BROTHERHOOD OF THE CROSS AND STAR
A PERSONAL VIEW by Jeremy Goring
In 1991 people were surprised to hear that I had been appointed by the Leader of Brotherhood of the Cross and Star to be his Representative in Europe. How did I, a retired academic historian and long-serving minister in the most reasonable of religious denominations, come to join this strange new movement emanating from blackest Africa?
I too found it all very surprising. Although two of our sons (whose judgment I respected) had joined the movement in London and had been appointed 'Christ Servants' after a couple of months in Nigeria, I myself was not at all attracted to begin with. I was put off by the name, which sounded old-fashioned and gender-exclusive. I was put off by the language, which seemed theologically narrow and conservative. And I was put off by some of the customs. When I discovered that members wore long white robes, knocked their heads on the ground and took off their shoes before they prayed, engaged in long Ramadan-style fasts and made their womenfolk cover their heads, I thought the movement owed more to Islam than to Christianity. On the other hand their belief in reincarnation, which seemed to owe something to Hinduism, seemed a point in their favour.
I have always been suspicious of new religious movements with exotic teachings, charismatic leaders and excitable followers. Steeped as I am in the religious history of 17th century England, I know something about the excesses of millenarian sectarianism. I am also aware of the harm done by the kind of evangelism that is now rampant in the United States, where the proclamation of the gospel goes unashamedly hand in hand with the cult of personality and the quest for money and power. And so when I eventually agreed to go to Nigeria to see things for myself I went there with my sceptical historian's intellect full of doubts about the glowing reports I had heard. I also went there confident that, with the expertise acquired through seven years' training as an analytical psychotherapist, I would easily be able to 'explain' the phenomena in terms of collective hysteria or mass delusion. I went there in fact half expecting - and wanting - to find deception, fraud and corruption.
But I was mistaken. In Calabar I found that the fruits of the spirit were as abundant as the oranges, bananas and paw-paws growing on the trees. Olumba Olumba Obu, the Leader of Brotherhood, turned out to be very different from the guru or 'holy man' of my imagination. No artificial 'aura of holiness' surrounded him. Here was a straightforward, practical, down-to-earth sort of person who spoke with clarity and authority about simple everyday things. Here too was a man of transparent integrity whose words and actions were all of a piece, someone of great understanding whose energy seemed to be boundless. But I did not immediately withdraw all my negative projections. I remained unconvinced by the high claims made by his followers on his behalf and, when it was suggested that I might like to be baptised into Brotherhood, I had no hesitation in refusing.
When, at the end of our stay, the Leader announced that he was going to appoint me his Representative in Europe, I was appalled. How could I, who had refused to be baptised into Brotherhood, ever represent the Leader in Lewes, let alone Europe? But after I had returned home and talked things over with my wife Rosemary who, much to my surprise, had accepted baptism in Calabar, and my sons George and Daniel, whose faith and love have taught me so much, I eventually decided that I would be baptised.
Although my baptism by total immersion was a moving experience, it brought no sudden change. I retained some of my misgivings, but I gradually began to see things differently. Although I had not asked to be - nor been asked if I were willing to be - appointed Leader's Representative, the fact remained that I had been given the job and really had no choice but to accept it, like it or not. Indeed it was precisely because I did not like it - and did not like the prospect of facing the disturbance that, I imagined, the news of my 'appointment' would arouse - that I came to think that it would be good for my soul, though not for my ego, if I accepted the situation with a good grace. What I soon came to realise was that Brotherhood's tenets accord quite remarkably with those I was brought up to believe in. I was, after all, raised in a tradition that was, by the world's standards, odd. My mother's family were, and had been for generations, Unitarians: a small denomination renowned - and sometimes reviled - for its unorthodoxy. I grew up with the notion, which did not seem to be shared by most other Christians, that divine revelation was not sealed, but that, in the words of a well-known hymn, 'the Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word'.
In the early 1960s, as a young Unitarian minister in London, it seemed to me that this prophecy was being fulfilled.
In 1963 I wrote an article in The Inquirer entitled 'A Spiritual Revolution'. I proclaimed that this revolution was 'going to sweep like a wild fire not only through this country but throughout the entire world'. A 'wind of change' was already blowing across the whole surface of the earth, but 'most strongly across Africa, where new religious movements, independent of Islam and Christianity, are coming into being everywhere'. I did not know then that Brotherhood had been inaugurated a few years earlier, in 1958. I said that this great spiritual awakening could not be contained within the rigid framework of institutional religion, for the new wine would burst the old bottles and the churches would be broken up or bypassed. 'We do not know where the Holy Spirit is going to lead us: all that we do know is that we have no alternative but to let our souls lie open to every breath of divine wisdom and let our minds be receptive to the mightier faith that is to be.' These closing words contained nothing striking or new: Unitarian preachers had already been talking like this for a century.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Unitarian I grew up convinced that what a person believed was less important than how he or she behaved: being a Christian had less to do with worshipping Jesus than with putting his teachings into practice. This emphasis upon practical Christianity was one I had also inherited from my father's family who were not Unitarians but Tolstoyans. In the 1890s my grandfather had helped to organise the London Tolstoyan Society and had been a leading member of the 'Brotherhood Church' set up to propagate Tolstoy's ideas. My grandmother's brother Charles Daniel became Tolstoy's English publisher and, not long before the great man died, stayed with him at Yasnaya Polyana.
From Tolstoy my grandparents derived a number of unorthodox beliefs and practices that set them apart from their neighbours. They were pacifists and vegetarians, avoided medical treatment, refused to serve on juries and insisted on educating their children at home. As often happens in such cases, some of the next generation rebelled: in the First World War my father ran away, joined the army, was commissioned in the cavalry, ate meat and fish, drank alcohol and submitted to vaccination. But in due course he married my mother, who had already embraced his family's views with enthusiasm, and so Tolstoy's influence persisted. And although I in my turn broke with some aspects of the family tradition, I have retained convictions that have made it difficult to remain at home in any church. Like Tolstoy I have sometimes despaired because the churches conform too readily to the ways and values of this world.
One of the things that impresses me about Brotherhood is the importance attached to St Paul's words, 'Be not conformed to this world'. Of course there are among its adherents many who do not heed the injunction: Brotherhood, like every other movement, has its quota of time-servers and power-seekers. And although Brotherhood, like early Christianity, is in essence a 'way' rather than a church, its members, when they come to organise its activities, inevitably become preoccupied with the kinds of worldly considerations that loom so large in the life of ecclesiastical bodies everywhere. But Brotherhood is not a church: it is a non-credal religious movement calling itself 'Christ's Universal Spiritual School of Practical Christianity', promoting practices - such as pacifism, vegetarianism, natural healing and not going to law - that conflict with what most people regard as 'normal'.
To find out about Brotherhood it is necessary to turn, not to what has been written about it by various people inside or outside the movement, but to what the Leader himself says. Olumba preaches every day, 365 days in the year. Each sermon has three text taken from the New Testament - never from the Old. He speaks spontaneously in the local language, Efik, and everything he says is translated on the spot. I suspect that the usually much shorter English version does not always convey the full flavour of what he says. And, as with Jesus, much of what he says is not addressed to the wider world but directly and specifically to those sitting at his feet.
What is his message? Essentially it is that he has been sent to proclaim the Kingdom of God - the rule of righteousness and truth - not as a future possibility but as a present reality. Like the 17th century mystic Jakob Boehme, he has a 'trinitarian ' view of time. The Age of the Father, represented by Moses and the Old Testament, gave place to the Age of the Son, represented by Jesus, the New Testament and subsequent Christianity; and this has now given place to the Age of the Spirit, represented by himself and all who embrace Brotherhood. This sets him apart from the great company of Christian evangelists who, in Nigeria and elsewhere, are still living in the Age of the Son, and therefore still looking back to the Cross as the focus of their faith.
Olumba believes that it is not appropriate to look back. Christ's assignment has been completed and the great need is for us to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us now. In his emphasis upon the Spirit which, he believes, is present in everyone, his teaching resembles that of Quakers and Unitarians. The difference lies in his belief that, in order to become fully responsive to the Spirit's promptings, we must repent and be baptised; for the end of 'the world' as we know it is near.
What, asks Olumba, is the Spirit now prompting us to do? Nothing more - and nothing less - than taking the gospel of Christ seriously. 'If you profess to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ but fail to practise his teachings,' he says, 'do you really believe in him?' The teachings of Jesus - turning the other cheek, going the second mile, doing good to your enemies - are not seen to be unattainable ideals but practical realities. Through such means Brotherhood has brought peace and reconciliation to parts of Nigeria torn by tribal conflicts. Practising the teachings also means engaging in works of healing: Brotherhood maintains 'spiritual hospitals' where sick people come for prayers, fasting and the laying on of hands. No faith is placed in drugs or inoculations: healing comes only from God. In this, as in so many areas of understanding, we have much to learn from Africa, the heartland from which humanity emerged and to which, spiritually, we must all return.
I can testify that through my links with Brotherhood, the most dynamic spiritual movement ever to emerge from Africa, I have derived inestimable benefits. I have been enabled to get in touch with what, fundamentally, I believe. I believe in God, by which I mean that I have total trust in the mysterious power that I cannot describe and dare not define that is for ever at work making love, joy and peace more abundant in this strife-ridden world. I believe that there is an 'urge to equilibrium' in the universe, which I encounter everywhere - in movements for peace and freedom, in groups seeking a common mind, in the promptings of the Spirit within. Always there is a benevolent process at work that brings order out of chaos, clarity out of confusion, harmony out of discord. The signs of the divine presence are wholeness, wholesomeness, holiness, health, healing. I believe that God is at work within each of us, binding up our broken bodies, integrating our fractured psyches, healing our sick minds. And the same God that is at work in us is also at work in the wider world, bringing healing and reconciliation to warring families, tribes and nations - always working, in spite of man's obstructions, to make the whole world one.
'I seem to behold a Kingdom of God embracing the wide world and of the blessed Christ reigning triumphant in the hearts of men, drawing together the nations of the world into one vast brotherhood, bound to one another by the chain of a common adoration and a mutual love.'
These prophetic words were spoken by James Drummond, the last of the great Unitarian divines. He died in 1918, the year that Olumba Olumba Obu was born. Are there such things as coincidences?
