A few weeks back, we attended the conference in Castlewellan Castle, in one of the most beautiful parts of county Down. The weather was exceptional, and the afternoon drives down the main street of Newcastle, with its extraordinary views of the Irish Sea on the one side and the Mourne mountains on the other, were breath-taking.
[photo from Wikipedia]
But even more extraordinary was the opportunity to spend time with Christians from Ireland, Scotland, England, France, the Netherlands, Germany and beyond. We studied Leviticus 1-5, with singing from Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1978), and it was wonderful. Fortunately one of the Dutch brothers recorded the meetings, and we can relive the experience here.
The experience of the conference has got me back into reading the old "brethren" classics. Last year, I read William Kelly's Lectures on the church of God (1865) - he was born not far from where we were studying - and began to work through the material on websites like Assembly Quest. Since the conference, I've been reading Kelly's commentaries on Romans, 1 Corinthians, Titus and Philemon, snapping up old copies from the Book Aid depot located near our house and browsing for what I can't find in hard copy on websites like STEM. Twenty years after leaving the "open" side of the house for greener pastures that turned out to be much less fertile than expected, I'm finding out how much I've been missing, and how so many of my concerns about church order and soteriology in particular could have been better addressed among some of those believers called "exclusives."
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