‘Third Way’ Christianity: Inside Boston’s Unconventional Anabaptist Group
Followers Of The Way claim to offer a respite from America’s poisoned politics by living like early Christians. How successful are they?
On Strength to Strength Sisters, a website for Anabaptist women, there is a snapshot of the large Kuruvilla family, with Laura and her husband Finny standing behind their eight children. Like many Mennonites, they are dressed conservatively. The girls wear long skirts, the mother’s head is covered, and the boys are clothed in old-fashioned, plain-colored baggy shirts.
They are not standing on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. Instead, they are in the Boston suburbs, one of the most progressive and diverse cities in the United States. Given that they come from the same branch of Christianity as the insular horse-and-cart-driving Amish, their presence is surprising to many outsiders.
The urban setting is central to the mission of Followers of the Way, the church co-founded by Finny Kuruvilla and his friend Matthew Milioni in 2013. According to Milioni, they wanted to do “something different, like an inner-city church plant” because it seemed an effective way to evangelize.
“Every country in the world is represented in America in our major metro areas. We’re sending missionaries from America to America,” he said.
On its website, the group proclaims: “We affirm the historic tenets of the Christian faith (for example, as taught in the Apostles’ Creed), but believe that many modern churches have departed from the one true faith by denying the gospel itself. The gospel at its essence is about a kingdom: that God’s righteous kingdom has burst upon the earth through Jesus' incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. King Jesus reigns over this kingdom, and calls us to renounce our prior allegiances and lay down everything to follow Him.”
“Women wear head coverings and are encouraged to stay home and homeschool their children... (but) levels of education in the church also defy expectations. Across genders, many hold postgraduate degrees. Careers in medicine, finance and academia are common. ”
Kuruvilla, a venture capitalist and graduate of Harvard’s medical school, is an elusive figure and a major funder of the group’s activities, but rarely gives interviews. He did not respond to a request for comment made by Religion Unplugged regarding his involvement with the group.
Milioni and his wife Erica, who also follow the Mennonite tradition of having a large family (12 children to date), appear to be the public face of Followers of the Way. Neither were born into Anabaptism. Their turbulent early years provided little hint that they would go on to found their own church, let alone one that broke the mould in such a religiously divided nation.
With his long beard, jeans and heavy brown boots, you could be forgiven for thinking Milioni is either from a hippie commune or a member of the Hell’s Angels. He admits to being an ex-biker.
“I was a drunken, carousing, brutalizing, fist-fighting skinhead,” he said of his late teens and early 20s.
Milioni said his family were Italian-Americans and Baptists who nursed a love of firearms and Republican politics. When he was 15, his parents moved the family from the beaches of Southern California to the woods of rural Oregon. Milioni said he hated it, but it mattered little. His home life wasn’t an environment where debate and disagreement were encouraged.
As a teen in the mid-1990s, Milioni responded by throwing himself into “smoking dope and hanging out at parties.” Soon, he recalled, he was spending most of his days couch-surfing at the houses of white supremacist gangs — people he described as “very strong, very dangerous, very violent” with his girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, Erica. It was all an attempt, he said, at finding “acceptance, and people to belong to.”
In 1998, they married, but Milioni and his new bride realized they needed to make a change. They were constantly on edge, he said, with bar fights and gang members threatening them with violence. One evening, when they were caring for a friend’s baby, they realized there was no way of protecting the child from gangs. They couldn’t even decide on where in the hallway to leave his car seat.
“If they throw a brick through that window, [the baby’s] right there,” Milioni said, recalling a conversation he had with Erica.
Milioni had always considered himself a Christian, but it was a stark reminder that his lifestyle and philosophy were at war. Repentance, though, was a long way off. Erica started closely reading the Bible. At the same time, some friends of theirs claimed to have had supernatural experiences that were thought to be caused by the devil. Milioni and his wife felt they needed protection and a new community. Also, as Matthew put it, “I just didn’t want to be crazy anymore.”
Christianity seemed to be the answer to their needs, and the couple spent a number of years setting up a house church and evangelizing on street corners. Milioni was drawn to the Mennonites and their unique dress after he saw a group of them in a hardware store. The pair were soon immersed in various Anabaptist circles. In 2014, they decided to start a new church.
Milioni’s journey from skinhead and gang affiliate to leader of an urban Anabaptist sect reveals the contradictions at the heart of Followers of the Way: A community that rejects nationalism, consumerism and political tribalism in pursuit of a “third way” Christianity — yet remains deeply bound to charismatic authority, strict gender roles and an uncompromising vision of biblical purity. This hasn’t always sat well with the church’s more left-wing believers. In today’s America, it can be a hard fault line to navigate.
An urban Anabaptist experiment
Compared with their youth, the Milionis live very different lives. Followers of the Way has been going for over a decade in Massachusetts, with branches in Malden, Medford and East Boston. The dress code is the same across each wing of the church — uniformly dowdy, inspired by the Anabaptists that spawned them. At nearly 50, Milioni cuts a distinctive figure in his bright orange shirt, but the other men dress more soberly. They wear brown and beige overcoats and pants and most have beards, echoing fellow Mennonites like the Amish. Women wear long dresses and are forbidden from shaving, cutting their hair or donning makeup or jewelry. All cover their heads.
When Milioni and his wife broke away from gang life, they were childless. Nearly 30 years later, they have five sons and seven daughters. The eldest, Hannah, is married to a FOTW member. Despite their American Gothic chic, one only has to glance at the group’s Facebook page to see that there is little attempt to promote a more simple rustic lifestyle. Apart from outposts in Richmond, Minneapolis and the Canadian cities of Toronto, Calgary and London, Boston is the Milionis’ home base, where 64 of the 100-plus members of FOTW reside. Many worshippers are from the city’s young, immigrant (especially Brazilian and African) and student populations.
Outside of the U.S., there is a branch of Followers of the Way in Uganda, but Milioni said foreign missionary work is frowned upon.
“I am calling for an end to the era of Western missions,” Miloni said. “They don’t need us for the gospel, but you also can’t untie the Gordian knot of whiteness in a post-colonial country. It doesn’t matter how genuine my friendships are — I’m always the most powerful person in the room. That’s not a good disposition to be teaching the gospel from.”
As a result, Milioni said the leadership of the church in Kampala is “African, not Western.”
“There is a contradiction at the heart of the Followers of the Way: A community that rejects nationalism, consumerism and political tribalism in pursuit of a ‘third way’ Christianity — yet remains deeply bound to charismatic authority, strict gender roles and an uncompromising vision of biblical purity. ”
Levels of education in the church also defy expectations. Across genders, many hold postgraduate degrees. Careers in medicine, finance and academia are common. Kuruvilla runs an apologetics group at Harvard, known as The Society for the Two Tasks, while other church members run ESL classes for immigrants in Boston. It sets FOTW apart from other Mennonites with similar dress codes, such as the Amish, among whom high school or college education for women is rarely encouraged.
David Anderson, a recent convert who works as an academic, said he was drawn to how a core part of the group’s identity is that they are “in the city, and not shunning the intellect.”
But Marcus Wollman, a former FOTW member, said the issue of women wearing head coverings is a “hard and fast line” that leaves little space for compromise, based on what they see as the edict from Corinthians 11 that “every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head.”
While in theory women are only required to cover their hair while “praying and prophesying,” one female member said she wanted to be able to do this “all the time.” FOTW believe that outward signs of modesty are seen to reflect an inner commitment to faith. Members also refused to be photographed by a photographer hired by Religion Unplugged for this story.
On a political level, the group’s values have little in common with the trad wife movement or the skinhead circles that Milioni said he was a part of decades ago. Followers of the Way are ardent pacifists, insisting that all warfare is against the teachings of Jesus.
AnnKatherine Herzog, 30, who trained as a teacher, is a FOTW member who grew up during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“I was raised Southern Baptist, and I could never see how Jesus saying we should love our enemies worked with bombing other countries,” she said.
In common with many American progressives, the members said they reject gun ownership and are critical of police brutality. However, church members are forbidden from voting or running for political office based on the theology of the “Two Kingdoms.” It mandates that Christians should be loyal to their faith rather than the state, rejecting any role in power or governance. In recent years, however, a number of members said they have joined protests against ICE raids.
When interviewed for Religion Unplugged, Milioni and his wife, Erica, expressed disgust at all things related to President Donald Trump, including the cozy rapport between evangelicals and the Republican Party.
“People think the solution to liberalism having gone too far is to have this hateful white nationalist, crusader form of Christianity,” Matthew said. “We don’t like that.”
Erica highlighted the signs held up by church members in solidarity with immigrants: “They say, ‘We love you, we’re here for you, we’re standing with you.’ We see these men and women as our brothers and sisters. We need to be ready and willing to lay down our lives for them.”
“Members reject gun ownership and are critical of police brutality. However, they are forbidden from voting or running for political office based on the theology of the ‘Two Kingdoms’.”
The biblical underpinnings of this philosophy are rooted in what Sattler College, a nondenominational university founded by Kuruvilla with informal ties to FOTW, describes as “Jesus’ commands of Christian peacemaking and nonresistance … [to] sacrificially serve those afflicted by war and injustice.”
The college further states a belief in “separation from the world in matters that Scripture commands, such as worldview, dress, and entertainment,” based on a hefty list of Bible verses.
But the FOTW’s progressivism ends here. Simplicity and modesty, members said, are the key values when it comes to gender, particularly and controversially for women. Married women are strongly encouraged not to work and to homeschool their children. The restraints placed on dress are mirrored in worship spaces — women cannot speak in church and male leadership — like in many Christian denominations — is the default. In addition, members also said all forms of contraception, abortion, divorce or remarriage are forbidden. Homosexuality, referred to as “SSA” (or same-sex attraction), is a sin. The theology isn’t too much different than the one espoused by practicing Catholics.
The group has a unique and slightly strange presence in a cultural landscape where the popular image of Christians is that they exist in one of two polarizing camps: With either the values of Vice President JD Vance or seminarian-turned-Democratic-politician James Talarico. Followers of The Way are trying, in Milioni’s words, to give a voice to people who “look at both extremes and think, ‘I don’t want anything to do with either of that’ or ‘I want to zig-zag back and forth.’”
He added, “I think there are people who are interested in a non-political Christianity that doesn’t have to be all-right or all-left.”
For Milioni, this might be a reaction to more than just his wayward teen years. He said he saw what the “culture wars” looked like from up close and sought a new path. Instead of digging their heels in, Followers of the Way’s response to those with opposing views has tried to push back against the divisive rhetoric of America’s current religious and political landscape.
A ‘Third Way’ with strict boundaries
Milioni and Erica’s story seemed like the sort found in mainstream evangelical conversion narratives. Yet their trajectory was not the norm among the community they created.
Followers of the Way’s recent converts said they had been searching for something less concrete. Rather than pivoting away from a dissolute lifestyle, their decision to join such a close-knit, high-control community was about running toward a set of values they felt were absent from many secular and religious spaces.
“I needed to find people who were serious about peacemaking and loving our enemies,” Herzog said.
With only 64 adult members spread across Boston, one of the group’s major offerings was the six co-housing units owned by Kuruvilla. Some followers said that the living situation made for an intimate existence, especially for those not born or raised in Boston. Housing can be hard to find in such a large and expensive city.
That sense of community was vital during hard times. When Herzog’s grandparents died, she said she was heartened that Followers of the Way did not simply tell her she would see them in heaven.
“It was more like, ‘Death isn’t something to celebrate. We’re hurting with you. God is grieving with you because this wasn’t part of his plan,’” she recalled.
Anderson said he was drawn to how FOTW had a theology the group calls “Christocentric” — or in his words, “trying to start your worldview-building or your theology through the lens of Christ and interpreting outwards from there.”
The commandment to “love your enemies,” he added, helped him “narrow the focus.”
This is something he and his family try to live out in practice. Anderson described finding the idea that those identifying as LGBTQ would think “these people [Followers of the Way members] hate me, or think I’m evil … really disheartening.” He has a friend whose son is transgender, and according to Anderson, that friend “still feels very comfortable coming around. … I think we’ve made them feel that they're just kind of friends in the community.”
This, along with their approach to LGBTQ protesters outside one of their worship meetings (FOTW members recalled greeting them with signs of welcome and offered snacks and drinks), is a far cry from the image of Christian fundamentalism too often seen in Trump’s America. Yet again, it seems, FOTW cannot be put in a box.
From speaking to Followers of the Way’s members, it’s clear they have little in common with far-right political influencers. But there’s no ignoring how the roles carved out for women would be welcomed by many in the manosphere. While debate and dissent are encouraged in some areas, behind the scenes, members said things are murkier.
“The adult women who accept the prohibitions on cutting their hair, shaving, wearing makeup or jewelry, or speaking in church might be exercising a choice. But ex-member Marcus Wollman, feared his future daughters could face excommunication if they deviated.”
Sermons are delivered on topics ranging from women’s head covering to the necessity of modest dress. One sermon delivered by Kuruvilla, entitled, “Winning the life-or-death battle against lust — Matthew 5:27-30,” equates women’s clothing choices to unwanted “lust.”
Describing it as a “two-sided” issue, he claimed that when working with male college students, female clothing choices emerged as a key struggle for them. Kuruvilla offered the following testimony of a student: “I was doing so well… but then I saw a girl wearing yoga pants and my day unraveled.”
He continued, “Jesus did not speak well of people who were instruments of temptation … men sin, but devils tempt to sin” and stated that a friend visiting India had no issues with “sin” because women were wearing more modest clothing.
The adult women who accept the prohibitions on cutting their hair, shaving, wearing makeup or jewelry, or speaking in church might be exercising a choice. But ex-member Wollman, who voluntarily left the group, said he feared what future daughters of his could face if they grew up in the movement, including “excommunication” if they deviated.
This policing of women’s bodies can seem even more controlling considering that female members are strongly discouraged from working after having children. Their role, current and former members said, is to raise the children and educate them away from the influence of the secular education system, homeschool being the biblical ideal as attested to in the group’s sermons.
Kuruvilla makes the church’s position on this clear in his book, “King Jesus Claims His Church: A Kingdom Vision for the People of God.” In it, he states that “Christianity should be our career" and that “education and culture often induce women to pursue a career and abandon their biblical calling of motherhood.”
Herzog said she values how FOTW diverges from modern culture by “not wanting to teach young girls … you have to cover up your imperfections (with make-up and cosmetics) in order to exist in the world.”
She also maintained that “our young people are going to be conditioned one way or another.” She insisted that FOTW was a better influence than the pressures exerted by the outside world.
It is unknown whether women have been excommunicated from FOTW. One female ex-member, however, refused to speak with Religion Unplugged for fear of being identified.
Rebekah Mui, a researcher in Anabaptist and anarcho-pacifist political theology at Virginia Tech who publishes videos about gender-based and sexual violence on Youtube, identified worrying trends in the way men in the group were discussing women.
Online jokes, she recalled, ranged from memes created to mock the inability of female members to comment or ask questions during sermons, to remarks on posts labeling menstruation as “disgusting” and blaming Eve for the pain of childbirth.
Mui said that for all their progressive trappings, FOTW are “patriarchal and fundamentalist.” In such settings, she said that women are very vulnerable to being shamed and “accusations that they’re flirtatious or not modest or not sexually chaste” can be weaponized against them.
Two open letters penned by ex-members in recent years highlighted the financial and spiritual power wielded by Finny Kuruvilla. The letters said Kuruvilla’s influence extends not just over church members, but at Sattler College, which opened in 2018 and enrolls fewer than 100 undergraduate students.
The college — headquartered in an office building overlooking Boston’s Charles River — offers “fully-funded tuition in exchange for a student's dedication to kingdom service or financial gratitude.” It employs a classical educational model where all students, including those majoring in biology, study “Old Testament, New Testament, apologetics, biblical Greek, biblical Hebrew and church history.”
A blog post written by Milioni when his oldest child, daughter Hannah, joined the school’s first class stated that Sattler College is a good option for parents who want their children to “experience all the depth and color of the world” yet who view the education system in general as “antagonistic to the faith.”
Former members, led by Marlin Waever, wrote an undated open letter to expose what they saw as a pattern of overreach after an internal rift. Behind their decision to leave was a concern about the creation of “toxic dependencies” by Kuruvilla’s role as both donor and spiritual authority at FOTW.
Kuruvilla’s financial power behind the scenes is significant. According to an official document from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education about Sattler College, “Dr. Kuruvilla is donating a cash stream that is valued at approximately $30 million for the creation and ongoing operation of the College.” Eventide Investments, the company he founded, has a median market capitalization of $1.7 billion.
Kuruvilla’s influence
In this context, Weaver’s concerns about Kuruvilla’s position were perhaps unsurprising. According to Weaver, Kuruvilla oversaw housing support and the salaries for workers at the organizations he funded, which often hired church members and included Eventide, a language center called The Bridge and Sattler College. Weaver and his family feared it meant few opportunities to diverge from Kuruvilla’s spiritual outlook and control, even in the workplace.
Weaver, who had been the director of The Bridge before leaving FOTW with his family, was offered the post of dean of students at Sattler a few years later. Despite initially accepting the offer and returning to Boston, he changed his mind. During the onboarding process for his new position, Weaver said he felt it was impossible to distinguish between professional employment at the college and submission to FOTW’s leadership.
Weaver described how his family “felt viewed as property of FOTW and manipulated by fear and dire threats of what could very well happen spiritually, especially to our children” if they didn’t rejoin. FOTW, they were told, “is the MOST biblically-based church there is.”
When Weaver raised concerns, he was met with hostility. Weaver said Kuruvilla labeled his family as “broken” and stated that they “need help.” The Weaver family was open about their discomfort. They had lived in a Boston home owned by Finny Kuruvilla while working at the Bridge and were willing to take a position at the college, where, Weaver said, “We would once again be taking Finny’s money.”
“Taylor expressed deep worry for students who were pressured to be re-baptized into the group after being told their original baptisms were an invalid way of proving their faith. ”
Wider concerns raised by Anabaptists on MennoNet, a community forum run by and for Mennonites, were reflected in an open letter by Dean Taylor, former president of Sattler College, who resigned in 2022 along with the entire board of trustees.
In a formal caution to the Anabaptist community, Taylor said Sattler exists “primarily for the propagation of … Followers of the Way.” He claimed the church was designed to draw youth away from their home churches, causing significant stress for the close-knit Anabaptist community, detailed in an 84-page MennoNet thread entitled “Sattler College Turmoil.”
Taylor said he expressed deep worry for students who came to him “exasperated over the pressure they were feeling” regarding re-baptism into FOTW after being told their original baptisms were an invalid way of proving their faith.
That concern was shared by those in the Anabaptist community at large. In one Sattler College board meeting alone, Taylor read eight separate emails from Anabaptist communities voicing “serious concerns” over what they saw as the problematic and inseparable link between Sattler and FOTW.
While Kuruvila would not comment to Religion Unplugged, Milioni insisted that “there is no official link between Sattler and FOTW” and that steps had been taken to manage the power dynamic.
“When the board left, we could have made it an FOTW board. It’s the opposite. The board has become more diversified and less in the hands of FOTW … the accusations being made are demonstrably false,” he said.
He said he felt uneasy about sharing more details on the conflict to Religion Unplugged for fear of jeopardizing any chance that those who left might “respond to an offer of making peace.”
A united future?
Every Followers of the Way member interviewed by Religion Unplugged emphasized the “third way” nature of the Kingdom Christianity that they adhere to. It’s clearly been a huge pull for young, hopeful people like Anderson and Herzog, who don’t feel at home in the traditional Christian churches.
Claiming to be neither politically left- nor right-wing politically, while at the same time taking an uncompromising stance on certain issues, has left other members like Wollman, who described himself as “becoming more and more radicalized and left-wing,” uncertain of how, when, or if he will re-join the group.
Any kind of re-entry, Wollman said, might be challenging given that FOTW’s leaders are not interested in taking a flexible stance on issues whose answers, they believe, are laid out in the Bible.
Cory Anderson, a scholar of Amish and Mennonite culture at Pennsylvania State University, said that FOTW are specifically playing on “imagined narratives of a pure religion at its early phase that represents authenticity of belief.”
He said at its core, the group is a “generational movement that relies heavily on a narrow set of charismatic leaders.” Such leaders are able to lay down the law, and challenges are simple to denounce if they do not fit within the bounds of what they see as a more “pure” form of religion.
John Gordon Melton, the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, said FOTW are another new and “more conservative” group in a long line of churches that go back centuries to the Reformation and to what they see as the “original culture that Christianity was born into.”
Whether Kuruvilla and Milioni are able to make a sustainable name for themselves within this tradition relies not only on their ability to adapt to the times, but the politics of those times. This might be particularly challenging when, as Anderson said, the group attracts people who are “attracted to the intellectualism of Followers of the Way, and how that intellectualism is employed to recapture an authentic Christianity.”
In 2025, Milioni was made the First Elder of Followers of the Way, a position that can be traced back to the New Testament and that throughout Christianity is viewed as a role for leaders considered spiritually mature.
While not a clean split, according to Milioni, he is “responsible for the church in Boston,” while Kuruvilla manages those outside the city. The new position suits Milioni, who now counts at least five of his children as adult members of the church — four of whom are married to fellow members.
Milioni said Followers of the Way are keen to keep the door open to “peace and reconciliation” with former members. It’s an all-too-rare statement for a faith leader in our current polarized age.
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