Darby, had no formal offices in their congregations and retained a charis-matic concept of ministry. But although within the local congregation decisions were arrived at collectively, the overall movement had one teacher who held a dominant position. The lack of institutionalized procedures for

Eventually full-time Christian workers attached to a particular congregation disappeared, but the Brethren continued to have itinerants. The pattern of support adopted for the latter and for foreign missionaries was that of ‘living by faith’. This was the idea that Christian workers should not be paid a regular salary but should look to God for all physical subsistence. The concept originated with Groves, but its most famous exemplar was George Müller who with his German Pietist background trusted God to supply all the needs of the children within his Bristol orphanages. Consequently, he received no sponsorship and refused to make any financial needs known. The example was universally followed within the Brethren movement though ‘living by faith’ spread beyond it to the wider evangelical world, principally through the contacts enjoyed by Hudson Taylor.115 Timothy Larsen in a recent article has argued that one effect of this doctrine was to reinforce the anticlericalism of the movement. This meant that leaders had to remain sensitive to the opinion of the people because they constituted the means of their support. It was, he wrote, ‘fuelled both by a positive desire to liberate the people and a corresponding negative wish to curb the ambitions of the leadership’.116

Paradoxically, Harold Rowdon has argued, the effect was to create an elite.117

One reviewer of Rowdon’s paper, who was himself raised among the Brethren, has noted that during his upbringing in the movement he ‘encountered a theoretically egalitarian society (“the priesthood of all believers”) rigidly structured in a hierarchical fashion. Missionaries “living by faith” were at the top of this structure as contrasted with the clergy in most other Christian traditions or with a spiritual elite based on “gifts.”’118 Perhaps the truth is that the acceptance of any full-time Christian workers, however financed, will inevitably produce classes of Christians. The crucial point is not the priesthood of all believers but the reality that some will have higherstatus ministries than others. Thus what begins with spiritual equality becomes, to some extent, a hierarchy.