The Brethren in Christ: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

Anabaptist bones, Pietist heart, Wesleyan pulse — and it argues with itself about which is load-bearing.

A body that formed among German-speaking farmers along the Susquehanna in Lancaster County in the 1770s, immersing adults three times face-forward like the Brethren, holding nonresistance like the Mennonites, and later taking on the Wesleyan doctrine of holiness and the revival meeting. Once plain — bonnets, beards and no neckties into the 1950s — it dropped the prescribed dress and now looks evangelical. Its largest national church is in Zimbabwe and Zambia, not the United States.

Why it is filed this way

The Brethren in Christ describe themselves as standing on three streams at once — Anabaptist, Pietist and Wesleyan-holiness — and their own historians have spent a century arguing about the balance. The Anabaptist inheritance is the ecclesiology and the peace position; the Pietist is the conversion narrative; the Wesleyan is the doctrine of a second work of grace.

DeitiesThe Trinity, with a Wesleyan emphasis: the Spirit is expected to do observable work in a believer after conversion.

Founded1778 CE · Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

FounderJacob Engle and the River Brethren

AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; assurance is preached, unlike among the Old Orders

TextsThe Bible · The Brethren in Christ Articles of Faith and Doctrine · Manual of Doctrine and Government

The map

The Brethren in Christ’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1517 CE Protestantism 1525 CE Anabaptism 1778 CE The Brethren in Christ

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

A changed heart and a disciplined church — neither alone. The Pietist half asks whether you have been converted; the Anabaptist half asks whether the congregation can see it in how you live. The Brethren in Christ have insisted since the 1770s that a church which drops either question stops being one. Go deeper — context →

Entire sanctification — a second work of grace, and an argued one. Taken from the Wesleyan holiness movement in the later 1800s: after conversion, a further crisis in which the Spirit cleanses the disposition to sin. Anabaptist-minded members have never been comfortable with it, and the denomination has repeatedly restated it in softer terms. ⚖ contested within Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

J Jacob Engle — a name at the head of a thinly recorded beginning. The Brethren in Christ have no founding document and no founding date they can defend to the year. Engle is the figure the tradition names for the first River Brethren baptisms in Lancaster County in the 1770s, and almost nothing else about him is recoverable. Domain The first River Brethren group and its baptismStanding Named in the histories, thinly documented, not venerated Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

The love feast, and the night people stayed over. Because members travelled by wagon from across a county, the love feast ran into a second day and the host farm slept everyone. Feetwashing, a full meal and then bread and cup — the Brethren order, kept when much else was let go. When Annually or twice a year — the love feast, historically an overnight gatheringWho Members and the wider congregation Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Christianity — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Zoroastrianism — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The Brethren in Christ — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The Brethren in Christ shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been