A life in letters: Brethren

The Christian Brethren movement to which my parents belonged when I was a child and again when I was a young man had its roots in the earlier part of the 19th century, when a few groups of Christians across the UK independently moved out of existing church denominations and set up small, evangelical fellowships in which they tried to replicate as exactly as they could what they regarded as the New Testament way of doing church.  The earliest reference to Brethren in Scotland relates to Edinburgh in 1838. The Brethren had no clergymen, and no denominational label or structure.  Later in the century, the numbers of Brethren fellowships increased as thousands of people across the country, many of them working-class were converted to a living Christianity through the various revival movements.  There was much spontaneous spiritual reality among these groups, but there was also frequently an extreme scepticism towards the established churches, and a tendency to fragment over issues of doctrine. Notably there was a division between the ‘Open’ Brethren who held that they should welcome to their communion services all Christians regardless of their church affiliations and the ‘Exclusive’ Brethren who forbade their members from associating with other Christians. The church my parents attended in Milngavie in the 1950s represented the ‘Open’ tradition – in 1959 there were 324 ‘assemblies’ in Scotland within this tradition.