In 2017 Charles Hales walked into his father's office in Sydney. His American business was about to turn over $100 million with 160 staff. Bruce Hales asked him what had happened to the revenue-per-employee ratio he had agreed to. Within eight weeks, 58 people had lost their jobs. Charles Hales told that story to the worldwide membership of his church in November last year, as an illustration of good discipline. Eleven months later his father told the Australian parliament: “I do not have authority over members' political choices, their businesses, or how they take part in civic life.”
What Strive is
Strive is the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church's annual business event, named for the year ahead and held late in the year before it. Strive 26 was held in November 2025 — on the Monday of the week in which its fundraising campaign ran, which the transcript dates as closing on Friday 21 November. It was recorded a week in advance and played to the membership on a Monday evening in every time zone on earth. It runs an hour and three-quarters. It opens like this:
“A quick reminder that there are to be no recordings, photos or screenshots of today's event. We made the decision to make this event virtual, partly to reduce the cost and so that you could all join us from the comfort of your own lounge rooms. This event was recorded a week ago and is being played on Monday evening in every time zone globally.”
The panels are chaired by Dean Hales and Charles Hales, two of Bruce Hales's sons, with Jeremy Joyce, Logan Currie, Roddy Cox, Caleb Hall, Stephen Fooks, Stephen Kirkpatrick, Ben Scott, Callum Jensen, Scott Cantrill, Philip Suggate and Craig Suggate. They are introduced by first name and they speak as officers of what they repeatedly call “the ecosystem”.
What follows is drawn entirely from that transcript. The quotations are theirs.
The numbers nobody outside has had
Three-quarters of the way through, Charles Hales gives the size of the whole operation:
“I believe the whole ecosystem costs about 430 million per annum to run and the school makes up 370 of that… 65% of that 370 million is actually HR costs. That's wages and salaries for teachers and staff.”
At the end, Craig Suggate gives the annual fundraising target — what the church calls “the one number”:
“This year's global 1 number need is [A$260.61] million Australian dollars. This represents a slight increase on 2025, yet a decrease on 2024 from what we collected. This is largely due to the OSG Campus Modernisation program which has now been fully funded… Circa 76% of the needs lie within OSG operating costs, which is our number one priority.”
Logan Currie explains how that number is arrived at:
“We roll up each of the entity in the ecosystem. Each of the regional budgets get rolled up into a global budget. So that provides our total cost for operational expenses across the whole globe. Next box down is the income sources… We have UBT, Tyremax, school fees, government funding, many other varieties in different regions. So the needs less the income equals the shortfall. And that is what GFT provides and that's what you're commonly known as the 1 number.”
Charles Hales, immediately after: “Fair to say without that one number we don't exist, do we?” Logan Currie: “Correct. That's what keeps the lights on.”
The campaign to raise it opened the moment the event ended. Philip Suggate:
“You will receive an email directly after this event with the pledge form attached and we'd encourage you to fill this out as quickly as possible. Your local GFT team will be in contact throughout the week to answer any questions you may have to assist you with completing the pledge. And finally, we're keeping this campaign to a very tight one week sprint which ends on Friday 21st November.”
That was 21 November 2025. The campaign described here has long since closed; what it shows is the method.
A consolidated global budget, a single worldwide target, a named local team contacting each household, and a one-week deadline. This is the organisation whose spokesman told the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that its congregations are “autonomous in their functions, and there's no centralised recordkeeping”.
The year before
Strive 26 was not the first. The transcript of Strive 25, held in November 2024, lets the two be compared, and the comparison shows an organisation reporting against itself year on year the way any group does.
The one number for 2025 was given as A$255 million, or US$190 million, or £150 million — the church converts its annual target into three currencies for a worldwide membership. The 2026 figure of A$260.61 million is, as the panel said, a slight increase on it.
On the money raised, the 2025 event reported that GFT donations in 2024 were around 26% up on 2023, and that compared with 2022 the ecosystem had achieved “a near doubling of donations”. Of that, approximately 26% went to the Campus Modernization Program, about half to OneSchool Global's operating costs, and the balance to Vision Welfare, the Vision Foundation and the Rapid Relief Team.
The Campus Modernization Program is itself a global capital programme with a global target. The 2025 event reported raising $143 million across 2023 and 2024 to bring every campus to a single standard, with works under way at more than 70 campuses and completed at 46 — “the opportunity”, as the panel put it, “to truly do for all what we do for one.”
And one number recurs in both years that is worth noting on its own. The Rapid Relief Team reported working towards “all 287 localities”; Vision Welfare reported “locality care teams now operating 287 localities globally”. That is the same figure Bruce Hales gave the Australian committee for the number of congregations worldwide. The church's religious geography and its operational geography are the same map, counted the same way, by the same centre.
The 2025 event also set out how a family in financial trouble should be helped. The panel asked members to look out for anyone struggling and to work through a four-step process. The first step is: “Is government assistance available?” The second is: “Can the family or relatives help?” Those are the first two questions put to the membership of a church whose Vision Foundation held A$262 million at the end of the following financial year.
The Global Board
Caleb Hall, speaking for UBT, describes the body he answers to and the target it has set:
“UBT and the Global Board have taken this opportunity to restructure and rebuild UBT 2.0 using the VSBE, which is the vision, strategy, budget and execution framework. UBT 2.0's goal is to elevate circumstances for all by doubling total client net profit by 2030 and embracing all our clients from the smallest upwards and also making sure that all of our 56,000 members prosper globally.”
A Global Board. A commercial objective — doubling the combined net profit of members' businesses by 2030. And a global membership figure: 56,000.
Above UBT sits GAP, the Global Advisory Panel. Jeremy Joyce gives its history and its function:
“GAP was originally set up as the Global Advisory panel just over 10 years ago… GAP was quite involved in establishing, helping them establish budgets and strategies and even execute those strategies. And when questions came up through the ecosystem entities, they came to GAP for direction.”
And how the entities are held to the budget, from Logan Currie:
“Each month there is a meeting of each of these entities with a representation in each region, which GAP helps to facilitate. And at those meetings they discuss income versus budget, expenses versus budget and obviously any challenges there are any shortfalls over under budgets and how we're going to resolve it.”
Global budget consolidation, regional representation, monthly performance review, and a central panel the entities go to for direction. Bruce Hales, to the committee: “The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church has no hierarchical structure, no clergy and no appointed ministers.”
The ATO
The reason GAP was rebuilt is stated plainly. The church's commercial arm has been under investigation by the Australian Taxation Office, and OneSchool Global has been examined alongside it.
The panel does not say how the investigation began. It began with a raid. In March 2024 the ATO raided UBT's head office at The Precinct, Sydney Olympic Park, together with Brethren charities and the church's global school headquarters — as reported by James Willis in the Daily Telegraph, which noted that action of that kind is taken only in exceptional circumstances and that the unit running the inquiries, the ATO's Wealth Program, deals with “complex and opaque business structures”.
That is the event the Strive panel is discussing, and the dates matter: an investigation opened in March 2024 was running through the whole of the 2025 federal election campaign, and is still running now.
Logan Currie, in the opening minutes: the ecosystem has “had other distractions and challenges with ATO and OSG audits and the costs that they incur.” Jeremy Joyce: “Over the last 18 months, particularly with the ATO investigation, it's given us an opportunity to reassess and then readjust and rebuild gap 2.0, which is a refreshed gap.”
Caleb Hall sets out where it stands:
“UBT has been through ATO audit over the past 18 months. Although it was a distraction across the business. To date we have made significant progress with the ATO and continue to work with them. They have commented that they have a better understanding of who we are and what we do and there has been a movement forward following ongoing transparency and cooperation. We also want to acknowledge that we've had some challenges and areas that we can improve on.”
And Charles Hales, later:
“I thought it might help to touch on the ATO situation that we had here in Sydney, Australia… whilst we acknowledge that there are things that we could have done better and should have done better, I think honestly, as a team, we would say we're actually glad that it did happen. It's given us an opportunity to sit back and look at our ecosystem, see how we can design it to be stronger and better fit for the future.”
Eight days after Strive 26, the same newspaper reported what “areas that we can improve on” had come to mean. UBT had agreed a voluntary disclosure to the ATO covering income tax and Fringe Benefits Tax issues across the 2021 to 2024 financial years. A UBT spokeswoman told the paper that “a payment of several million dollars has been made to the ATO as part of a voluntary disclosure made by UBT to close the FBT and salary splitting matters off.” She added that UBT was working with the ATO “on two other matters that are ongoing”. The ATO declined to comment, citing taxpayer confidentiality.
So the sequence runs: a raid in March 2024; an investigation still open through the 2025 election; the central governance panel rebuilt as “GAP 2.0” in response; a multi-million-dollar voluntary disclosure on fringe benefits and salary splitting; two further matters outstanding; and, in the same month that last fact became public, the church's leadership telling 56,000 members it was “actually glad that it did happen.”
A voluntary disclosure is not a finding of wrongdoing and attracts reduced penalties by design; UBT thanked the ATO for its fairness and said it had cooperated throughout. Nothing here suggests the church or any of its entities has broken a law. What the record establishes is that the organisation which told an Australian parliament it has no businesses and no vested interests had, at that moment, three live matters with the national tax authority arising out of a raid on its commercial headquarters.
There is also a question in the shape of the disclosure that has not been asked. Fringe benefits tax and salary splitting are, on the face of it, matters for an employer. Each Brethren-owned business is a separate company with its own directors, its own payroll and its own obligations to the ATO. If arrangements of that kind arose inside those businesses, the disclosures should have come from those businesses.
They did not. The disclosure came from UBT — a single entity, covering four financial years, settling the matters off in one payment. That is consistent with UBT having administered the arrangements across its clients rather than merely advising on them, though it is not the only possible explanation and UBT has not been asked to give one. It is worth putting to them, because the answer bears directly on the question the Australian committee is examining: whether thousands of Brethren-owned companies are genuinely independent employers that happen to share a consultancy, or one commercial organisation wearing several thousand company numbers.
“What happened to the ratio that you agreed?”
The single most revealing passage in the transcript is told by Charles Hales as a lesson in cost control. It is worth reading in full.
“Just thinking back to 2017 when I walked into father's office and he always brought us up on that 1 million revenue per person. And at that stage the overheads in the US had risen quite dramatically. We had a number of years where we bled and lost a lot of money and we'd finally made some money. And he asked me what the revenue was going to be that year and I said, I think we might just hit 100 million. And he said, how many staff have you got? And I said 160. And he said, what happened to the ratio that you agreed? And I said, I think I actually said something like, come on, dad. It's like we were actually making some money for the first time. And he said, just, if I was you, I'd probably get back to that ratio. Anyway, I walked out of the office and we regrouped. In the next eight weeks, we cut 58 staff to get back to that ratio.”
Three things are established by that account, by a son of Bruce Hales, to the worldwide membership of the church.
First, that Bruce Hales sets operating ratios for members' businesses — “he always brought us up on that 1 million revenue per person”, a standard applied generally, not advice given once.
Second, that those ratios are agreed. “What happened to the ratio that you agreed?” presupposes a commitment made to him and capable of being broken.
Third, that the consequence of being asked is action. Fifty-eight jobs, eight weeks, no further conversation described.
It is not an isolated account. Dean Hales tells his own, about a business he ran:
“I remember sitting down with Jeremy and then subsequently after with dad and Gareth and I remember dad saying, look, you've got an overhead structure to support a $20 million business, but the last six months you've been averaging a run rate of 10 million. And it was that old point on the ten point plan cut to the concrete. So we had to aggressively cut the overheads and it's ultimately what saved the business.”
Dad, Gareth, a ten-point plan, and an instruction to cut. Gareth Hales gives evidence to the Australian parliament at 11.30am on Friday; Bruce Hales is listed for 1.00pm.
Both men speak carefully about redundancies afterwards — Charles Hales says “we do not want staff… put out on the street”, Jeremy Joyce speaks of doing it “with care and compassion and dignity”, and both point to HR100, a mechanism for redeploying “community staff” into other members' businesses. That qualification should travel with the quotes. It does not change what the quotes describe.
Dean Hales also quotes his father's business teaching directly, citing it by volume: “an awesome quote of BDH. Back in the seminar set version 5, he said, you can't advise anybody until you get accurate reports.” There is a seminar set. It runs to at least five volumes. It is about business.
Why the profits matter
The transcript is unusually frank about what members' business profits are for. Dean Hales:
“This is something we're very passionate about because ultimately it fuels the ecosystem, it gives a basis to continue to give generously to GFT, and that is we need positive EBITDA and cash in our businesses.”
Charles Hales, a minute later, anticipating how it sounds:
“Sometimes you sit up here and you could view us as being obsessed with business, but the fact is there's much more important things in business and money making. But however, the one number is such a big number. The community is so big now, we're seeking to put such good conditions out there for the children learning that we have to raise this money.”
That is the mechanism the whole structure runs on, described by the people who run it: members' businesses generate profit, the profit funds the one number, the one number funds the school. It is also, precisely, a vested interest — the thing Lloyd Grimshaw told the committee the church does not have.
Two global surveys
The church told the committee there is no centralised recordkeeping and no register of members' private activities. The transcript describes two worldwide data-collection exercises, both long-running, both reported back by region.
The Business Vision Survey. Roddy Cox: “We want to thank all our businesses globally for contributing to the confidential survey. And every region will have these presented back to them very shortly. So the revenue has flatlined. However… since 2014, which is the very first survey that we've done globally, we've had significant growth with more than doubling the revenue since that time and very similar stories with the profits as well.” A twelve-year global time series of members' business revenue and profit.
The Household Vision Survey. Roddy Cox again: “understanding the data globally on all our households is very important to all of us and they will be presented back to the community in early 2026. Early indications are the debt has risen slightly. However, 50% of our community are under the age of 30 and there's been a net increase of 295 households in the last 12 months.” Those results were due back to the membership in early 2026 and have not been published.
Household debt, household age profile, and a net household count accurate to a single figure, worldwide. There is a register. It is surveyed, and the results are briefed back.
A third exercise is mentioned in passing by the OneSchool panel: “We recently surveyed 500 businesses globally” on what employers wanted from school leavers, which produced a curriculum partnership with FranklinCovey and DDI.
The script
The fourth panel is about public relations, and it issues the membership with a line to take. Stephen Kirkpatrick:
“PBCC has never altered its position as a fundamental Christian church, promoting Christian principles and supporting one another to live our beliefs. PBCC has no business interests and does not trade apart from minor administrative needs such as the PBCC website.”
And then, explicitly, the instruction:
“It's important for everyone to be easily able and succinctly articulate who PBCC is… We've been labelled a cult which we need to counter. PBCC is a system of care, compassion and teaching to help us move forward in every area of our lives. We're a Christian church, not a cult. We're not controlling business, we're not political influences.”
Charles Hales adds: “if we're going to get charged with that, you need to have absolute confidence to rebut it.” Dean Hales then works through what he calls the three traits of a cult — recruitment, absolute control and brainwashing — and rebuts each.
That first sentence is checkable, and it is wrong. PBCC Services Pty Ltd, ACN 165 353 131, registered in New South Wales and based at The Precinct in Sydney Olympic Park, is wholly owned by Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, ACN 158 542 075 — the church entity itself holds all twelve of its shares. It was called Universal Support Team Pty Ltd until July 2021. Its accounts for the year to 30 June 2022 show revenue of $1,166,866, including $337,916 of “Client Subscription Charges” and $106,651 of “Entity Management”. Among its directors is Merrick Lloyd Grimshaw — the Lloyd Grimshaw the church sent to give evidence in Canberra nine months after this event.
Nothing about that company is improper: it is a registered charity, its constitution restricts its income to charitable objects, and its directors are doing a job. But the church told 56,000 of its own members that it has no business interests and does not trade, while owning a company that invoices subscriptions and bills for entity management — and the man who repeated that position to a parliament sits on its board.
These are the same formulations the church later used in parliament. “No business interests”, “not controlling business”, “not political influences” were distributed to 56,000 people as agreed language before Lloyd Grimshaw sat down in front of the committee and said the church “does not have any businesses, it doesn't have any vested interests.” Six weeks after that, Bruce Hales wrote that he has no authority over members' businesses or how they take part in civic life.
The reputation operation
The same panel describes what the church had built, by November 2025, to handle the coverage:
“In response over the last 18 months, we've significantly increased our proactive efforts in reputation management. So we have a team that's absolutely focused on defending our brands, protecting our interests and advancing our way of life… The initiative we're working on is an ecosystem wide effort supported by a global team of experts assisting in the different work streams.”
The work streams are then listed: a weekly PBCC podcast featuring “brothers and sisters from many countries”; the Our Neighbours productions; a Voices of Brethren music production; a new Brethren Kitchen channel; and new pages on the PBCC website covering “separation, dining, marriage, funerals, technology and more”. The panel closes with this:
“We've been spending time engaging in a proactive way with the media to hopefully result in some additional balanced reporting about the PBCC and our way of life.”
A global team of experts, organised into work streams, defending brands and protecting interests. Lloyd Grimshaw told the committee: “there are no employees in the church, there are no official positions or titles.”
The halls are being centralised too
Ben Scott describes a structure that has been built over the last year and that has not been reported anywhere:
“PBCC Properties is a brand new entity in the ecosystem separate to the church itself, but we're calling it a new era for our Gospel Hall Trust… over the past 12 months we've set up a new legal system, we've presented to every locality, we've designed best practice guidelines and established new roles and responsibilities, the global regional all the way down to the local level. And we've also built a database of what localities plan to spend on building new halls which has uncovered a huge need for funding.”
And what that structure now does:
“Our mission for 2026 is to help localities grade the urgency of their new buildings that they're proposing to make sure that one number in GFT funding must take a priority.”
Global, regional and local roles. A central database of local building plans. Central grading of which congregation may build. He also notes the effect on the people who ran the halls before: “the trustees, many of which have served for many, many years, making sure that they're not feeling like they've lost that input.”
That was announced to the membership in November 2025. Two months later the change surfaced on a public register in England and Wales: the Central GH Trust, charity 1125717, was renamed PBCC Properties UK on 9 January 2026, and its registered office in its own filed accounts is The Precinct London, 1 Finsbury Square, EC2A 1AE. It lends money to local gospel hall trusts, interest-free and recallable at three months' notice, with a committee approving each application. The Charity Commission registered the English congregations in 2014 on a model that treated each local trust as autonomous. They are now being run to a universal standard set globally.
The quiet part, about charitable status
The OneSchool Global panel contains the clearest statement in the document of why any of this matters to the church. Stephen Fooks:
“Recent non routine audits and increased scrutiny by the regulators have made it clear we must invest in strengthening our governance structure and improving the way we do business. And we need to do this to preserve our charitable status and to protect the significant amount of government funding contribution.”
He also tells members how to think about their giving: “We encourage each person to see their contribution not purely as a donation but as an investment.”
And on the schools themselves: “The new Sydney campus is opening in 2026. Was fully funded by the local catchment… the aim is for every location to reflect the same standards, identity and experience. What we do for one, we do for all.”
The nest egg
One more disclosure, from Jeremy Joyce in the closing panel:
“The Endowment Fund was set up to be able to make sure that we're not living hand to mouth, that there's a sustainable way forward. And we're very pleased to report that the returns have been consistently generating over 10% on the invested Endowment fund and the quantum has almost doubled over the last two and a half years, which we're incredibly thankful for. The very generous donations that have come, particularly from those that have sold businesses or had liquidity events of late. And we're now using these distributions to help fund our ecosystem.”
A Global Endowment Fund, returning over 10%, roughly doubled in the two and a half years to November 2025, fed by the proceeds of Brethren business sales, and already distributing into the ecosystem.
Readers of this site will recognise the shape. The Vision Foundation, an Australian registered charity, reported net assets of A$262,315,240 at 30 June 2025, up from A$204,969,947 and A$122,996,260 in the two preceding years — almost exactly a doubling over that period. It made a surplus of A$57.3 million and no grants to charities at all. We set out the structure beneath it in The Brethren's bank. The transcript does not name the Vision Foundation as the endowment, and we do not assert that it is. It does explain why a charity holding a quarter of a billion dollars might make no grants: a nest egg is not meant to be spent.
What this document is, and what it is not
It is not evidence of anything unlawful. Nothing in it suggests the church or any of its entities has broken a law, and the people quoted are describing, in good faith and to their own membership, work they plainly believe in. Much of the content is unremarkable: business advice, concern about children and screens, support for widows, encouragement to budget.
What it is, is the organisation describing itself when it is not being asked to account for itself.
On 21 August, Lloyd Grimshaw told the Australian parliament that the Brethren assemblies are “autonomous in their functions, and there's no centralised recordkeeping”, that there is “no hierarchical appointment to say these people are senior and these aren't”, that “there are no employees in the church, there are no official positions or titles”, and that “there is no such thing as a Brethren business because the church does not have any businesses, it doesn't have any vested interests.”
Set beside that, in the church's own words to its own people: a Global Board, a Global Advisory Panel that entities come to for direction, regional budgets consolidated into a global budget, monthly income-versus-budget reviews by region, a target of doubling members' combined business profits by 2030, two confidential worldwide surveys of businesses and households, a reputation team organised into work streams, a property body with roles from global down to local and a database of what each congregation intends to spend, an ecosystem costing A$430 million a year, a single annual fundraising number of A$260 million raised in a one-week sprint, an endowment fund fed by business sales, and a father who sets the revenue-per-employee ratio his sons' companies run at.
Both accounts cannot be true.
One further point of timing. Strive is named for the year ahead and held in the November before it, which means Strive 27 is weeks away. The last one was recorded before the Australian parliament had called anyone from this church to give evidence, before the referral to the charities commission, and before Bruce Hales was asked to appear. Whoever chairs the next one will be speaking to the same 56,000 people, about the same ecosystem, with all of that behind them.
How this was put together
This article is based on transcripts of Strive 26, held in November 2025, and Strive 25, held in November 2024. The speakers are quoted as the transcript records them; where the transcription is plainly garbled we have either omitted the passage or marked the reading in square brackets, and the figure given for the 2026 one number is one such case — the transcript renders it as “26061 million Australian dollars”, which we read as A$260.61 million. That reading is supported by the 2025 figure of A$255 million given at Strive 25 and by the panel's description of the new number as a slight increase on it.
Everyone quoted was speaking in a stated role within the church's business ecosystem, at an event organised by it and addressed to its membership. Nothing from the welfare, family or schooling panels concerning the circumstances of named individuals or children has been used.
Lloyd Grimshaw's evidence is from the official transcript of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, 21 August 2026, with the qualification he gave: that when he said “the church” he meant the secretariat entity that is the charity in Australia, and that he was nonetheless “representing the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church and representing the fellowship”. Bruce Hales's statements are from his written submission to the same inquiry, Submission 366, dated 5 October 2026, published in full here.
The account of the March 2024 ATO raid, the voluntary disclosure and UBT's response is the reporting of James Willis in the Daily Telegraph, published 25 November 2025, and the quoted words are UBT's own statement to that newspaper.
PBCC Services Pty Ltd's ownership, former name, address and officeholders are from its current and historical company extract at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and its revenue from its financial statements for the year ended 30 June 2022, which state on their face that they have not been audited or reviewed. That Merrick Lloyd Grimshaw and Lloyd Grimshaw are the same person is confirmed by Brethren Intelligence.
The charity figures are from filed accounts and public registers: PBCC Properties UK (charity 1125717, formerly the Central GH Trust) from its own accounts and the Charity Commission register; the Vision Foundation from its financial report for the year ended 30 June 2025 as filed with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.
The church denies involvement in the 2025 Australian federal election and denies that it controls its members' businesses. Nothing here alleges unlawful conduct by any person, company or charity named.
Brethren Intelligence has investigated the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church since 2020. The directory holds 8,409 companies and 9,000 individuals across 20 countries. The five systems that run the church worldwide are set out free here.
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