For those of you who have not yet spotted it, there has been some rebranding of the Exclusive Brethren it would seem, They have a new website which gives a very different message as well as a different name for themselves.
Take a look at the new and the old
The old has much more information on it but maybe the new will be added to in time. In my opinion what they are doing is obfuscating the issue of labels for their group even more. I don't know how many brethren groups there are but many call themselves the Exclusive Brethren and many call themselves the Plymouth Brethren. So I am not sure how this name change is going to help. They remain the people who kept my mother from her son for well over 30 years and the people who keep fathers from their children, and children from their parents. They remain the group who excommunicated people for having a computer but now many of them have one etc etc. If you haven't read Animal Farm you should.
It leaves me with a dilemma too - this blog is called "Research on the Exclusive Brethren" and the title of my dissertation also has Exclusive Brethren in it. Do I now change this to "Plymouth Brethren Christian Church formerly known as the Exclusive Brethren" or what? We need an acronym - prizes for the first person to come up with one.
All of these changes - the 'pie hours' , the donations of park benches, and now the website are all making it hard for me to focus on my doctoral research - which by the way for the confused, is separate from the questionnaire research which many of you have taken part in - along with the charities commission stuff and other things going on it is all a bit too much right now.
And I still haven't sort those ologies out yet.
And I need to interview 4 more people - any volunteers?
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3 comments:
Of course now the new and the old are the same website - the old one is no longer live. But you can of course still see it using the wayback machine
A friend of mine who is a psychiatrist AND an active member of a "Brethren" church told me to watch the video with Richard Dawkins. Many Plymouth Brethen missionaries came to work in Argentina and Uruguay. In fact, my great grandparents were missionaries from New Zealand, and most of my family still belong to that church. In Spanish they are called "hermanos libres" (literally "free brethren"), although they reject to be called a denomination/church or any such labelling. I always thought that they were Plymouth Brethren, and that the Exclusive Brethren were something different.
Hello MR
If you friend is a psychiatrist then no he is not a member of the brethren being talked about in this blog. There is a lot of confusion over names - the Exclusive Brethren for decades refused to give themselves a name. Then when they set up a website they needed one. So they called themselves the Exclusive Brethren. But during the time when the Charity Commission were investigating them, the decided to rebrand themselves to the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. This has really obfuscated things! I suspect you are talking about the Open Brethren - an offshoot that resulted from a schism in 1848. And yes many refer to them at the Plymouth Brethren. Hence the confusion!!
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