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Overview

25 Things You Should Know About the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church

Mainstream media coverage tends to focus on the obvious — no TV, no radio, separate housing, not eating with outsiders. This list covers what actually matters: the wealth, the control, the cost of leaving, and the gap between what the PBCC claims and what the evidence shows.

Source Open & Candid / Brethren Exposed
Published March 2025
Category Overview
Read time 8 min
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The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, formerly known as the Exclusive Brethren, is a controversial sect with approximately 56,000 members worldwide. What follows are the 25 most important points to understand — drawn from company filings, charity records, court documents and testimony from former members.

Leadership & Membership
1
A church where the leader Bruce Hales and the wider Hales family have likely amassed a combined wealth of over $1 billion.
2
A church that you are born into. You cannot simply decide to join.
7
A church where you can only be a trustee of a gospel trust if you are in fellowship with Bruce Hales. He alone has the final say on whether you remain a member.
13
A church where non-members must make an appointment to attend a meeting.
Education & Employment
3
A church where children attend their own schools from around age six and cannot attend university in person.
4
A church where members can only work for other members' businesses or start their own — severely restricting career choice.
10
A church where approximately one in every eight working-age members owns a trading business.
12
A church where not one member works as a doctor, nurse, firefighter, teacher, lawyer, banker, politician, professional sportsperson, police officer or member of the armed forces. There are no public servants.
Financial & Commercial
9
A church where members operate the Universal Business Team (UBT) — a business advisory with global revenues of approximately £300 million, serving Brethren businesses only and heavily influenced by the Hales family.
11
A church that benefits from charitable status worth an estimated £50 million per year, while likely spending less than 10% of that benefit on charities outside its own network.
6
A church with hundreds of millions in assets, with all meeting rooms owned by charities called Gospel Trusts.
8
A church with over 600 registered charities worldwide — including the Gospel Trusts — with not one female trustee.
14
A church where member businesses have profited from Covid contracts, the war in Ukraine, floods in New Zealand, fires in Australia and Grenfell Tower regulatory changes.
24
A church where membership costs approximately $25,000 per year for a couple — not including school fees or annual funding drives.
Political Activity
15
A church that claims it did not coordinate thousands of members to campaign for the Liberal Party in the Australian election — despite former members stating it was highly organised from the top.
16
A church where members have donated AUD $2 million to right-of-centre political parties across Australia, New Zealand, UK, Sweden, Canada and the USA — excluding tele-campaigning, leaflet drops or donations below reporting thresholds.
17
A church where members do not vote in elections — relying instead on God's will.
Control & Surveillance
20
A church where members have paid for surveillance of former members.
23
A church where the travel of all members is controlled — all trips require approval through the centralised travel operation, Orbit.
25
A church where leavers are immediately removed from all local community WhatsApp groups and their LinkedIn connections quickly disappear.
Human Cost
5
A church where leaving or being excommunicated typically means losing your family, children, job and home.
18
A church where LGBTQ+ members have been subjected to conversion therapy and so-called cure drugs. The only option for a gay member to live openly is to leave — and be told by family that it would be easier if they were dead.
19
A church that offered to pay a victim of sexual abuse on the condition of their silence.
21
A church where thousands of families have been broken apart by the doctrine of separation.
22
A church where hundreds of members have broken the law and requested leniency on the grounds of their Christianity and church work — drink driving offences being among the most common.
An evidence support pack for all 25 points is available at a small charge for journalists. Contact Open & Candid via the contact page.

The four sons of church leader Bruce Hales — Gareth, Dean, Charles and Greg — have recently recorded a series of podcasts in which they deny substantially all of the above and present the PBCC as an orthodox Christian church, misunderstood by the outside world. The podcasts are hosted by Brethren spokesman Lloyd Grimshaw.

The PBCC presents itself as a loose collection of like-minded individuals with shared values. And yet, somehow, those individuals have built the Universal Business Team — a $600 million global operation serving over 3,000 Brethren businesses. They have created OneSchool Global, one of the largest private school networks in the world. They have developed a global charity in the Rapid Relief Team. And they have managed to charter flights between Australian states to campaign for the same political party.

"I will stop calling it a cult when it stops ticking the boxes of a cult." — Former member, 2025.

At Open & Candid, we see a highly commercial operation of considerable organisational sophistication — one which appears to have moved steadily away from anything resembling Christianity and to be driven considerably more by profits than prophets.

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