History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
In the 1770s a group of Mennonite and Reformed farmers near the Susquehanna river, moved by the Pietist preaching then running through the German settlements, concluded that they needed a baptism of their own choosing and immersed one another in the river. Jacob Engle is the name most often attached to the first group. They were called the River Brethren for where they baptised, and adopted the name Brethren in Christ during the American Civil War, when a body seeking exemption from military service needed a legal name to give.
Its founding is bound to Jacob Engle and the River Brethren — 1778 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A converted heart and a disciplined body, held together; neither the inward experience nor the outward church is enough on its own.
The divine. The Trinity, with a Wesleyan emphasis: the Spirit is expected to do observable work in a believer after conversion..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; assurance is preached, unlike among the Old Orders.