Bethesda, 1848 — the division that ended the unity project.
Benjamin Newton's errors about Christ at Plymouth were the trigger; Bethesda Chapel in Bristol, under George Muller, received two men from Plymouth after satisfying itself they held nothing wrong. Darby issued a circular refusing fellowship with Bethesda and with anyone receiving from it, and the movement has been in two pieces ever since.
The 1848 division is the movement's permanent scar. Benjamin Wills Newton, the leading teacher at Plymouth, was found in 1847 to have taught that Christ, as a man born under the law, stood under God's judgement on Israel in a way that touched his person; Newton retracted, but the assembly at Plymouth had already been broken up by Darby. When two men from Plymouth applied to break bread at Bethesda Chapel in Bristol, where George Muller and Henry Craik led, Bethesda examined them, found they held nothing wrong, and received them. Darby issued the Bethesda Circular in August 1848 declaring that any assembly receiving from Bethesda was itself out of fellowship. Muller and Darby, who had been friends, did not speak again for decades. Muller went on to run orphanages in Bristol that cared for more than ten thousand children without soliciting funds, on principle; his side of the movement became the Open Brethren, and the missionary sending that flowed from it — Anthony Norris Groves to Baghdad and India, and hundreds after him — is the Brethren's largest positive footprint in the world.
The same ground, other faiths
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