17/05/2026
I remember queuing with my daughter Tegan outside a small restaurant in Brixton Market not long after it opened. It felt like a genuine find — unhurried, unpretentious, the real thing.
Tegan and I talked about going back.
Franco Manca has just announced 16 restaurant closures and 225 job losses. BrewDog sold for £33 million last year. 220,000 ordinary investors received nothing — not because the business failed through bad luck, but because the financial architecture had always decided who would be paid first.
The founders had banked £50 million each years before the sale. The US private equity firm had preference shares with an 18% annual compound return — legally, structurally, always first in the queue. The Equity Punks, the true believers, the people who wore the brand's identity as their own? They received exactly nothing.
These aren't just business stories. They are stories about the gap between the voice an institution uses and the reality it operates within. Between what is said in the room and what is written in the document. Between the covenant implied and the contract signed.
We live in an age desperate for authenticity — in politics, in culture, in faith, in business. We are drawn, powerfully, to anything that seems to have found its own true voice. BrewDog found it early. So did Franco Manca. The tragedy is not that the voice was false from the beginning. The tragedy is that the structures they built around it could not sustain it.
Jesus said something arrestingly simple about this. "Let your yes be yes and your no be no."
The Sermon on the Mount is, among other things, a sustained challenge to the gap between what we project and what we mean. When 220,000 people hear "you are owners of this," they should be owners of this. When a brand speaks the language of community, the legal structure underneath should reflect community. When a voice claims authenticity, the small print should be able to bear its weight.
That's not a business regulation. It's an ancient moral demand. And it is one that every institution — including the Church — is subject to.
There is a question running underneath both these stories that I'll be sitting with across a new three-part blog series.
When the gap between the promise and the reality finally becomes visible — who is it that bears the cost?
The search for the authentic voice is not merely a cultural longing. It is, at its deepest, a spiritual one. We are made for the real. We recognise, even when we cannot name it, the difference between a voice that means what it says and one that does not.
Blog One of The Small Print of the Kingdom is live now at the link below. I'd love to know what
A three-part series on authenticity, community and cost. What BrewDog, Franco Manca and ancient wisdom teach us about the gap between covenant and contract.
