Pete Alwinson has spent about forty years in ministry to men. He holds an MDiv and a DMin, pastored for thirty years, and is executive director of Forge, a city-wide ministry to men. Like Father, Like Son: Getting Free from People, Patterns, and Problems came out of that. New Growth Press published it.
What makes it different
Alwinson does not do the thing this genre almost always does. He is not trying to help you recover or reclaim your masculinity. He says so directly.
His argument is that the question of what makes a man is the wrong starting point, and that most men’s material fails because it starts there and ends up handing men a list of traits to perform. What he wants instead is for a man to know God as his father, and to live out of being a son rather than out of trying to qualify.
The full subtitle on some editions says it plainly: how knowing God as father changes men.
That reframing does a lot of work. If your identity is settled because of whose you are, then the pressure to prove something comes off, and the specific pattern you are stuck in, whether that is approval-seeking, anger, avoidance, or performance, loses most of its fuel. The “people, patterns, and problems” in the title are what he thinks gets loose when the identity question is answered first.
Why it works for the father wound
A lot of men reading this had a father who was absent, harsh, or simply unreachable, and no amount of teaching about God as father lands until someone deals with the fact that the word “father” is already loaded.
Alwinson knows that and works with it rather than around it. He is not asking you to pretend your dad was fine. He is arguing that your earthly father’s failure is not the last word on what a father is, and that this is the specific thing that has to be repaired before anything else moves.
Where CalledToBetter stands
Our position is that men and women are equal in worth and dignity before God, and that Scripture describes distinct roles for them, without our defining those roles past what the Bible states plainly. Alwinson’s approach sits comfortably with that, largely because he declines to build a definition of manhood in the first place. He is after identity, not a role chart.
Honest notes
It is conversational and full of personal stories, which is the right register for the subject and will feel thin to a reader who wants systematic theology.
The previous version of this review said each chapter ends with a “Take It to Heart” reflection section. I could not confirm that. If you are buying it for a group, check the preview.
It also quoted a review team discussing the book in a small group. There was no team. Removed.
The listing this post links is the paperback. Kindle and audiobook editions exist, the audiobook read by Alwinson himself.
Who should read it
A man who has read the muscular-Christianity books and come away tired rather than helped. Anyone carrying something unresolved about his own father. Men who keep repeating a pattern they can name and cannot break.
Skip it if you want practical tactics or theological depth. This is about the thing underneath both.
Like Father, Like Son on Amazon