Letters to the Reader

A Personal Word

As I referenced in the opening chapter of the book, and as you may have heard, in 2023 it became public that I had an affair. I want to acknowledge that sin to anyone who reads this book, but further to demonstrate my process of confession, repentance, and restoration.

Throughout this book, we have looked at the process of discipleship by seeing how Jesus led the 12. During my process of repentance and restoration, I have reflected on how Jesus restored Peter with gentleness, healing, and a re-centering on mission. After repeating the question “Do you love me?” three times, Jesus ends with a call to mission: “Follow me.”

To show you what that has looked like in my life, I want to share key messages from some letters I wrote during this process to my community, as well as a report from the leaders who discipled me through the restoration process. I’ve edited these letters slightly to connect them to what you’ve already read in this book, in order to help them make the most sense in the context of what we have been learning here.

I hope that these will give you a picture of what restoration can look like thanks to the grace and forgiveness of our Savior Jesus who calls all of us to follow him and make disciples, no matter what we have done.

Letter 1

Let me begin by saying thank you for all the kind words and encouragement you have sent in recent weeks.

I’m so sorry for any pain I have caused. I’m sure my behavior has caused confusion and disappointment for many of you. I’m very sorry.

Sally’s kindness and grace have been wonderful, and the way in which my children and the whole family have stepped forward to offer support, help, and guidance has been incredible. It is beyond my ability to fully express how grateful I am to all of them. Sally and I are together in the UK and doing well, and the children and the grandchildren are all thriving. Thank you so much for all your prayers—they have been a blessing to us all.

I’m planning to share my journey of restoration with you through a series of letters. I hope you find them helpful both in understanding my situation and that of others going through similar experiences.

In future letters I hope to share some of the healing process that Sally and I are engaged in, but for the first couple of communications I thought I would share the beginnings of my personal journey of restoration and recovery.

The counsel I have received suggests that all restoration and healing occurs in community, so I have invited a group of wise, mature, and experienced women and men—whom I call the Restoration Team—to walk with me. Their main tasks have centered around asking me hard questions and listening carefully to what I’m saying. Meeting with them every two weeks has been truly transformative for me, providing not only helpful pointers for the journey but also uncovering and confirming a therapeutic process I’ve been in for a while. This process is helping me answer some really important questions.

Questions like: “How did I become emotionally and physically involved with someone during the COVID pandemic when for most of my adult life I’ve only ever loved one woman—Sally?”

And, “Why would I ignore all the warning counsel from my family, who felt concerned when they saw changes in my behavior?”

To be honest these questions are only the latest in a series of questions I have been wrestling with for some time, prompting a quest for a deeper understanding of my inner life. This quest has led me to start a doctoral research program into the intersection of neuroscience, communication, and spiritual formation and to seek therapeutic solutions to my struggles.

These struggles have often left me exhausted and overwhelmed with feelings of abandonment, rejection, and isolation. During these times I have found myself losing track of my thoughts mid-sentence, flooded with unexpected emotions. I’ve even fallen asleep mid-sentence while talking to friends.

This reminds me of the story of falling asleep while driving my truck that I shared in the prologue of this book. As in that situation, all the struggle and trauma I had experienced leading up to COVID (not all due to the pandemic) had taken its toll. I was bumping along the bottom of my physical and emotional capacity. But I just kept going, because that’s what I thought I should do. It was what I had been trained to do from when I was a small boy, and if I'm honest it’s something I still have a tendency to do even now. Keep calm and carry on!

These kinds of inbuilt mechanisms have given me great resilience over the years, but have also left me with real frailties. The layers of loss and grief have been laid down into my soul year after year, and I have simply ignored them and moved on to the next challenge. I honestly thought I was processing these things well, but most of the pain was unresolved. Even now the inner workings that lie behind these tendencies still beset me.

I offer none of this as an excuse for my behavior or as a request for a free pass. I share them simply as a way of inviting you to understand how the Lord is bringing about change in the midst of my journey of restoration and recovery.

I have come to realize that I am one of those people that Jesus spoke of when he saw that they were “harassed and helpless.” Fortunately for me I’m not “a sheep without a shepherd.” I, like you, have a wonderfully caring and compassionate Shepherd who understands my frailty and is able to meet me in my need.

Knowing this has brought me afresh to the scriptures particularly John’s Gospel where I see Jesus counseling frail failures like me: the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, and Peter. In his compassion Jesus says and does really unexpected things. In John 4 he sends the woman at the well as a missionary to her village. In John 8 he tells the woman he’s not there to condemn her. In Peter’s restoration he asks him repeatedly “Do you love me?”

Jesus understands trauma, grief and the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that will support their healing, and he seeks relational connection rather than anything else. This is perhaps what Paul means by “restoring someone gently” when we’ve fallen into sin.

This is the process that I’m in, and I’m deeply grateful to the Lord for all the ways he has shown me his kindness in all of this.

Thank you for all your prayers and kindness.

Mike

Letter 2

Thank you to everyone who was so kind and encouraging after my last letter. The support I have received from you and all my family and friends has meant more to me than I could ever say. Bless you! Your encouragement helps me to continue to seek the deep repentance and faith-filled journey I need as I receive the Lord’s restoration in my discipleship from him.

As I indicated in my last letter, I have been pressing into a process for some time, trying to understand what lies at the heart of my struggles. Sally and I have been best friends for 50 years, and so it was a real shock when I realized I wasn’t functioning well in our relationship.

In my last newsletter, I related the strange experience of falling asleep and running off the road on a journey (a story I repeated in the prologue of this book). The experience mystified me for many years, and I tried several different interpretations to explain what happened. But it wasn’t until a retreat that I took last year with the Onsite therapeutic team that I began to understand what it all might mean.

Onsite, the gold standard of therapeutic organizations, offers retreats at their locations in several places around the United States. There was a place available for me at their horse ranch in the mountains of San Diego County in California, and so I traveled there in the hope of finding some help and guidance.

The therapeutic team and the personal therapist assigned to me offered a variety of different therapeutic processes, including conversation, meditation, art, foraging, and EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). It was an incredible experience that has continued to provide resources for reflection and healing that I return to on an almost daily basis.

During one session I was invited into what I think experts in the field call a “psychodrama”. I was among a very small group of fellow travelers, and we were helped to understand what neuroscience and psychotherapy are beginning to uncover about the connection between behavior and trauma. Three of the participants were asked to sit one behind the other on seats, each holding a different toy representing different parts of the brain. The person in the back seat held a reptile, representing the brain's survival instincts. The middle seat was occupied by someone holding a teddy bear, representing our need for intimacy and comfort. The person in the front row was given an Einstein doll representing the part of the brain, such as the frontal lobes, that offer us rational thought.

The Onsite team of clinicians positioned themselves around the chairs. One stood on one side describing how the various parts of the brain react in response to trauma. Two others stood opposite each other on either side of the front and middle chairs near a sheet that laid on the floor. After giving a detailed explanation of the structure of the brain, the narrator said, “And this is what happens as a result of trauma….” At this moment, the two other clinicians picked up the sheet and cut off the front-row seat from the other two. The narrator explained, “The rational part of the brain is cut off from the other parts of the brain. In trauma the brain focuses on the instincts for comfort and survival.”

I found this idea very challenging, but as I reflected with my therapist, things began to fall into place. In the end the insights I gained proved enormously helpful.

In my desire to understand what was going on in my life, I had the beginnings of an explanation of what was going on inside of me. I had always assumed reason would guide my actions, and yet these recent discoveries in neuroscience suggested that my brain (like everyone else’s) was likely to take a different path than the one I might have expected, one that connected to much deeper instincts than reason.

It would appear that our brains have deeply ingrained strategies of attachment that are automatically activated as a trauma response as a quest for survival.

My pattern of attachment is what the specialists in the field call “Anxious Attachment”. This tends to lead me to look toward new places of security and comfort, particularly if the ones I previously relied on no longer appear to offer me the nurture and protection I hoped for.

For most of my life I have experienced what I would call “manageable trauma.” Although this was at times quite extreme, I was able to find a way through. But in recent years I have experienced multiple layers of unresolved trauma that have overwhelmed me. It’s difficult to write this, but I found myself struggling with such a sense of loss and abandonment that I looked outside of my marriage for comfort and security, even though this was a “self-sabotaging” strategy (an apparently common behavior in those who have experienced multiple traumas). It wasn’t a rational or even a conscious decision; it was something that happened as an unexpected response to what I understand now to be overwhelming circumstances.

In saying this I’m not suggesting that I’m not responsible for my actions or that what I did was anything other than sinful. But it does help me to understand where and how the Lord wants to heal and transform my heart and mind.

In all of this I take great comfort in the knowledge that the apostle Paul—reflecting on the internal, irrational battle that existed within him—seemed to understand his own behavior from a similar perspective:

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.

I fully identify with what Paul is saying here and the next statement is very similar to things that I’ve expressed through this whole experience:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

And of course I also fully embrace what Paul says next…

Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!... There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.

In my next letter, I hope to share more on this important process in my life. My hope is that it will help you to pray for Sally and I, and I pray that it might perhaps help you with some of the things with which you wrestle.

Much love,

Mike

Letter 3

Charlie was an amazing dog. So many of you mentioned our highly relational and lovable black Labrador when you sent messages of thanks after visiting Sally and I in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. You also invariably mentioned Betty, Sally’s mum. It was as though meeting Betty and Charlie made you feel that you had connected with us as a family when you came for training with us and our team.

After we left Pawleys Island and went to live in Greenville, South Carolina, Charlie struggled with health problems. You will perhaps remember how he miraculously recovered from illness a couple of times. But the day finally arrived when Charlie would not recover again. I knew it as I knelt beside him to pray one more time. Charlie just lifted his sweet noble head and looked directly at me. It was as though he was trying to tell me something. Perhaps he was trying to say his time had come and he was going to be taken from us.

I loved Charlie, but the deep sense of loss I experienced took me by surprise. I wept and wept. After we laid him on the back seat of the car and took him to the vet for his final journey, I spent the whole day not able to do anything other than sit alone and cry. It was as though his death opened a fault line within me, and the unanticipated flood of emotions rushing through the fissure in my heart was overwhelming.

I wasn't ready for this at all. I had held it together with the loss of my parents and even the tragic death of our grandson, but somehow Charlie’s death circumvented my defenses and knocked me to the ground. All the old wounds of struggle, rejection, and hurt seemed to be laid bare.

Questioning why this was the case, I sought help. The therapist, after a few sessions, suggested that I might be the subject of what he called “compounded loss”—a condition created by a continuous experience of the trauma of loss without the opportunity to process it through the natural patterns of grief. I learned a fundamental axiom of life that grief heals trauma. Each of the five processes of grief (denial, guilt, bargaining, depression, acceptance) takes us deeper into our inner life and helps us to settle and naturally heal old wounds and the losses associated with them.

I’ve learned that this is because the emotions connected to each stage of grief attract deep, often hidden hurts and feelings and help us to process them. The stages of grief are not necessarily connected to feelings that can be rationally explained but are internal processes seeking a reason to be there. So they connect to unresolved feelings and wounded memories, and with this the miracle of healing takes place. And so, the processes of grief (if embraced) heal past traumas. In the death of my dear canine friend Charlie, the Lord revealed that I needed to find a journey of healing for the wounds that remained unresolved within me.

But unfortunately the healing would have to wait a little while. Sally and I moved from Greenville to Dayton, Ohio, hoping that working in a local church would promote our healing journey. We had drifted apart in our struggle for emotional survival, and we both hoped the move would bring us closer and offer a path of recovery from the burdens we carried.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened. In our first year, we were plunged into a vicious church fight in which I was again pilloried and persecuted for my theology of mission and discipleship. In our second year we were thrown into the COVID crisis with all of the complications and challenges associated with it. I reverted to type, pushed down the pain, and activated my familiar patterns of duty and discipline. Sally and I were again coping separately with our struggles, and into this immensely complex and difficult set of circumstances I was offered an illicit relationship which I foolishly and wholeheartedly embraced like a drowning man grasping at anything to stay afloat.

Though it offered an anesthetic to the pain, the relationship could not of course bring healing. When it ended I pressed further into therapy in the hope of finding answers to the deep needs that were being exposed within me. I discovered that for me duty and discipline have functioned as what the apostle Paul calls “the law,” and my compensating strategies for the effects of the law are often expressions of what he calls “the flesh”. Together they have conspired to bring about “death.” Of course with death comes grief, and with this grief, I have rediscovered the life axiom I learned with Charlie’s death: grief heals trauma.

For me, the deep grief I have experienced over these last months has begun to produce a fruit of healing I could never have anticipated. I’m so grateful to all those who have been brave enough to share the journey with me. And I realize that those who have rejected me in this time have been used by God to increase the grief and so deepen the process of healing.

I, like many of you, have been conditioned to avoid the process of grief from my nurturing experience onward. I now understand how the Lord intends the stages of grief to heal all our losses. Loss is common to all and is no doubt the direct result of us leaving paradise. But in his kindness, the Lord has provided within the stages of grief a way we can all find healing and an emergence of hope that we might reclaim the paradise lost.

In my letters, I have attempted to share a transparent picture of what’s been going on with me. In some ways, the first was simply an attempt to share what happened, offering my sincerest apologies. The second tried to explain the irrationality of my behavior and the therapeutic process I’ve been in to help me understand how such things happen to ordinary people. I concluded with a reference to Paul’s plaintive cry at the end of Romans 7: “Who will deliver me from this body of death!” and his expression of gratitude to begin Romans 8: “There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.”  I have felt the depth of both of these simple expressions of faith, and they continue to be the deepest cry of the heart.

May you continue to know the Lord's pleasure and his loving presence in all things.

Much love,

Mike

Letter from Restoration Team

Dear Ministry Partners and Friends,

I hope this letter finds you well. We are reaching out to provide an update on the accountability and reconciliation process that Mike Breen has undertaken, as well as to offer insight into the journey of restoration that we believe is essential not just for Mike, but for all of us. This letter reports on the process Mike has been through, the journey of the restoration and accountability team, and how we see this as a pathway for future growth and healing for the entire body of Christ.

Goal: To communicate the restorative process and the benefits of a grace-based approach to dealing with mistakes, sins, and failures. Our aim is to encourage a restorative, rather than a legalistic, response to failure, following the teaching of Galatians 6: "Restore with a spirit of gentleness."

The accountability process, co-chaired by Dr. Reginald S. Screen and Dr. Mike Rayburn, has been a thorough and prayerful journey. Over several months, Mike has been engaged in deep reflection and accountability, working to understand and address an inappropriate relationship that took place. This moral failure has been a source of pain for Mike, his family, and many others who were impacted by his actions.

Dr. Mike Rayburn offered the following perspective on Mike’s journey:

“In my opinion, Mike has made a thoughtful and sincere effort to make himself accountable to a panel of Christian leaders (both men and women). I believe his purpose was to be honest and transparent about what happened between him and a woman, which amounted to an inappropriate relationship and a moral failure. I think he saw this as a necessary step in the process of healing for him and his family, as well as a need to understand himself. He recognizes that the weaknesses in his own personality, which led to his mistakes, need to be understood and corrected if he is to be less susceptible to the same failures in the future.

“I see in him a determined effort to address these things with the help of professionals as well as with a rather insightful group of praying friends.

“Quite frankly, I have not seen such a comprehensive effort to deal with sin in most Christians, or in the Church at large. In my experience, the effort rarely goes beyond repentance before the Lord, and occasionally an attempt to apologize or make restitution to those who have been hurt. In terms of an outlook for the future, all that is offered is hope—tempered with a reality check. We are usually told, ‘Since we are all flawed, we need to accept the fact that we’ll probably do it again’;

“There is no attempt made to understand why we make bad decisions. How are we deceived into doing what we hate (Romans 7)? How can we tear down the strongholds of lies and vain arguments in our minds that our enemy uses to control our behavior (2 Corinthians 10)? How do we learn how to be like the young men in 1 John who have overcome the evil one?”

Additionally, Robert Pitman, who has been closely involved in the process, shared the following:

“I have seen a broken Mike and a vulnerable Mike that I have not seen before. Mike is learning things about himself that have led to brokenness, but it’s what’s been needed that is leading him to healing and the restoration of his marriage and family!”

Mike Smith, a long-time friend and spiritual mentee of Mike Breen, offered his reflections:

“Mike has been a spiritual mentor in my life for over 10 years, which made this moral failure extremely difficult for me to comprehend and even humanize. However, being a part of his restorative process has reminded me that none of us are ever beyond the threat of temptation and failure, NOR the latitude of grace. The whole of this process has allowed Mike to see the progression and the mindset that ultimately produced this failure and, at the same time, reclaim the life and commitment to Christ that he originally embraced as a spiritual leader. I have seen him recalibrate his life through remorse, consideration, and a genuine desire to return to being the man God called him to be.”

Ryan Snow also shared his perspective, highlighting the tangible growth and accountability Mike has embraced:

“Mike is slowly growing, healing, and changing. He has been submitted to a consistent process of connection and some level of tangible and regular accountability with this group, his wife, and family. I am thankful in an age of leaders who hide and are not culpable, that Mike is seeking restoration in a tangible, honest, and humble way.”

Mike Ely, another member of the reconciliation team, offered his encouragement based on what he has witnessed:

“I’ve been a part of the reconciliation team for Mike, and I’ve been encouraged by his candor and honesty in dealing with his own brokenness and healing. His humility to not brush over his own issues but deal with them head-on, and to submit to those whom he was leading and mentoring for years, is a difficult and courageous task. But Mike pushed through. It’s refreshing to be a part of a healthy healing process, and I believe Mike is moving forward himself and with Sally into a healthy future.”

Finally, Mike’s wife, Sally Breen, shared her personal reflections on their marriage and this journey of restoration:

“We are digging deep into the foundations of the good marriage and good friendship we have had over these last 50 years. Good soil always eventually grows good fruit, even if it’s been dormant for a while or ravaged by storms.

“During the worst of times, I was still very clearly hearing God’s voice, audible at times, and it led me through. One time, when I was pleading with the Lord and in a very low, desperate moment with all my emotions coming out, I said to my Father, ‘I love Mike so very much.’ He replied, ‘But I love him more. Hand him over to me. I will take very good care of him. I know his heart.’ So that’s what I did.”

The accountability and restoration process has brought about significant personal transformation for Mike. He has faced his own failures with a depth of honesty that is rare and has taken meaningful steps toward restoration through professional help, spiritual guidance, and support from close, praying friends. We, as the Church, can take away valuable lessons from this process, not just for Mike, but for all of us.

The future pathway for Mike is one that continues to prioritize grace over judgment, healing over shame, and accountability over hiddenness. His journey reflects the biblical call to restore with a spirit of gentleness (Galatians 6), and we believe this is the model the Church must adopt as we walk with those who fall into sin. This is not just about Mike’s restoration, but about our collective journey toward grace-filled living—acknowledging that we all stumble and that restoration is possible for everyone.

Thank you for your ongoing prayers and partnership as we continue to support Mike through this process. We hope that this letter not only informs you of the steps taken but also encourages all of us to embrace a grace-based approach in our personal and communal lives.

In His Grace,

On behalf of The Accountability and Restoration Team:

Dr. Reginald S. Screen and Dr. Mike Rayburn