A life in letters: Morning Meeting

One of the distinctives of Brethrenism is the ‘morning meeting,’ and it was that which made the most impression on me as a young child. It lasted well over an hour. The congregation sat round the table in the centre of the room on which was placed a loaf of white bread on a silver plate and deep red wine in a silver chalice, symbolising the death of Christ – bread for his body, wine for his blood.  The climax of the service was the taking of first a morsel of bread and then a sip of wine by members of the congregation as plate and chalice passed from hand to hand. Children were not entitled to partake.

The criterion for participating was simply faith in Jesus Christ. You didn’t need to be ‘good enough’– your participation was in itself deemed to betoken faith that though you realised your own imperfection, you could freely approach a holy place by virtue of Christ’s death.  

In practice, though, you had be known by the elders to be a believer before being offered the bread and wine. This meant that, if you were attending another Assembly while away on holiday or business, you had to obtain a ‘letter of commendation’ from your home church to the elders at the Assembly you were visiting.

The morning meetings began with unaccompanied hymns, prayer, Bible readings and spiritual reflections, all focussed on the adoration of Jesus for his self-sacrifice on behalf of the human race in general, and specifically, on behalf of the believers gathered around the table. The speakers, who were always men, never women (for hadn’t St Paul instructed women to be silent in church?) claimed to speak as they were prompted by God’s Holy Spirit, so that it was God who led the worship.

Much of what was said at these Christian Brethren services was beyond my understanding as a child, but I don’t recall being particularly bored. But my earliest memory of church is of the morning I lay across my father’s lap in the corrugated-iron hall in Milngavie, kicking my legs in the aisle while some worthy speaker droned on. I must have been very young: in later years I’d be allowed to take a book with me to read during the service, but kicking your legs was definitely forbidden.

I remember one Morning Meeting when I was 8 or 9 launching an imaginary space rocket loaded with a noxious gas, which followed a carefully-calculated trajectory across the room through the meteor-shower of dust particles illuminated by shafts of morning sunlight. Finally, it locked into orbit around the head of Mr Phillips, a kindly grey-haired brother who seemed to be talking at inordinate length. At a signal from base, the craft released its potent cargo, and I waited expectantly for Mr Phillips to falter, and sit down, but he continued speaking steadily, on and on, until the ground controller had to concede that it would take more than an imaginary gas attack to silence him.

My parents and I began attending Carluke Baptist Church in 1962. There, the communion service (the equivalent of the Morning Meeting) was a 20-minute addition to the morning service, from which it was separated by a short gap which allowed those who had come to the first service, but who didn’t wish, or didn’t consider themselves eligible to take the bread and wine to leave. Here too the criterion for participation was simply faith in Christ.

The Baptist communion was led by the pastor assisted usually by two deacons, who ‘gave thanks’ for the bread and wine – the ‘elements’ as they were called. It is difficult to see how anyone, even those susceptible to spiritual experience can truly connect with the symbols and their significance in such a brief service.

And I (of the wandering mind and the dull, grey heart) was not remotely susceptible. ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’  said an elderly lady to me after the morning meeting at Ebenezer Hall in Coatdyke which my parents and I attended in the 1970s. I nodded, trying not to look too downcast. I wrongly assumed that to fess up to my own utter lack on connection with the service would have been to identify myself as a failure.

At Coatdyke, I was encouraged to contribute at the Morning Meeting. I did so a few times – standing up ‘into the great silence’ as I put it to myself, praying or speaking briefly, normally without any sense of the ‘givenness’ of what I was saying, sure that the threadbare nature of my utterances would be obvious to all, and yet at the same time proud of them. ‘Was what I said OK?’ I’d ask on the car home, with a terrible need for affirmation.

Shortly after Lorna and I were married, we began attending Celt Street Evangelical Church in Inverness. It was at a time when a good many brethren fellowships were rebranding themselves as ‘Evangelical Churches’, perhaps to escape the cultural connotations of the words ‘Gospel Hall.’ At the same time some of them, but not Celt Street, embraced new ways of working such as appointing a full-time elder who was in practice a pastor, or welcoming female voices at the Morning Meeting.

At Celt Street, I participated increasingly in the Morning Meetings as thoughts, relevant words, and pictures with some kind of explicatory power came to mind with a sense of spontaneous freshness. There was also a discernment as to which ideas were truly unsought, truly ‘given’, from the subconscious or from God, and which were shallower, an offering from somewhere nearer the surface of my mind when the deep places were silent. Or so it felt. I appreciated this sense of givenness, and wondered if this was the spiritual gift which I felt had so long eluded me.

I rejoiced in the symbols and images and ideas, and rejoiced in the sense of being in some way ‘used’ by God. Yet I would have been doing better had I been able to delight more in God and less in the joy of the dancing symbol which points to God.

Holm Evangelical Church which Lorna and I later moved on to had no Morning Meeting and I felt a sense of loss, although I am not sure whether this was just because I no longer had a regular forum in which to participate. But the Brethren were certainly on to something in creating – or re-discovering - the Morning Meeting with its space to reflect and contribute, although the silencing of women was a scandal. Charismatic churches have now recovered these times of group ministry, although in a more lively way, and releasing a wider spectrum of spiritual gifts.