When we think of rebels, we tend to picture leather jackets, dramatic exits, and people who generally refuse to fill out risk assessment forms.

But if you look closely at history, the most disruptive rebellion ever staged didn’t involve an army or a political coup.

It involved a carpenter’s son from a dusty backwater town who looked at the entire religious, social, and political hierarchy of his day and quietly said: “You’ve got this completely wrong.”

If we want our churches to survive and be relatable in 2026, we need to stop presenting a sanitised, polite version of history.

We need to remember that the foundation of the whole thing was pure, unadulterated defiance – and Jesus was the ringleader.

Jesus didn’t just bend the rules; he systematically targeted the gatekeepers of the establishment.

Let’s look at his operational profile:

• The Sabotage of the Sunday Routine: The establishment had very strict, complex rules about what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath. Jesus deliberately healed people and picked grain on the day of rest. When the authorities called him out on the administrative infraction, his response was essentially: The day was made for human beings, not your rules. * The High-End Table Flip: This wasn’t a quiet protest. Walking into the Temple courts—the absolute centre of regional economic and religious power—and physically overturning the tables of the money changers is a radical act of civil disobedience. It was a direct strike against corruption masquerading as tradition.

• The Ultimate Social Friction: In a culture obsessed with social hierarchy and purity laws, Jesus routinely chose the worst possible guest lists. He ate dinner with tax collectors (the corporate traitors of the day), spoke publicly with outcasts, and treated women as intellectual equals in a society that didn’t even allow them to testify in court. It was a total breakdown of the established social order.

Imagine trying to manage Jesus via a modern diocese committee. He would be completely unmanageable.

He didn’t check in with the local scribes for theological clearance, he completely ignored the regional power structures, and he consistently told the people in charge that their elaborate, fussy rituals were completely hollow.

In modern cinematic terms, he didn’t operate like a polite historical figure; he operated like Neo from The Matrix. He walked into a heavily coded, low-functioning system, completely exposed the illusion of the gatekeepers, and showed ordinary people that the rigid “programming” of the authorities wasn’t the real truth.

He was a ringleader because he replaced bureaucracy with direct, reality-bending action.

When people look at the church today, they often see a place of strict rules, heavy admin, and polite, unchallenging tea mornings. They think it’s the definition of the establishment.

But the irony is magnificent: the entire movement started as a counter-cultural rebellion against stuffy, exclusive gatekeeping.

When we write, when we design, and when we open the doors of a local parish, we aren’t trying to maintain a museum of polite behaviour. We are trying to keep a radical space alive—a place where the lonely are brought in, the proud are challenged, and the beauty of the text actually changes how we treat our neighbours.

*Imagery co-created with AI

Updates from our Exeter studio on our craft, theology, and the art of slowing down.