Knock Knock, Who's there?
- Thread starter I'll be ready!
- Start date
When I was 11 years old, I had a card with verses from Romans. I told my Catholic friend, who was probably 9 at the time that we needed to talk.
I read him the verses on the card and he prayed.
We moved away. We reconnected whwn I was in high school and he went to mass on that Saturday.
Fast forward 45 years and we reconnected on facebook. He is a solid, vocal Christian and married a Christian girl.
Did I plant a seed? Maybe... maybe not. Did God draw him? Absolutely.
I read him the verses on the card and he prayed.
We moved away. We reconnected whwn I was in high school and he went to mass on that Saturday.
Fast forward 45 years and we reconnected on facebook. He is a solid, vocal Christian and married a Christian girl.
Did I plant a seed? Maybe... maybe not. Did God draw him? Absolutely.
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The Mennonite Brethren originated in Russia and eastern Europe, and like other Mennonites, they're Anabaptists. There's no relation to the Plymouth Brethren.
I spent my latter teen years in a Brethren chapel after my parents left the mainline church we had been attending. I left home to go to school and returned to a more traditional Baptist denomination (and ultimately my present church which is effectively "Baptist-lite"), but I still visit my parents' chapel when I'm home for a visit at Christmas. My roommate is Brethren, and his church and mine are on good terms; there's a fair bit of cross-pollenation of members in both directions.
The Plymouth Brethren are an English Nonconformist, evangelical denomination founded around 1820 in England. The two principal founders were George Mueller and John Nelson Darby.
Darby split over theological differences in and founded his own movement; so the Brethren are more or less split into the Open Brethren (Mueller's group) and the Exclusive Brethren (Darby's). The primary difference between the groups is that the Open Brethren are more open to engagement with the world, while the Exclusive Brethren tend to be more separated from worldly influences. Open Brethren are more likely to invite any professing Christian to participate in their meetings, particularly the Lord's Supper, while Exclusive Brethren are very separatist and not only practice strict closed communion, but will forbid fellowship with anyone outside of their group, even closing their meetings to non-members.
(Confusingly, there's a subgroup called the Closed Brethren, who also restrict the Lord's table to members or visitors from like-minded assemblies who bring a letter of introduction. But non-members are otherwise welcome to visit and participate in the meetings. Hence the Closed Brethren are actually part of the Open Brethren.)
What they all have in common is that they disregard traditional confessions and creeds (nuda Scriptura), and have no professional clergy. Local assemblies are autonomous and choose their own elders, generally with the elders themselves recognizing other men who meet the biblical qualifications and inviting them to become elders, but in some assemblies they're elected democratically. Some of the Exclusive Brethren have a top-down authority structure, but the Open Brethren have no central authority or denominatonal headquarters. It's not really a denomination so much as a network of like-minded assemblies.
Despite the rejection of formal creeds, Brethren are generally orthodox, typically (but not exclusively) premillennial and Dispensationalist (especially the ones following Darby), and are involved in missionary and evangelistic activity. My parents' little chapel supports a couple of missionaries overseas, and also holds weekly lunches for the community (with a "free store" where people can take donated clothing if they need it) as well as a yearly turkey dinner on Christmas day. (We always go on Christmas Eve to prep for that. It's fun.)
There are typically two services on a Sunday morning. The first is the breaking of bread (which my parents' chapel used to call "sharing time"). The chairs are arranged in a circle. There's no leadership; whenever someone is led by the Holy Spirit to speak (typically restricted to men, but not exclusively in all chapels), he may read and meditate upon a Bible passage, request a hymn or song, or pray. At the end of the hour the Lord's Supper is taken every week.
After a break (during which the chairs are probably arranged back in rows), there's the gospel meeting. This would be more familiar to a more traditional Protestant. There are songs and hymns, prayers, announcements and so forth, and then the sermon, which is given by one of the elders--or, frequently, a guest from another chapel whom the elders have invited.