Mike Breen (pastor)

For other people of the same name, see Michael Breen (disambiguation).

Mike Breen
Born	13 June 1958
Occupation	Author, speaker, pastor
Spouse(s)	Sally Breen
Children	Beccy, Libby, Sam

Mike Breen (born 13 June 1958) is an English church leader, minister, author and entrepreneur. Breen has been an innovator in leading missional churches throughout Europe and the United States.

Biography

Early life

Breen recalls never having read a book at age 16, due to dyslexia. To enable him to parttake in classroom discussions, his school teacher and returned missionary, Mrs. Dearmest, handed him a Living Bible to read. He read it all and his life changed.

Education and ministry

Breen holds a degree from St John's College, Durham, a Church of England theological college and is an ordained minister in the Church of England. He started out as a curate in Cambridge in 1984. From 1987, he served as parish priest in Brixton in the inner city of London — a "tough parish in the east end of London. Brixton is like south-central Los-Angeles in many ways". During his time in Brixton, Breen pioneered missional communities as a ministry model.

The Breen family lived in Little Rock, Arkansas from 1991 to 1994.

In 1994, Breen moved to Sheffield, following Robert Warren as senior rector of St. Thomas' Church, Crookes, an Anglican-Baptist local ecumenical partnership. As team leader, Breen led St Thomas' to become England's largest church by attendance by the turn of the decade.

While at St Thomas', Breen begun The Order of Mission, a Protestant, Charismatic and Evangelical monastic order. As vicar, Breen became the order's "Senior Guardian of The Order of Mission" (TOM).

In 2004, Breen moved to Glendale, Arizona, to serve as a pastor of the Community Church of Joy and taught at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

In 2006, the Leadership Network approached Breen to lead an initiative into church planting. The European Church Planting Network was established in 2007 with Breen as a senior leader. The ECPN Leadership Community gathered church leaders from all over Europe, with a stated goal of seeing 500 new churches planted across Eastern and Western Europe by the end of 2011. The result of 1,137 significantly exceeded this goal.

Since 2008, Breen has lived at Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where he serves as the leader for 3D Movements, an "organic movement of biblical discipleship and missional church" helping established churches and church planters move into a discipling and missional way of being church.

In January, 2014 Breen spoke in a leadership event to the multi-thousand member North Heights Lutheran Church, which sparked concerns leading to the April, 2014 decision of the elder board to remove 3DM completely from the church, and publishing at length the reasons for their decision. Among those reasons attributed to 3DM were that, "worship attendance has dropped off dramatically," and a corresponding drop in giving, along with staff cuts.

Marriage and children

Breen is married to Sally Breen. The couple have three children, Beccy, Libby and Sam.

Notable contributions

• Missional Communities, also named clusters and MCs
• Life Shapes
• Huddles

Published works

Breen's books have been translated into Spanish, German, and Norwegian.

Further reading

• How I Chose Movement over Mega : The Story of Sheffield

See also

• Missional Community
• St. Thomas' Church, Crookes

External links

• Personal blog, a collaborative effort by Mike Breen and the 3DM content team
• 3DM, 3 Dimensions Ministries
• The Order of Mission