Title: Exclusive by-path
Description: I think Exclusive By-Path fills a historical gap in Brethren biographies. While exact dates are not given, Christine Wood’s book appears to cover the period from the late 1930s to somewhere in the 1960s, and describes life among the Exclusive Brethren in Surrey and Brighton from the war years until about 1960. The book was not published until 1976.

The early chapters describe an unhappy home life and a rather unhappy school life, including encounters with good and bad examples of Christians. Through attending a young people’s society called The Crusaders, Christine became a committed Christian, and made it her life’s ambition to follow Christ and learn more about God’s ways. 

It was as an earnest, sincere, but gullible seeker after truth that she came under the influence of a man called Clive, who seemed to know all the answers to her questions, even though some of the answers were surprising and disturbing. From Clive she learned that the established churches were evil, perhaps even Satanic, and she should give up her non-Christian boyfriend and her Crusader’s badge. After many discussions with Clive, he pointed her to three possible places of worship, the Open Brethren, the Kelly Brethren and the Exclusive brethren, but advised her not to go to the last of these until she had tried the others. 

Bad advice to give to an inquisitive person! Predictably she went to the Exclusive Brethren first, and soon joined them, thinking she must have found real Christianity at last. What she found was a mixture of warm, loving people, and cold, stern, judgmental people who wanted to control her and impose on her a whole set of arbitrary rules, some of which seemed to be based on nothing more than a whim, a prejudice, or a love of control. 

She found herself attending meetings and learning a lot of allegedly Christian theory, but having little time to practise it in any fruitful way. The Brethren in Surrey put pressure on her to move out of the home of her unbelieving parents, but did not offer her any practical help to do so. When she did comply with their demands and moved to a rented flat in Brighton, the Brethren there said it was unseemly for a young, unmarried woman to live on her own, and she ought to be back in her parents’ home. So there seemed to be judgmental meddling and control, whatever she did. 

The Brethren objected to her wearing a small gold locket containing a picture of her deceased brother, and objected to her red items of clothing, because Rahab the Harlot had possessed a scarlet cord. They appeared to ignore David’s lament and eulogy for King Saul, in which he declares appreciatively, "Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel." And the fact that Daniel wore scarlet and a gold chain. And that nearly all scriptural mention of scarlet is associated with godly people. They were not moved by Christine’s quotation from Proverbs 31 about the virtuous woman who is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed with scarlet. The balance of emphasis in Scripture appeared to carry no weight compared with Exclusive Brethren rules. 

Christine describes a Brethren girl called Priscilla who was brought up with no games or dolls (considered to be idols) and no books except bible stories. Women’s magazines were tools of the Devil, and Christine was reproved for reading The Wind in the Willows. She describes how the Brethren sometimes refused to shake hands with other Christians, and disinherited those who left the fellowship. 

There were striking examples of hypocrisy. There was a brother who condemned Christine for going on holiday. “Your holiday pandered to the flesh,” he asserted. “You have been abroad to see the scenery – the fallen world. You should be dead to all that and walk in the Spirit.”

“When I go abroad,” he went on virtuously, “I go to see the Lord’s people, not the sinful cities that man has made, or the scenery.” It later emerged during a moral purge that this brother’s trips abroad were actually to visit women who were in no way connected with the Lord’s people.  

The book also mentions hushed-up cases of Brethren youngsters who were “driven to take their own lives to escape the tyranny and the cruel system that enslaved them.”

As far as a spiritual pilgrimage was concerned, Christine came to look back on her Brethren years as wasted time, as “the years that the locust hath eaten” as Joel would put it, or as “By-Path Meadow,” as John Bunyan would put it.  Her emancipation from this spiritual wasteland was assisted by a lovely young man called Geoffrey, and by the Rev. John Stott, Rector of All Souls, Langham Place, London, who enjoined her to “stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”

Another sister who left the Brethren at the same time wrote and circulated a letter to those who withdrew from her. Christine quotes from this letter, because it well expressed her own verdict:

“Looking for the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, ,goodness, self control—as a result of what is considered ‘further light’, I see instead only mental cruelty, discourtesy, harshness, slander, immorality, religious fanaticism and persecution, the characteristics of the Pharisee, incitement of hatred of parents, the break-up of the family unit ... I have been profoundly disturbed by the way many of the Exclusive Brethren have spoken of other Christians in a derogatory way, implying that they are lost, and that we are the ONLY people—the others counting for nothing in God's sight as they seem to in ours.... I am appalled by the inhumanity, selfishness, self-righteousness... .

Christine later married Geoffrey and enjoyed a happy Christian life with him, until he died suddenly, tragically young, during a dental operation. 

In subsequent pages Christine reflects soberly on the joys and tragedies of her life, the dark and bright strands of its pattern, trying to make sense of it all, with a flame of faith that often flickered, but never quite went out. 

As Canon Arthur Neech said, the book evokes pity, laughter, indignation and admiration. Maybe it will contribute to the emancipation of others who have been similarly enslaved.
Subjects: Biography, Church of England, Plymouth Brethren
People: Christine Wood