How To Host a Plymouth Brethren Style Division: The Bethesda Method

Snark-free version available here.
Just like the Olympics, the Plymouth Brethren Division is something that keeps coming around, and everyone's into it and talking about it for years afterward, with strong loyalties and room-dividing views.  It's the oldest tradition the Brethren have, having first celebrated a glorious, hotly contended division in Bethesda, in 1848.  The First Great Brethren Division!  What an honour to be the spiritual descendants of this great heritage!

  But maybe your small group isn't going to be lucky enough to have a division of its own, on its own... and without a division, how will everyone know who's wrong?  Below is a simple guide to Hosting a Plymouth Brethren style division of your own!  It's easy!  (Everyone's doing it):

Step 1: Choose a Cause/Person

First you need something or someone to object to, or fight against.  Something you can make people fear.  The best thing to do is have a look at any and all ways that your group could be seen as divided into two camps (old/young, modern/traditional, thoughts/feelings-based, Beatles/Stones, it really doesn't matter.)  Then you drive a wedge into that barely-visible seam.

   A particularly good method of driving a wedge between two groups, is to use some kind of "doctrinal" issue.  It's best to take something incredibly lofty and mysterious and beyond human comprehension like the precise nature of and relationship between the various persons of the Godhead, (or exactly what's going on with God allowing sin, then curing it somehow with death. By dying.  Himself.  Incarnated as Man.  But distinct from Himself. Yet one.)  Then either say something opinionated which will divide the room, or better yet, if someone else says anything like that, (especially if it's something you don't really fully understand, either in terms of what the man is saying or intends to say) proclaim it A Threat. To God.  To His Name.  His People. His Table.  His Doctrine.  His Testimony.  His Whatever.  It helps if this person wrote this down so you can quote bits of it out of context without speaking to the man much at all about the matter.

   Then, and this is particularly brave and vital: say it's all actually quite simple.  And then roll up your sleeves get ready to defend God from the "new" and "complicated" ideas of your brethren!

Step 2: Form Two Teams

You can get jerseys, a rallying song, a humorous mascot, team names, or whatever.   What you need to do at this point is figure out who's going to be on your team.   In fact, you really need to draft people to your team.  This should be done by quiet meetings in coffee shops, seeking to woo future team members, and by secret emails and phone calls.  Direct communication.  Eye contact.  Lowered voices.  Leaning in conspiratorially.  Smiling and shaking heads in agreed disbelief over the folly of the other team and its clownish captaincy.  Agree who you really just don't like very much.  Bond over spite and past grievances. Use any form of closed-hearted bigotry that is available to you.  See how many people can be brought into the great cause of Defending God From The Threat you've concocted.

Step 3: Token Gesture of Poisoned Peace

This is important: You don't want to look like the Bad Guy.  So what you need to do is reach out, to what has now become The Other Team, with a poisoned olive branch.  This is best done with an extremely sanctimoniously* worded, extremely formal letter.  Indirect communication.  No phone calls or face to face meetings.  Not even emails.  That risks connection and understanding.  No.  You need a paper olive branch.  A letter.  That you're going to photocopy a lot and show to everyone as evidence of how nice you were, in your passive-aggressive, pious way, yet, somehow, your gesture of fellowship will have been inexplicably spit upon and cast to the floor!  Oh, the humanity!

  It's a delicate balance.  It has to seem almost sincere, but also be as judgmental, closed, passive-aggressive, insulting and assumption-filled as possible.   Make the language not merely Edwardian, but Victorian, if not downright Elizabethan.  Quote a number of insulting verses.  (That's easy.  The bible's full of verses that can be used to impugn people, all the while maintaining full deniability. "It's not me disrespecting you.  I'm just faithfully passing on what God said about you...")

   Be sure to use the word "concern(s,ed,ing)" repeatedly.  Because of course you aren't fighting and insulting people and just being nasty, paranoid and trigger-happy.  No. You're concerned.  For God. For His Things.  And for His people, whom He's left, clearly, in your care, lest All be lost.

* (sanctimoniously: in the manner of a prissy, effete, tattle-tale, duplicitous, muckraking, religious bitch-boy who feels he is above absolutely everyone.)

Step 4: Rallying the Troops Letter

Once your false peace overture has the Other Team properly enraged, this is all that's left to do:  You now need a letter to your own team across the globe, sent with copies of the poisoned olive branch letter and the equally sanctimonious retaliation letter from the other.  You can use the Internet and phones at this point, but because now you want direct communication that could result in a genuinely knit together team with which to engage what you have now ensured is the Other Team.  

   This letter needs to be stirring.  It's like the "rallying the troops" speech that's in almost any movie you carefully deny having ever seen, only it's on paper.  It can be a lovely souvenir to keep in a place of honour after the war, to be used during re-enactments.  It should use the word "sad" and "forced" and "leaving us with no choice but to" as much as possible.  A good template of a "rallying the troops" letter could be drawn from Aragorn's speech in The Return of the King:

Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!

Now, cast more in the Plymouth Brethren style, this forms an excellent skeleton for the Brethren equivalent of a "rallying the troops" speech, inciting division (what Brethren do instead of genocides and wars):

Beloved Brethren gathered to the previous name of our Lord Jesus Christ! Saints! My brothers. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the faithfulness of the saints fails, when we forsake the path clearly laid out by those who have gone on before, and walk in blatant disregard of what is clearly outlined in the divinely inspired Word of God, but it is not this day. An hour of grievous wolves and false teaching and new strange doctrines and falling away when our beloved Christian testimony comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we stand on scripture! Because you hold dear the holy Word of God, forswearing the temptations and corruption of this wicked world, I bid you stand, gathered saints!

(Note: It may help to shout this speech from the back of a rearing horse while waving a sword about.) 

Step 5: Mock-Regretful Declaration of War

And then it's off.  Reach out with your anger.  Feel your hate.  Fire a number of bitchy, pious letters about how "sad" you are to have been "forced," to have been "left with no other choice" but to gleefully tear around the countryside bashing one another upside the head, and firing photocopied, highlighted letter after scripture-decorated, carefully signed letter; like an endless barrage of stinking dung missiles landing on people's doorstops, daring any and all not to read them.  Like accidentally discovered porn in a park, no one will be able to resist having a bit of a surreptitious peek, no matter how disgusted it will make them once they have.

  It's amazing to have the privilege of hosting a really good Division.  Just do it.   About once every eleven years. You can thank me later. You'll love it.  If it's your first division, don't be self-conscious or worry about being too petty or silly.  Anything goes.  Do it in the name of obeying scripture and walking uprightly.  Do it in the name of maintaining Christian testimony.  Do it in the name of endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit. Do it in the name of protecting God and His Name and His Table from the ideas of the people you grew up with.  Do it in the name of protecting the children who might otherwise be led astray or you know, hurt.  Above all, do it in the name of faithfulness, obedience and love.  Because you've been forced to, and have no other choice but to be faithful.

Step 6: Armistace Day

And then there's nothing left but to clear away all the bodies.  Party's over.  Time to put out the trash.  Toss them into mass graves with monuments to the bravery and faithfulness of all those involved in the struggle against the vicious Hun/your brother Steve.

  Wait until the poppies have had time to grow.  Dress up in your Sunday morning business casual uniforms.  Salute the cenotaph.  Stick out your chest to more proudly display the faithfulness/status medals you earned in this tragic, necessary venture, when you risked your all to defend the Lord Himself from that mysterious, sudden, shocking attack that came from out of nowhere.  Pray to the Lord Above, thanking Him in ornate, flowery prose that He helped you remain Right, and obedient to scripture.  Thank Him that you are not as other churches are, even like those Presbyterians.

  Take a deep breath and demand from everyone in attendance there, the full recognition you deserve for having fought so that your children could leave your assembly and more than a third of your gathering could quit attending any kind of church again forever, manifesting their lack of faithfulness.  And console yourself that in future, when things get too dusty and cobwebby and lonely, that you can reminisce about how hard it was and how faithful, brave and smart everyone was. And when you get bored of that, you can always start another one.  Hallelujah!