Why I Won’t Be Writing to Alex Personally

I want to start by saying something that will surprise regular readers: Alex’s letter is not, in itself, the problem. It appears to be more careful, more courteous, and more genuinely wrestling with Scripture than many an angry elder (or cowardly YouTube commentator) that I’ve handled elsewhere.¹ He quotes the wonderful Samuel Rutherford rather than openly raging, (though I suspect that same rage is lurking just below his surface). He says he sympathises with my burdens, (to whatever extent that sympathy reaches), which is worth acknowledging before I say anything else.

But courtesy is not the same as having done the work, and sincerity is not the same as engagement. And so I want to explain, publicly and just this once, why I am not going to write Alex a private, bespoke, point-by-point reply — and why that refusal is not evasion but defiant consistency.

The pattern is always the same. Someone watches several videos. They read “some content” — those words which gloss over a great deal of unacknowledged work. They form an impression, sometimes an accurate one, often not, and then they write to ask me to do, personally and for free, what I have already done publicly and at length: in three books, in a Q&A chapter that anticipates almost this exact list of objections, and in years of podcasting and blog writing.²

Watching a video clip is not the same as reading. A clip shows you a sunrise and a soundbite; a book shows you the argument, the exegesis, the qualifications, and — critically — the answers to the very questions being asked of me now. God Closed Church closes its central chapter with a section titled “Some Common & Much-needed Q&A,” built entirely from real correspondence with men who raised concerns almost identical to Alex’s.³ If Alex’s questions are sincere, that chapter, and my wider writing, is where sincerity leads but not to my inbox.

I do not owe every viewer of a ten-minute video a private tutorial in exchange for their attention. I owe to the Lord Himself the witness He has formed in me, communicated boldly. That is what the books are.

What Alex Is Actually Saying

In fairness to him, let me lay out the substance of his letter plainly, because it deserves a plain response even if not a private one:

• He notes I hold to continuationism and otherwise sit within conservative evangelicalism, yet remain dissatisfied with its modern expressions.
• He understands me to teach that the covid-19 church closures were a form of divine judgment — a “merciful” one.
• He references my rebuke of the Banner of Truth for not, in his reading, sufficiently calling for repentance.
• He believes I teach that Hebrews 10:25 has been misapplied — that it concerns the eschatological gathering at Christ’s return rather than a weekly command to attend a building.
• His chief concern: that this amounts to calling Christians out of their local churches into a kind of exile, and that this is “extreme separatism” — with the practical worry that an isolated believer, alone, has no means of feeding himself, and that “lone wolf” Christians will use my teaching as cover for rejecting all fellowship.
• He closes by saying the content feels doctrinally vague, weighted toward anecdote over substance, and cites Rutherford’s warning against Brownist separatism — the sin of looking for a ‘perfect’ visible Church.

That is a fair summary, and it is worth answering — not privately, but here, where it can serve every Alex, not just this one.

The Very Bad Figs, and the Charge of Vagueness

Here is the irony: the charge of vagueness always arrives from people who have not read the chapter where the boundary lines have been drawn with the greatest precision.

In God Closed Church I spend an entire chapter — “Two Baskets of Figs” — on Jeremiah 24. Jeremiah saw two baskets at the Temple: one of very good figs, one of figs so rotten they weren’t fit to be picked up, let alone fit for human consumption. The shock of the passage is not the badness of the bad figs. It is who they were. The bad figs were not the exiles. The bad figs were the ones who stayed — the most religiously zealous, the most doctrinally sound-sounding, the most confident that their continued Temple attendance proved their fidelity. The good figs, the ones on whom the LORD set His eyes for good, were those who bowed their heads and went into exile in obedience to His judgment.⁴

So when Alex says my teaching feels light on substantial doctrine, I’d ask him pointedly: has he read that chapter? Because “vague” is very rarely what critics mean. What they usually mean is unwelcome — a claim that reorders where the danger actually lies, and that is uncomfortable regardless of how carefully it’s argued.

And here is where Alex’s own letter, without meaning to, supplies the evidence for the very chapter he hasn’t read. He grants, almost in passing, that he “sympathises with a lot of my burdens” about the state of the church — one sentence, quickly moved past on the way to his real concern, which is that I am harming the harassed and helpless, not helping them, and therefore dishonouring the LORD Whose Name is Jealous. This is exactly what Alex is saying.

But that is precisely the posture of the very bad figs: a nodding acknowledgement of the rot, offered without cost, followed immediately by a defence of staying put. It is not the same thing as bowing one’s head to the ground. The good figs in Jeremiah 24 did not footnote their concession and move on; they bowed, wept and felt the weight of what their own unfaithfulness had cost. A sentence of sympathy sandwiched between a list of accusations is not biblical lament. It is the “very bad fig” instinct still standing upright, dressed in the language of concern.

Systemic Ills, Not Anecdote

Alex’s other worry — that this is anecdote dressed as doctrine — deserves the same answer from a different book. The Glorious Few names something I call the Abedi Inversion: the systemic process by which the Church’s own de-radicalisation of genuine discipleship gets mistaken for health, while the actually radical — the “very few” who take Christ’s claims at full weight — get mistaken for the danger.⁵ The whole burden of that book is that this is not one bad experience generalised into a theory. It is a systemic diagnosis, argued from Scripture, with specific reference to John the Baptist, and the wider biblical pattern of counterfeit versus authentic radicalisation laid out in detail.

A critic who has watched two videos has not read the argument, and has therefore not earned the standing to call it anecdotal. That is not a limitation of what I am saying but rather a limitation of the critique; and it is not mine to solve on his behalf, in a private email, on his timescale.

The Actual Answer to the Lone-Wolf Concern

I will give Alex this much directly, because it’s the one part of his letter that isn’t answered by “go and read”: no, I am not commending isolated, unaccountable, self-feeding Christianity, and anyone using my work to justify that has misused it. The confession Mairi and I published this year says plainly that departure from unfaithfulness must still eagerly desire the gathering — the means of grace, the safeguards of fellowship — even while separating from infidelity (Psalm 106:47 makes the longing explicit).⁶ Real exile, biblically, is never solitary by design and certainly not by preference; it is a people bowing their heads together, not a man alone with a laptop declaring independence from the Body of Christ.

Samuel Rutherford’s warning against Brownist separatism is fair game to raise — but it assumes the church in question has “faults,” not systemic apostasy. That is precisely the distinction our confession draws, at length, between tolerable imperfection and the kind of doctrinal gangrene that Paul told Timothy to cut away rather than live alongside.⁷ Rutherford wasn’t writing to a church with gangrene. Read carefully, he isn’t actually the objection to my position; he’s assuming the very distinction my position depends on.

Rutherford’s warning presupposes a world with one ‘mother kirk’ and functioning courts capable of distinguishing tolerable fault from disqualifying error — a mechanism we no longer have across today’s fractured, mutually contradictory denominational landscape. Applied literally now, his rule would demand loyalty to an ecclesiology that no longer exists — and it’s worth remembering that Rutherford himself, a Covenanter who wrote Lex, Rex in defence of resisting corrupted authority, spent his life distinguishing imperfection to be endured from corruption to be resisted, not counselling passive endurance of whatever church order one is handed. Conscripting him as a blanket argument against departure asks him to contradict his own life’s work.

No Lament, No Urgency

There is a further reason I won’t be taking this up privately with Alex, and it is not primarily about doctrine. It’s about tone — or rather, about what tone reveals.

I have written before about the “gut-wrenched anguish of Jeremiah” that these conversations produce in me — not because disagreement wounds me, but because of what entrenched spiritual deception costs the Church.⁸ I have lost friendships, my livelihood, and my wife’s livelihood over this conviction, and I have wept over all three. Every serious correspondent I engage with — the ones who’ve actually left, who write to me from genuine exile, often alone, often grieving — writes with that same anguish. There is weeping in their emails. There is a felt sense that the hour is late and that something precious has been lost.

Alex’s letter, for all its courtesy, has none of that. It reads like a checklist: doctrine confirmed here, concern flagged there. There is no lament in it — no sense that the state of the Church he “sympathises” with actually grieves him. And that absence is not a small thing, because it is precisely the same absence I meet from institutional voices who treat the thousands who have left — often at enormous personal cost, often into painful isolation not of their own design — as a problem to be managed rather than people to be wept over. Alex’s letter belittles them without ever mentioning them: every “lone wolf” jibe, every worry about the dangers of departure, is aimed at real people who left with tears, not swagger, and who are patronised by precisely this kind of calm, undisturbed correspondence from within the institution they left.

I will engage at length with anyone who writes to me the way Jeremiah wrote — anguished, urgent, willing to be wrong. I have far less to say to a list of concerns that arrives dry-eyed.

Where This Leaves Us

If Alex wants the fuller answer to any of this — the exegesis, the qualifications, the pastoral safeguards, the eschatological framework — it is written, at length, anticipating almost exactly his list. The books exist so that I don’t have to re-litigate the same ground privately with every sincere questioner who found me through a video rather than a bookshop.

I’m glad Alex is asking sincere questions rather than raging. But sincerity earns a public, permanent answer that will serve him and everyone like him — not a private essay written for an audience of one who hasn’t yet opened the book.

Read the chapter. Read the confession. Then, if questions remain, perhaps we can talk; but it is to be a talking only through tears.

Come and weep with us, Alex; until then, as the Scot Rutherford could have said, “Haud yer wheesht.”

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Notes

1. God Closed Church, ch. 4, “Two Baskets of Figs.”
2. God Closed Church, “Some Common & Much-needed Q&A.”
3. Ibid.
4. God Closed Church, ch. 4, on Jeremiah 24:1–6.
5. The Glorious Few, ch. 1, “The Abedi Inversion.”
6. “A Confession for Faithfulness to Jesus Christ in a Period of 21st-Century Church Apostasy,” firebrandnotes.com, 4 February 2026.
7. “An Open Letter to the Church: Is Your Church Faithful?”, firebrandnotes.com, 1 December 2021.
8. God Closed Church, ch. 4, “Two Baskets of Figs,” citing Jeremiah 4:19.

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