Growth of the Brethren Movement: National and International Experiences: Essays in Honor of Harold H. Rowdon

Description: The essays in this book have been contributed in honour of Dr. H.H. Rowdon, a teacher of several generations of students at the London Bible College and a historian of the Brethren movement. The book includes reflections on the historiography of the Brethren, but it is their character and growth which form the principal focus. The writers make original contributions to national, regional, or local histories and at the same time raise wider themes and issues on topics such as revivalism in New Zealand and the Orkney Islands, or paternalism and missionary endeavor in Zambia. Leading features of the Brethren are discussed through papers on several seminal figures such as Anthony Norris Groves, John Eliot Howard, and George Muller. Above all, the opportunities and problems represented by the worldwide growth of the movement are looked at with reference to a number of countries, among them Britain, Germany, Jamaica, and Angola, or to individual congregations in places as diverse as Birmingham, Singapore, and Tasmania. 'Over the whole world...', concludes Prof. D.W. Bebbington in his contribution, 'Brethren played a distinctive role as evangelicals of the evangelicals.'

Brief description: Tim Grass is a Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon's College, London, Assistant Editor for the Ecclesiastical History Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He also serves as Facilitator of the Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative. Tim has authored Gathering to His Name: The Story of Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (2006), SCM Core Text: Modern Church History (2008), The Lord's Watchman: A Life of Edward Irving (2011), and F. F. Bruce: A Life (2011).
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Review Quotes: It is with considerable pleasure that I commend this tribute to Dr. Harold Rowdon. Harold is the doyen of the scholarly study of the Brethren Movement, and has also worked tirelessly since his retirement from academe for the benefit of those many lively evangelical churches that have emerged out of the movemement in Britain over the past twenty years, and in encouraging international links with the many different overseas movements that look back for their origins to the considerable Brethren missionary work throughout the world of the past hundred years. It is fitting that younger scholarswho are following in his academic footsteps should celebrate him in this volume.
--Roy Coad, author of 'A History of the Brethren Movement'

While 'culture conflict' rives many Open Brethren congregations in the homelands, this well-researched, well-interpreted, and well-written series of essays reminds us of the sacrificial ministries of evangelists and missionaries who have had and are having a glorious part in the globalization of Christianity, with much reality and little hagiography.
--Ian Rennie, retired V.P. and Academic Dean and Professor of Church History, Tyndale Theological Seminary, Ontario, Canada

I am glad that Harold Rowdon is being honoured by this wonderfully appropriate collection of essays. The Brethren are in danger of becoming one of the best kept secrets of church history. But here we have evidence of their immense global impact in missions and of their profound legacy in contemporary evangelicalism. The book picks up the passions that Harold Rowdon has demonstrated over the years as I, a former student and colleague, have good cause to know.
--Derek Tidball, Principal, London School of Theology