CATEGORY:
Church History REVIEWER:
Rick
The Pilgrim Church
E. H. Broadbent
I first read this book some years ago. I think I’ve now read it three times.
The period covered is from Pentecost to the early 1900’s. Yes it’s Church
history and contains many names, dates and places, but it is more special than a
simple account of facts and figures. Firstly, because it left me with a very
distinct empathy with many of the peoples mentioned in the book and a sense of
‘I know who my true brothers and sisters in Christ were now’. It is full of
accounts of many personal struggles and trials of faith, “and they loved not
their lives unto the death.” I know that accounts of persecution can be very
unsettling to some people but through it all you’re usually left with a great
sense of awe and victory. It is not a book about persecution but that is
unfortunately a part of the story. I have sometimes skipped over some of those
parts having seen the general picture and just moved on with the story.
This book introduced me to many peoples, groups of churches and ‘movements’ I
had not previously heard of at the time I first read it. As I say though, it is
not a database of dry statistics. I’ve learnt through this that many of the
‘unknowns’ not included in ‘popular’ Church histories were actually the true and
faithful ones in Christ. As I understand, these people such as, the Waldenses,
Albigenses, Lollards and Bogomils (some of their names were given to them by
their oppressors) and numerous others are often either overlooked in many Church
history books or are painted in a bad light. Throughout the ages the ‘official’
Church refers to them as ‘heretics’ and considers them to be their bane. Such
was the intensity of hatred for them that whole armies were gathered and sent to
wipe out entire populations in an attempt to ‘cleanse’ the ‘Church’ from these
‘vile corrupters’. Please don’t get the wrong impression here; the book spends
much time in details of glorious salvations and outpourings of the Holy Spirit.
There are times of peace and times of war, times of victory and times of defeat.
It’s very ‘real’ and very objective.
How is that Broadbent’s account differs from many others then? He travelled
extensively gathering what he could from various sources and directly from those
who were descendants of ‘the pilgrim church’. He reads between the lines of the
accounts given by ‘their enemies’, which of course would not paint them in any
favourable light. There were some preserved, written records, which clearly
expose the tyrannical behaviour of much of the ‘official’ Church. Interestingly,
I recall reading somewhere that many of these have since ‘disappeared’ since
Broadbent’s days. The recently (1999) reissued edition of The Pilgrim Church has
an excellent foreword by Dave Hunt. He also makes mention there of records no
longer being in circulation. What makes this account so valuable is that it drew
upon sources that were available in the Author’s day (he lived from 1861 –
1945), much of which does not seem to be now in circulation.
This book is about ‘real’ Church history. It needs to be read right through and
not kept solely for reference, but will do very nicely for that purpose
afterwards.
