Tragic story of Christianity gone wrong

Beautifully told tale of faith and hypocrisy. The abuse of religion is no adequate reason to ignore what may be true and wonderful within it, but this true family sage is salutary to those who feel their grasp on Christianity is faultless

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Very, very interesting book

This was a very enlightening and absorbing, if at times, disturbing book. I had heard of the Plymouth brethren but not of the Exclusive Brethren. It's always good to hear the author read their own books and particularly this one as it was based on personal memoirs. Rebecca read it well.

Her book has led to me wanting to know more and I'm now watching various documentaries about this so-called church. After hearing so much about him in the book, it was good to see Rebecca's father speaking in the BBC documentary.

These so called Christians are nothing more than power crazy control freaks and over the years have caused so much heartache and misery to families. It's a form of mental abuse indoctrinating people in the way that they do.

This sect/cult is so unchristian and are completely distorting biblical teachings; they are definitely not walking in the footsteps of Jesus and will one day find themselves hearing Him say, 'I never knew you.'

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Worthy

Someone with A level British History and an Art Lit degree wishes to recycle some of her essays. Dull in parts. A bit of virtue and privilege signalling towards the end. Where this book excells is as an account of being a child in a branch of Christianity so strict it morfed into a cult - those straight narratives and internal molologues really matter. And the moral of the story is ... always talk properly to the kids.

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Interesting story flatly told

I found this book very trying to get through. Her story telling isn't very compelling which is amazing as her story is astoundingly interesting. I had to work quite hard to see that through how it was delivered. It's not terrible, but it did grate a little on the long haul. It'd have benefitted a great deal from being at least an hour shorter and to concentrate more on her experiences than the long sad fade of her father.

If you're hesitating to get this - you can do better, choose another book!

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2 people found this helpful

Captivating

A fascinating insightful memoir. Having bought the book, and never had time to sit and read it, I bought the audio book to listen to it whilst driving.

On more than one occasion I found myself sitting in my car at the end of my journey, determinedly listening in to the end of the chapter, and then listening to just one more.

Rebecca Stott's reading of her own book takes us right back with her, to different times and the very different world she grew up in. And we're blessed that she's chosen to tell her own - and her father's - story.

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1 person found this helpful

Interesting story

Rebecca Stott writes well and her account of life in a cult is fascinating and frightening. I recommend reading this book.

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Breathtaking, haunting, tragic.

A glimpse into a world resembling Orwell’s 1984, only with religion, and continuing into 2018. What happens when men, drunk with power and self-importance, put themselves above the truth. At the same time it’s a story of love and forgiveness. Being an ex-cult member myself, I found this book was deeply meaningful.

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4 people found this helpful

A moving memoir of childhood

Rebecca Stott both writes and reads beautifully - her memoir of a childhood bound by the rules and regulations of The Brethren is almost unbelievable, when you realise other families are living like this in the UK and other countries today. Her and her family's gradual realisation that things are not as they should be within the hierarchy of the Brethren brings relief tempered with anger and sorrow. Descriptions of her childhood forays into locked rooms, hidden boxes, to try and make sense of her life are wonderfully recounted and it is with relief that, as the reader follows her into adulthood, she emerges as a sane, sensible, gifted writer, relatively un-haunted by the gods and demons of her past. A very interesting book, well worth listening to.

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Close to home

I have just finished listening to this audio book after leaving a considerable gap after starting this book and enjoyed it immensely. I should perhaps say that I am from the same background as Rebecca Stott though I was born in 1969 and did not really experience the Taylor "system" at all. I am also from the same area of the world and grew up in Haywards Heath in Sussex. I grew up in the meeting there and had a most happy childhood in that fellowship not without its griefs and pains but I could always trace the rainbow through the rain.

I don't normally write reviews of books online or elsewhere, not because I am a rubbish writer and apt to go off at tangents but because I am a mild-mannered sort of chap who isn't generally bestirred to wade into controversy. I did however know Roger Stott - very slightly. I met him occasionally at my aunt and uncle's rather grand house on Muster Green but my memories of him on the internet are somewhat clearer. We crossed swords several times and it is because those same issues arise again, that I have put electronic pen to virtual paper. Mainly we argued on the priniciples of Textual Criticism of which he knew next to nothing though hugely widely read in literature, the arts and the brethren's minisitry not to mention the Bible. He was larger than life even in an online debate and was an intimidating though not unfriendly opponent.

The book is delightfully read by Rebecca Stott herself. If we have met, it would be in the mists of time. I am conscious that relatives of mine are also her kith and kin and that some of the things she narrates will have caused some embarrassment and shame (that might be an unavoidable side effect of uncovering the truth) There are various issues arising which trouble me - they are not necessarily the fruit of mature reflection though they have puzzled me for some time.

Some years ago, Ann Thwaite brought out her work "Glimpses of the Wonderful" on Henry Gosse, the brilliant and somewhat underrated father of Edmund Gosse, the author of Father and Son of whom she was also the biographer. It is a long time since I read either but I recall feeling that Edmund Gosse (though an affectionate son) seems to have erred on the side of literary creativeness when describing his father's strictness. Henry Gosse was a Plymouth Brother and by all accounts quite a strict one but an unconventional and brilliant person who could hardly be described as a run of the mill PB. Gosse Jnr makes a lot of the unconventionality of his upbringing even by Victorian standards and that is fine as far as a novel might go but what are we to do when the historicity of an account is assumed and a certain credibility is asked for? This is always a problem. And it was a problem listening to this delightful work. As I listened to it on the long and beautiful commute to work, I kept hearing things which didn't quite ring true - anachronisms - just little things sometimes which made me wonder. If I had been reading, I would have marked the place with a pencil and pondered the issue later: when you are trying to avoid mad lorry drivers fleeing at top speed from Holyhead to the border, you don't always have time to rewind and listen again. These slight errors are distracting and in themselves not especially important but they do raise issues about the credibility of the witness in historical terms, though the uninformed listener to the novel would not be perturbed at all by them.

There is for example, the tendency to say, Brethren were not allowed to do this or that or the other and to generalise from one's own particular experience. Here again there is a discrepancy which is very interesting. I asked my father (who is mentioned unnamed, I think) whether the Morrises had newspapers and novels etc throughout the 1960s and it is clear that they did. My grandmother Morris would not have been so docile in giving up reading yet alone throwing away precious gems of English Literature. Indeed she kept up a correspondence with her uncle, Richard Kelland (a very eccentric relative who remained with the Taylor Brethren after 1970) a wide ranging correspondence which encompassed even modern literature in its scope. I would have to check again but my impression of scanning these letters is that they both took and read the Spectator and read the literary reviews. Fortunately, Grandma kept diaries which give through the 1960s a record of her own attendance at meetings, the scriptures read, those who ministered etc with not infrequent commentary on the quality of the ministry. She frequently notes the times that Roger Stott and others came to Haywards Heath to show the dear brethren there the way more exactly. It is clear to me that he was sent as an enforcer of the system seeking to impose it on people who consistently objected to it. It is not always clear to be sure, whether RS is Roger or Robert Stott but despite the frequent approvals of RS's ministry in terms of exposition, the gulf between these people is clear. Indeed just about the whole of the Haywards Heath meeting left the Taylorite fellowship in 1970 after the Aberdeen incident and with every subsequent division sought a return to classic EB doctrines in so far as they could be shown to be scriptural. My grandmother records a terrible meeting with Philip Cowley in Brighton where the scripture was Jael and Sisera. Underneath she wrote very clearly "Could have done with a tent peg myself".

I was told by the blessed Margaretta Siderfin that she had always seen my grandparent's house, Crowhurst, as a sanctuary where she could say just exactly what she thought about what was going on and no one would blab about it. So while Roger Stott was busy seeking to power build, there were those who just got on with their lives in the fellowship regardless and despite his efforts to subdue them. Not that there weren't stormy seas for those keeping their heads below the parapet but many were (forgive the mixed metaphor) securely anchored and there was (again witnessed by my grandmother Morris's diary) a great deal of excellent spiritual food: there is corn to be had even in Egypt. It doesn't make such a dramatic story but when the whole thing collapsed, you find that those that held more lightly to the system were perhaps not so violently set off course spiritually. They hadn't invested so much in the outward forms but had clung to the inward certainties of the faith. They didn't all blame the whole of their subsequent misfortunes on the brethren since they had never really joined the thing or bought into it. One might say, they were waiting for deliverance from it. I do not doubt that fear kept many of them in much longer than they would have ordinarily stayed and I do not want to underestimate the terrible consequences of such cruelty to innocent people as was habitually practised.

It would be most interesting to hear Mrs Stott's side of the story, she is still living but I would hope that her memoirs would encourage an account to be made of the resilience, resourcefulness and courage of so many of these sisters among the brethren - a quality that shines out as a very welcome ray in this account of Roger Stott's life.

Pray to the Lord and not give him rest for the deliverance of those still ensnared in such a terrible system of spiritual slavery, that they may, in the words of one of our Sussex saints, know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day. Amen.
Gregory Morris

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4 people found this helpful

An interesting family story

Stott narrates the tale of her family, from the generations first ‘caught up’ in the Brethren to how she, along with her parents and siblings, managed to escape into the outside world. It provides a fascinating insight into the inner workings of a fundamentalist religious regime, or cult, and is a deeply personal account of a family within. Some of the language was, at times, a little melodramatic. I also felt it was a shame that so much of the story was focused on Stott’s father, as I found him fairly unpleasant. I would have liked to have found out more about Stott’s mother, for example, to hear more about how she has coped having left the community she had always known and then after her marriage ended. Nevertheless, worth a read/listen.

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