In The Days Of Rain- Rebecca Stott

                        

Reading the paper on Friday I came across an interview with Rebecca Stott in which she was discussing this book. The headline caught my eye because it was about an escape from a cult and being a minister well I am always fascinated by these sorts of things.

As I read the interview became apparent that the cult she was referring to was in fact the Plymouth Brethren of which her father had at one time been a leading light. Intrigued I bought the book and read it in just over a day.

The first thing to say is that this book is incredibly well written, the author has a clear engaging style and short chapters which draw you in and make you want to read more and more.

From a Christian perspective this book was also helpful because in the book she details the separation the Plymouth Brethren were supposed to have from the rest of the world. She details the difficulties that this caused her when she went to school, she says for instance she had no idea how to talk to the other children, she felt that she spoke a different language to them. She spoke of the rapture of being left behind and most of them had no idea what these things meant.

As churches it is very easy to fall into the same pattern, that we speak of things that we all understand and yet nobody on the outside has any idea what we are talking about, when we speak of sin, repentance, when we speak of eschatology and soteriology. We can be guilty of speaking Christian-ese which only those on the inside understand.

As we do this more and more not only do we become unintelligible to the world outside but we forget how to speak to the world in terms that they can easily understand and so our gospel communication becomes less and less effective.

The book also highlights the harm that can be done when things go wrong in churches. Her father after being hurt by the brethren church eventually abandoned his confession of Christ and would lurch from disaster to disaster after that.

Church history is littered with examples of people who have been hurt by churches, who have been let down by Christian ministers and sadly that pattern has repeated itself, it goes from walking away from a church to abandoning a profession altogether. How we need to be temperate and considered in the words we use with one another and think before we speak.

However there are some problems with the book and some clear points of view that are being relentlessly expressed. The first main problem is that time and again she refers to the brethren church she grew up in as a cult. This may well be true however at no point in the book does Stott identify what a cult is, what the accepted academic definition of a cult is. It is just boldly asserted that this assembly was a cult.

The second issue I had with the book was the relentless feminist agenda that the book was pushing, why doesn't God speak through women? Why did the women have to sit at the back of the assembly and be quiet?

I have no problem with feminism as such, women pray in our prayer meeting, ladies present the items of praise we sing on a Sunday during worship. I hope the women in our church feel welcomed and valued because they most certainly are.

However in Stott's book it is in my view a radical feminism that is advanced. One excerpt stood as particularly demonstrative to me of Stott's line of thinking "One day when my daughters were a bit older, I told myself, I'd talk to them about that, about patriarchy and how dangerous unchecked male power can be." (Pg. 101)

Any form of unchecked power is dangerous not just unchecked male power, unchecked female power would be just as dangerous, we live in a system that recognises that, we have checks and balances in our legislative system, in our church we have several courts that can be appealed to.

This speaks of a broader problem in society that when people say what they want is equality that is not what they mean, what they mean is they want preferential treatment, they want to be treated better than others. We see this with the radical feminist agenda, with the LGBT groups and to be fair with Christian lobby groups as well.

In short would i recommend that you read this book? Absolutely it is a fantastic book offering a grown up secular insight into a religious group. Read it however with your eyes open and read it remembering 1st Corinthians 1 that the wisdom of God is foolishness to those who are perishing.

Time and again you get the impression that this intelligent women could not understand the things that happened as she was growing up and why is that? Because these things, rightly applied and understood, were revealed by God not by human wisdom.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Days-Rain-Rebecca-Stott-ebook/dp/B01N5BS5JD/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1501511371&sr=1-1&keywords=In+the+days+of+rain