Plymouth Brethren

Anyone had experience of them?

We have a new meeting hall and gospel hall being built down the road from me. There is already one in Didcot and a huge place in Britwell-cum-Sotwell. both less than 4 miles from the new one.

In times of falling church attendance why are they doing so well?

There’s a church up here has been for decades not noticed a an increase and can’t say I’d be bothered either way.

Cults and weird sects always do OK in times of political turbulence.

In times of falling church attendance why are they doing so well?

Perhaps they have all the answers.

I work for a PB owned company, however I’m not PB myself.

They are obviously very religious, when people ask my thoughts, they easiest way to describe them is hard-core Christians.

The company I work for is approx a 50/50 split between community & non community staff, that mirrors my teams headcount. The owners of the business work are open community, so I would class them as a bit more progressive – example in point they realise & appreciate the need for certain  skills & expertise in order to grow their business, which has to come from people with a bit more commercial acumen.

AFAIK they are all self funded, so the businesses and community members all ‘support the cause’.

It doesn’t really impact my ability to run a commercial team in the business, they have a pretty strong work ethic & whilst they live a somewhat sheltered life & have a few religious quirks, they are all a normal mix of people.

I’m not religious at all, and they are fine with that. It’s certainly a whole world I never realised even existed before I started working for the company I do. Probably my biggest issue is watching my tongue at work, they are not a fan of the potty mouth – even if I do hear the odd expletive from them 🙂

Full on mentals.

Alexander Crowley and the bellend who invented homeopathy were Plymouth bretheren.

They all drive people carriers and there’s a whole street of PB members in Aldeburgh.

Some sort of weird cult like the other one, name escapes me…

Christianity. That’s the one.

There were some that lived near my parents a few years ago. They went to great expense to have the drains rebuilt so that they didn’t converge with their next door neighbour’s drain before hitting the main sewer. All the females wore headscarves.

Founded the roots of today’s USA.

Look how well THAT’S grown…

Used to be whole villages full of them up on the Moray coast. Not heard of them for a long time. Think of them as Puritans with hopefully an Oliver Cromwell amongst them.

<span style=”color: #444444;”>They went to great expense to have the drains rebuilt so that they didn’t converge with their next door neighbour’s drain before hitting the main sewer.</span>

Wondering what the biblical imperative was for this particular move?

<span style=”color: #444444; background-color: #eeeeee;”>Founded the roots of today’s USA.</span>

How so?

Some sort of weird cult like the other one, name escapes me…
Christianity. That’s the one.

HA ha! So true.

“Alexander Crowley ”

Do you mean Aleister Crowley?

I know someone who teaches at one of their schools. They have some weird beliefs about teaching/learning after a certain age so have to employ non-believers.

Their business network seems quite extensive, and slightly disturbing.

Born Edward Alexander Crowley.

If I’d have put ‘The Beast’ would that have helped?

We have a small PB meeting hall Nextdoor but one to our house.

They seem pleasant enough.  They usually meet there one evening a week and attend 3-4 times every Sunday. Their hymns sound a bit dreary.

They seem very family focused,  with 3+ generations always arriving together, wearing their Sunday best. All the families are obviously very close.

All in they are very good neighbours to have; always friendly. I’m not religious myself,  but I like them.

Other than the singing,  I’m not too aware of the details of their faith and what else they do in the meetings.  I keep meaning to find out more but have not got round to it yet.

Went to school with a couple of PBs, nice blokes, didn’t follow the code. Their dad was seen every Saturday afternoon, in his best dark suit, watching the footy results in the local tv shop window.

Cant be as odd as the Jesus Army from Daventry way – with camo uniforms, “fighting for you” minibuses, an extensive business network – and blank stares.

We had some using a bungalow over the road as a meeting house for a while. On the whole they were fine aside from the number of cars trying to park outside one small bungalow every time there was a meeting.

They moved out when they had to remove the church hall like structure that they built covering 95% of the back garden. Still occasionally see a few around so I guess they found a new more suitable site.

I used to work with one. When he got a company car he had to have the Radio/ICE removed.

Go watch son of Rambow…

Like most groups there are some propper nut cases in the exclusives but there’s mostly people who make up the numbers.

I’ve a lot of dealings with them as they’re endemic in my industry, some good to work with/along side some not so much. I’ve heard horror stories of parents not speaking to children ever again because of who they chose to date and so on but the same could be said of pretty much any social group. The normals are normal, the outliers are weird.

As for growth in an age of the decline of the church it’s something you’re born into and it’s an in our out thing, no half way, so it’s like anything else, if your parents are ardent veggie/football fans/readers etc etc. It’s much more likely you’ll carry on with that. It’s especially true with something like religion which is pervasive and in a case like the exclusive brethren where it’s very much a tight social group you’re surrounded by it and much less likely to have your opinions challenged at a formative age.

There is a difference between Open Brethren and Exclusive Brethren in terms of how they interact with the wider world.

If Exclusive Brethren, they keep themselves to themselves.

Why are they expanding? I think they have higher than average birthrates, but if you are Exclusive, you just can’t walk in and join them; it’s fairly closed community.

They seem very family focused,  with 3+ generations always arriving together, wearing their Sunday best. All the families are obviously very close.

They are family focused in the way any cult is. If you don’t do what they want they will expel you – your family will stop speaking to you completely, refuse all contact, etc.

There is a very big Exclusive Brethren community near where I lived in Wellington as a teenager. Our Headmistress was Open Brethren and it was a girls only school so they all trooped along.

Very weird. They have restrictions about women being educated and they aren’t allowed to work, so all the girls were hauled out of school the minute they turned 16. They weren’t allowed to eat with us, or even really talk to us, so the mothers would turn up at lunchtime in giant station wagons (estates, in your quaint British dialect) and take them away and park around the corner from the school to eat lunch.

They weren’t allowed to wear make-up or cut their hair, listen to music or have a TV etc. Me and my friends formed a rescue squad for a girl called Berta, when she turned 16 she left home and moved into my friend’s brothers flat, got a job etc, goodness knows how as she wasn’t very prepared for the world so we had to help her a lot. Her brothers and cousins eventually found out where she lived and came around to “rescue” her, it all got nasty and violent.

I could see their big church from across the valley, it looked like a swimming pool, and one minute the parking lot was empty, the next minute there were hundreds of cars in it. In their defence, they live very quietly!

Born Edward Alexander Crowley.

Into a PB family. I don’t think you could say he embraced that particular group himself.

Founded the roots of today’s USA

How so?

Confusing with those folk who set sail from Plymouth?

He was also into mountain climbing, I dont trust that Chris Bonnington either…

I don’t think you have anything to fear at all, in fact you may come to appreciate having them nearby. My sister lives in an area of Salisbury where there are several families and she has gone slowly from suspicion to appreciation over the years, mainly because she has had some woodwork done by one of their men and was impressed by his work and by the ease of dealing with him. From what she says they sound decent, reliable, pleasant but self-contained.

I guess that not being emotionally and verbally incontinent like most folk makes them look shady or something.

<span style=”color: #444444; background-color: #eeeeee;”>In times of falling church attendance why are they doing so well?</span>

Fewer people going to church doesn’t mean theres been a big shift in the population’s religiosity. It just used to be more of a social / cultural norm to go to church, regardless of your religious convictions. People who would have gone to church in the past out of expectation and politeness now have all sorts of other things they can do on a sunday. Back when people were working 6 day weeks church was the only place you’d get to meet a girl if you didn’t have Tinder installed on your slate. The numbers of people who really want to go to church probably hasn’t changed all that much though and the more left-field and immersive kinds of religions are probably at least holding steady and might even prove comparatively attractive compared to mainstream churches with dwindling attenders and elderly priests being dragged back out of retirement .

Thats pretty much how we now differ from the  US – we perceive it as a very religious nation because their church attendances are high, but its just still a social norm there to go unless you have a fairly firmly held reason not to. Its also sort of polite to say that you go to church even if you don’t. So when you look at figures for church attendance there you don’t really know whether people are just saying they go to church or whether its actual bums on pews.

<span style=”color: #444444;”>Alexander Crowley and the bellend who invented homeopathy were Plymouth bretheren.</span>

which is why today there are hundreds of thousands of people just like Alexander / Alisteir Crowley and a new equiveluient of Homeopathy is being dreamt up every few minutes.

To be frank though – homeopathy is obviously a load of bunkum, but at its inception it was pretty much the first stab at medicine with any kind of rationale behind it. At the time there was no real methodology surrounding medicines and how they were either developed or administered. So as a medicine its garbage but by creating a template for developing medicines it proved quite useful.

I ran an incident late last year which involved the recovery of casualties and wreckage from a helicopter / plane crash. Almost before the emergency services response had all arrived, an organisation called Rapid Relief (https://www.rapidreliefteam.org/gallery/uk/) arrived and set up a massive catering truck, barbeques and gazebos. They kept us all fed, watered and entertained for over 48 hours – and a nicer bunch of people you couldn’t hope to meet. It turns out that they were Plymouth Brethren, and didn’t ask for a penny for either their time or their food.

If organised religion was only about being kind and good to your fellow man, I’d be all for it…

I do work for quite a few they are fine, Im not religious and thats not a problem, no swearing, red top paper, co ax cables, radios, never seen any with cats or dogs or radios but when they trust you its given back

The marriage is a wee bit like farmers but maybe more arranged, they enjoy drink and sex loads of kids, hope they are not on the forum reading this

How do I join?

Seems a quirky but reasonable bunch. Hope to meet a few around the village.

<span style=”color: #444444;”>Seems a quirky but reasonable bunch.</span>

Aside from the whole shunning people that want to leave the Brethren, being anti gay and generally avoiding mass media which is a bit too controlling and culty for my liking.

They’ve had to do more charitable activities to ensure they retained their identity as a charity for tax purposes.

Forgot to add you dont want to be gay, they will ship you off to America to do blokie things to make you a real man then come back married

Avoiding mass media is a wise thing.

They may be growing in some places, but the local clan built a big church on some waste ground some years back, and there were loads of cars there on Sunday evenings, always lots of people around, you’d see the women around town a lot as well, very distinctive with their long hair, long skirts and headscarves, but a couple of years ago they sold their big church, which is now an Emmanuel Church, and built a little wooden ‘shed’ next door, literally a large shed, no windows, and probably big enough to hold a dozen or so people.
You don’t even see them around town anymore, so I don’t know what’s caused the crash in their numbers.
I used to work on print stuff for their business, they had a shop doing industrial footwear, and had a company selling their own brand work boots, V12 Workwear, and they were lovely people to work with, very appreciative of the work I did retouching their product photos.
They insisted no mobile phones were used in the shop, and I don’t think they were keen on any computers, so I had to physically take things to them, although, thinking back, they might have used email.
Slightly odd people in their beliefs, like keeping water connections to their homes separated from the neighbours, but Roma have similar restrictions as well.
At least they don’t keep coming to my house harassing my girlfriend when I’m not home, trying to push their way into the house!

There was a sect ( Is that the right word?) in Brackley where I used to live. Honestly can’t remember interacting with them at all apart from the occasional trip to Goodness Foods; a farm foods co they used to run.

Kept themselves to themselves.

Brackley? Jesus Army led by Noel Stanton, very hierarchical, cultish, Stanton used to have a fleet of Rolls Royces and young men used to be encouraged to be celibate and ‘save themselves for Jesus’ B’Jesus. Haven’t seen much evidence of them for a long while which is surprising given all the homeless people they could be praying (sic) on.

Brackley? Jesus Army led by Noel Stanton

Nah, that was 20 miles away in Daventry, the only thing the Plymouth Brethren ever got up to was a bit of freestyle preaching in the town square…