and kindly. Not to win debates, but to test your ideas. Iron sharpens iron, but only if you’re both sharpening.

Why does recovering critical thinking matter personally? Because you can’t navigate a complex world with a simplistic mind. You’ll get exploited, manipulated, and led astray. More importantly, you’ll never grow.

Intellectual cowardice keeps us so very small.

The Gift of Critical Thinking to Others

But here’s the real reason to care about this: critical thinking isn’t just for you.

When you think critically, you make everyone around you better. You model intellectual courage. You demonstrate that it’s possible to disagree without demonising. You show that changing your mind isn’t weakness—it’s strength. And universities that used to embody this, have becomes places that do the complete opposite.

You become someone others can trust, because you’ve shown you care more about truth than about being right. In a world drowning in bad-faith actors and tribal loyalties, this becomes a gift to others.

You can also create space for honest conversation. When people know you won’t punish them for doubt or curiosity, they’ll bring their real questions to you. And those conversations—the ones where people are actually thinking, not just performing—are where real change happens. It is possible to discover the power and pleasure of critical thinking. And you can be the door out of ideological fundamentalism that others are trapped in.

Critical thinking is contagious. But so is its absence. We get to choose which virus we want to spread.

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Why Christians, of All People, Should Champion Critical Thinking

The properly Christian training of the mind is not a training in ‘religious’ subjects, but a training in how to think. C.S. Lewis

Finally, a word to Christians: We need to recover critical thinking not despite our faith, but because of it.

Christianity has always been, at its core, a truth-seeking faith. That said, there have been—and still are—forms of Christianity that resist critical thinking. Both these expressions, and modern secular ideological bubbles, rely on self-reinforcing environments that shield individuals from dissenting views.

The key difference between the Christian and secular versions lies in the ultimate anchor for their reasoning—but that is beyond the scope of this article. What matters here is that today’s post-truth epistemic closure and anti-rational thinking function, in many respects, like a form of fundamentalism. Increasingly, people are becoming fundamentalists—of whatever ideology they have adopted or been absorbed into.

But Christianity in its more major forms, did not merely tolerate critical thinking; it helped create the intellectual conditions that made systematic critical thinking possible. This happened through deeply interwoven theological, institutional, and cultural developments.

Christianity did not invent human rationality, but it did provide powerful plausibility structures—social, institutional, and moral frameworks—that reinforced the value of truth-seeking, intellectual humility, and rational accountability. These structures helped sustain habits of critical thinking across generations.

Critical thinking does not survive on technique alone. It depends on deeper cultural and moral commitments—especially the belief that truth exists, that it is worth pursuing, and that one’s identity can survive being wrong.

Christianity provided one of the most historically powerful frameworks for sustaining those commitments. When that framework weakens, as it has exponentially, critical thinking does not automatically disappear—but it becomes more fragile, and harder to sustain at a societal level. Which is what we have arrived at today.

This helps explain why societies can retain the language of critical thinking, the suggestion of it while gradually losing its actual practice.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Apostle Paul told the Thessalonians to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The Bereans were commended for examining the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul taught was true (Acts 17:11). Faith is not the absence of questioning—it’s the commitment to keep questioning until you find answers that are real.

The greatest Christian thinkers—Augustine, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer—were all rigorous critical thinkers. They didn’t fear reason; they wielded it in service of truth. They knew that a God who is Truth Himself has nothing to fear from honest inquiry.

Too often, modern Christianity has retreated into anti-intellectualism, as if thinking hard is a threat to faith. But the opposite is true. Lazy thinking leads to shallow faith—the kind that collapses the moment it meets a challenge. Critical thinking forged in the fires of real engagement creates a faith that lasts and bears testimony to reality.

Moreover, we worship a God who became incarnate—who entered into reality, into flesh and blood and history. Christianity is not a gnostic escape from the material world; it’s a full affirmation that the world is real, that truth is knowable, and that we are called to seek it with all our heart, soul, and mind (Matthew 22:37).

Critical thinking, rightly understood, is not rebellion. It is worship.

The world doesn’t need more Christians who can repeat talking points. It needs Christians who can and are willing to think—who can engage culture, answer hard questions, and give a reason for the hope within them (1 Peter 3:15). And that requires the courage to think critically.

And that would be a revival our world desperately needs.

Christian leadership is haemorrhaging at both ends—older leaders collapsing under defended survival, and younger leaders refusing to inherit a model that burns people out. Yet the answer is not the abandonment of leadership, but its re-formation—towards a way of leading that no longer survives by defence, but is sustained by freedom, and a deeper participation in the life of God.

We are living through a collapse of leadership trust and, just as quietly, a collapse of leaders themselves. This is not primarily a crisis of competence or strategy, but a formational crisis — a crisis of the leader’s interior world. That is why I’m returning to Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader, a book that names with rare clarity how leaders fail not through lack of skill, but through the loss of interior freedom.

I began this series just before the end of last year with an overview of The Undefended Leader (read it here), and this second piece continues a step-by-step walk through the book.

Leadership organised around defence slowly erodes interior freedom, relational authority, and spiritual depth. Before we can speak meaningfully about a better future for Christian leadership, Walker insists, we must first tell the truth about the storm—and about why so many leaders, often with the best of intentions, have learned to armour themselves, or quietly step away altogether.

Let’s begin where Walker begins: with the truth about the hostile world of the leader.

The Storms of Exposure

There is a particular loneliness to leadership that few people talk about honestly. Not the loneliness of being busy or burdened with responsibility, but the deeper loneliness of being permanently exposed.

To lead today is to live in a permanent state of exposure. Leaders are:

• Assessed before they are understood

• Criticised before they have finished thinking

• Condemned for the very patience and discernment we later complain they lack

Walker names this reality with particular clarity. He describes the leader's world not as occasionally difficult but as structurally hostile.

This reframes what we often misdiagnose as leadership failures. The issue is not primarily a lack of skill, courage, or even integrity. It is the conditions under which leadership is exercised and practised.

Walker’s claim is essentially this:

Leadership never happens in calm, indoor conditions. Leaders don’t get to work from a sheltered control room. They stand outside, exposed to the elements.

He uses the image of a weather system to describe the ambient pressures that come with leadership, almost by default. Leaders become the screen onto which others project their hopes and fears, their idealism and their disappointment, their gratitude and their blame. Leaders live with a level of scrutiny and visibility that few can escape, where actions are watched, motives are interpreted, and silence is often filled with assumptions. Alongside this comes a chronic ambiguity: decisions must be made without full information, for outcomes that remain unclear, and all with a persistent sense of operating without a solid place to stand.

Much of what lands on a leader does not properly belong to them at all. Disappointment that has nowhere else to go often settles on the leaders, simply because they are there. Even changes people have explicitly asked for can generate resistance once they begin to unsettle familiar patterns. Gratitude is fleeting; frustration is additive and adhesive.

Crucially, Walker’s point is not that leaders are doing something wrong when any of this happens. This is not bad weather caused by poor leadership techniques. You do not choose this weather, and you cannot opt out of it. It comes with the role and is intrinsic to it. To lead is to step into exposure, and the question is not how to avoid the weather, but how to stand in it without becoming hardened, defensive, and lost.

So before we talk about being “undefended,” we need to be honest about the weather system leaders are standing in.

Only leaders who are honest about the hostility of their environment can choose not to be defended.

This isn’t about pretending the storm isn’t real. It’s about learning how to stand in it without becoming someone you’re not.

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Defensiveness as an Adaptive Response

Walker observes that leadership today demands greater exposure than previous generations faced—a reality that has intensified exponentially since he first identified the trend.

• Decisions are exposed before they are mature

• Judgments outpace reflection

• Narratives are set before meaning can settle

The leader’s interior world—which should include hesitation, doubt, prayerful wrestling, and slow discernment—has been hollowed out by environments that deny them room to breathe and be.

This produces what Walker describes as a hostile field. Importantly, this hostility is not primarily personal. It does not require bad actors, although there are plenty of those these days. It arises from systems that prize speed over wisdom, clarity over truthfulness, and performance over presence.

Some leaders are indeed morally bankrupt. But the hostility directed at most leaders cannot be explained by moral failure alone; leadership itself has become a site onto which anxieties, projections, and unmet longings are placed.

In such a world, defensiveness is not a moral failure. It is an adaptive response.

Walker is careful here. Leaders develop defences because defences work. They protect against misunderstanding, against attack, against being consumed by expectations that are impossible to satisfy. Defensiveness allows leaders to function. It enables them to survive.

In fact, many of the traits we reward in leaders—certainty, control, emotional distance, message discipline—are simply socially sanctioned forms of defence. They signal competence in a hostile environment.

The tragedy, Walker suggests, is not that leaders defend themselves.

But what begins as protection slowly becomes imprisonment.

Over time, defended leadership reshapes the self. Leaders lose touch with their own vulnerability, not because they deny it, but because it becomes too dangerous to access.

• Feedback gets filtered

• Relationships are thinned out

• The interior life narrows and constricts

• Leadership becomes about performance rather than presence

What gets lost is not effectiveness, at least not at first, but something more subtle and more costly: authority rooted in honesty, influence grounded in relationship, and vision born from depth rather than protection.

The world of leadership has grown more hostile since Walker’s book was written. Leaders now operate within attention economies that reward outrage, flatten any nuance, and archive every misstep forever. Social media and digital permanence mean that mistakes are not merely remembered; they are curated and weaponised again and again.

The possibility of repair has diminished, and redemption has been removed from public life. The costs of exposure are increasing, and protection mechanisms are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Here is our catch-22. Our world seems to require more defence than ever, which will lead to more of what we are already suffering.

Is there an alternative?

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Undefended Naivety

In this context, undefended leadership can sound naïve, even reckless. It raises a genuine and pressing question: Is it possible to lead without defence and still remain safe?

The rest of Walker’s book answers this question, having allowed us to ask it honestly upfront. Because the deeper issue is not whether leaders can afford to be undefended, but whether leadership that is permanently defended can ever point beyond itself.

One of the quiet tragedies of the hostile world of leadership is what it does to those watching from the edges. Younger leaders are not rejecting responsibility just out of apathy or fragility, but also because they have paid close attention. They have watched leaders endure relentless storms, public scrutiny, moral failure, and institutional collapse. They have seen the personal cost of leadership borne not only by individuals, but by families, friendships, and faith itself. And they have noticed how often leaders respond by armouring up—controlling, managing impressions, defending territory—only to discover that these very strategies eventually cause their downfall.

What many younger leaders see is not simply failure, but a lack of alternatives. Leadership appears to demand either heroic invulnerability or quiet self-betrayal. When those are the only options on offer, opting out can feel like the most honest choice. In that sense, leadership avoidance is not cowardice but is discernment shaped by observation.

This is where Simon Walker’s work becomes rather radical. The Undefended Leader does not ask leaders to become tougher, louder, or more resilient in the usual sense. It offers a different imagination altogether: leadership that remains open under pressure, truthful under threat, and present without resorting to defence.

Walker names the cost of defended leadership with rare and penetrating clarity. And more importantly, he gives us an alternative path that younger and perhaps older leaders have scarcely seen embodied. Not a denial of storms, but a way of standing within them without losing one’s soul.

This is where a theological horizon begins to emerge.

The Recovery of Interior Freedom

Although Walker does not write a theology of leadership, his vision is unmistakably shaped by his Christian imagination and theological convictions. The undefended leader he gestures toward is not simply emotionally intelligent or psychologically integrated, but grounded in a different source of security altogether. This is leadership that does not derive its legitimacy from performance, approval, or control, but from a prior belonging. Most leadership advice teaches you how to survive the system. This one teaches you how to live in a different one.

At its deepest level, the invitation here is Christological.

In Christ, God does not bypass the hostility and vulnerability that deform human life, but recapitulates them—entering our pressures, misunderstanding, abandonment, and threats, and reorders them from within. Christian leadership, then, is not heroic survival in a hostile world, but a participation in Christ’s own way of inhabiting it.

From an Ignatian perspective, the task is not the removal of storms, but the recovery of interior freedom within them. Discernment begins by telling the truth - speaking out loud - about the pressures we face and noticing how fear and defence have organised our responses. Our task is not to eliminate vulnerability, but to learn how to stand undefended before God—honestly, attentively, and free enough to choose where we place our trust. Which is often where we started when we first chose and responded to a call to leadership.

In a world organised against vulnerability, this is not weakness. It is participation in a different reality and a form of leadership that does not require sacrificing one’s soul to survive.

Chapter Two of Walker provides a necessary reckoning. It names the real pressures leaders face, legitimises the defences they have built, and quietly prepares the ground for a more radical question: what would leadership look like if it were no longer organised around fear and self-defence?

The chapters that follow look at this possibility.

Why not join me as I unpack the rest of The Undefended Leader?

I’m planning a series of paired posts: one engaging each chapter, and a second reflecting more personally on my own journey into—and ongoing practice of—being undefended.

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Disagreement has become an almost intolerable strain on the modern moral imagination. It now triggers reflexive withdrawal, ritualised indignation, and the familiar theatrics of virtue.

So few people seem willing to remain in the presence of difference; fewer still are ever permitted to. The real question, then, is this: how do those who still wish to stay do so without being captured by the immense gravitational pull of identity politics?

The Three Practices, developed by Jim Henderson, are among the most significant resources I’ve come across for navigating precisely this terrain. They are profound in their intent, and disarmingly actionable in practice.

They are simple to name:

I’ll be unusually interested in others.

I’ll stay in the room with difference.

I’ll stop comparing my best with your worst.

I’ve been trained in the Three Practices and have experienced their impact firsthand. As our world continues to fragment and polarise, they have become increasingly compelling — and increasingly necessary as a response and antidote.

Recently, I interviewed Jim Henderson about how the Three Practices were conceived, how they developed, and how they are being lived out today.

(This post also appears on my other site SpEx.so)

A year ago, I wrote about Jesus — who he was, and who he is — as my anchor in life and in the growing chaos around us. Over the past twelve months, the world has not calmed. If anything, it has become more unstable. Ideologies harden, propaganda multiplies, and the pace of opinion accelerates faster than wisdom can keep up. There is more noise, less depth, and a growing sense that the ground beneath us is shifting further.

And yet Jesus remains. Utterly. Radically. Different.

He is my place to stand when everything else feels uncertain. He is the measure by which life makes sense, the source of identity and meaning when borrowed certainties begin to fail. He is not an escape from the storm, but the liferaft within it — and the quiet assurance that the storm does not have the final word. He is my hope not only for this life, but for a life yet to come.

This Christmas, I find myself returning to Jesus — not sentimentally, but deliberately, and desperately. The King of creation comes into the world, unlike any other. Not as power and ideology expect. Not as culture demands. As the world seems to devolve, I find that he does not recede. He becomes clearer and nearer. More sharply opposed to what is distorting our culture and our times. More compelling, not less.

So I offer this updated reflection on the Christ of Christmas, as we step once more into the liturgy that receives him tomorrow, on Christmas Day.

—

Jesus was unlike any other leader,

past or present.

Not simply better. Not merely wiser. But wholly other.

Fully God.

Fully human.

He lived without disguise,

died without resistance,

and rose without revenge.

And yet it is not only this that arrests me now.

He did not rape, torture, or kill.

He did not abuse the vulnerable.

He did not lie to survive,

cheat to win,

or steal to secure himself.

He did not manipulate crowds,

coerce loyalty,

or terrorise enemies or take hostages.

He raised no armies.

He incited no violence.

He had no political sponsors

and no machinery of power behind him.

He did not court the rich

or flatter the influential.

He stored up no wealth

to insulate his life

or guarantee his future.

Instead, he took the lowest place.

He knelt.

He washed feet.

He touched the unclean.

He ate with outcasts.

He crossed boundaries others fortified—

religious, ethnic, social, and gendered.

He honoured women.

He welcomed children.

He demanded the protection

of their dignity

and their bodies.

How utterly different.

And this difference matters so much now as it did then.

For we live in an age where identity is forged through opposition,

where belonging is secured by enemies,

and meaning is sustained by grievance, offence and denial of reality.

An age where politics has learned to behave like a religion,

and ideologies demand devotion, loyalty, and purity tests.

Many now turn to movements

to tell them who they are,

who they must fear,

and who they must oppose.

Intensity is mistaken for truth.

Outrage becomes a moral currency,

as identity politics creates people as tools of cultural warfare.

But Jesus does not offer an identity

constructed against others.

He does not gather followers

by naming enemies to be defeated

or tribes to be defended.

He does not baptise our causes,

sanctify our anger,

or lend divine authority

to our resentments.

He will not be reduced to a symbol,

deployed as a slogan,

or conscripted into our campaigns.

He is life.

He is truth.

He is reality itself—

the ground beneath my feet

When every ideological platform begins to crack.

Those captivated by ideologies

promise clarity but deliver captivity.

They offer belonging

at the cost of complexity,

certainty

at the price of love.

Jesus refuses our categories—

left and right,

progressive and reactionary,

pure and impure.

He stands before us,

not as an idea to agree with,

but as a person to follow.

Not as an identity to perform,

or someone to baptise, and recognise our self creations

But as a life to receive.

To follow him is to be loosened

and delivered from every false certainty

and re-anchored in love.

To belong to him is to be freed

from the exhausting labour

of self-justification and self-generation.

This is why he unsettles us still.

He cannot be captured by our movements.

He will not be weaponised for our causes.

He remains stubbornly,

mercifully,

real.

And in a world addicted to ideology,

He offers something rarer,

and far more costly still:

a life,

a way,

a truth

that we can actually stand on.

This Jesus captivates me. This Jesus consumes me.

To see him as he is leaves me only one response:

my soul,

my life,

my all.

Over the last few days, my social media feeds — shaped by the strange, selective algorithms we all live under — have been replete with progressive and left-leaning Christians condemning the upcoming “Christ in Christmas” event in London linked to Tommy Robinson. Anecdotally, those are the voices I see most loudly. And beyond my feeds, the national news and radio have been wheeling out predominantly Anglican clergy (as they always do) to denounce the gathering in firm, moral tones, with warnings of the ‘Far Right’ and ‘Christian Nationalism’.

I understand why people feel uneasy. I am no Tommy Robinson supporter. But I also sense that something deeper is happening here — something revealing, something uncomfortable, and something worth paying attention to. Because if we only focus on the personalities involved, we risk missing what this moment is saying about the soul of the UK, and perhaps the state of Christianity itself.

We seem to have had Christian groups who have spent months entirely at ease under pro-Palestine banners, Islamic slogans, rainbow flags, LGBTQ+ causes, BLM symbolism, climate change flags, and anti-colonial rhetoric, who are suddenly and seemingly scandalised by a carol event — and not primarily because of the carols. That contrast alone should make us pause.

Anglican and other priests have been arrested for supporting a proscribed extremist organisation—Palestine Action—whose activists violently assaulted a police officer with a sledgehammer. Yet many of the same voices express horror at a proposed carol service, immediately castigating it as ‘far right Christian nationalism’. It is a revealing moment in our public discourse: outrage is not always proportionate to actual harm, and moral energy is, I suggest, often spent denouncing the wrong thing.

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Policing Faith

For years now, huge numbers of ordinary Brits have felt ridiculed, unheard, and publicly shamed simply for being British. And the moment some of them reach for Christian symbols, language, and tradition — the very things Christianity once assumed belonged to all — those who preach tolerance respond with moral panic and purity tests. The contradiction is hard to ignore.

Beneath that reaction lies something more uncomfortable: the instinct to decide who is “allowed” to reach for Christ, who may “recover” Him, who counts as worthy of invoking His name. As though Christ belonged to some ideological tribe or moral elite. As though we could curate where Christ is permitted to appear.

But here is the truth few want to say aloud:

The most unsettling element of this carol event will not be Robinson. It will be the Crosses, the icons, the voices publicly shouting, “Jesus is King.”

That will disturb many who have been perfectly comfortable with other ideological symbols dominating public space all year. The offence is not nationalism; the offence is Christ showing up in a place we did not approve.

And if anyone imagines the attendees will be the fever-dream caricature of the “far right,” it is worth remembering how elastic that label has become — a catch-all category deployed for almost anyone who disagrees with a dominant progressive moral imagination. It functions like a modern heresy charge, shutting down conversation rather than opening it.

This caricature stands in stark contrast to Trevor Phillips’ firsthand account after attending the Unite the Kingdom march with 150,000 taking part in London this year. Many of whom might well be at this Christmas Carol Event:

“The vast majority seemed normal, not like the stereotype of some far-right extremists.”

Exactly. The people attending will mostly be ordinary folk — neighbours, parents, tradespeople — people reaching for meaning, identity, and yes, perhaps even faith.

And that prompts a difficult question:

If we casually call this gathering “far right,” are we prepared to label everyone condemning it “far left”? Of course not — and that’s precisely the point. These labels are flattening our moral vision and impoverishing public discourse. They tell us more about our cultural anxieties than about the people themselves.

Here is another irony:

Some of the voices denouncing this event come not from worshipping communities or from people living a discipleship-shaped Christian life, but from cultural and professional Christians — those whose functional faith has migrated into ideological symbols, activist liturgies, and moral slogans. Their causes have become their creed, baptised with Christian symbols and terminology.

Yet they insist that those gathering in London have “no right” to use Christian imagery. Misappropriation is a serious charge — but it is being levelled by many who have done the same thing with their ideological beliefs. And they can appear as cultural middle-class Christianities, offended by their sensibilities, unable and unwilling to have empathy for those in their sights.

And yet, to be fair and truthful, not everyone raising concerns fits that description. There are many thoughtful Christians genuinely troubled about co-option, distortion, or Christian symbols becoming vehicles for grievance or identity conflict. Those concerns matter as much to me as they do to you.

But even here, a question lingers:

Why is it so easy to publicly denounce this event, yet so hard to critique the ideological culture of the progressive left and their ideological capture in public?

Their symbols, chants, and moral framework have dominated public space for months with scarcely a murmur from the same people now speaking so forcefully. That asymmetry reveals something about the state of Christianity in Britain — people often more willing to critique unfashionable expressions of faith than fashionable forms of ideology.

The danger of co-option is very real. Christian symbols can be bent into political tools and have already been used by the progressives and left this year. But it is hard to name that danger without first acknowledging how we ourselves — left and right — are discipled by cultural ideologies that function like anti-Christian liturgies.

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Resistance Is Futile

Tommy Robinson now speaks openly about having found faith and believes a kind of revival is stirring outside the established church — among people who, like him, feel they would never be welcomed by its leaders. Whatever we make of his claims, the dynamic he is describing is not unfamiliar. Time and again in Christian history, those on the edges of church respectability have insisted they are encountering God, while the institution has responded with suspicion, distance, or outright rejection. Often, the church has been uneasy not only with the individuals involved but with what their presence might say about its own life and witness.

Throughout the centuries, many of the Church’s most significant renewal movements began precisely in these marginal spaces. In nearly every instance, the resistance was shaped as much by cultural anxiety and political concern as by theology: fears of instability, the loss of control, and the unsettling presence of people who did not fit the accepted norms. Yet history shows how often these same movements became agents of renewal, mission, and reform that reshaped the Christian landscape, no matter how much people condemned them at the time.

There is a pattern to such moments in history:

1. God meets people in unexpected places — often outside established structures.

2. Authorities denounce these encounters as spiritually suspect, socially disruptive, or politically dangerous.

3. The “outsiders” form new communities around their lived experience of God.

4. Some of those communities become significant renewal movements in theology, mission, and prayer.

5. Within a generation, the church often adopts what it once opposed.

What begins as illegitimate spirituality at the margins often becomes the birthplace of renewal for the whole Church.

This is the cautionary note for our current moment. The increasingly alarmist efforts to proscribe the carol event associated with Tommy Robinson may end up driving more people toward it, not away. When leaders resort to sweeping denunciations, collapse every distinction into the language of extremism, or speak as though attendance is itself morally suspect, they unintentionally reinforce the narrative that the church and the cultural establishment neither listen nor welcome. People already wary of institutions often interpret such reactions as proof that something genuine must be happening beyond official boundaries. Ironically, history teaches us that attempts to shut down fringe religious gatherings rarely diminish them; more often, they consolidate them.

If we are wise, we will pay attention not only to the very real risks but to the deeper questions being revealed — questions about belonging, credibility, and the gap many now feel between the church and the people it is called to reach.

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Looking In A Mirror

This moment, if we are willing to receive it, is a mirror.

It reveals the ideological purity cults we build, the idols we defend, the boundaries we draw to gatekeep Christ, and the strange comfort we find in labelling others rather than examining ourselves.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy is pastoral.

Instead of denouncing and deepening polarisation, this could be a moment to reach out —

…to listen,

…to understand the woundedness beneath the rhetoric,

…to invite people into a relationship with Christ and into communities that actually form disciples of Jesus.

For many who participate in the carol service, there is pain there. There is longing. And beneath the surface noise, there may be genuine hunger for God. Christ often appears where respectable religion least expects Him. As mentioned above, we only have to take a cursory glance at church history to see this. What if this part of a ‘dirty/messy revival’ as messy as other moments in history, to lean into instead of condemn?

Grace always begins when we stop gatekeeping Christ, lay down our ideological idols, and open our eyes to the people right in front of us.

Summary

Given the minefield I have stepped into on this topic, let me summarise what I have attempted to express:

Post-Church Condemnation: Those outside the church in post-church life who have made cultural ideologies their mission are as guilty as those charged with Christian nationalism.

Genuine Concern & Suggestion: Christians who sincerely want to follow Jesus, in whatever form that takes and with Christ at the centre of their lives, are right to feel uneasy. But before reaching for the reflex of condemnation, I am suggesting it is worth asking whether something deeper may be happening — something that might actually be an opportunity to help people find faith in Christ.

Opportunity: What if there are hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who, amid the political and cultural turbulence of our age, are instinctively reaching for Christianity as a stabilising identity and source of hope? And what if, instead of being dismissed or denounced, they were listened to, welcomed, and gently guided toward a relationship with Jesus by those who have one — one not captured by nationalism or by progressive ideology, but shaped by the gospel itself?

And for absolute clarity:

If anyone reads this as support for the event or for Tommy Robinson, they have not read what I have written.

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Statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital - Aaron Levenstein

There’s a strange move I keep seeing in online arguments about thee major issues in my world - UK grooming gangs, trans access to women’s spaces, and immigration.

It goes like this:

• Raise a concern about grooming gangs?

  → “Well, actually, on average, most sexual offences are committed by white British men.”

• Ask questions about specific risks around trans access to women’s spaces?

  → “On average, most violence against women is from cis men, not trans people, so this is an unnecessary waste of concern.”

• Point to patterns in crime or exploitation linked to migration in a particular context?

  → “Statistically, migrants commit fewer crimes in total than UK nationals, so your concern is irrelevant.”

On the surface, this sounds intelligent: “I’m the one talking about the data/facts; you’re just emotional/irrational.” And very quickly, the use of these national average stats is used to hit verbal nails into people with concerns, declaring them racist and transphobic.

But this kind of statistical sleight of hand is, at best, a basic failure to understand how data works and, at worst, a deliberate fog that denies reality and props up the indefensible. And yes—I’m fully aware of how statistics are weaponised to stoke anti-immigration fears.

To be clear: this post isn’t taking a position on immigration, gender ideology, or grooming gangs. My aim is far narrower—and aimed at something particular and pernicious that quietly corrodes all these important arguments: the habitual misuse of statistics in our public discourse. These issues I have used are simply some of the most vivid illustrations of the problem. But the same statistical error shows up everywhere—distorting political debate, muddying cultural conversations, and quietly sabotaging our moral reasoning.

This error is called the base rate fallacy — the fallacy of misapplied aggregation.

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The Drunk-Driving and Clerical Abuse Test

The tyranny of the collective leads us to ignore extremal events. But extremal events often matter the most. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Imagine someone saying:

“Most car accidents are not caused by drunk drivers.

Therefore drunk driving isn’t a serious problem, and we shouldn’t focus on it.”

You’d recognise instantly how bad that argument is.

We know:

• Yes, most accidents involve sober drivers.

• And also drunk driving is a serious, distinct, and massively dangerous subset that deserves laws, campaigns, and targeted enforcement.

The fact that drunk drivers are a minority of all drivers does not mean we ignore the risk they pose.

We can hold two truths at once:

1. Most drivers aren’t drunk.

2. Drunk drivers are still a serious problem.

But when the topic is grooming gangs, gender, or immigration, that basic common sense disappears.

And imagine applying the same logic to clerical abuse: “Most young boys are abused by family members, not priests—so claims against priests don’t really matter.”

We now recognise that kind of reasoning for what it is: a grotesque misuse of aggregation that helped entire systems look the other way while children were harmed.

We learned—slowly and painfully—that aggregate data must never be used to dismiss abuse within a specific subgroup. Today, it’s culturally unthinkable to wave away accusations against priests or pastors with national averages. We know better.

And yet, for some reason, we’re willing to grant certain populations—whether ethnic groups or gender-identity categories—a similar shield of cultural protection.

The aggregate is invoked to smother the particular.

And it isn’t justified.

The Tyranny of the Mean

Beware of the single story that claims to explain everything. - Hans Rosling

Averages and aggregates are powerful tools. But they are clumsy.

An overall mean tells you something true about the population. It does not tell you everything you need to know about subgroups, patterns and mechanisms of harm.

• You can say, “White men commit most sexual offences in the UK,”

  and still need to ask, “What’s going on in these specific grooming networks in these specific towns?”

• You can say, “Most violence against women comes from male partners and family members,”

  and still need to ask, “What about this particular context — prisons, changing rooms, refuges — and how do we protect women there?”

• You can say, “On average, migrants don’t offend more than natives,”

  and still need to ask, “Are there specific cohorts, routes, or exploitation systems that need targeted attention?”

Using the big aggregate to dismiss the smaller pattern is just as irrational as pretending the smaller pattern is the whole picture.

In other words, it’s entirely possible to:

• acknowledge who does most of the harm overall,

• and take seriously where there are concentrated pockets of distinct harm.

Leaders must be able to do both. That’s what data/truth and care for people demand.

I’m exhausted by those who take one incident and falsely smear an entire people group with it. And I’m equally weary of the virtue-signalers who use national average statistics like a moral sledgehammer to shame anyone raising real, local concerns.

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Why Do We Hide Behind the Mean?

The average is often the refuge of the politically frightened. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Because it’s emotionally and cognitively convenient.

• Identity protection – If a specific problem feels like it will fuel “the other side,” we instinctively reach for statistics that make it go away.

• Tribal fear – We’re terrified that acknowledging one problem (say, grooming gangs, or specific migration harms) will hand ammunition to racists, bigots or culture warriors.

• Cognitive dissonance – It’s easier to silence a concern with a clever-sounding stat than to live with tension: “This problem is real, and it can be misused by people I disagree with.” Imagine how different our public life would be if we modelled the courage to hold that tension rather than flee from it.

Instead, we weaponise aggregates to police conversations and justify our cognitive bias:

“You’re talking about X pattern?

That’s statistically small compared to this big mean.

Therefore, you must be a racist/transphobe/bigot/fascist.”

And just like that, real victims vanish behind our need to win the argument, our tribal virtue-signalling, and—far too often—our sheer ignorance of the issues.

What Good Leadership Looks Like

If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will - Mother Teresa

If you are a Christian leader in church, business, politics, or community, I believe we are called to resist this intellectual laziness. Good leadership does at least four things to resist the misuse of aggregates and related fallacies - four practices we can all undertake if we choose to:

1. Refuses to use the mean as a shield

   • You never dismiss a specific harm just because it doesn’t dominate the overall statistics.

   • You don’t say, “Most abuse looks like X, so we don’t need to talk about Y.”

2. Holds two truths together

   • “Yes, the majority pattern is here.”

   • “Yes, there is a meaningful, smaller pattern there that also needs honest attention.”

3. Names the fear openly

   • “We’re afraid that talking about this will be hijacked by extremists [insert the names of groups we fear and feel pressured to placate].”

   • Say it. Be courageous and name the fear. Don’t pretend the problem itself doesn’t exist.

4. Protects people, not narratives

   • The question is not, “Does this topic help or hurt my side?”

   • The question is, “Who is being harmed here, and what is a truthful, proportionate response?”

Misapplied aggregation isn’t just a statistical mistake — it’s a spiritual one. It’s what we do when we prefer the safety of our narrative over the uncomfortable, searching light of truth. It lets us hide real victims behind averages. It lets us feel righteous while avoiding repentance. It lets us win arguments without loving our neighbour.

But Christians are called to something better.

Statistics means never having to say you’re wrong. - Manfred Eigen

Jesus never dismissed the one suffering person because “most people aren’t like that.” He never hid behind the majority pattern to ignore a minority harm. He saw the one bleeding woman in the crowd, the one wounded man on the roadside, the one sheep that wandered. The kingdom is built on the truth that the one matters.

As ever, comments are welcome. And just to be clear and a reminder: this article isn’t about gender, immigration, or any other hot-button topic per se—it’s about how statistics are misused to prop up arguments for those issues and others.

Our task, as human beings, as human leaders, is far more humble and close to home. It is to grow up. It is to learn, through the experiences we are given, who we are—what it means to be courageous, what it is to serve, what it is to be loved and to love, what it is to be real, what it is to be fully human. True leadership is leadership of ourselves and others into this kind of life: embracing our full humanity, discovering what it is to be fully human, to participate fully in the world. Once we understand this, we begin to understand that leadership is not restricted to the narrow range of activities it is often supposed to be.—Simon Walker, The Undefended Leader Trilogy Book 1

We are living through a collapse of leadership trust. Moral failures, abuses of power, burnout, narcissistic patterns, anxious systems, and communities left wounded or disillusioned have forced a painful reckoning. Our crisis is not primarily strategic. It’s not about competence - as if there is some new leadership practice we need to develop to solve things. It’s not even about culture.

And we are also living through a collapse of people wanting to lead and being able to survive in leadership. Everywhere I turn — in churches, charities, and mentoring conversations — I keep hearing a similar confession from leaders:

“I’m not sure I can do this much longer.”

It’s not just pressure or tiredness, although those are bone-crushingly present. It’s something much deeper.

There is a profound sense of disorientation — as if the familiar maps for leadership no longer match the landscape we’re actually walking through. And our landscape has changed so rapidly that, like the tide going out, it has revealed the nature of our leadership crisis.

It is a formational crisis — a crisis of the leader’s interior world.

Working harder, smarter, and with greater competencies is not enough to navigate the world we now lead. Something else, much more fundamental and intrinsic to the nature of leadership, needs our attention.

This is why I keep returning to Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader. Long before we were talking widely about trauma, attachment, differentiation, or systems theory, Walker was naming something fundamental:

Leaders fail not because they lack skill but because they lack interior freedom. They become defended.

The Defended Leader

Defendedness is not a kind of villainy or wickedness. It is a survival strategy.

Walker explains how a defended leader protects their core, their self: guarding wounds, managing fear, holding on to identity, projecting strength, over-functioning, withdrawing, charming, controlling, over-working, numbing, protecting. What sits backstage inevitably leaks onto their front stage. And when the front stage outstrips the maturity of the back stage, and when the off-stage (that hidden life in Christ) is thin or neglected, power becomes distorted.

The result?

• Anxious leadership

• Reactive leadership

• Ego-driven leadership

• Leadership that cannot be questioned or held, learn, and admit to being wrong.

• Leadership that fails to metabolise pain and grief

This is the story behind so many leadership collapses in the church today. In a world marked by volatility, cultural fragmentation, and relentless political tension, formation is no longer optional. The world is already shaping—and often misshaping—our inner lives. Which is why who we are as leaders now matters more than ever.

Integrating Psychology, Theology, and Reality

What makes Walker’s work so compelling is its integration:

• psychology (ego structures, defences, attachment)

• theology (kenosis, humility, cruciformity, hiddenness)

• leadership theory (power, trust, presence, formation)

And what makes Walker’s integration so valuable for Christians is that it brings together three domains we too often keep apart—our inner psychology, our lived theology, and the real dynamics of leadership and power. Most Christian formation falters precisely at the points where these worlds collide. And the world we now inhabit is forcing those collisions with seismic intensity.

We preach kenosis but have no language for the ego; we teach humility but ignore the attachment wounds that sabotage it; we call leaders to cruciformity without attending to the psychological structures that make self-giving unsafe or impossible.

Together, these three create a coherent account of leadership.

This is what makes Walker’s work so compelling: it refuses to let Christians live split lives. Healing (psychology), holiness (theology), and vocation (leadership) belong together. Integrated, they offer a pathway into the freedom Jesus promises—freedom from the defended, anxious self; freedom for the self poured out in love; freedom to lead in ways that are courageous, compassionate, and deeply Christ-shaped.

This is not an optional extra for Christians. It is the very texture of Christian leadership.

And Walker insists that this kind of leadership is not, at its core, a technique. It is a way of being. A leader’s authority flows from their interior world, their relationships, and their spiritual grounding. It is a matter of formation — and this is precisely the arena in which God meets us, shapes us, and equips us.

If we give ourselves to formation as leaders, we discover that God is already there. The journey toward becoming an undefended leader is not something we undertake alone; it is the very place where God chooses to take part with us.

An undefended leader then is one who:

• doesn’t need to protect their own status

• can hold power without dominating

• can release control without losing identity

• can admit to being wrong

• can face conflict without collapsing

• creates safety rather than threat

• lives from being, not performance

This is the kind of Christian leadership that can navigate any context.

This is the kind of leadership the church desperately needs.

Why Walker’s Approach Matters

One of the reasons Walker’s Undefended Leader model speaks so powerfully today is because it’s based on what researchers call a constructivist understanding of how people learn, grow, and make sense of life.

That sounds technical, but the idea is actually very simple — and deeply biblical and Christian.

1. What “constructivist” means (in plain English)

Constructivism says that:

• We don’t just receive truth like data being downloaded.

• We build meaning together, over time, through relationships, experience, and interpretation.

In other words, human beings co-create the world they live in — how they see themselves, how they understand others, how authority works, how trust grows, and how communities hold together.

2. In other words

• Understanding is relational. We learn from how we interact, not by standing at a distance pretending to be “objective.”

• Meaning comes from experience. People form beliefs and behaviours through their lived story — not because they were told the “right answer.”

• Reality is co-created. In any church, team, or ministry, things like identity, belonging, power, and trust are created by how people relate and behave, not by rulebooks alone.

3. Why this matters for Christian leaders

If reality in our communities is something we help build, then leadership is not first about techniques or fixing people.

Leadership is about:

• Creating the conditions where truth can be heard.

• Making space for people to discover what God is doing.

• Helping communities shape healthy patterns of trust, identity, and power.

• Owning how we contribute to the culture we live in — good or bad.

This is precisely what The Undefended Leader is trying to do:

To show leaders how their inner life, presence, trustworthiness, and self-awareness help build the very reality their people inhabit.

Undefended Leaders in one sentence:

We become undefended leaders when we realise that leadership is not about enforcing a reality, but participating with God and others in constructing a truthful one.

The Undefended Series

In a time when the church is rightly asking hard questions about power, narcissism, emotional maturity, trauma, institutional fragility, and the formation of leaders, we need a model that:

• Takes the emotional life seriously

• Understands power relationally

• Honours the complexity of the human person

• Is deeply aligned with the way of Christ and a cruciform

• Emphasises interior truthfulness and freedom

• Refuses to reduce leadership to techniques and practices

This is what The Undefended Leader offers: a way of understanding and practising leadership that is psychologically mature, spiritually grounded, relationally wise, and attuned to how leadership is actually constructed in real communities.

Walker’s Undefended Leader is a trilogy that has shaped me for years. I’ve recommended it widely — including to my Doctor of Leadership students — yet I’ve never taken the deeper personal dive it deserves. I’ve long felt its impact, but I’ve not paused to excavate its core lessons and press them firmly against the contours of my own life and leadership as I have wanted to. And the condition of our world has made me reach for it more and more.

So I am going to do that now and post my reflections on the trilogy here. I hope you will join me.

Over the coming posts, I’m going to unpack from Walker:

• Identity — The defended vs. undefended leader

• Authority — How authority is actually formed, granted, sustained

• Power — The moral weight and spiritual responsibility of power

• Presence — Leading through grounded, un-anxious presence

• Formation — The inner journey that makes leadership possible

• Responsibility — The moral horizon of true leadership

We need undefended leaders.

And the hopeful truth is: they can be formed.

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• Preaching tolerance — and cancelling those who think differently.

• Condemning colonialism while holidaying in Dubai.

• Declaring “my truth” as sacred, while mocking anyone else’s.

When belief collides with reality, we don’t rethink — we double down. That’s the madness of our age. However, for Christians, this is the frontline in the battle for reality and opportunity for our growth and freedom.

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We’re living through a golden age of contradictions — not subtle ones, but jaw-dropping reversals spoken back-to-back, with zero irony and even less self-awareness. One moment, people are shouting “Trust the science!” to defend demands for climate policy change — the next, those same voices deny the basic science of biological sex.

Protesters flood London waving Palestinian flags, chanting “globalise the intifada” and calling for Israel’s destruction, and it’s labelled a peaceful protest.1 Meanwhile, someone unfurling a Union Jack outside their home is accused of colonialism, racism, and provocation — by the same people, within the same breath.

When an artist at a broadcast national music event openly calls for the death of Israelis, it’s brushed aside—defenders claim more important issues are at play beyond mere words. Yet the next week, some of those same voices denounce Charlie Kirk as a far-right, misogynistic fascist for rhetorical comments that pale in comparison to direct incitements of violence and murder.

This isn’t just an inconsistency. It’s psychological. When people hold two conflicting beliefs and don’t want to admit the contradiction, they resolve the tension — not by rethinking — but by doubling down.

That’s cognitive dissonance.

Understanding cognitive dissonance isn’t just useful for making sense of the chaos—it might be the only way to stay sane while watching it unfold. In this piece, I’ll unpack what it is, why it matters, and how it quietly fuels some of the most baffling, outrageous behaviour driving today’s discourse. I’ll also share ways we can confront our own cognitive dissonance—and break free from its ancient psychological grip on our sanity. More importantly, we’ll explore the unique opportunity Christian leaders have to drive meaningful change in a world held hostage by this inner conflict.

What Is Cognitive Dissonance?

We all suffer from cognitive dissonance. It’s part of being human—clinging to who we believe we are, even when reality gently and at times loudly suggests otherwise.

Think of the parent who sees themselves as nurturing—showing up, loving deeply, doing their best. Then comes the hard truth: their child feels distant, unseen. And the parent recoils, “But I’ve always done what I thought was right.” Because to consider that our love didn’t land the way we intended? That’s not just hard—it’s identity-shaking.

Or the professional who sees themselves as a top performer—driven, focused, capable. Then comes feedback: missed deadlines, strained collaboration. And instead of reflecting, they deflect: “My boss doesn’t get it,” or “If it weren’t for me, this team wouldn’t run.” Not out of arrogance—but because the dissonance between how we see ourselves and how others experience us can feel unbearable.

Cognitive dissonance disturbs us most where we’ve sacrificed the most.

It’s one thing to be corrected on a casual habit. But when the thing being questioned is the very thing we’ve poured ourselves into—our parenting, our leadership, our calling—that pain runs deep.

Because we need to believe the investment we have made meant something, so when we’re told we might have missed it, caused harm, or got it wrong, it’s not just humbling—it’s unravelling. Our minds resist, not because we’re proud, but because the alternative feels like too much to bear. It’s not just “Was I wrong?”—it’s “Then what was it all for?”

At its core, cognitive dissonance is the tension we feel when two truths, beliefs, values collide—and we’re not ready to hold both. It’s that subtle, sometimes gut-deep discomfort when the story we’ve told ourselves meets the one reality is telling back. Psychologist Leon Festinger, who coined the term in the 1950s, found that we’ll go to remarkable lengths to avoid that tension. We’ll rationalise, rewrite, and reject. Not because we’re deceitful—but because we’re trying to protect our sense of self. And the more invested we are, the more fragile that self becomes.

In short—it’s not about logic. It’s about survival.

And dissonance, in small doses, isn’t always a problem. It helps us preserve identity and make sense of contradiction. But when it becomes our default—when contradiction becomes a badge of honour instead of a warning—it erodes our ability to grow, connect, and lead with integrity.

Cognitive dissonance feels worse today—not because we’re more fragile, but because we’re flooded with competing beliefs, values, and narratives at every turn. We scroll through contradictions all day—fragmented truths, moral whiplash, a thousand versions of what’s right. And our minds crave resolution. So we virtue signal. We perform. We curate. Or maybe screen and shout. We try to hold it together on the outside, even as things quietly unravel within.

The irony? Many of the loudest voices railing against disinformation and dogma are often the most deeply entrenched in their own. Not because they’re evil (well, mostly) — but because they’re human.

This is the deeper cost of the digital age: it doesn’t just divide us—it disorients us. We’ve lost the rituals and reference points that once helped us make sense of the world. Now, we’re left trying to piece together a life of meaning in a world that never stops spinning.

And here’s the burden we carry as leaders: we’re expected to model integration in an age that’s quietly disintegrating. To hold space for others while our own souls are fraying at the edges. So how can we do that?

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Can We Escape Cognitive Dissonance?

The human mind is wired more for coherence than truth. When our beliefs, identity, or tribe are challenged, we don’t instinctively ask, “Am I wrong?” We ask, “How do I make this feel right again?” But healing starts at the root of our dissonance—with the courage to pause and consider where we might be wrong.

Perhaps one of the most important practices we can cultivate is learning to ask, “Am I wrong?” Not from a place of shame, or performative virtue, or anxious self-doubt—but from a place that’s rooted. Grounded in Christ. Secure enough to stay open. To pause. To ask, “Is there something here I need to see?” Not to tear ourselves down, but to be formed more fully into truth.

Escaping the grip of cognitive dissonance requires something most of our culture actively discourages: intellectual humility. The ability to say, “I might be wrong.” Or even harder: “My side might be inconsistent.” That kind of thinking is rare — not because it’s impossible, but because it’s uncomfortable, slow, and deeply uncool on social media.

In a world driven by outrage cycles and dopamine hits, dissonance isn’t just tolerated — it’s monetised. Entire media ecosystems, political movements, and influencer brands are built on maintaining their audiences in a state of moral superiority and outrage, even when the facts collapse beneath them.

So, can we escape cognitive dissonance?

Individually, yes — but only if we’re willing to spot it first in ourselves. Cultural change always starts at the level of self-management. That means asking uncomfortable questions, being curious instead of defensive, and choosing logic even when it costs social points. But collectively? We may be headed deeper into the age of contradiction before we climb out. Because right now, there’s more reward for being loudly wrong in a loyal tribe than being quietly honest in no-man’s land.

So here’s the invitation: to grow not despite what we value, but because of it. Dissonance often surfaces around the things that matter most—our values, our relationships, our calling. And that’s what makes it feel so personal. So threatening. But what if that very tension is a sign that we care? That we’re still invested? That something sacred in us is resisting fragmentation?

To face dissonance, then, isn’t to betray our values—it’s to honour them. It makes us more honest, more integrated, more whole. Not because we’re discarding what we believe, but because we’re letting it form us more fully. When our identity is secure in Christ, we can stop guarding our contradictions and start listening to them. Not every challenge is true—but every moment of dissonance is an opportunity to ask: What matters most here? And what is grace trying to show me?

Understanding cognitive dissonance doesn’t just clarify the madness. It gives us a map. And in a world this upside-down, that’s a head start. Now let’s explore some of the uncomfortable steps we can take to freedom.

Redeeming Dissonance: Steps to freedom

Cognitive dissonance is the soul’s alarm bell. It rings when what we believe and how we live drift out of coherence and alignment. Psychology names it as discomfort between thought and action; theology recognises it as the Spirit’s summons back to wholeness. For Christian leaders, this tension is not an enemy that silences us, but an invitation to transformation and spiritual integrity.

Noticing our cognitive dissonance is often the first act of grace. It doesn’t fix it—but it names it. It interrupts the cycle. It gives us a moment to ask, What am I protecting? What truth am I avoiding? And that moment matters. Because until we name the tension, we can’t move through it—we just keep reacting, defending, curating, surviving.

But facing dissonance is costly. It asks for something deep: our certainty, our pride, sometimes even our place in systems that reward performance over honesty. That’s why a secure identity in Christ isn’t optional—it’s essential. When our worth isn’t on the line, we can afford to be honest. We can face what’s real, even when it hurts.

That kind of rootedness gives us the courage to stay in the tension long enough to be changed by it. We’re not scrambling to prove anything—we’re already held. And that makes space—for considering, for growth, for realignment. This is how we navigate dissonance: not by denying it, but by acknowledging it. Naming it. And trusting that God’s grace is strong enough to carry us through.

We can work with the grain of our psychology—the very processes that so often entangle us—and begin to see them as spaces for spiritual and leadership practice. The same patterns that capture us can also become the path to freedom, if we’re willing to pay attention and move toward them. Often, it’s the discomfort itself that signals we’re growing.

The first movement is awareness. We stop defending ourselves, choose to observe ourselves, and begin to see. Psychology terms this metacognition, but Scripture refers to it as confession. “Search me, O God, and know my heart,” prays the psalmist. This is not about wallowing in self-recrimination, but about entering into liberating truth. For in the biblical imagination, truth is not simply accuracy—it is aletheia, an unveiling and discovery.

Noticing our cognitive dissonance can be a breakthrough moment—the ground of possibility for deep, lasting transformation. It’s where real change begins.

From awareness, we can then move into curiosity—not a sterile intellectualism, but a holy wondering. In the face of dissonance, we are tempted to justify, to explain away. But grace invites a different path: to ask, “What is God showing me here?” Psychology describes this as cognitive flexibility. The Church knows it as metanoia—a turning, a transformation of mind and heart. Repentance is not grim or punitive. It is luminous. It is the soul’s turn toward the Logos, toward the pattern of divine order.

Then comes the opportunity for realignment. Modern therapeutic wisdom tells us to clarify our values and live in alignment with them. The Christian tradition goes deeper. It reminds us who we are in Christ. We are not self-made—we are God-created, Christ-redeemed, Spirit-renewed. Our calling is to cooperate with grace, to be realigned around the imago Christi within us.

We need to resist the pull to make this a purely intellectual task. Coherence isn’t something we can reason our way into. The heart has to come with us. And the truth is, our emotional lives—so often tangled with shame, fear, and exhaustion—don’t just need to be managed. They need to be seen. Brought into the light. Held and reordered. This is at the heart of what is at stake for the Christian with our cognitive dissonance.

And all of this has to take shape in action. Psychology calls it behavioural change; the Church calls it obedience. A word that’s fallen out of fashion—but one that’s deeply biblical and essential for transformation. Obedience isn’t servility. It’s the embodied expression of faith. Faith without works is dead, James reminds us. It’s an apology offered, a habit surrendered, a restitution made. These aren’t just moral gestures—they’re sacramental. It’s how the Word becomes flesh again in us, as belief moves through our bodies and into the world.

In time, we move toward integration. The scattered pieces of our story begin to find their place. What once felt fractured and contradictory starts to hold together—not perfectly, but redemptively. Psychology calls this narrative coherence. The Church calls it sanctification. It’s the slow, holy work of being drawn into the story of salvation—where no wound is wasted, and every fracture and dissonance becomes a place grace can touch.

Even this isn’t the end. We were never meant to navigate dissonance alone. Transformation may begin in solitude, but it’s meant to take root in relationships. And yet—for many, dissonance is the very reason we start to withdraw. The gap between what we believe and what we experience in church can feel disorienting. Painful. Sometimes even shameful. And so, we pull back—not because we don’t care, but because we don’t know where it’s safe to wrestle. But dissonance isn’t a sign we should isolate—it’s a signal we need a deeper connection.

We need others to help us see what we can’t—to sit with us in the tension, to name the contradictions with kindness, to affirm what’s true and gently surface what needs to shift. That kind of presence doesn’t expose us—it steadies us. It reminds us that God still holds us. And that’s the gift of community at its best—not just belonging, but honest, grace-filled reflection. A space where healing begins.

And so, when these movements—awareness, curiosity, alignment, emotional healing, action, and community—cohere, what we call dissonance is revealed not as a flaw, but as a threshold. It becomes the very instrument by which the Holy Spirit re-forms the soul around the truth of Christ. Psychology offers insight into how. Christian faith unveils the why. Every rupture between belief and behaviour becomes a summons to participate in the great reconciling mission of God.

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The Battle for Reality

For Christian leaders, the cultural epidemic of cognitive dissonance isn’t just a battle of ideas—it’s a war over reality. And not just any reality, but Kingdom reality: the eternal, unshakable truth God has written into creation, identity, morality, and redemption.

Cognitive dissonance fractures people—not just mentally, but ontologically. It splits who they say they are from who they were created to be. It pressures them to live in contradictions that cannot hold—and then punishes them for noticing. That’s why naming dissonance isn’t unkind. It’s pastoral.

But this work is costly. Naming contradiction in a culture built on it invites mockery, rejection, and misunderstanding. Sometimes it means standing alone. Yet this is the prophetic call of the Church in an age of madness: to bear witness to reality when the world runs from it.

And the reward? Souls rediscovering who they are.

We live in a world that teaches people to compartmentalise belief, affirm contradiction, and live fragmented lives. But the gospel doesn’t call us to fragmentation—it calls us to integration. To love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Not just to believe true things, but to become whole.

It’s a rescue mission.

In the midst of this fragmentation, Christian leaders carry a rare and radical call: to offer something more compelling than performance, louder than ideology, truer than tribal slogans—coherence. Not shallow agreement, but soul-level alignment with reality as God defines it.

Christ doesn’t just resolve our dissonance—He walks through every part of it. He names the gap. He lives in deep coherence with the Father. He chooses integrity over comfort, even when it costs Him everything. On the cross, He holds the weight of all our contradictions—and in His resurrection, He doesn’t erase the wounds, but transforms them. In Him, the fractured is gathered. The divided is made whole. He doesn’t just forgive our fragmentation—He heals it. And He invites us into that same wholeness, one surrendered step at a time.

I remember once, in my early twenties, my pastor—someone I deeply loved and respected—sat me down and shared some hard truths about my behaviour. I remember the shame as I heard his words. How it cut deep into the foundations of how I saw myself, how I believed I was seen. I can remember and still feel the cognitive dissonance that kicked in, and still hear the justifications running through my mind—why he was wrong, why he didn’t understand me, why my life was more complicated than he knew or appreciated.

I got into my car after that meeting and prayed for help. And I sensed the Lord whisper, “Does this man want the best for you?”

Yes, I replied.

Then it doesn’t diminish you to consider this.

I’d spent years absorbing words from parents who lashed out in anger—accusations meant to wound, to shame, to tear me down. But this was different. These were words meant to heal. To call something deeper out. To shape more of Christ in me. And they did and continue to do so decades later.

And I knew—it was time to start receiving them. And I’m still learning. Over time, I’ve found that no matter who’s speaking—those who love me, and even those who clearly don’t—I can pause and consider what’s being said. I can ride the unsettling wave of cognitive dissonance with this quiet anchor: It doesn’t diminish me to consider this.

That phrase has become both a cognitive and a faith practice—helping me find coherence between my identity in Christ and my capacity for growth.

So this is our moment: to be the ones who don’t flinch at dissonance. The contradictions aren’t going away. But they don’t have to define us. In fact, they might be the very conditions for revival—if we’re willing to trade comfort for clarity, noise for truth, and self-preservation for sanctification.

Culture may be crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.

But the Kingdom won’t.

And those who walk in Christ made coherence won’t just survive this age of dissonance—

They’ll be part of its healing.

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5..Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. 6The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. - James 3

Over the past few weeks, as I scrolled through my social media feeds, I felt a sense of sadness. Friends—good people, many of them Christians I admire—were throwing around words like Nazi, dictator, apartheid, and misogynist, not as carefully chosen terms but as blunt weapons, hurled across digital divides.

Words can become weapons rather than tools for truth.

What struck me wasn’t only the hostility—it was the cheapness. Words that once carried the weight and currency of history were being inflated and overextended, almost emptied of their true gravity. I realised I was watching not just ordinary disagreement, but rhetorical inflation at work, powered by the emotional currents of our polarised age.

Why Rhetorical Inflation Happens

We are living through a time of affective polarisation: when politics and culture stop being about competing ideas and become about competing identities. We don’t just disagree with “them”—we feel disgust, fear, and even hatred. And once strong emotions are in play, our language then escalates.

That escalation produces rhetorical inflation: the steady devaluation of words as we spend stronger and stronger currency to keep pace with our outrage. This devaluation of words is part of a broader dynamic of linguistic inflation.

Linguistic inflation is when our words are worn thin through overuse or exaggeration. In the constant churn of 24-hour news, social media, and instant messaging, it’s easy to reach for bigger and bigger words to sound persuasive, passionate, and certain. But the more we do this, the less weight our language carries.

Think of the everyday examples: “I gave 110%” or “I feel a million per cent better.” The result is that our speech becomes inflated, and its meaning devalued. However, on a day-to-day basis, these linguistic inflations can be relatively harmless.

However, Rhetorical Inflation is a more intense version of the same problem, with the disastrous results that we are now seeing writ large. Instead of exaggerating numbers, we inflate moral and political terms. A politician we dislike becomes a “dictator”, a Facebook personality a “Nazi”. The mechanics are identical: we escalate the language to hit harder, but in doing so, we evacuate those words of their actual moral weight and meaning.

Psychologically, harsh labels give cognitive closure and release the rush of tribal solidarity. Sociologically, it’s even clearer: platforms reward outrage, and extreme words travel way faster than careful ones.

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The Dangers of Rhetorical Inflation

This rhetorical inflation is both dangerous and extremely harmful. It is not making things better but far worse. In particular:

1. Truth decay. If everyone is a “Nazi,” then no one is. When we throw the heaviest words at every disagreement, we strip them of their meaning. Historical terms that once helped us recognise genuine atrocities—slavery, genocide, apartheid—lose their sharpness. The tragedy is that when we do face real horrors, our moral vocabulary has already been over-spent. We can no longer speak with clarity or conviction, because the words we need have been devalued by casual overuse. Truth itself is weakened.

The tragedy of rhetorical inflation is that when we do face real horrors, our moral vocabulary has already been spent.

2. Dehumanisation. Rhetorical inflation doesn’t just damage language; it damages people. Once someone is labelled in inflated terms, they are reduced to the caricature of that label. The person in front of us is no longer a neighbour, a colleague, or even a fellow human being made in the image of God—they become “the Nazi,” “the fascist,” “the misogynist.” And when we reduce people in this way, we subtly remove the possibility of repentance, dialogue, or change. They are cast beyond redemption.

To dehumanise someone with a label is to abandon the gospel itself; Christians are never permitted to deny the image of God in another.

3. Dialogue collapse. Rhetorical inflation is addictive. Once one side escalates to “Fascists/Nazis”, the other side feels pressure to up the ante—perhaps to “Godless/Anti-family/Anti-Christians”. The exchange becomes an escalating verbal battle. And soon, there is no conversation left to have, only a contest of rhetorical force. Persuasion, compromise, and listening all completely vanish. Potential dialogue spirals into mutual condemnation, leaving no space for understanding or common ground.

Rhetorical inflation is like pouring petrol on the fire of the tongue (Jas 3:6).

Put together, truth decay, dehumanisation, and dialogue collapse are not just cultural trends; they are also deeply theological realities. They expose how quickly we surrender our speech to the powers of the age, allowing our words to become instruments of accusation instead of vehicles for truth, dignity, and reconciliation. When language is inflated, when neighbours are reduced to caricatures, and when conversation hardens into hostility, we step outside the terrain of Christian witness. The Christians cannot simply imitate this pattern.

Our vocation is to sanctify our speech: to speak truthful words, to see others through the lens of the imago Dei, and to hold our conversations open to the possibility of grace, instead of revenge.

The world already has an accuser. The Church is called to speak truth without inflation, words that heal rather than wound.

Spotting Inflated Speech

So how do we know when rhetorical inflation is at work? There are a few clear signs to spot it:

Escalation. This is where ordinary conflict gets framed in extreme historical terms. A disagreement over policy becomes “fascism,” a poor leadership decision becomes “dictatorship.” The gap between reality and rhetoric widens, and the words begin to carry more heat than any truth.

Definitional drift. Serious words lose their anchor in history and evidence. “apartheid,” “genocide,” and “Nazi”, “misogynist” all have specific, concrete meanings rooted in historical sufferings that generated them. When we use them carelessly, we are no longer naming reality but bending language to score a point. Put simply, before you use terms, ensure you know what the origins and meanings of those words are. And challenge others who bandy them about to show their working out for using them.

Thought-terminating clichés. Watch for the phrases that shut down dialogue: “End of,” “Educate yourself,” “There’s nothing to discuss.” These are simply refusals to enter into honest, good-faith dialogue. They mask insecurity with certainty, robbing us of the possibility of genuine understanding.

Each of these signs tells us the same thing: words are no longer being used to seek truth or build understanding. They are being used as weapons. And when Christians join that game, we forget our calling to speak with clarity, with proportion, and with grace.

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Who Is Most Captive to Rhetorical Inflation?

The hard truth is that none of us is immune to Rhetorical Inflation. Some more so in particular:

Those who crave certainty and closure. For some, the most challenging aspect is living with tension and ambiguity. Harsh labels feel like resolution: “Now I know exactly who the enemy is.” It gives a sense of clarity and safety—but it’s a false clarity that comes at the expense of truth.

Communities carrying wounds. When a community has been hurt or traumatised, or perceives itself as being hurt and traumatised, the instinct is to protect itself. That can lead to broadening the perimeter of perceived threat, causing one to see danger everywhere. Rhetorical labels then become a kind of armour, and a way of keeping pain at bay. That instinct is understandable, but if left unchecked, it distorts our speech and our witness, and amplifies everyone’s pain.

High-engagement online users. The internet rewards outrage. Come on, we know this by now! Measured words disappear into the noise; extreme words get clicks and shares. The more time we spend online, the more our speech is shaped by these incentives—often without us even realising it.

Polarisation entrepreneurs. There are pundits, activists, and influencers whose livelihoods depend on keeping us angry, shocked and offended. Their business model is rhetorical inflation, and we are their content. For them, extreme language isn’t an accident—it’s the product they sell.

And let’s be clear: Christians fall into this, too. On the progressive side, the temptation is to reach for words like racist, fascist, Nazi, dictator, misogynist, etc., against anyone who questions their visions of justice. On the nationalist side, the labels shift to traitor, Marxist, liberal, for those who challenge an ideal of faith fused with country. Both mirror one another (I wrote an article explaining why this is so).

Both weaponise language to dominate rather than to illuminate.

A Theological Diagnosis

It would be easy to leave this whole conversation about rhetorical inflation in the realms of psychology and sociology. Those disciplines give us real insight, but as Christians, we need more than that. If our speech is part of our discipleship—and Scripture insists that it is—then we must also name what is happening theologically. Ultimately, how we engage with our words reveals our theological anthropology—our deepest identity and being, and who we are becoming.

Imago Dei. From the very beginning, Scripture tells us that every person is made in the image of God (Gen 1:26–27). That means our words never fall onto just a human being—they are spoken to image-bearers, those whom God has dignified.

When we reduce someone to a rhetorical label, we deny their dignity as image-bearers of God.

The Powers. Paul tells us that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the powers and principalities (Eph 6:12). These powers today include the cultural and digital systems that reward outrage, inflame anger, and deform our speech. Social media algorithms are not neutral; they discipline and train us. They push us toward rivalry and escalation, until our words look more like weapons of the world than witnesses to Christ. Without theological discernment, we don’t even notice—we get swept along by the tsunami of rhetorical ignition.

All of this matters because, for Christians, words are never “just words.” They either participate in God’s work of reconciliation or they echo the Accuser, and Father of Lies. That is why we need a theological accounting of rhetorical inflation: only theology reveals both the depth of the problem and the possibility of redemption.

Our words either serve reconciliation or echo the Accuser—there is no neutral ground.

If Satan is the father of rhetorical inflation, then every time we give in to inflated words, we are not just speaking carelessly—we are echoing the Accuser. That should stop us in our tracks. Our tongues are not neutral. They either participate in the reconciling Word made flesh, or they mirror the destructive speech of the enemy.

This is why the way we speak, especially as Christians, cannot be brushed aside as “just words.” To exaggerate, to caricature, to condemn with inflated labels is to step into the wrong economy - a false kingdom - of speech. It means we are no longer sanctifying our language, but letting it be co-opted by the powers.

Our speech will either echo the Accuser or witness to Christ. The choice is made every time we open our mouths.

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A Christian Alternative

If rhetorical inflation is part of our fallenness, then Christians cannot settle for only diagnosing the problem. We are called to offer a different mode of engagement. Theology not only helps us explain what has gone wrong with our speech; it also points us toward the healing of language in Christ available to us.

Christ the Logos. John begins his Gospel by naming Christ as the Logos—the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1–3). Our speech is never trivial in that light. It is meant to participate in the Word who creates, reveals, and redeems. If our words only wound and divide, they are out of step with Christ. To speak truthfully, proportionately, and in love is to echo the Logos in our own human register.

Every word we speak either echoes the Logos or drowns Him out in noise.

The Sanctification of Speech. Paul exhorts us: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Col 4:6). This is not rhetorical nicety but a spiritual discipline. Just as our bodies are sanctified as temples of the Spirit, so too our words must be sanctified as instruments of grace.

Faithful speech is not naive—it does not shrink from naming sin—but it names sin truthfully and proportionately, without inflation.

In other words, if it names and labels, it has a clear and truthful working out attached to it.

Sanctified speech is not soft speech; it is truthful speech held in the grip of grace.

The Ministry of Reconciliation. Paul describes the gospel as the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to us (2 Cor 5:18–19). Our words, then, are to be tools of that ministry. Harsh, rhetorically inflated labels foreclose reconciliation; they exile (cancel) people beyond the reach of grace. Christian speech is and should be cruciform: it tells the truth, but it does so in a way that keeps the door open for repentance, healing, and restoration.

Christian words are cruciform—truthful, but always bent toward reconciliation.

Practices of Faithful Speech. If this all sounds abstract, it doesn’t have to be. The Christian alternative is not silence, nor is it niceness. It is speaking as those who know our words can either echo the Accuser or echo the Word made flesh.

Christians have concrete practices to help us resist rhetorical inflation:

• Name behaviour, not essence. Condemn the act before condemning the person.

• Define carefully. Don’t dilute serious words from their actual meaning.

• Practice slow speech. “Quick to listen, slow to speak” (Jas 1:19).

• Aim for restoration. Rebuke should seek repentance, not exile.

• Love enemies. Jesus forbids language that forecloses reconciliation (Matt 5:43–48).

Our vocabulary is part of our discipleship—words are practices, not just expressions.

For leaders: before using a heavy label, ask—am I naming this to serve truth and open the way for restoration, or to win a fight and express something ugly within me?

A Pastoral Word

We live in a time when words are cheapened every day. Rhetorical inflation corrodes our moral vocabulary, dehumanises neighbours, and turns dialogue into combat. And Christians, if we’re honest, have often joined in. I know I have.

But this is also where possibility lies. In a culture addicted to inflated speech, imagine the witness of communities that speak differently—words measured, gracious, proportionate, and truthful. Speech that corrects without caricature, names wrong without denying dignity, and leaves space for reconciliation.

This isn’t just a linguistic cosmetic makeover. It is a recovery of Christian distinctiveness. Every time we resist Rhetorical Inflation and sanctify our speech, letting our thoughts and words be crucified, we reveal another way of being human—one patterned after Christ, the Word made flesh.

Our words aren’t just air—they’re embers; in Christ, even whispers can set the world on fire with reconciliation.

I began this article, noting that Rhetorical Inflation is like pouring fuel on the fire of the tongue (Jas 3:6). However, I genuinely believe, and I am trying to grasp an alternative possibility.

What if words weren’t just flames online, but sparks in the dark?

What if every syllable we breathed was tinder for God’s fire, waiting to ignite? This possibility before us is not slight—it is cosmic in its scope and nature. What if our chatter, our stutter, our tweets and texts, were tuned into the frequency of the Logos, the Word behind all words? What if in Christ, our language was hacked, rebooted, re-coded? Where the broken became beautiful and words that once wounded now wove worlds of reconciliation.

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When Words Become Violence, and Violence Becomes Deserved

How you speak about someone when they die shows who you are. – Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk’s murder prompts this short article. Let me be clear at the outset: I did not agree with everything Kirk said, nor with many of the positions he took publicly. This piece is not about defending his politics or his rhetoric. It is also not about the battle for free speech that Kirk stood in the middle of. It is not about left and right.

It is instead about us.

What compels me to write is what his killing revealed in us—in the reactions it provoked almost instantly. People are celebrating his death. Others insist he brought it upon himself. Voices declare him a fascist or Nazi, as if those labels excused the violence. Most unsettling of all for me is people I know and respect needing to vent about him so forcefully in the very moment of his murder.

Why?

Why, when a young man is brutally killed, do we not reach instinctively for grief, for lament, or for forgiveness? Why do we grasp instead for condemnation and rage? What is going on at large in us that we would rather use his death to unleash anger than to seek reconciliation or even silence?

Instead of reaching for forgiveness, reconciliation, or peacemaking—those fragile but necessary gestures of human community—something more ugly has emerged: justification of violence, reversal of victim and perpetrator, and even delight in brutality.

Concept Creep: The Psychology of Reversal

People often find ways to excuse or explain away violence so they don’t feel guilty about it. Psychologists call this moral disengagement—for example, by blaming the victim and saying they brought it on themselves. Linked to this is the just-world belief, the idea that bad things only happen to people who somehow deserve it.

At the same time, our culture has stretched the meaning of words like trauma, abuse, and violence. Because of this “concept creep,” even disagreement can feel like an attack. And when people tie their beliefs to things they see as sacred, any challenge is felt not as debate, but as a kind of violation.

So instead of seeing disagreement as normal civic life, more and more people experience it as a personal assault.1

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The Gaslight and the Aftermath

When violence happens, people feel torn: they know it’s wrong, but they may also feel relief or satisfaction. To ease that inner conflict, they often say things like, “We don’t support violence, but he brought it on himself.” That way, they appear to condemn violence while actually excusing it.

More subtle is the rhetorical device of “Of course I don’t support violence, but he was [insert adjectives of choice]”.

This is a kind of gaslighting on a large scale. The victim’s suffering is denied or twisted, making it seem like the harm isn’t real or is being exaggerated. Psychologists call this secondary victimisation—the victim is hurt not just by the attack itself, but also by the way people respond afterwards.

And sometimes the victim is even accused of using their suffering to gain sympathy or power. And I have seen this extensively about Kirk, that those aggrieved by Kirk fear his death being used against them. That’s scapegoating: blaming and excluding the victim so the community feels united and justified, as if the violence was necessary or even reasonable.2

Putting it all together

This process is a cycle of moral inflation (words = violence) → justification of violence (they provoked it) → gaslit denunciation (we condemn, but really they’re to blame) → secondary victimisation (their protest is opportunistic).

It functions to protect the aggrieved’s worldview, preserve group identity, and neutralise the moral claim of the actual victim.

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A Word to Those Who Despised Him

Some of you reading this might be one of the aggrieved I mention, so hurt and feeling abused by Kirk that you think I am minimising your need to speak about him.

Many people truly believed Kirk was a fascist, a Nazi, or an abuser of others. Perhaps some are convinced his words caused deep harm. But if that is the case, then how people respond to his death matters even more, for it is possible to become so sure of someone’s malignancy that we begin to speak from a dangerous place.

When murder is met with gloating and satisfaction, or denouncement of the person murdered, people risk allowing the same logic that justifies violence to take root in themselves. Participation in the victim inversion that declares they deserved it corrodes compassion and blinds us to our own complicity in cycles of violence.

When Conviction Turns into Condemnation

There is a vital difference between condemning someone’s actions and declaring the person themselves intrinsically malignant and bad. To call views and beliefs harmful or oppressive is part of moral discernment. Even when it is hinted at indirectly or wrapped in clever language, suggesting that someone might be malign and somehow ‘deserving’ of death is to step into dehumanisation. We can do this in subtle, passive-aggressive ways—sneering, insinuating, or implying things about his death without ever saying them outright. That way, we tell ourselves we have not crossed the line, while still feeding the same hostility and contempt.

It gives us the comfort of moral cover—I never said he deserved it—yet the meaning is clear enough. In reality, this disguises rather than removes the harm.

When we speak like this, we are not only stripping away the dignity of the other person, but also diminishing our own.

It pushes us further from compassion, and draws us nearer to the cycles of anger and violence that corrode community. If we allow ourselves to speak from that place, we risk becoming what we most despise.

Christian tradition has always been wary of naming individuals as inherently malignant. Malignancy is real, but no one person is its sole embodiment. Christ died for sinners, not for the righteous. To speak from a place of certainty about another’s evil risks stepping into God’s seat of judgment. That is perilous ground—for leaders, for communities, for all of us.

Leaders especially must resist this temptation. When leaders model disdain, their communities learn disdain. When leaders justify hostility, their people learn hostility. But when leaders name evil without condemning persons as irredeemable, they protect their communities from sliding into the same inversion that baptises violence as virtue.

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Why This Matters for Leadership

Leadership is always exercised in the contested space of meaning. How we speak in moments like this—what we choose to say or not say—shapes the moral and emotional imagination of our communities. If words are treated as violence, and violence as deserved, then leaders must resist: telling the truth, protecting victims from being re-victimised, and reminding people that disagreement is not desecration.

To lead faithfully is to hold space for difference without collapse, to protect the vulnerable from scapegoating, and to refuse to baptise violence with moral justification. This is affective work—tending to the emotions, fears, and sacred values that drive our distortions.

If we sneer, dismiss, or even hint that Kirk “deserved” his death, we model a way of speaking others will imitate. Communities take tone as permission. When disdain is normalised, it multiplies. When violence is excused, it becomes acceptable, even when veiled in hints and insinuations.

But if we speak with care, we show another way. We demonstrate that it is possible to disagree profoundly with someone’s life and words, yet still respond to their death with gravity, restraint, and lament. Leadership sets the temperature: our words shape how others live together.

What temperature are you setting?

The Christian Call to Resist Violence

But as Christians, we are called to something deeper still. The way of Christ refuses the logic that words justify violence or that violence redeems. At the cross, Jesus bore the violence of the world without returning it. He absorbed the scapegoating of the crowd, and in his dying breath offered forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

To follow Christ is to refuse to let violence wear the mask of virtue. It is to reject the narrative that victims bring suffering on themselves. It is to resist the temptation to delight in the downfall of an enemy.

The murder of Charlie Kirk revealed something more about us than about him. And it is this “us” that God is addressing, calling us away from vengeance and into the costly, cruciform work of love.

At a moment as brutal as this, the call of Christ comes to us: blessed are the peacemakers.

There is real power when, even while we are aggrieved and wounded, we resist the pull of contempt and instead reach out in love. In a culture quick to sneer, justify, and divide, such a response offers a different path—one marked by lament, forgiveness, and reconciliation. To choose peace in grief is not weakness but strength, for it breaks the cycle of violence and begins the work of healing.

References

• Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.

• Campbell, R., & Raja, S. (1999). Secondary victimization of rape victims: Insights from mental health professionals who treat survivors of violence. Violence and Victims, 14(3), 261–275.

• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

• Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat. Johns Hopkins University Press.

• Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.

• Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17.

• Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Springer.

Over the years, I’ve seen just how transformative coaching can be. I’ve benefitted from having a coach myself — a space to pause, think out loud, and find clarity when I felt stuck or couldn’t see the wood for the trees. I’ve encouraged others to find coaches too, and watched as they discovered fresh perspectives, insights, and momentum.

So recently, I decided to take the plunge and train as a coach. I wanted to be able to offer this to the people I work with — in particular, Christian leaders.

Having completed and passed my initial coaching training, I am now working on my next level of certification, which requires me to complete many more hours of coaching practice under the guidance of my coaching trainers and mentors.

So if you are reading this, you can help me, and in return, I can help you or someone else you know. I can offer free coaching that helps me build up my practice hours.1

If you are interested in meeting with me for coaching, please use this link to register your interest:

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What Coaching Is (and How It Fits with Counselling & Spiritual Direction)

Coaching is a structured, forward-focused conversation: a place where you can step off the wheel, catch your breath, and explore what matters most. It’s about helping you see where you are, where you want to go, and how to take your next step. It’s a space to think out loud and find clarity in the process.

It isn’t the same as counselling, which often looks back with a trained professional at problems, feelings, wounds, loss and thoughts, to understand how our past may be influencing our present.

Nor is coaching spiritual direction, which, with a trained guide, helps us notice and respond to God’s presence in our lives.

Direction is primarily about intimacy with God; coaching is about practical next steps and action.

Of course, all three overlap. Together, coaching, counselling and spiritual direction complement one another. I have written in more detail about that at my other site, here.

Why Coaching Matters — Especially for Christian Leaders

Leadership often feels like they are running hard but not moving forward — or getting lost among the trees, unable to see the forest. Coaching provides the chance to step back, regain perspective, and think with intention.

For leaders, it’s a way to process challenges, sharpen focus, and move from being reactive to being strategic. For Christian leaders, coaching is especially valuable: it helps align leadership with calling, ensuring that our ministry flows not out of exhaustion or pressure, but out of identity in Christ.

Good coaching doesn’t hand you answers. It draws out the wisdom and courage already within you, helping you see more clearly and act more faithfully. Over time, that can mean the difference between burnout and resilient, joyful leadership.

The Invitation

If you’ve ever longed for that kind of space, I’d love to offer you the gift of a free coaching session with me. A chance to pause, think out loud, and explore what’s next — no pressure, just time set aside for you.

The link to register your interest is here: https://bit.ly/Jason-coaching

The phrase “quiet revival” had plenty of airplay across the UK Christian summer festivals this year, as well as countless podcasts, blogs and Christian magazine articles. Many have rejoiced at the thought that the long decline of the Church in England and Wales might finally be slowing—perhaps even reversing—as Gen Z leads an unexpected turnaround in attendance. Testimonies flowed, stories were told, and rightly, the crowds cheered.

But one moment stood out to me at the Wildfires Festival. Pete Greig, speaking with his usual candour, remarked that his social media feeds were filling with critiques: that this wasn’t the right kind of revival. The wrong churches were involved, the wrong demographics were showing up, and the wrong people were being stirred. Pete’s response, as I heard it, was both gentle and sharp in my mind: do not expect God to bring revival in the ways or with the people you predict, expect and demand.

That single sentence struck me. It exposed what I see as two distortions circling this “quiet revival.” On one side are the over-analysts and sceptics, eager to pick it apart until nothing is left. On the other side are the enthusiasts, quick to oversell it with grand claims that cannot yet be borne.

We are in danger, as we always are, of either reducing what might be signs of a move of God into nothing more than a sociologically explicable phenomenon. Those who are cynical will be pursuing this vociferously. On the other hand, we can fall prey to over-claiming and hype, with the inevitable disappointment that follows. Overzealous Christians can all too quickly sprint into the next great thing they are excited about, leaving common sense and discernment behind them, unused.

I want to suggest that between these poles lies a better way—not control, not hype, but simple participation in what God is quietly doing.

The Danger of Over-analysis: Which are you prone to?

Revival is fragile, often beginning in hidden ways—through prayer meetings, repentance, or simple acts of worship. But over-analysis turns this living reality into an object of study. Sociologists and church commentators ask for proof: statistics, demographics, measurable outcomes. Cynics dismiss signs of renewal as nothing more than cultural shifts or generational moods. This over-intellectualisation dismantles the mystery.

Like dismantling a bird to discover how it sings, we end up with nothing but pieces.

This danger is a well-recognised phenomenon across philosophy, psychology, and theology. It’s when excessive analysis distances us from the very reality or experience we are trying to engage with. Different disciplines name it in slightly different ways. Take a moment to see which you might be prone to:

Over-intellectualisation (psychology)

In psychology, over-intellectualisation is a defence mechanism: analysing emotions instead of feeling them. Applied to revival, it involves dissecting the events until nothing remains to be experienced. Instead of praying, repenting, or worshipping, we stand outside, theorising about what it all “means.”

Paralysis by analysis (the popular phrase)

Endless analysis often disrupts action. For the quiet revival, this means debates about definitions and authenticity replace the act of joining in. Communities can get stuck asking, “Is this really revival?” instead of actually praying, evangelising, and living it.

Hermeneutic of suspicion → hermeneutic of reduction (theology/philosophy)

Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic of suspicion” is helpful in moderation, but when pushed too far, it reduces faith to sociological or psychological explanation. In revival talk, this shows up in cynics who dismiss signs of renewal as nothing more than cultural shifts or generational trends—explaining away grace until the mystery is gone. And often, a hermeneutic of suspicion is a thin veneer to cloak a disdain for who and where people say they are experiencing God.

Phenomenological ‘bracketing gone too far’ (philosophy)

Husserl taught that bracketing judgement helps us see phenomena clearly. But when applied too heavily, it dissolves the immediacy of what is happening. In revival, this looks like people observing “from a distance” with clinical detachment, refusing to commit until they have neutral proof—missing the moment because they are too cautious to step inside it.

Heidegger’s ‘present-at-hand’ vs. ‘ready-to-hand’ (existential philosophy)

Heidegger contrasts using things naturally (“ready-to-hand”) with analysing them abstractly (“present-at-hand”). In revival, we experience renewal most when it is “ready-to-hand”—prayer, worship, lives changed. But when we step back to interrogate it as a case study—“present-at-hand”—the lived reality of revival slips through our fingers.

Loss of tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi)

Polanyi said, “We can know more than we can tell.” Revival is often tacit: sensed in atmosphere, embodied in prayer, encountered in worship. Over-analysis eclipses this tacit knowing, trying to reduce it to words, data, and categories. Like explaining how to ride a bike while riding it, the very act becomes impossible when reduced to explanation.

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When Naïveté and Overzealous Hype Take Over

The equal and opposite danger is hype. Every stirring becomes a revival. Sweeping claims spread quickly. Emotionalism masquerades as depth. Christians chase the next great move of God. The result? Inflated hope, followed by deep disappointment. And credibility is lost.

I dwelt above on the main errors of over-analysis; I now want to outline the main counter errors of naiveté.

Uncritical Enthusiasm

Every surge of activity is baptised as a “revival”. But without discernment, we confuse genuine works of the Spirit with passing trends or crowd psychology. Enthusiasm is good—but revival is so much more than mere excitement.

Unsubstantiated Claims

A hallmark of overzealous responses to revival is the tendency to make sweeping, unverified claims: thousands coming to faith, whole regions and demographics transformed, cultural tides turning overnight. These stories spread quickly, especially on social media, but without grounding in reality, they create fragile hopes that are easily dashed.

When expectations are raised beyond what God has actually done, disappointment is inevitable.

Instead of strengthening faith, hype breeds cynicism once the dust settles.

Emotionalism Over Depth

Strong emotions often accompany revival, but emotional displays alone are not proof of God’s presence. Tears, fervour, shaking, falling over, or any other intense worship moments can be powerful. Still, if they become the primary measure of revival, they risk masking the deeper marks of transformation—repentance, holiness, endurance, and love of neighbour. Overzealous responses sometimes equate feeling with faith, overlooking the slow, costly change that true revival always demands.

Tribal Sprinting

Another danger of overzealous hype is the tendency for Christians to sprint from one “next great move” to another. One month it is revival in one town, the next month a new conference, the next a fresh movement somewhere else. This restless pursuit of excitement leaves believers exhausted, chasing spectacle while neglecting the steady work of discipleship, prayer, and holiness. In the end, what is proclaimed as revival can resemble spiritual consumerism more than participation in God’s renewal.

Loss of Credibility

When revival is constantly claimed but not borne out in reality, the Church’s credibility suffers. Outsiders who hear exaggerated reports of transformation but see little evidence begin to dismiss revival language altogether. Even insiders grow weary of repeated claims that fail to materialise. If every ripple is proclaimed as a tidal wave, then when genuine waves come, they may be ignored. Overzealous hype undermines the very witness it intends to promote.

Spiritual Disappointment

Perhaps the greatest danger of overclaiming revival is the aftermath. When hype builds and then fades, believers are left disillusioned, even wounded. Some may lose trust in leaders who promised too much; others may grow suspicious of any talk of God’s renewal.

The cycle of excitement and letdown hardens hearts rather than softening them. Instead of preparing people for deeper faith, hype can inoculate them against genuine revival when it truly comes. There are already too many who have been vaccinated against the moves of God.

The Middle Way: Participation Over Control

Pete Greig’s reminder at the Wildfires Festival is crucial: do not expect God to bring revival in the ways or with the people you predict. The Spirit does not work to our categories, metrics, demographies or timelines. To over-analyse is to reduce revival into nothing. To over-claim is to inflate it into everything. Between these poles lies the better way: to humbly participate in what God is actually doing.

I want to suggest what I believe is a better way, and am indebted to Richard Beck’s ‘The Moral, the Existential, and Ontological framework’ to do this. Beck’s framework, with three layers, is a map that allows us to bring all the possible ways we might analyse and observe Christianity in the world. We can use it to sensibly review The Quiet Revival without falling into over-analysis, and also gain insight into wise ways to engage with it confidently.

Revival is First Ontological

At its root, revival is not about feelings, statistics, or even immediate visible change. Revival is ontological—it has to do with being itself and our participation in God’s renewing presence. This means that the beginning of revival is a mystery of grace: the Spirit of God stirring prayer, awakening hunger, and infusing life into His people. These beginnings are usually hidden, subtle, and difficult to measure.

They are not manufactured or managed, but received.

To speak of revival as ontological is to say that it is first God’s act of renewal, before it is ever our experience of renewal. Revival begins in the depths, in the unseen reality of God’s presence drawing near. It starts with identities that are received, not constructed—people saved into the truth of being God-made, not self-made.

Grace opens our eyes to see that God is God and we are not. It invites us to exchange all the other false grounds on which we try to build our being. Before this exchange, our lives are grounded in ourselves: our achievements, our tribes, our control, our fears. But through grace, something shifts. We yield that ground, entrusting ourselves wholly to God.

This surrender is never easy. It often feels like dying before rising again. Yet on the other side of surrender, we find life. Our being becomes rooted in God’s life. Identity, worth, and security are no longer self-sourced, but received as pure gift. Revival, then, is not simply about outward change or cultural impact. It is first a transformation in the ground of our being—an exchange of foundations—so that our lives rest not in ourselves, but in God.

Then Revival Becomes Existential

Once revival is rooted in God’s presence, it inevitably reshapes our lived sense of meaning, identity, and belonging. This is the existential layer. Revival begins to “show up” as fresh joy in Christ, a rediscovery of who we are as the people of God, and a deepened sense of connection to one another in worship and mission. Individuals feel assurance and hope; communities find renewed confidence in the gospel; churches rediscover their place in God’s story.

At this stage, revival is less about measurable outcomes and more about atmosphere:

Let me say that again. At this stage, revival is less about measurable outcomes and more about atmosphere: the shared sense that God is among us, that our lives are being reoriented, and that our belonging in Christ has become more real than our doubts or divisions.

Finally, Revival Becomes Moral

From there, revival inevitably spills over into the moral layer—the visible transformation of lives and communities. This is the level of behaviour, action, and outward change. People repent of sin and patterns of compromise. Families are healed, justice is pursued, the poor are served, reconciliation begins, and even society feels a shift. These are the moral fruits of revival: they flow outward from what God has already done ontologically (in His renewing presence) and existentially (in reshaping our belonging).

But they are not the first signs—they are the later fruit.

To look only for moral evidence is to demand the harvest before the seed has sprouted.

Why This Order Matters

When we invert this order, we distort revival. If we insist on moral results first—numbers, conversions, social change—we may dismiss what God is doing in its earliest and most fragile form. If we look only at the existential level—who is involved, what groups are stirred—we reduce revival to sociology or tribal identity. But if we start at the ontological level, recognising that revival is first God’s presence shared with His people, we see everything else in its proper place. Revival begins in being, deepens into belonging, and then blossoms into behaviour. Only by honouring this sequence can we participate in revival without dismantling it by cynicism or distorting it with hype.

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Conclusion

Revival is never straightforward. It resists our categories, outpaces our strategies, and unsettles our expectations.

In the end, it belongs to God, not us.

Our danger is always the same: to overanalyse it until the life is squeezed out, or to overclaim it until hope collapses under its own weight. Both distortions are temptations of control—whether through scrutiny or through hype.

But revival, especially when it is quiet, does not ask to be controlled. It asks to be received.

It begins ontologically—in the presence of God quietly renewing His people—before it ever becomes existential, reshaping identity and belonging, or moral, transforming lives and societies. To begin anywhere else is to miss the point.

So perhaps the call of this quiet revival is also quiet: not to dismantle it with cynicism, nor inflate it with slogans, but to enter into it with faith, prayer, repentance, and humility. To inhabit it, rather than explain it. To wait, rather than rush. To discern, rather than exaggerate.

If we can do that, then maybe we will discover what God is actually doing in our midst. Not the revival we expected. Not the one we demanded. But the revival God has chosen to give us.

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Debbie shares insights from her doctoral research and introduces her program, Wellspring for Renewal, a year-long journey designed for ministry and Christian leaders seeking deep soul care, spiritual formation, and sustainable leadership practices.

Deborah Owen is a spiritual director, leadership coach, and retreat facilitator with years of experience guiding and walking with Christian leaders. Drawing from a rich blend of neuroscience, attachment theory, the Enneagram, and the way of Jesus, she creates safe, sacred spaces for transformation.

You’re invited into 10 months of transformation, a journey from exhaustion to inner renewal, from isolation to authentic connection, and from striving to Spirit-led leadership.

• Website: InsideOutMinistries.info

• Substack Blog: Rooted and Rising

• Email: debbie@deborahcowen.com

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