A Historical Sketch of the Brethren Movement


Book Description

During the past twelve years I have been pastor of the Moody Memorial Church of Chicago, an independent church standing very largely for the very truths which the brethren love and from which Dwight L. Moody profited so definitely. This has, in measure, cut me off from that full communion with assemblies of brethren which I enjoyed for years, but has in no sense lessened my love and respect for them. H. A. Ironside







A History of the Brethren Movement


Book Description

Coad's work traces the history of the Brethren Movement, which began more than 170 years ago and has since spread throughout the world. The author considers some of the outstanding characters produced by the movement, as well as its signficance in relation to the whole Christian church.




The Growth of the Brethren Movement: National and International Experiences


Book Description

The essays in this book have been contributed in honour of Dr. H.H. Rowdon, a teacher of several generations of students at the London Bible College and a historian of the Brethren movement. The book includes reflections on the historiography of the Brethren, but it is their character and growth which form the principal focus. The writers make original contributions to national, regional, or local histories and at the same time raise wider themes and issues on topics such as revivalism in New Zealand and the Orkney Islands, or paternalism and missionary endeavor in Zambia. Leading features of the Brethren are discussed through papers on several seminal figures such as Anthony Norris Groves, John Eliot Howard, and George Mÿller. Above all, the opportunities and problems represented by the worldwide growth of the movement are looked at with reference to a number of countries, among them Britain, Germany, Jamaica, and Angola, or to individual congregations in places as diverse as Birmingham, Singapore, and Tasmania. 'Over the whole world...', concludes Prof. D.W. Bebbington in his contribution, 'Brethren played a distinctive role as evangelicals of the evangelicals.'







The Plymouth Brethren


Book Description

This is the first history of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative, nonconformist evangelical Christian movement whose history can be traced to Dublin, Ireland in the late 1820s. The teachings of John Nelson Darby, an influential figure among the early Plymouth Brethren, have had a huge impact on modern evangelicalism. However, the credit for Darby's work went to some of the first generation of his students, and as evangelicalism has grown it has completely ignored its origins in Darby and the Brethren. In this book, Massimo Introvigne restores credit to John Nelson Darby and his movement, and places them in a contemporary sociological framework based on Introvigne's participant observation in Brethren communities. The modern-day Plymouth Brethren emphasize sola scriptura, the belief that the Bible is the supreme authority for church doctrine and practice. Brethren see themselves as a network of like-minded independent assemblies rather than as a church or a denomination. The movement has also refused to take any formal denominational name; the title "the Brethren" comes from the Biblical passage "one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren" (Matthew 23:8). The Plymouth Brethren offers a typology of differing branches of this reclusive movement, including a case study of the "exclusive" branch known as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and reveals the various ways in which Brethren ideas have permeated the modern Christian world.




My People


Book Description




Programmed by God or Free to Choose?


Book Description

Are we in fact more than just inert clay in the divine Potter's hands? This book seeks to prove conclusively from Scripture that mankind's freedom to seek God was not retracted at the fall, and that all humanity's sins were borne on the cross by the Lord Jesus Christ. The five points of Calvinism under scrutiny, often known by their acronym, TULIP, are a resume of doctrines formulated at the Council of Dort in 1619. This council maintained that the fall of Adam resulted in the inability of man to seek, or even to desire to seek, God. The Council of Dort declared that only those who have received prior regenerating grace are in fact capable of seeking Him. As you read this book, you will see that God has sovereignly decided to preserve genuine human freedom of choice, and that this brings Him glory and delight. You will also see that predestination is not about who is destined to become a Christian, but about whom a Christian is destined to become.




In the Days of Rain


Book Description

A father-daughter story that tells of the author’s experience growing up in a separatist fundamentalist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk Rebecca Stott grew up in in Brighton, England, as a fourth-generation member of the Exclusive Brethren, a cult that believed the world is ruled by Satan. In this closed community, books that didn’t conform to the sect’s rules were banned, women were subservient to men and were made to dress modestly and cover their heads, and those who disobeyed the rules were punished and shamed. Yet Rebecca’s father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking Brethren minister, was a man of contradictions: he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and hid copies of Yeats and Shakespeare behind the Brethren ministries. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult’s leader, Roger became an actor, filmmaker, and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail. A curious child, Rebecca spent her insular childhood asking questions about the world and trying to glean the answers from forbidden library books. Only when she was an adult and her father was dying of cancer did she begin to understand all that had occurred during those harrowing years. It was then that Roger Stott handed her the memoir he had begun writing about the period leading up to what he referred to as the traumatic “Nazi decade,” the years in the 1960s in which he and other Brethren leaders enforced coercive codes of behavior that led to the breaking apart of families, the shunning of members, even suicides. Now he was trying to examine that time, and his complicity in it, and he asked Rebecca to write about it, to expose all that was kept hidden. In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott’s attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father’s role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family and the power of self-invention. Praise for In the Days of Rain “A marvelous, strange, terrifying book, somehow finding words both for the intensity of a childhood locked in a tyrannical secret world, and for the lifelong aftershocks of being liberated from it.”—Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill “Writers are forged in strange fires, but none stranger than Rebecca Stott’s. By rights, her memoir of her father and her early childhood inside a closed fundamentalist sect obsessed by the Rapture ought to be a horror story. But while the historian in her is merciless in exposing the cruelties and corruption involved, Rebecca the child also lights up the book, existing in a world of vivid play, dreams, even nightmares, so passionate and imaginative that it helps explain how she survived, and—even more miraculous—found the compassion and understanding to do justice to the story of her father and the painful family life he created.”—Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus




Fundamentalism and American Culture


Book Description

"This work provides the history of Christian fundamentalism, which emerged as a movement with that name in 1920. It first looks at the roots of the movement in evangelical revivalism before 1920. Then it considers fundamentalists' most characteristic outlooks. It describes the distinctive outlooks of Dispensational Premillennialism concerning history and modern times. Then it looks at the role of Holiness teachings, especially Keswick Holiness, in shaping fundamentalism. Fundamentalists, especially of the Presbyterian variety, were also militant defenders of traditional evangelical Protestant orthodoxy. Being a coalition of related movements, fundamentalists displayed a variety of view as to how to engage mainstream culture. These outlooks and tendencies coalesced into a nationally prominent fundamentalist movement during the years of cultural change from 1917 to 1925. The analysis looks at various dimensions of fundamentalism of the 1920s. The penultimate chapter looks more recent American fundamentalism, especially in the rise of the religious right since the 1970s. The concluding chapter reflects on the continuing legacy of fundamentalism in the twenty-first century, even as the term itself is less widely used"--