Christian Unity (the book) - The Maranatha Community

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.Groves used his medical knowledge to treat eye disorders successfully, andcame to value education in mission, but there was no future for the group inthe troubled city. He left Baghdad to survey the prospects of work in India,and eventually resettled his mission in Chittoor, about 60 miles inland fromMadras. He married again in 1835, on his return to England, and new recruitswent out to help his work in the Godavari Delta region, a missionary work towhich the Brethren are still committed today.In his life of Groves, G H Lang, himself one of the BrethrenError! Bookmark notdefined., defines the principle of Christian unity which he believed the firstBrethren held as ‘liberty of fellowship with all the family of God’. He quotesGroves’ first biographer:‘The original principles of this happy communion are fully detailed andlargely dwelt upon, in Mr Groves’ letters and journals; they tended tonothing less than the enjoyment of union and communion among all whopossess the common life of the family of God. The realization of theseprinciples enabled Mr Groves, whether in Ireland, England, Russia, or thepresidencies of India, to go in and out among God’s people, everywhere,both conveying and receiving refreshment.’ 104Lang wrote his life of Groves when he himself was working as a missionary in aMuslim country and saw in the situation in which he found himself anillustration of how this principle of ‘liberty of fellowship’ works. He writes:‘From thirty years’ observation of travel in the gospel in nearly as manycountries I am sure this liberty is a most real asset for spreading the truthas to the church of God. I write in a town in North Africa, 650 miles fromthe Mediterranean. Beyond to the south stretches only the vast desert. Itis a veritable outpost of the three kingdoms, those of man, the devil, andGod. To represent the last in this almost wholly Moslem town I find,twinkling amidst the Islamic midnight, a small native Coptic PresbyterianChurch, a Lutheran Mission of godly Germans, aiming to reach the104Lang, G H, Anthony Norris Groves, saint and pioneer, Thynne and Co, London, 1939, p148. Groves’ first biographer was his widow Mary (nee Thompson). The quotation by Langfrom her biography of her husband is from her Memoir of the late Anthony Norris Groves,Second Edition, James Nisbet and Co, London, 1857, p 39.Page 132