Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

„We pray that… all who desire the welfare of the Church of Christ, may labour to see
themselves and others so circumstanced as not only to love, but to receive into the
appointed fellowship of breaking bread, all whom they believe to be brethren in Christ
Jesus; not requiring uniformity nor oneness of understanding, but only the possession
of the one Spirit.‟ 103
One of the early Brethren was Anthony Norris Groves (1795-1853), who has been rightly
called „the Father of faith missions.‟ This meant Christian endeavours to take the Gospel to
those who have not known it on the principle of seeking support by prayer from God alone,
and not from appeals to people in general or by relying on commercial investments.
But he was also a pioneer of Christian Unity and while many, particularly in the 19 th Century,
followed his example of working by faith (including his brother-in-law, George Müller, who
founded his entire orphanage work in Bristol on the faith principle), not so many captured his
large vision of Christian unity.
After studying chemistry, dentistry and surgery in London, he practised as a dentist in
Plymouth and Exeter before enrolling in Trinity College, Dublin, to prepare for the Church of
England ministry. In Dublin he associated himself with a group of men who tried to follow
the pattern of church life laid down in the early Church, having, so they believed, no separate
clergy and no organisation other than the local congregation, which was responsible only to
the lordship of Christ for its sustenance and governance.
Groves withdrew as a student at Trinity only a few months before he would have graduated
because he came to believe that the New Testament did not require ordination as laid down
by the Church of England. He also did not believe he should go as a lay missionary with the
Church Missionary Society (CMS) (founded in 1799), as he learned that he would not be
able to officiate at the Lord‟s Supper as a layman.
With immense courage, and ploughing his own money into the venture, he set sail in 1829 in
a borrowed ship with a group of followers that included his wife and three children, to sail,
via St Petersburg, to found an independent mission in Baghdad. In 1825 he had written a
challenging work, Christian Devotedness, in which he set out the principle that a follower of
Jesus should give all his wealth unreservedly to Christ, assured that God would supply all his
real needs.
The mystic and the seer were combined with the dynamic man of action in Groves. In
Baghdad the little missionary group suffered plague, famine and civil war. His wife and
daughter died there in 1831 and little appears to have been done outwardly in evangelism, but
Groves recorded no bitter thoughts and wrote that he had learned „...to kiss the hand that
wounds, to bless the hand that pours out sorrow‟ and to submit his soul entirely to the will of
God, though he could not see a ray of light.
103 The Witness. This quotation shows how, in the very earliest days of the (Plymouth) Brethren, there
was an ecumenical spirit in accord with Anthony Norris Groves‟ dictum that life not light was the
basis of Christian fellowship, even for the fellowship of the Lord‟s Supper. Brethrenism quite soon
came to lose this understanding of oneness in Christ in practical terms, though holding it in theory.
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