Somehow, evangelical pastors have figured out how to make their end of Christianity even worse—by implementing the ‘Moses Model’ of church leadership. It really is remarkable how they’ve turned an essentially dysfunctionally-authoritarian flavor of religion into such an extreme worst-case-possible scenario. But the Moses Model lets them make that transition with ease. Today, we’ll examine its history, its dealbreaking flaws, and how to spot it in action even if a pastor tries to obfuscate its influence on him.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 5/27/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: A mind-blowing fan theory about ‘The Last Unicorn.’ Here’s where to buy the book!)
SITUATION REPORT: The ‘Moses Model’ of church leadership destroying churches and lives
One model of church leadership that alarms me is the Moses Model. In this model, pastors set themselves up as Moses. They claim to receive both their authority and marching orders straight from Yahweh. In this model, congregations have no power whatsoever. Their only option is to obey.
For a while, I’ve noticed Calvary Chapel cropping up in discussions of rigidly authoritarian and abusive leaders. Calvary Chapel is not just an evangelical megachurch, but also a network of about 1800 churches. A Reddit thread from a year ago warns people about them. Likewise, commenters on a 2016 blog post talked about being shunned or otherwise mistreated by leaders of their Calvary Chapel churches. And we’ve briefly touched on Calvary Chapel itself in discussions about pastors in their network like Jack Hibbs, the hilariously-overblown Endtimes culture warrior.
Eventually, I discovered a 2023 blog post from the church’s own website talking about the Moses Model. Once I saw it, oh, I just had to know more.
The official Calvary Chapel party line about the Moses Model doesn’t match what they claim about it. Their definition of the model lacks any accountability measures. It describes only the best-case scenario for a congregation “when these convictions are lived out.”
Any time I see a big evangelical dichotomy between belief and practice and only mentions of the best-case results, I expect to see hypocrisy, bad-faith actors, and abuse—and lots of them. In the case of the Moses Model, congregations agree to their leaders’ demands because they only see the upside to a divinely-appointed leader as their pastor. But they soon learn—to their grief—what that gauzy vision really looks like in the flesh.
The upshot: Somehow and against all expectations, some evangelical hardliners have managed to make evangelicalism even more abuse-prone with this Moses Model of church leadership.
The domineering father of the Moses Model
Advocates of the Moses Model say pastors should lead churches like Moses led the early Hebrews: with divine authority imposed on the flocks, who must obey. That’s where it gets its name. And it’s a relatively new concept.
Until 2000, it’s unlikely any Christian ever heard of any serious chatter around the Moses Model. On Google Books, the infrequent mentions of the phrase in the 1990s don’t usually carry the modern definition of it. Mostly, they talk about spiritual movements that begin on Earth and flow upwards. One 1986 book defines the phrase as being able “to live on both the vertical and horizontal planes,” meaning being able to commune with both Jesus and humans.
But by 2005, it began settling into its modern definition. By now, the phrase really only means authoritarian church leadership with no accountability.
Even by then, though, many Christians were side-eyeing it. In 2000, a pastor wrote for Christianity Today that only 30% of pastors thrive under the Moses Model. A 2005 Puritan Board thread talks about Calvary Chapel’s practices as “cultish.”
But hardline evangelicals like it that way. They crave structure, a black-and-white worldview, and clear lines of power. Younger people, in particular, seek father figures who won’t fail them. They’re all easy prey for any culty movement. (Ask me how I know.)
Mostly, the modern concept of the Moses Model sprang fully-formed, like the goddess Athena, from the forehead of Chuck Smith, who died of lung cancer in 2013. He pastored Calvary Chapel in California from 1965 till his death. But in 1968, something made him clamp down hard on his power—and that same force would grow his church beyond his wildest dreams. It also sparked abuse allegations, which Christianity Today discussed in 2007.
The really funny part: Brian Charles “Char” Brodersen, the grandson of Chuck Smith, talked early on about moving his future church away from the Moses Model. His dad, Brian Brodersen, married Smith’s daughter. After Smith died, Brian inherited the Calvary Chapel network and became the lead pastor of Smith’s flagship Costa Mesa church—which is the base of the entire troubled empire. When Brian stepped down in January 2025, his son Char became the lead pastor. Though he’s fairly quiet on Twitter, a rough glance shows me not everyone’s pleased with his leadership.
But before Char’s shift in opinion, Chuck Smith’s Moses Model set a darker precedent—with a hippie preacher named Lonnie Frisbee.
Here’s what happens when a square and a hippie start a religious movement based on religious ecstasy
If Chuck Smith’s name sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because we talked about him as part of the movie Jesus Revolution. In 1968, this normie square pastor discovered the drug-addled but super-charismatic hippie Lonnie Frisbee. Frisbee’s conversion and subsequent preaching converted many thousands of other flower children in the Jesus People movement—and sent many of them to Smith’s church.
The two fell out around 1971 over Frisbee’s increasing Pentecostal-style excesses. Smith was always more of an orderly person. He had a lot of trouble with showy stunts like faith healing and speaking in tongues. Sure, he was a bigtime Endtimes nutjob. He got into the Satanic Panic too! But he drew the line at Pentecostal practices, it seems.
Ironically, neither Smith nor any other straitlaced evangelical pastor seemed to have much of an issue with Frisbee’s ongoing drug use or off-limits sex. Instead, their focus always centered around maintaining their power and control. When Frisbee stopped being useful enough to overlook his flaws, Smith and other pastors abandoned him. Shunned and all but erased from Calvary Chapel’s memory, Frisbee died of AIDS in 1993.
The brutal Moses Model was already in place in 1971. It just didn’t have a formal name yet. From its very beginnings, it had no room for nuance or grace. Pastors in this model care nothing for the flowers already growing in their garden. They rip dissenting flowers out by the roots.
The damage done by the Moses Model
As you might suspect given Chuck Smith’s acceptance of Lonnie Frisbee’s “sins,” Christianity Today revealed in 2007 that he also accepted similar behavior from other leaders in his network. Insiders complain about the lax environment:
Easy forgiveness, insiders say, has created an atmosphere of sexual license, where some unethical pastors sense that there are few consequences for sexual misconduct. [. . .] [Calvary Chapel culture] has enticed some leaders to become power hungry, avoid financial oversight, and, at times, become spiritually abusive.
Sometimes, people slip abuse accounts slipped into news stories like this one accusing a Calvary Chapel pastor of deliberately trying to break up a marriage. Allegedly, the pastor wanted to take control of the couple’s prison ministry.
One Redditor got creeped out by one Calvary Chapel guy’s “crazy Charles Manson vibes.” Meanwhile, social media creators (like Moral Combat last year and Demon Mama in 2020) regularly detail abuse by Calvary Chapel ministers. News sites cover these stories as well.
Julie Roys, an evangelical watchdog blogger, has an entire tag devoted to Calvary Chapel on her site. There, we find men within this network accused of everything from murder to child sex abuse to running an over-the-top “persecution-themed boot camp” complete with simulated torture. One guy even tried to sell his church’s building out from under the congregation without telling them he was doing it. Talk about jaw-dropping levels of overreach! (We talked about him back in October. Rodney Finch is certainly a standout hypocrite.)
Every one of these scandals carries a high cost: Lost trust and faith, divided families and communities, and even the name of Christianity itself tarnished.
Very obviously, Calvary Chapel’s model of ministry doesn’t even result in their own ministers following their own rules. Proponents can try to No True Scotsman themselves out of accountability all they want. They can’t hide the truth.
The fatal flaw of the Moses Model
Here is a big evangelical site being as delicate as possible about this church leadership model:
In the theocracy that God established in the Old Testament, Moses was in charge. He listened to God and relayed God’s messages to the people under him. Moses explains his role in Exodus 18:15–16: “The people come to me to seek God’s will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God’s decrees and instructions.” Moses was the spokesman for God, the teacher of the Law, and the intercessor between the children of Israel and God. The Moses model of church leadership says that pastors should be like Moses in that they speak for God, teach the Word, and intercede on behalf of their people. The pastor listens to Jesus and leads the church accordingly. [. . .] There is nothing inherently wrong with the Moses model. Sometimes the Moses model is criticized because of a perceived lack of accountability. [Source: Got Questions, possibly 2023]
“Perceived,” hmm? I don’t think so. Try actual, Got Questions. I’ve yet to see a single example of the Moses Model that has concrete provisions for accountability.
That is the fatal flaw of the entire Moses Model: Open dysfunctional authoritarianism sold as Jesus’ divine plan for churches. Proponents use tons of Bible verses to paint it that way, too. While it can be fun to watch evangelicals dueling about doctrines, not one of them can claim an objective high ground—not even a Bible website.
The Moses Model as a fancy way to describe dysfunctional authoritarianism
Calvary Chapel is open about using the Moses model. Most churches use the Moses model in disguise. [Source: Shepherds and Wolves; Twitter, 3/11/2025]
In dysfunctional-authoritarian church leadership, nobody outranks the pastor. Consequently, nobody can force the pastor to do anything. Worse, all a pastoral candidate needs to do to convince a hiring committee that he’s their man is make them think their god appointed him to the role. That’s it. Training and qualifications matter less than his acting abilities.
The committees have no way to detect a bad-faith actor, either. A writer for Bethel Church diplomatically phrases evangelicals as having “a certain credulity toward claims that a thing is ‘biblical’ simply because one finds it in the Bible.” But let’s call it what it is: Evangelicals in general are incredibly easy to lie to, as we can see by the sheer number of people doing it.
To evangelicals, a proficient faker in wolf’s clothing looks exactly the same as a sincere shepherd. No gods will tip the committee off about a malignant narcissist looking forward to tearing their flock apart. Really, the malignant narcissist will probably come off as a much better candidate than a sincere shepherd. He’ll know exactly how to play to their hopes and dreams—and he’s shameless enough to do it to get the job.
Once a faker gets into a pastor position, the church becomes dysfunctionally authoritarian forever—if it wasn’t already there. The faker’s goal is wielding and growing his personal power, not promoting whatever his congregation considers its “mission statement.”
If the Moses Model doesn’t already hand the pastor complete power over the church, he will quickly start changing the church’s formal rules to achieve it. He appoints loyal generals and lieutenants who’ll guard his interests, then courts the favor of the church’s most politically-powerful members—who become trusted informants and hall monitors. A dysfunctional-authoritarian leader has no interest in appointing sincere sub-shepherds. They’re nothing but trouble!
Mark Driscoll did this with Mars Hill. In 2007, he changed the church’s bylaws for his board of elders, effectively stripping them of power. Their lost power flowed to Driscoll himself and his small inner circle of yes-men. He fired anybody on the elder board who pushed back. Once his grip on power was assured, his ego spun right out of control—leading to his downfall in 2014.
RZIM implosion in 2021 revealed the same dysfunction in leadership. RZIM was large enough that sincere people did sometimes accidentally make it into leadership. Any such underling, however, faced punishment and demotion for criticizing Zacharias’ impropriety.
And we can see this same dysfunction in other churches today.
Spotting the Moses Model flying under the radar
It can be subtle work to spot the Moses Model in a church. Here’s an example of how to do it:
At a recent conference put on by the Kentucky Baptist Convention (KBC), Josh Schmidt presented a “Breakout Session” about it. He’s the pastor of Burlington Baptist Church. It specifically names the Moses Model as part of “delegating and developing leaders.” So yes, he knows about it—and apparently thinks highly of it.
His church doesn’t explicitly say it’s Moses Model, though. So we dig deeper.
The first line of his bio at the church website (once there, click his picture to pull it up) uses the model’s conceptualization of pastors being “called.” The idea of Yahweh appointing pastors is a big part of the model.
That alone wouldn’t be a smoking gun, of course. It’s a fairly common sentiment in evangelicalism. So we dig a little deeper.
In a 2023 interview with Todd Gray (video here; timestamps refer to it), Schmidt stresses congregations’ need to obey their pastor. When Schmidt talks about his upward move from one church to another larger one (5 minutes in and lasting for a few minutes), he definitely didn’t seek input from anybody else. Instead, every time he made a career decision, he told his underlings it was happening.
Schmidt’s church website talks about church membership, but it offers no formal governance voice for members—again, a trait associated with the Moses Model, which does not allow church members any voice in pastors’ decisions. His church’s website also includes references to a “church covenant,” a very big red flag indeed. If his church has elders at all, it’s clear that they are sub-pastors under him, not laypeople as many churches have in the role. His view of power is top-down all the way.
Verdict: This is a Moses Model kind of church, whether or not its pastor uses that exact phrase to describe it.
(See what I mean here: Evaluating their claims; Covenants and contracts.)
Evangelical flocks need to be more careful than ever at spotting leaders who like the Moses Model
I’m talking about today’s topic because I love people. (Love the Christian, not their Christianity!) Whether their beliefs are true or false, I want everyone to be safe in whatever groups they join. Accordingly, it deeply concerns me that evangelical leaders are dragging their end of Christianity further and further into extremism. Their groups already aren’t safe. The Moses Model will only make them less so.
Without self-education, evangelical pew-warmers will have difficulty in spotting red flags before their lives go to pieces. They’ll happily plunge into a Moses Model style of church because its flaws won’t become clear until it’s far too late. And it always will become too late, as Mark Driscoll’s congregants learned to their sorrow. They learned just as Chuck Smith’s congregants did. And as Ravi Zacharias’ followers did. And many more before and since Smith ruled Calvary Chapel with an iron fist.
The problem isn’t embracing the wrong doctrines or not Jesusing hard enough, as proponents of the Moses Model argue. Rather, the problem is a dysfunctional authoritarian system that hands all power to pastors and has no checks on their power—and thus, no way to force them into accountability.
Power-hungry evangelicals can see these earlier pastors’ rise to vast personal power just as easily as I can. Perhaps since they are “to the manner born,” and thus speak the language of power like natives, they can even see these opportunities more easily! Either way, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they would emulate those A-list pastors’ leadership model to get the same prize for themselves.
Given how increasingly authoritarian evangelicalism as a whole is skewing, I strongly suspect that this model of church leadership has infested churches. Pastors just aren’t using its official name, is all. (Just like so many Southern Baptist churches still hide their denominational affiliation!)
But people know what to look for now. And increasingly, they aren’t fooled by these pastors’ performative piety.
NEXT UP: Speaking of liars for Jesus, we’re checking out an April YouTube interview of Bill Schnoebelen! (Am I the only one who thought this grifter was stone cold dead?) See you soon! <3
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Endnote:
Number of times I misspelled “Calvary” as “Cavalry”: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
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