In 2023 it was estimated that there were some 3.6 million active participants in the Christian or Open Brethren worldwide, gathering at over 40,000 locations in at least 140 countries in the world, and maybe approaching 160.
In the past 150 years, growth has been rapid and diverse. The Christian Brethren have included among their number enthusiastic students of their history. But most who have spent their lives among them and who are committed (or not) to their ideals, have little or no knowledge of the history of the movement, or such as they have is vague and shaky.
This short account seeks to record the essentials, to help to illuminate how the Brethren movement got to here, and to provide a perspective which gives understanding of the Brethren today. It refers to all parts of the movement.
Beginnings
The origins lie in Dublin, Ireland, in the mid-1820s—now almost 200 years ago. But the Brethren did not spring from nowhere, and they were not quite the new, original start that is sometimes assumed by Brethren. The roots are deep in the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century, which in turn owe much to the Pietist movement in seventeenth-century Lutheranism in Germany, and also to the Moravian Christians whom the Pietists influenced and who in turn encouraged evangelical revival in Britain.
Nearer to the 1820s, the revivals of the eighteenth century sparked intense further revivals between 1800 and 1810 in the British Isles. These produced a generation of evangelical Christians who were spiritually stirred and searching for something better, in church life as well as in other aspects of their lives. These stirrings produced a number of events or movements. There was the revival in Geneva from 1817, to which the Scot, Robert Haldane (first, a Congregationalist and then a Baptist) was linked. The Genevan revival established a few independent evangelical churches in the area in the 1820s, some of which linked up with the Brethren movement once it emerged.
There were other small movements, not unlike the Brethren. For example, the Campbellites in North America emphasized thoughts about the nature of the church which were comparable to those of the Open Brethren: that local churches should be independent, that they should be the work of all, and that they should be governed by elders. The churches of the Campbellites still look rather like Open Brethren assemblies when you encounter them. But that does not mean that there was any causal connection between them at their origin—certainly, Brethren should not claim relationship with them. More widely, it was not only shortly-to-be Brethren who were seceding from the Church of England in the 1820s and 1830s: there were others who found their way into other English nonconformist groups.
Even the Anglican high-church Oxford movement, which sought to call their church back to the thinking of the Church Fathers of the second to fourth centuries, was linked to these evangelical stirrings. For a key agent, John Henry Newman (subsequently a Roman Catholic cardinal) had experienced an evangelical conversion in about 1815, before going to Oxford. (His brother, Frank Newman, was one of the early Brethren, although in later life he identified as a Unitarian.)
These evangelical sentiments extended to a small group of upper ranking men and women in Dublin in the mid-1820s, many of them closely associated with Trinity College Dublin. They were of different denominations, but longed to express the evident unity and simplicity of the New Testament church. In 1825, three (one of whom was John Parnell, later Lord Congleton and a pillar of the Open Brethren) resorted to breaking bread privately to express their unity. The following year, Edward Cronin, a former Roman Catholic although by then an evangelical dissenter, moved to Dublin and began breaking bread, again privately, with a few friends. A third group, Anglican evangelicals, was centred on J. G. Bellett, but was influenced by a then Anglican dentist (formerly a high churchman) who was studying at Trinity College for the ordination necessary to become a Church Missionary Society missionary. He was Anthony Norris Groves, who in 1825 had published the first edition of a booklet, Christian Devotedness, which was important in shaping Brethren spirituality in its early years.
The group began to break bread each Lord’s Day, although not at a time which would preclude involvement in denominational services. It was these innovations that John Nelson Darby, a curate in County Wicklow (to the south of the city), first came into contact with during the late 1820s, when obliged to recuperate in Dublin as a result of a riding accident in his parish. By no stretch of the imagination were these Brethren congregations, if judged by the subsequent criteria of the Open Brethren for a local church. They were rather the informal activities of small groups of like-minded friends who probably did not see themselves at the time as having formed local churches.
The move towards becoming a distinct congregation was initiated in November 1829 when a wealthy Dubliner, Francis Hutchinson, offered to the Cronin and Bellett groups a room in his house in Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, for breaking of bread on Sundays. Crucially, however, the meeting remained at a different time from local church services, so as to allow individuals to maintain their denominational connections. Shortly, Parnell returned to Dublin, joined the unified group, and proposed moving to commercial premises in nearby Aungier Street. The move was for a variety of reasons, including the desire to offer a more public witness to Christ and to make the venue less intimidating for poorer people than was an upper-class drawing-room. On moving location, they met at the same time as denominational services conventionally took place. This meeting can claim to be the first Brethren local church in a recognizable sense. If a place name is to be attached to ‘Brethren’, it would be more accurate that it should be ‘Dublin Brethren’ than ‘Plymouth Brethren’! But it was not much in advance of two other ecclesial developments, the first independent of Dublin, the second very clearly linked to Dublin in the person of J. N. Darby.
At the end of March 1829, George Müller arrived in London from Prussia, to train as a missionary to the Jews. He had had a classic Pietist conversion in November 1825, while he was at Halle University, established in 1694 as the intellectual engine of the Pietist movement. Within three months of his arrival in London, however, a bout of ill-health drove him down to Teignmouth and Exmouth. There he had a further spiritual experience that reshaped his evangelical path. It also brought him in touch with Devonians connected with the developments in Dublin. By early 1830, he was pastor of a Baptist church in Teignmouth. Later in the year he married a sister of Norris Groves, and adopted the practice of what became known as ‘living by faith’, of which he knew from the life of the Pietist professor and orphan-house founder in Halle, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727).
Also in the summer of 1830, he persuaded his Baptist fellowship to take the Lord’s Supper every Sunday (rather than monthly or quarterly) and took steps in the direction of what became the characteristic form of worship and ministry of Brethren churches. He also met the Scot, Henry Craik, who had had his own seminal evangelical experience and conversion in the then evangelical hothouse of St Andrew’s University, Scotland, before adopting baptist principles when he moved to Devon. The two became firm friends until Craik died in 1866.
The second development was in Plymouth. This was in part the result of encounters in Oxford, cross-fertilizing with strains from Trinity College Dublin and annual conferences at Powerscourt, near Dublin, organized by Lady (Theodosia) Powerscourt. These focussed on the study of prophecy and its future fulfilment, another important thread in the evangelicalism of the time. The initiation of an independent congregation in Plymouth early in 1832 was the work of B. W. Newton (a native of east Cornwall and schooled in Plymouth), Darby, G. V. Wigram, and a coastguard officer based at Plymouth, Captain P. F. Hall. The link between the first three was Newton and the University of Oxford, where the brilliant Newton, tutored by the brilliant Frank Newman, met Darby and became a close friend of Wigram. The background was vibrant Calvinism in Plymouth, curated in the 1820s by the Anglican cleric, Robert Hawker, whose followers were left searching after his death in 1827 for fellowship to match what they had experienced. In 1830–1, the group in Plymouth was cross-denominational. Critical to the emergence of a congregation distinct from the existing denominations was Wigram’s retention in December 1831 of Providence Chapel, Raleigh Street, where nascent Brethren ideas (including on prophecy) could be publicly preached and practised. Also critical was Wigram’s advocacy that the breaking of bread in the group should shift from Monday evenings to public administration on Sunday mornings.
At that point, the denominational clergy among them stopped participating. This distinct gathering in Plymouth grew rapidly under the ministry of a significant group of men who became luminaries of the early Brethren. Thus Plymouth did become one of the great poles of the Brethren in the first two decades of their development.
Meanwhile, at Craik’s instigation, he and Müller moved in 1832 to Bristol, to revitalize an existing church of Congregational background and plant another. Craik was an introvert scholar in indifferent health. Nor was Müller an extrovert, and his mental and physical health was poor up to about 1850. Nevertheless, the two churches grew rapidly, gathering several hundred by the 1840s, among whom were a number with considerable ability in leadership and ministry. What Craik and Müller had been feeling for in church life in Teignmouth, on the principle that there should be no rule but Scripture, they worked out in detail over the next decade (in some cases with the help of Robert Chapman who was exploring similar matters in the fellowship he had formed in Barnstaple, Devon).
The key matters addressed were baptism; whether baptism was essential to fellowship at the Lord’s table; participation in worship and ministering the word under the leadership of the Spirit; and the structure of church leadership. The conclusions were that the Lord’s table should be open to all who were truly believers; that ministry should be under the leadership of the Spirit; that the right to minister was determined by gifting rather than formal recognition; that Craik and Müller should not seek to set themselves apart from others, either by having offering boxes that were named as being for them or by using the title, ‘Pastor’; and that the local fellowship should be led by a group of elders. They codified these points in writing and disseminated them widely via the early editions of Müller’s autobiography and the annual reports of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution (SKI), which they had founded in 1834 to spread the gospel through the Word. These were widely read, among the few Brethren that there then were and among evangelicals more widely.
As the Open Brethren grew in the second half of the century, these means and word of mouth ensured common, though not always completely consistent, understanding on the points. Another important influence in this period was from the Quakers, a nonconformist group with roots in the radical Puritanism of the English Civil Wars and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (1642–59). In Britain and what became the USA, the Quakers settled into being a significant sect, involved in industry, commerce, and banking, but neither in government nor the military. They too were influenced by the revivals in the early 1800s, and an important evangelical minority formed among them. The result was serious tensions within Quakerism, and a significant number of evangelicals left, some for the Brethren as early as the 1830s—their presence was notable in Bristol, Tottenham, Birmingham, and Kendal, to name but a few places. They brought with them both the Quaker penchant for egalitarianism5 (that one individual had no greater status than any other—‘brother’ or ‘sister’ was their characteristic mode of address for all) and a form of worship which was verbally spontaneous and immediately inspired by the Holy Spirit. Their influence on the ethos of the Brethren, and the practice of worship at the Lord’s table, seems obvious.
The Brethren did not spring up fully formed in 1829, 1830, or 1831: these were men and women feeling their way forward on a new spiritual path. They wanted to unite and have fellowship with all true believers; but they found that existing Christian groups cramped their freedom to follow and apply what they concluded Scripture taught with respect to the church. It took some years to work out the path with clarity. But by the end of the 1830s and the beginning of the 1840s, others were identifying them as a distinct grouping and they were recognizing it themselves. Initially, others identified them by the name of their leaders (e.g., Müllerites or Hallites), but very quickly ‘Brethren’ or ‘Plymouth Brethren’ held the field, both within and without. Some at least did not want to be distinct, and did not want a name. The tension between (on the one hand) wanting simply to be Christians without respect to denomination and (on the other) simply following Scripture in church life was evident from the earliest years. It persists in the Christian or Open Brethren down to this day. But the reality was that, by the 1840s, they were distinct from others, and the religious census of 1851 identified nearly 200 congregations of Brethren in England and Wales. There were probably some others not identified in the census. One other feature of the early Brethren worth calling attention to is the fact that, from the beginning, they were a missionary movement, but crucially a movement with a different underlying strategy as to how mission should be carried out (different in the sense of not being directed, funded, and carried out by a society, and with its operatives ‘living by faith’ rather than subsisting on a stipend provided by the society).
Norris Groves, who was key to shaping their ethos, set out on his first missionary journey to Persia, undertaken at his own expense and in faith, and without any managerial supervision at home or abroad, in June 1829, before any distinct Brethren church existed in the British Isles! The effort in Baghdad proved a failure in human terms. But thanks to encountering in Baghdad evangelicals who were Indian (British) administrators, it led him directly to India, to which he then promoted mission. In letters and home visits, he recruited missionaries from among the Brethren in the UK, including George Beer and William Bowden, who went from Barnstaple to the Godavari delta on the east coast of India as early as 1836–7. Müller came to Britain in 1829 with mission in mind, and at several stages wondered whether he had a call to mission himself. He concluded that he did not, but, through the SKI, by the mid-1840s he was funding missionaries at home and abroad who were working independently and living by faith (at the time, they must have been mainly from the small Brethren movement). Unsurprisingly, he also paid a number of visits to Germany in the 1830s and 1840s, where he did not fail to preach and where he planted a short lived church in Stuttgart in 1843.
Among missionaries whom Müller supported was Leonard Strong from Exeter, a long-time evangelical Anglican minister on the Demerara Coast (eventually part of the colony of British Guiana). Learning of the nascent Brethren in part from his Exeter contacts, he seceded from the Anglicans in 1838 to establish a Brethren church in 1840 on the Coast, where he was soon joined (with the SKI’s support) by no fewer than three missionaries from Bethesda Chapel, Bristol. Müller concentrated some support for mission and education on the Guiana coast for the rest of the century. Strong’s influence led to Brethren work in other parts of the Caribbean before 1850. But he was not alone in this. Notably, in Jamaica, a distinguished naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, visited for ornithological and botanical research purposes in the period 1843–7. He had already come into contact with Brethren in Hackney and Tottenham before he left for the Caribbean, and he did not fail to establish assemblies in Jamaica. There were others working with him at the same time. In the split of 1848, which will be referred to below, these churches remained in fellowship with Darby, and today some of them remain connected to what is now the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Taylorite Exclusive Brethren).
The other notable missionary excursions by the Brethen before 1850 were those of Darby and Chapman. These were focused on continental Europe. Darby spent much of the period 1836–44 in France and French speaking Switzerland. He produced a notable translation of the New Testament into French. He also left behind assemblies, some of which remain Darbyite to this day. His missionary journeying did not stop there. He visited Germany in the 1850s and the first Darbyite assemblies there came into being in connection with Carl Brockhaus of Elberfeld. In the 1860s and 1870s, Darby visited North America frequently, with important results, as we shall see, and included a visit to Jamaica in the late 1860s, to ensure that the assemblies linked with him were continuing as they ought. For his part, Chapman took a lengthy walking tour in Spain in 1838, preaching the gospel as he went. He continued to take a close interest in evangelistic work there in the remainder of the century.
Division
The youthful Brethren movement was by its nature innovative and experimental. It was also committed to the knowability of divine truth by humans who paid attention to Scripture. And there were the same personality clashes which afflict fallen human beings, even the twice-born. It is evident that Darby and Newton were powerful personalities. When Darby returned to Plymouth in the mid-1840s after his long period on the continent, he found that Newton was increasingly in command of the church there. Newton and he also diverged on eschatology: both were pre-millennialist, but differed in particular on Darby’s attachment to the idea of a secret rapture of the church before the tribulation. Darby’s concern for the situation was such that in 1845 he brought about a division of the Plymouth church. But he continued to pay close attention to Newton’s teaching among those Darby had left (lest it sully the purity of the church and churches). His opportunity came when in 1847 Newton published pamphlets which suggested that he had espoused a biblically faulty Christology. Newton sought to adjust his position in the face of Darby’s public criticism of him, but not enough to satisfy Darby, nor eventually Newton’s fellow leaders. For, at the end of 1847, Newton was forced to leave his church. He did not fellowship with Brethren again, confining his ministry to a single independent congregation in London. But for Darby the matter did not end there. He was convinced that any heresy was a serious danger to the purity of the church, and that those who had sat under Newton’s teaching could seriously contaminate others wherever they went, even if they gave specific evidence that they did not hold the heresy. Darby therefore demanded that Newton’s former church and any who had fellowshipped there should be quarantined.
The arguments in Plymouth were common knowledge among the Brethren churches, and leaders had in fact sought to reconcile the parties over a period of time. Craik and Müller in Bristol had sought not to be involved in those efforts and to stand aloof from the dispute. But in April 1848 two prominent persons from Newton’s former church in Plymouth came to Bristol and sought fellowship at Bethesda Chapel. When examined by those leaders there who supported Darby, they were declared not to hold the heresy in question and were admitted. Darby immediately intervened in person in Bristol, and then declared to a meeting of leaders in Exeter that he could no longer fellowship with Bethesda, implying that others should not either. He considered that Bethesda must themselves judge whether Newton’s work was heretical or not, which the Bethesda leaders elaborately argued was unnecessary. Eventually, later in the year, after Newton published an edited version of the writings in question, Bethesda was obliged to examine them in detail in a long series of church meetings. The result was to find them wanting. But it was too late, as at the end of August Darby had already issued a circular to all Brethren churches, to make it clear that he considered that Bethesda should be under the ban too, as should be any who had fellowshipped there.
This split the small Brethren movement, and, as we have seen, affected the small number of Brethren fellowships which had been established outside the British Isles. Those who sympathized with Craik, Müller, and Bethesda coalesced into a loose grouping of independent churches—for one of Bethesda’s arguments had been that it was for each fellowship to decide such matters in its own circumstances. As a result, one scholar has termed them independent Brethren. On the other hand, the group which remained with Darby were closely linked with what became the Park Street meeting in London, which determined matters of concern in the meetings (as they were known) and set out what line they should follow. These have been termed connexional Brethren. Efforts were made at reconciliation in the 1850s, although they tended to be at conferences of one or the other group, which were likely to reinforce differences rather than reconcile them. Over a generation later, in the 1890s and 1900s, there were efforts at reconciliation in discussions in the UK and the USA between key Open Brethren and representatives of what was by then the main connexional or Exclusive Brethren group (the Raven Brethren), in direct linear descent from Darby (who died in 1882). These discussions were without significant result until in north America in the 1930s the Grant8 Exclusive assemblies began to merge gradually into the Opens. Immediately,the discussion of the 1890s and 1900s tended to formalize and institutionalize longstanding positions, at least in the case of Bethesda Chapel, Bristol, which in 1906 endorsed formally as a church the, at the time explicitly, personal positions that some of its leaders had taken in the discussions in 1894.
Exclusive Trajectories
Meanwhile, there tended to be regular tensions within the connexional Brethren about doctrinal matters, which were probably made worse by the process of central decision on such matters. Surprisingly, in 1866, Darby himself published Christological views which seemed remarkably like those which he had condemned in Newton twenty years before. And in 1881 there was a split between followers of Darby and followers of William Kelly, who had long been an intelligent, and judicious, staff officer to Darby. The seceders were known as the Kelly Brethren, characterized particularly by commitment to evangelism. Further divisions took place in the 1890s and 1900s, leading to the Lowe and Glanton Brethren, still within the Exclusives (Lowe being a leader and Glanton being a village in Northumberland where the Exclusive assembly was excluded from the main body of connexional Brethren in the first decade of the twentieth century) This led to a separate group of Exclusives, known as the Glanton Brethren, who were also committed to outreach and who over the years in the UK produced some noteworthy academics. In the USA, there were splits too in the 1880s, leading to the emergence of the Grant Brethren in 1884, already referred to. In continental Europe, in 1926 the Lowes and Kellys united as what became known as the Kelly-Lowe-Continental Brethren (which might be described as Darbyite, without the extremes that developed among Taylorite Exclusives in the English-speaking world in the mid-twentieth century). They maintained a steady existence for nearly seventy years, and the remaining Glanton Brethren joined them in 1974. But a tendency to divide emerged in the 1990s when, on the Continent, some among them showed interest in the Charismatic movement.9 Since the year 2000, there has emerged from them a vibrant group of churches which are essentially wide-hearted in their commitments and willingness to collaborate with true believers of whatever background. In the main body of Exclusives, despite centralized control on doctrinal matters, the emphasis of Darby was anti-institutional.
In contrast with the Open Brethren, who mostly held that congregations should still follow the principles and patterns laid down in Scripture, Exclusives did not think it possible or right to follow the church practice of the New Testament and thought that there could no longer be any recognized offices in the church, because it was ‘in ruins’. Increasingly, the focus was on the somewhat mystical inspiration of a single ‘Man of God’ whose guidance from God would light the way in achieving the unique ‘great recovery’ that the Exclusive Brethren considered themselves to represent—recovery, that is, of the true church from the ruin of the Christian sects, that is, denominations. This mystical inspiration of an individual was rather foreign to the matter of-fact, common-sensical Open Brethren, although it has been argued that, among them, there was a mystical element to the nature of worship at the breaking of bread. The Exclusive emphasis on separation from both society and other branches of Christianity, tended to lead the Taylorite group into a cuk-de-sac. Numbers, having been concentrated on the UK, the old Commonwealth Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and the USA, seem to have stagnated in the twentieth century, before a sharp decline resulting from the controversies among them in the 1960s.11 But this should not lead us to underestimate the influence of some of Darby’s ideas on the Open Brethren, on evangelical Christianity, and even on wider culture in at least one important country. Darby’s theological teachings, and those of some of his associates, both then and subsequently, had considerable currency in the Open Brethren.
First, anti-institutionalism and resistance to titular elders in the local church was a significant strand among them. This was in tension with the multiplication in the Open Brethren of parachurch bodies both as vehicles for the ministry of individuals and as collaborative endeavours.
Secondly, separation was important among the Open Brethren, too, not just on the more conservative side, at least until the middle of the twentieth century. Even Müller, for all his interdenominational involvement in the last third of his life, was not involved in wider society, even in Bristol, and the many words that he wrote in the course of his life do not suggest that he read a local paper or national periodical or took any interest in political or international affairs.
Thirdly, Darby’s framework for eschatological interpretation was also standard in the Open Brethren until about 1960. Finally, of wider influence has been the principle that there can be no Christian unity without common understanding of what constitutes biblical truth, including on secondary matters of, for example, ecclesiology. Darby’s longer-lasting influence was through his distinctive eschatology (including that of a secret, pre-tribulational rapture). This, mediated by the Scofield Bible and Lewis Chafer of Dallas Theological Seminary, became the accepted orthodoxy in the USA and in Atlanticist evangelicalism. It remains so among north American evangelicals, and, because of the political significance of their number in th USA, influence US foreign and environmental policy, even today—why is it necessary to conserve the earth’s resources if believers are to be raptured out of the world, the parousia is near, and the old creation will pass away with it?
The Open Brethren, Revival, and Revivalism
Even if the majority of Brethren congregations in the UK in the period 1848–50 sided with Bethesda Chapel in Bristol in the dispute with Darby and others, they were still few and scattered. How did it happen therefore that in the British Isles there were nearly 1,200 Open Brethren congregations by 1900 (and almost the same number of Exclusive meetings, counting the then three groups of Exclusives together). So far as the Open Brethren are concerned (and possibly the Exclusives too), the answer is the great revival of 1858–63 and the revivalist campaigns that followed.
The Open Brethren was already a movement which gave great prominence to spreading the biblical gospel both at home and abroad. This was a key motivation of George Müller and it was shared by others. The revival spirit of 1857–8 spread across the Atlantic in an evangelicalism which was truly a transatlantic phenomenon. In the British Isles, the small prayer group that lay at its root in the province of Ulster was considerably influenced by Müller. The Brethren movement and the revival shared some important characteristics, in particular an egalitarian, demotic style and the fact that its propagators were lay people as much as formally recognized ministers. The revival benefitted all denominations, of course, as they do. But in the thirty years that preceded it, the Brethren had certainly created an ecclesial vehicle which was available and proved to be attractive to the converts of the revival. It was also the case that the Brethren had by the 1860s and 1870s large numbers of itinerant evangelists and teachers on the ground across Britain and Ireland (many in England and Wales supported by Müller’s SKI). They were enthusiastically committed to carrying on the work of the revival and the revivalist meetings of (for example) Moody and Sankey. They were also very ready to adopt the techniques of revivalism, with tents, harmoniums, enthusiastic singing in popular style, and simple, enthusiastic preaching.
Brethren evangelists used cottage meetings, tent campaigns, and gospel vans. A number of Open Brethren congregations were established on the back of short, local tent campaigns in rural and suburban areas. The Brethren’s mode of operating suited church planting, from one point of view at least: they did not need expensive buildings and professional staff in order to establish a congregation. It was sufficient for ‘lay’ men and women of like mind to find one another in a new suburb and form themselves into a church, as they knew that they were supposed to do; and to acquire some plain, utilitarian, economical (not to say rudimentary) premises in due course. Their ecclesiology assumed that any group of believers had from God the spiritual gifts and resources to flourish as a congregation.
This mode worked not only at home, but, in the age of settlerism13 across the globe, it worked for migrants to the cities of north America and the open spaces of Australia. Its downside was that, in an uncontrolled way, it could drain resource and talent from the urban core, leaving dwindling, ill-resourced central congregations behind, a phenomenon common in the Brethren in the past 150 years. By the end of the nineteenth century, Open Brethren growth was rapid indeed in the British Isles, including, from 1860 onwards, in Scotland and Ulster especially. At this stage, assembly lists (which had first been introduced on the Exclusive side, which needed them more for managerial purposes than the devolved Opens) may well have underestimated numbers.
But according to the lists, growth was from 838 congregations in 1887 (implying that some 700 congregations at least had come into being since 1850), to 1,185 in 1897, and 1,337 in 1904. This growth continued into the twentieth century, notwithstanding the disruption of the First World War. The number was 1,440 in 1922; and 1,739 in 1933. The background is that no one was explicitly driving this growth: it was the work of individuals, local churches (though it is doubtful how much churches, as such, were planning the establishment of further churches), and itinerant evangelists. The drivers were the priority of evangelism, belief in the virtue of the Brethren way of doing church, and the view that believers should associate in the particular way developed by the Open Brethren in the nineteenth century. The same modalities were probably partly at work in the expansion of the Open Brethren in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the Dominions and in the USA. This was the peak period of the belief that the British Isles were ‘too crowded’ and that there were greater opportunities in the places just stated. Emigration was in consequence strong, not so much as an expression of imperialism as of finding a more promising place to live. Younger people either brought up in the Brethren, or acquainted with them following conversion, were among those who emigrated, and they took with them the same inclination to form churches on ‘New Testament principles’, as the more conservative side of the Open Brethren termed them. An early example of this trend was J. G. Deck (known best for his hymn-writing, although he was a competent teacher). He was among the early Brethren in Newton’s church in Plymouth, but emigrated to New Zealand in 1853, where he did not fail to promote the gospel and the Brethren cause, as well as to establish a Deck dynasty there. A second factor in Open Brethren development in these places was the globalization of itinerant evangelism and teaching in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Darby and Müller had shown the way in their continental preaching before the split, but with the improvement of long distance transport in the second half of the century, the phenomenon flourished through names associated with the Brethren, such as Donald Ross and Donald Munro with respect to North America; Harrison Ord, Henry Varley, and Rice Hopkins in Australia and New Zealand; Lord Radstock and F. W. Baedeker in continental Europe and Russia; and Müller (eventually in 42 countries, but majoring on the USA and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and continental Europe). These declared their Brethren identity only to varying extents, partly to ensure a welcome among all evangelicals. But they certainly contributed to the formation of Open Brethren assemblies. By early in the twentieth century, there were 100 or so Open assemblies in Canada, 130 in the USA, 100 in Australia, and 110 in New Zealand.14 These countries in turn became great engines for the worldwide growth of the Open Brethren in the twentieth century, through missionary endeavour.
That was the result of the second vital hread in the global growth of the Open Brethren. This combined the inherent interest in mission from the beginning expressed particularly by Norris Groves and his brother-in law, George Müller, with the flowering of missionary commitment among young evangelicals in North America, Britain, and continental Europe from 1880 onwards. The latter was sometimes expressed through the new ‘faith missions’, which were giving effect to principles coined by Norris Groves and dramatically applied and publicized by Müller. But Anglo Celtic Open Brethren across the world gave expression to the principles themselves on a stunning scale from 1880 onwards.
In the period up to 1914, for example, there was a single congregation in north London which had something like thirty members abroad in mission. The sheer scale of overseas missionary endeavour from the UK, the Dominions, and the USA is noteworthy in itself for such a small denominational group. This was helped by the fact that there was no paid official pastorate in the Brethren: until recent decades, the only choices for anyone with a calling to full-time Christian work in the Brethren were itinerant evangelism and teaching, overseas mission, and (eventually) academic biblical studies and theology.
In the nineteenth century, much of this missionary endeavour focused on Britain’s imperial holdings across the globe. We have seen how British nterests in the Caribbean dating back to the seventeenth century became a channel of Brethren missionary endeavour from the earliest years. In the ourse of the nineteenth century, the Indian sub-continent was a magnet for Open Brethren endeavour, among the British in India as well as among Indians. The Straits Settlements, as they were known (the Malayan peninsula and Singapore), also attracted interest from the 1850s onwards. From the 1880s, the opening up of sub-Saharan Africa and the colonial ‘ scramble for Africa’ led to intense interest from the Open Brethren, and to a century of work across the British territories—with a focus on what was termed ‘The Beloved Strip’ of east Central Angola, southern Congo, and central and northern parts of what became Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Outside the empire, China, too, was a great focus in the late nineteenth century, though here the main vehicle was Hudson Taylor’s inter-denominational China Inland Mission, which was given heavy financial support by Müller and which in its early years drew heavily on the Open Brethren for its governing committee and its missionaries (a fact which the early historians of the CIM at the turn of the twentieth century were reluctant to acknowledge!). Unsurprisingly, early missionary effort from the Open Brethren in the Dominions also tended to be directed towards British imperial territory. It was only after the Second World War, for example, that attention in Australia and New Zealand (and the USA) turned, with great success, towards Papua New Guinea—perhaps because the war itself had caused them to ‘notice’ Melanesia.
The USA was of course different. It was not without its imperial aspect, as it must be acknowledged discreetly that the scramble for colonies touched the USA as well. So Cuba and the Philippines in due course became centres of Brethren missionary interest, although in the case of the Philippines not until after the First World War. It was natural, too, for Brethren in the USA to be attracted to central and south America (where in the 1950s the deaths of five missionaries in Ecuador by the hand of those whom they were trying to reach gave an example and an impulse to a new generation of Brethren missionaries from the USA). Japan and China, which had since the late nineteenth century been of interest to the mainline denominations in the USA, were also magnets for Brethren work after the First World War. Another vector of Brethren overseas Christian interest was trade and industry.
In the period up to 1914, British capital was sufficient and free to seek remunerative employment in many different parts of the world, sometimes far beyond the borders of empire. Brethren ‘laymen’ went with it and did not fail to take gospel opportunities that presented themselves as a result. Such individuals were, for example, significant in the establishment of Open assemblies in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. Much earlier, Philip Robinson, formerly of Tewkesbury and Australia, had paved the way with respect to the origins of the Brethren churches of Singapore. A little further into the twentieth century,
Open Brethren penetration into Oceania was sometimes attributable to business activity by Australians and New Zealanders there, as is exemplified by the early Brethren work in Fiji. A great strength of Brethren ecclesiology was that there was to be no minority cadre of educated professionals who were expected to do all the work of the Kingdom: it was the business of every adherent, according to their gifting, to extend it by making the gospel known, forming churches, and tending them pastorally. As noted, the Brethren were interested in continental Europe from the beginning. In addition to Müller and Darby, Chapman’s gospel walking tour for some months in Spain in 1838 initiated a longstanding Open Brethren interest in Spain, to the point that in the final decades of the nineteenth century there were more Brethren workers there than in any other country. In Italy, work was started by Guicciardini in the 1830s, reinforced greatly by T.-P. Rossetti who, as a political exile in Britain during the 1850s, came into touch with Brethren. On his return, he encouraged growth which led to a body of approaching 300 Open Brethren churches in Italy, aided by much missionary support over the years from the UK. William Gibson Sloan, from Scotland, went to the Faroes in 1865: he waited thirteen years to see the first convert, but it led eventually in the twentieth century to a flourishing group of churches accounting for 15% of the population of the islands.
Global Growth in the Twentieth Century
Radstock, Baedeker, and Müller spent time in ‘drawing-room’ evangelism in Russia in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The results were limited, although they probably brought encouragement to evangelical groups like the Pashkovites who were subject to Tsarist restrictions, and today many such local gatherings survive as cousins of the Brethren. However, the contacts sparked interest in Germany and Britain in evangelism in eastern Europe. The Allianz Bible school was set up in Berlin in 1905 (the ancestor of today’s Biblisch-Theologische Akademie at Wiedenest) specifically to produce evangelists to work in eastern Europe and Russia.
Among the first graduates were evangelists whose work initiated what are now the Open Brethren churches of Poland, the eastern part of Czechia, and (with help from Frederick Butcher from Britain) the Brethren churches of Slovakia. At the same time, E. H. Broadbent and G. H. Lang, and evangelists from Switzerland, travelled in eastern Europe, in particular in eastern Poland and Romania. The churches in eastern Poland (now the western part of Ukraine, centred on Lviv) did not survive the depredations of Hitler and Stalin. The position was different in Romania, however, where the number of churches and believers grew steadily in the twentieth century despite persecution from the fascist regime in the Second World War and from Ceauşescu in the Communist period afterwards.
Now there are nearly 740 congregations in Romania, including some Hungarian-speaking congregations and a small number of surviving German-speaking congregations. In the inter-war period, some small efforts were made in evangelism in the newly established country of Yugoslavia. Slovak churches were planted in what is now the multi-ethnic and populous autonomous Serbian province of Vojvodina. The Brethren member, J. W. Wiles, worked in Belgrade, from 1913 as a lecturer in English at the university, and from 1920–41 as an agent of the Bible Society.
Further south, Albania waited until 1990 before Italian Brethren, subsequently assisted by US and British missionaries, were able to establish a number of churches in the new era of religious freedom. A few Brethren churches were established in Bulgaria, and one or two in Greece, which has so far been a country largely impervious to evangelical work. The Balkans and Greece remain the area of Europe with very low numbers of evangelical Christians. Turning to western Europe, there were few Open Brethren churches in Germany until after the fall of the Third Reich, but they have seen steady growth since then. Open Brethren work in France dates from the 1850s, with effort from the UK, across the border from French-speaking Switzerland, and again across the border by the fratelli of Piedmont among Italian speakers in (French) Savoy. But growth was relatively slow among the anti-religious French population.
The period since 1945 has seen the multiplication of missionary workers from North America and from Britain—in the latter case, there was a notable shift in number of British missionaries towards Europe and away from the rest of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Another development worthy of note in western Europe has been the continuing strength of the Kelly-Lowe Continental Darbyite Brethren in France, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. The perturbations in the group in the 1990s have given birth to a considerable number of churches in these countries which retain much of the style of their background, but which are fervent for the biblical gospel (including through mission, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) and open to fellowship with other Bible-believing Christians irrespective of background. There is one last feature of the worldwide mission of the Open Brethren in the last 150 years that is worth noting. Looking to the practice of the New Testament church, the Open Brethren believed that it was essential to indigenize the leadership of the church as soon as possible after evangelization. This was not only theory, but was put into practice, for example, by Walter Fisher in what is now Angola in 1890–1906 and then in what is now north-west Zambia. He sought to establish elders in the churches as soon as possible, perhaps not always successfully. But the fact is that this indigenization of leadership has had extraordinary success in recent decades in Africa. It is noteworthy that there is a significant number of African countries in which there has been strong growth of Open Brethren churches where missionary input has been curtailed. This would be true in Angola in the long years of civil war after independence, in Ethiopia during the communist period in the 1970s and 1980s, and in Burundi in the civil unrest of the 1990s. Part of the discipling after Brethren evangelization emphasizes indigenous leadership as the biblical norm.
The cases cited suggest that, in line with the dominical promise, the Holy Spirit is able to work through those with genuine spiritual experience. By contrast, there are countries which suggest that, where church planters and missionaries hold the reins too tightly, the church can be infantilized and therefore weakened. (It is ironic that, under western pressure, some African countries are at present imposing educational requirements for church leaders which threaten to disqualify some existing indigenous leadership.) We should not leave Africa, however, without noting the countries where there are particularly large numbers of Brethren adherents: Angola, Chad, Nigeria, and Zambia; and noting the very high proportion of children and young people who are present at congregations and preaching points throughout sub-Saharan Africa. As the successive volumes of The Brethren Movement Worldwide: Key Information show, the growth of Open Brethren churches across the world has been remarkable in the last 160 years. That there should be such congregations in perhaps 155 or even 160 countries in the world; that there should be more than 25,000 fully fledged congregations and another 15,000 preaching points (some at least on their way to being independent congregations); that the total number of people engaged in these places should be 3.6 million including children—all these data are astonishing. They are all the more astonishing when it is remembered that this has been achieved largely on the faith principle by workers who have not had the security of fixed salaries, and that it has not been in any meaningful sense a work centrally directed by human planning staffs.
The principles, thought of as being biblical, have been made clear enough to all concerned, and there have been mission service groups which have seen their role as support and encouragement, both practical and spiritual. But individuals have been independently called to mission and evangelism (normally followed by commendation by their own local church). Geographically they have gone where they have thought that God was calling them, although there have of course been familial influences, and encouragement from inspirational figures already involved in the work. Nor has there been much external influence on the way in which the work has been done or on the methods used, although across the 150-year span there has been plenty of evidence of innovation and inventiveness, including in relation to the application of technology. All that has, however, normally been left to those on the spot. Essentially, the work has been delegated and devolved. Humanly speaking, it may appear that this has been wasteful, inefficient, and sometimes incompetent. But those who have been involved in Brethren evangelism and mission might reasonably say that they prefer their way of getting the work done under God’s guidance to others’ way of not getting it done. If it had been centrally funded and directed, there must be a question whether anything like as much would have been achieved.
Identity: ‘To be or not to be?’
I referred above to an uncertainty at the heart of the development of the Brethren in their earlier years—the tension between recognizing that iblically there is only one Church, comprising all the genuinely faithful in Christ Jesus; and being faithful to the principle of Scripture alone as the authority and faithfully applying it, not only in personal life, but also in church life. There is a tension here that each generation of Christians has to manage with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is easy to take the second principle too far, to try to apply Scripture to each and every minute detail of practical church life. This way lies a legalism which is inimical to the teaching of the New Testament.
There have also been real difficulties among the Brethren around the question of separation, including separation from other true believers in Christ. That is, separating from them because their ecclesiology or their eschatology, for example, has been considered to be defective. In the Open Brethren, this led in the period 1880–1914 to a wide spectrum of types of churches, including to the Open Brethren’s only public split, between the Churches of God (the so-called Needed Truth assemblies) and the main body. But throughout the twentieth century, the wings of the Open Brethren (one of them continuing to be deeply influenced by Darby’s ecclesiology and eschatology, as mediated through his followers) were deeply suspicious and apprehensive of each other. At the same time, however, the Open Brethren influenced both the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century, and the fortunes of Bible-believing Christianity more widely. In the UK, coupling with a group of conservative evangelical Anglicans and the Keswick movement, the more non-denominational side of the Open Brethren was crucial between the World Wars in preserving the flame of evangelical Christianity. This was reinforced in mid-century through the entry of individuals of Brethren background into academic biblical studies.
More widely, it can be argued that elements of the ecclesiology of the Open Brethren have become deeply influential in Christianity, including in evangelical Anglicanism and through Brethren involvement at the roots of Pentecostalism. But it is easy to be too idealistic about the way in which we apply principle in church activity; and, in the western world at least, to be seduced by cultural modernism, our biblical radicalism, or even by our eschatology, into saying that nothing in the past matters—that there is nothing to be learned from it and that it has no relevance to us. The apostle Paul, for one, did not agree with that point of view. As he told the Corinthians, the experiences of even the old people of God were written for the learning, and warning, of the church. This is surely true, too, of church history, judiciously interpreted and applied, particularly the history of one’s own spiritual grouping. For five or six generations, the Open Brethen were confident in their openness to all who were genuine believers in Christ and faithful in following him.
They were confident, too, in their identity as Brethren. About 1970, a significant change took place on the progressive side of the movement, at least in the old Anglo-Celtic countries. It involved rejection of Brethren identity, and rejection of the Brethren past in a rather modernist way. This was often tantamount to asserting that no good thing could come out of the Brethren as a matter of principle. More than once, I have heard Brethren-background church leaders say, most of ‘my people’ (a dangerous formulation in itself) know nothing about the Brethren and I do not tell them. Sometimes, this is coupled with admiration of some other preferred Christian grouping.
This approach spells death for the movement and all that it can still achieve. It is not to learn from past Christian history, not to be strengthened by it, as is biblical; it is to reject it absolutely. There is much in the Christian past that can be questioned and criticized, in the Brethren as in any other Christian denomination, stream or group. But our assessments should be objective and informed.
I trust that this synopsis of Brethren history will have been illuminating, but also encouraging that there is much in our past from which we can learn, by which we can be inspired, when we have measured it against Scripture. Above all, let us be as passionate about the gospel as our forebears were, about its crucial importance to every human with whom we share this God-given planet, and as determined as they were that the gospel should be heard by everyone in every place in obedience to our Lord’s final command.
