History & overview · every faith gets one
The doctrine of separation, carried to the point where you cannot eat with your own child.
The most tightly bounded surviving branch of the Exclusive Brethren, descended from John Nelson Darby through the leadership of James Taylor Senior and Junior and now led from Sydney by Bruce D. Hales. Members do not eat with non-members, do not attend university, do not join professional bodies, and until recently did not own televisions, radios or computers connected to the outside; they run their own schools, their own businesses and a large disaster-relief operation. Just over 55,000 people.
In June 2012 the Charity Commission for England and Wales refused the application of the Preston Down Trust, a PBCC meeting-hall trust, to be registered as a charity, on the ground that it had not demonstrated the public benefit required in law; the Commission's concerns included the doctrine of separation from evil and the body's disciplinary practices, which it found produced moral and physical separation from the wider community and limited interaction with the public. The Trust appealed to the First-tier Tribunal. On 8 January 2014 the Commission registered the Trust after the PBCC executed a deed of variation setting out its doctrines and practices, including undertakings about public access to worship and about pastoral practice where families are divided by discipline. The decision was criticised in Parliament and by the British Humanist Association, which questioned whether political lobbying had influenced it. Practices of withdrawal from and of not eating with those outside the fellowship have been described in evidence to inquiries and courts in Britain, Australia and New Zealand as separating members from family, including from their own children.
Why it is filed this way
Sociologists and inquiries have treated the PBCC as a high-demand religious movement rather than a denomination among others: membership is effectively hereditary, exit carries a severe social cost, and central leadership is personal rather than constitutional. The body describes itself as a mainstream Christian church. Both descriptions are on the record; Panfaith reports who says which.
The founding
The Exclusive line dates from Darby's Bethesda Circular of 1848, which held that assemblies are linked and that fellowship with a defiled assembly defiles. Successive divisions narrowed it. Under James Taylor Senior from the 1920s and his son James Taylor Junior from 1959, the doctrine of separation was tightened decisively: the 1960s brought the requirement that members not eat with non-members, which meant that a member whose spouse or child was withdrawn from could not share a table with them, and the withdrawal of members from professional associations, trade unions and public office. The body adopted the name Plymouth Brethren Christian Church around 2012.
Its founding is bound to John Nelson Darby, by descent; the modern body shaped by James Taylor Jr — 1848 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world under judgement from which the believer must be visibly, physically separate, and a fellowship that is one body across every country.
The divine. The Trinity, with the Brethren tradition's exact and combative concern for the person of Christ — the divisions of 1885 and after were fought over precisely this..
Death and after. The pre-tribulation rapture of the church, tribulation, then Christ's appearing — the Darbyite scheme, held without modification.