An Address presented to the Bible College of New Zealand - 1990
by Dr Peter Lineham
Preface
I'm a historian and wrote the history of the Brethren in New Zealand. This led me to begin to collect archives of the movement. When I was a student in England I began to take an interest in British Brethren history as well. In 1985 I was invited to give a paper at a conference in the city of Florence to celebrate 100 years since the death of one of the great Florentines, Count Piero Guicciardini, who founded the Brethren in Italy, as well as contributing to many aspects of Italian life. So I guess I've thought a lot about the history of the Brethren. Let me tell you about it.
I'm a member of the Open Brethren in Palmerston North but originally from the West Coast. I grew up in the group called the "Reading Brethren" and in my childhood, because we were such a small group, we were nurtured on curious little books about why the Open Brethren were wrong and we were right. When (in my University years) I moved to the Open Brethren, I had thought a lot about what the point of the Brethren was.
THE BRETHREN HERITAGE
Introduction
That was the beginning of the Brethren. They are sometimes called the Plymouth Brethren but they should really be called the Dublin Brethren. The group quickly prospered and in May 1830 they hired a hall in one of the lowest class suburbs in Dublin and it was so shabby that the rich were cautious about coming but nonetheless gospel outreaches were able to begin.
The scene is in Dublin some 160 years ago. Nobody knows precisely when. In the house of a noble in Fitzwilliam Square, a little group of sombrely dressed men (some of them in clerical garb) and a woman (sometimes), have begun to hold a service - something like the service of worship and communion that the Open Brethren still celebrate weekly - although it was held on Monday evenings so that the ministers present could hold their Sunday services as well. There is an atmosphere of excitement because it has never happened like this before, and a sense of secrecy because if the Anglican bishop hears, there will be trouble for the Anglican ministers present.
WHO WERE THE EARLY BRETHREN?
The Dublin Brethren were a very interesting group of people. Let me introduce them:
The key man was J.G. Bellett, an intensely spiritual person, who wrote The Moral Glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, and a man who loved to befriend anyone with spiritual desires. Francis Hutchinson, the owner of the house was one of his friends. Another was Edward Cronin, a former Roman Catholic, who had felt unable to accept the authority of any denomination since then and was therefore, not received by any church at communion in those strict days. Bellett wanted to give him some fellowship.
Another friend of Bellett was the Reverend John Nelson Darby, the godson of Lord Nelson and Curate of Calary, Co. Wicklow. Darby, a sharp faced twenty-eight year old, with a burning dedication to Christ, had a deep desire to win converts among the Roman Catholic population. He was active in a great evangelistic move. But his own denomination, the state church, ruined things because it was a state church and insisted on raising the money for his salary by collecting tithes from everyone including Catholics.
This little group of young men also included a woman - Lady Powerscourt, a high bred widow who had been overwhelmed by the sense that Christ was soon to return. She invited the group to her family mansion to discuss the "signs of the times". They soon found they didn't agree fully on the interpretation of the end times but they were inspired by her enthusiasm for studying and discussing the Scriptures. It is sometimes speculated that Darby considered marrying her.
This group was visited every year by Anthony Norris Groves, a dentist from Exeter who had a great reputation and a gentle godliness expressed in his famous book Christian Devotedness.
Groves wanted to be a missionary to Baghdad. He was an Anglican so was told to gain a degree before ordination. He went to study at Trinity College, Dublin annually at the time of exams. There he began to fellowship with Dublin evangelicals - the future Brethren. Groves must have sat through discussions about how unfair the treatment of Cronin was. As he talked to Bellett, he began to reject the idea that the denominational boundaries of the church were essential. How could Christians be one? Groves suggested: 'That simple principle of union, the love of Jesus, instead of oneness of judgement in minor matters.' (Coad, The Brethren Movement, p 20.)If this was so, then couldn't any group of Christians worship together? Groves told Bellett: 'This, I doubt not, is the mind of God concerning us, that we should meet together in all simplicity, as disciples, not waiting on any pulpit or minister but trusting that the Lord would edify us together, by ministering as he pleased and saw good from the midst of ourselves.' (cited by Coad, p 28) Thus, he rejected the need for sacred building, ordained priest or set liturgy.
Groves made another major contribution to Brethren ideas when, in the final year before his graduation, the money he was saving to come to Dublin was stolen and he decided the Lord obviously didn't want him to get his decree. So he got to thinking. He knew the Lord had called him to be a missionary in Persia but why did he have to be ordained? What did ordination really achieve? Was it more than the mark of exclusive authorisation by an earthly institution?
The Brethren soon spread especially to the West Country of England (hence the name "Plymouth" Brethren). Soon an enormous missionary effort spread them throughout the world. The appeal owed something to large forces in the evangelical world for simultaneous movements to return to early Christianity were springing up in Switzerland, in Italy and in other places. Harold Rowdon has described the growth of the Brethren in Britain in his book, but it is from Roy Coad's book that you can sense the general extent of the Brethren movement throughout the world. New research is taking the story further.
It was always a minority movement of those who abandoned popular Christianity in order to be faithful to Christ. This was what it was like in New Zealand. It spread here about 1850, brought by people who had met the movement in England. There was a Mr John C. Courtney who began preaching in Auckland in 1854. But far more important was a settler in Motueka, who had been one of the early preachers of the Plymouth Brethren, and one of their greatest hymn writers, James George Deck. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1852.
By 1865 he had begun to preach in many parts of New Zealand, and a small cluster of assemblies began to be noticed. However the more dramatic growth came in the late 1870s when an evangelist with Brethren links in London, Gordon Forlong, bought a farm in Bulls.
The result was two revivals - one in Dunedin, which became the basis of the Salvation Army in New Zealand and a second in rural Manawatu, when some of his converts in the little bush village of Rongotea decided to ignore the existing churches and meet in simplicity as brothers and sisters only. This movement for Christian simplicity and enthusiastic evangelism was the characteristic combination which planted the Brethren in many of the rural dairying districts of New Zealand, where people had the freedom to respond, and overcome the formality of the existing denominations. From this emerged several great bush preachers, among them the great C.H. Hinman.
The characteristics of the movement established in Dublin thus were carried into many different settings.