Latest news with #ProdigalSon
Washington Post
01-08-2025
- Sport
- Washington Post
The Commanders are coming, one way or another. Pony up, taxpayers.
I'm not in the predictions business, but to those of you hoping and praying that the Washington Commanders will come back to D.C., I offer this: Let not your hearts be troubled. The Commanders, who can't wait to flee Landover, Maryland, will undoubtedly come to rest on the last remaining large, undeveloped tract of District land, to wit: 180 acres commonly known as the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium Campus. Yes, Washington's football team will, like the Prodigal Son, come back to the city it abandoned in 1997, settling into a first-class, 65,000-seat, state-of-the-art, spanking-new stadium with a roof and supporting facilities and infrastructure for use as a franchise member of the NFL whose total value has been estimated at around $190 billion. The Commanders franchise alone weighs in around $6.3 billion as of August 2024 — so, unlike the Prodigal Son, it won't return spent and emptyhanded.
Cambrian News
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Cambrian News
Roger Wagner exhibition to open in Machynlleth
A man given to mystical depictions of great trees in landscapes and pastoral scenes such as the exhibition catalogue's cover image, The Fields are White, which shows angels harvesting a field of corn, Roger also derives much inspiration from Biblical stories. He has often returned to subjects like the Annunciation, the Walking on the Water, the Prodigal Son and Paul on the Road to Damascus, while one of his most affecting single images is that of the aged St Simeon holding the infant Jesus in the Temple.
New York Post
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Hollywood agent allegedly stole $2M from actors — then gave this bizarre excuse to hide crime
A Hollywood agent stole $1.8 million from struggling actors on shows such as 'Law & Order' — claiming some of their checks were late because of 'earthquakes' while enjoying spa treatments at the Four Seasons, Manhattan officials said Tuesday. Mark Measures, the disgraced former owner of KMR Talent, bilked 160 actors out of the hunk of dough in addition to stealing from six employees who worked at his agency, according to a 40-count indictment unsealed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The washed-up agent, 60, was fueled by his illicit greed to fund his personal lifestyle — which included the fancy self-care hotel sessions as well as splurging $55,000 on seats at the Arena, the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, said Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Rachana Pathak. Advertisement 4 Washed-up Hollywood talent agent Mark Measures stole nearly $2 million from struggling actors he represented, Manhattan prosecutors announced Tuesday. Steven Hirsch 'This was during the time that actors and agents were begging for money,' Pathak told the judge. 'Raiding escrow accounts is black-letter embezzlement.' Measures also allegedly used the money for purchases at high-end clothing stores such as Zegna, Saks Fifth Avenue and Revolve, to pay off creditors, settle AMEX bills and make car payments. Advertisement The scheme, which ran between June 2021 and March 2024, stole residuals and holding fees from wannabe-bigtime actors who were represented in KMR, including those working in film, commercials and voiceover work nationwide. Measures, who lives in Los Angeles, would find any excuse in the book to not pay his clients, blaming everything from banks, 'earthquakes, power blackouts, sick employees, and mail delays' — until he ultimately ghosted them, prosecutors said. One of his victims, Joe Gately — a Harlem actor who has appeared in episodes of 'Law & Order' and 'Blue Bloods' — told The Post after Tuesday's arraignment that Measures owed him $6,500 over a drug-advertisement campaign in 2021. 'He's a thief,' Gately, 59, seethed outside the courtroom. 'We've all wondered where the money went, so today offered a little information. It's not surprising at all he couldn't pay.' Advertisement 4 Joe Gately, one of Measures' alleged victims, appeared in an episode of TV's 'Prodigal Son.' MAX Messages including emails released by the DA's office showed Measures' clients demanding their money from the washed-up agent, including one where an alleged victim is seeking thousands of dollars owed to her for desperately needed medical treatment. 'Those funds (that seem to have been stolen by you at this point) were to be used for my IVF treatment,' the emailed message reads. 'I am in the doctors office in tears as you've put me in a really challenging financial position by stealing my almost $20,000 from me.' Measures is also accused of embezzling $26,000 from wages intended for the retirement accounts of six workers at his New York City-based office. Advertisement 4 Measures was allegedly fueled by greed to fund his personal lifestyle — including by spending at least $55,000 on seats at the Arena, the home of the Los Angeles Lakers. Steven Hirsch He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment and refused to answer whether he stole money from his clients. Judge Althea Drysdale ordered Measures to turn over his passport before releasing him, as the charges were not bail-eligible. 'As much as you hail from California, you must be here on any day that I tell you to be here,' the judge warned. 4 Emails released by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office show Measures' clients confronting the talent agent about their missing money. DANY Press Office KMR operated as a franchise of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union until it was suspended in March 2024. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg urged victims to contact his office as the investigation remains ongoing. Advertisement 'Rather than pay the actors and employees, the defendants used their hard-earned money to fund his lavish lifestyle,' Bragg said in a statement. Measures is due back in court July 15.
Telegraph
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Listen: The lost tapes that reveal Kenneth Williams's hidden Christianity
Suggest to most people that Kenneth Williams – Carry On star, raconteur and regular panellist on Radio 4's Just a Minute – was a devout Christian and they are quite likely to answer with one of his famous catchphrases: Stop mucking about! And you certainly wouldn't think he had any interest in the Bible if you listened to his 1987 edition of Desert Island Discs, recorded a year before his death at 62. Told by presenter Michael Parkinson that he could have the works of Shakespeare and the Bible to help him while away his days as a castaway, the offer was met with silence. Here and there, though, Williams dropped the odd clue: the occasional recorded remark; mentions in his diaries; one of his Desert Island Discs that was a piece of scripture set to music by Brahms. But stored away, almost entirely forgotten, were a series of recordings of Williams reading Bible stories, made 50 years ago. Now they have come to light again and form the heart of a BBC radio programme about Williams and his faith. Called Said the Actor to the Bishop, it will be broadcast in Radio 4's Archive on 4 strand on April 12, to mark the start of Holy Week, the most sacred time in the Christian calendar. The bishop in question is James Jones, a former bishop of Liverpool, and former chair of the Hillsborough Independent Panel. Back in the 1970s, he was a producer at the evangelical organisation Scripture Union. Audio cassettes were highly popular then and he planned a series of tapes of famous actors reading Bible stories. Keen to use the best possible storytellers, he hired Derek Nimmo, Thora Hird, Dora Bryan – and Kenneth Williams, who by then was entrancing children through his storytelling on BBC One's Jackanory. The rediscovered tapes reveal Williams using his extraordinary talent for voices to bring alive characters in the New Testament: he is a terrifying Devil, a brave John the Baptist, a plotting Pharisee, a very human Jesus. According to Jones: 'It was his own faith that he brought to these stories. You can hear he believes in the way he reads.' He could hear Williams' own experience of temptation in how he recounts Jesus being tempted by the Devil. 'Temptations were something like all of us that he lived through. But he was quite self-controlled. He didn't often give in to them,' Jones says in the programme. An example would be his friendship with the gay playwright Joe Orton with whom he holidayed. 'He wouldn't do what Joe was doing but he would quite like to know what was going on.' The most moving moments come, though, with Williams's reading of two of Jesus's parables – the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. His account of the Good Samaritan, helping a man left beaten on the roadside, is full of tenderness and compassion. And with the Prodigal Son, as he recounts how the spendthrift older brother returns home after a ruinous life and is embraced with love by his delighted father, there is something else there too. 'He brought to it his relationship with his own father. There was an ache there for that love,' says Jones. When Jones approached Williams, the actor was at the height of his success with the Carry On films, while also famous for radio's Hancock's Half Hour and Round the Horne, whose characters included Rambling Syd Rumpo and Sandy, of the camp couple Julian and Sandy, who often spoke the gay language Polari. While Jones was well aware of this success, he had no idea of Williams's private life – his solitude, his difficulties with his father, his gay encounters and, above all, his personal faith which he kept particularly quiet. He got an inkling of it when Williams readily agreed to read the stories, and then heard far more about his religious beliefs when they talked over several lunches held at the time of the recordings. 'Faith really mattered to him,' says Jones. 'He would end every day praying and asking for forgiveness.' In his diaries (published in 1993) Williams at one point writes: 'I am full of the feeling of nearness to God…For me God means Truth and Goodness and Beauty…one real act of love…please let me be capable of it.' His was a religious sensibility that, Jones says, is almost mystical. The diaries also reveal a man with many friends, who he considers gifts from God, but also a person of great complexity, who had no life partner, could sometimes by cruel and rude and at times struggled with his homosexuality. 'He had an ambiguous attitude to fame, drawn to wanting to be recognised,' his authorised biographer Wes Butters says in the programme. 'In the Baptism story Jesus has to hold on to the voice he hears, and that is a very Kenneth Williams story – he wanted to hold on to the values that matter.' Jones says: 'I do wonder if there was a sense of shame in him about who he was, about his sexuality. 'He was very critical of the Church and bishops, didn't like the structure. He didn't go to church. He felt his urge to entertain people would get in the way of being part of a church community. He had to get away to pray. Performance was a barrier to God.' Some people claimed that he renounced his Christianity later in life but Jones says he knows nothing of that. While Jones wanted Williams to read the Bible stories, full of admiration for his narrative skills but also a fan of his quick wit and mastery of double entendre used to impressive effect in the Carry On films and Round the Horne, Scripture Union was not so sure. They feared that Williams's bawdy reputation would harm their own. But it didn't happen. The tapes sold well but have since been forgotten. Scripture Union later destroyed the master tapes, but Jones kept his own copies. A mention of them to a BBC producer led to the programme. Even Williams's own friends – including fellow broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, who tells the programme that Williams 'was the funniest man I ever met' – knew nothing of this side of Williams's life. But Wes Butters was aware. 'We would meet up every two or three weeks,' Butters tells Archive on Four. 'I wanted to hear all about the Carry On films... He would often talk about the quiet inner life and his striving for God.' Born in 1926, Williams was the son of Louie, as he called his mother, with whom he shared a mutual devotion, and Charles, a hairdresser who was a Methodist and sent his son to Sunday school which is where he first discovered Bible stories. The family lived above his father's barber's shop in Bloomsbury, while Kenneth was evacuated during the Second World War to live with an Oxfordshire vet, returning with a new accent of elongated vowels. After army service he went into repertory theatre, wireless dramas and comedy, West End revues – and the Carry On films, appearing in more than any other actor. His diaries, published posthumously after his death in 1988, reveal his faith cheek by jowl with his film work. In 1964 he reports deciding to give up 'fags, then drink' for Lent, to 'start making some sort of gesture to God'. In the same paragraph he records a costume fitting for the James Bond spoof Carry On Spying. In 1988, Jones, by then working as a vicar, was on the top deck of a bus in London when he spotted Williams, whom he hadn't seen for years, step off it and walk down the street. He thought about going after him but the bus moved off. A week later, Williams wrote his last entry in his diary – 'Oh, what's the bloody point' – and died of an overdose of barbiturates. Jones was desolate, forever wondering if he should have gone after him. 'It would be sad if all people remembered Kenneth for was 'infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me' [his iconic line from Carry On Cleo ],' says Brandreth. 'Now, thanks to these Bible readings, we get another side – Kenneth telling what for many people is the greatest story ever told.'
Telegraph
09-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
What I saw inside Britain's most secretive Christian group
Chapter 15 of the Gospel of Luke tells the parable of the Prodigal Son. 'A certain man had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give to me the share of the property that falls to me,' it reads in John Nelson Darby's translation of the Holy Bible, the version favoured by the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. The son went his own way, 'into a country a long way off', where he was 'living in debauchery'. Then, a famine hits and, realising he has made a terrible mistake, the Prodigal Son returns, welcomed back into the open arms of his father. He 'was lost and has been found'. This is a passage that has particular significance for Ross Markham, now 42. He was born into the Plymouth Brethren, Britain's most secretive Christian group, but left briefly, aged 17. This Prodigal Son only made it as far as Woking, but he was, he says, living in debauchery. He was 'like the son in Luke 15… I was disillusioned. I didn't feel the Church was fulfilling enough. But I was probably just ungrateful.' Within a year, he was back. It is a Wednesday night, and we are gathered in a Brethren meeting hall, a windowless low-rise brick building in a business park on the outskirts of Hereford. There is no artwork, no cross, no pulpit – just a carpeted floor sloping gently downwards, like a bowl, to the centre of the room, and benches in concentric circles with a handheld microphone set at every other seat. Ross is sitting near the front, in a sea of men in blue checked shirts. On Sunday, the Lord's Day, they all wear white. The women sit behind the men, the babies in their arms. Ross's wife, Charlotte, and their daughters are on the benches towards the back, dressed in their finest clothes, their heads covered with silk scarves. While one woman from the congregation is invited to choose a hymn at the beginning of the service, the rest are not permitted to speak in meetings. I am sitting at the back of the congregation, accompanied by an ever-present representative from the Church's communications team. Visitors to Brethren meeting halls are unusual, even though they are technically public places of worship. According to the Church, 'well-disposed' members of the public are welcome at some meetings, but in practice few attend. And, of course, without a chaperone from the congregation, even a 'well-disposed' visitor would struggle to get past the electric gate that juddered open as we drove in. It is especially unusual that a journalist has been granted access to the inner sanctum. The Brethren – a group that has roughly 18,500 UK members, and 50,000 worldwide – has always generated headlines, but its battle against negative media portrayal has taken on a new dimension in the social-media age. Ex-members are appearing online in increasing numbers, giving their life in the group a less than favourable review, making allegations of control, coercion and mandated shunning at the hands of Church elders. In its 200-year history, the Brethren has had many names. 'Exclusive Brethren' is a term from which it has distanced itself, although 'Exclusive' still formed part of the group's name on Companies House until five years ago. It has also been referred to as both the Closed Brethren and the Raven-Taylor-Hales Brethren, after a succession of its leaders. It calls itself a church; the media calls it a 'sect'; its critics call it a 'cult'. I drove to meet Ross Markham and his family, then, with a degree of trepidation. Charlotte meets me at the door with their red-haired four-year-old daughter Evangeline. It is a spacious, detached mock-Tudor house with sweeping stairs to a landscaped garden. The Markhams moved to Hereford from near London in the mid-noughties to help set up a new assembly from scratch. Their three elder daughters still live in the family home, as all Brethren do until they marry. Biancha, 20, works for the family businesses, which produce fire-alarm systems. Cristie, 18, works for the Church. Amina, 16, is studying for her GCSEs at the Brethren school in Tewkesbury, an hour away by minibus. The formerly strict dress code for Brethren women seems to have relaxed. Ross and Charlotte's elder daughters are wearing make-up, as are most of the other young women I meet. When they are not in church, where their heads must be covered, they wear a 'token', usually a headband or clip. Life in the Church follows a predictable pattern. Meetings take place daily, although some are now over Zoom, and at least three times a day on Sundays, starting with the Lord's Supper – a Brethren Holy Communion – at 6am. Socialising is largely confined to the home, so entertaining other members of the fellowship is a cornerstone of Brethren life. The Markham family has a vast sitting room, with six sofas and armchairs arranged in a circle, for this purpose – as well as a dining table that seats 20. Charlotte grew up as one of 10 home-schooled children in a Brethren assembly in Worcester. She had a secretarial job in a Brethren family business after leaving school. But even if she had wanted to work following her marriage to Ross, aged 21, she wouldn't have time, 'what with all the entertaining at the weekend'. Inside, their home is immaculate, the surfaces polished to a high shine. In the downstairs bathroom, the loo paper has been folded into origami, like in a hotel. On the upright piano in the living room, there is a book of Taylor Swift sheet music, and above it, a large canvas portrait of all the Brethren leaders from the early 19th century to the present day. The first is John Nelson Darby, 1800-1882, an Irish ex-lawyer, ex-curate, and the founding father. In 1827, he fell off his horse and in the period of convalescence that followed, became convinced that the Anglican Church had lost its way. It had, among other things, become too hierarchical. He joined with a group of like-minded people to form a new assembly that worshipped in what they saw as true accordance with biblical teaching, that would separate itself from the sins of the world, and even from other Christian denominations. There was to be no clergy, no leader, and they would 'break bread' as equals in fellowship. Still, Darby soon became the dominant personality in the Brethren movement. In the intervening years, there have been splits within the Brethren, where leaders, assemblies and families have disagreed over doctrinal or spiritual matters, and separated into smaller factions as a result. The most significant exodus – and the most disastrous for numbers – followed what has come to be known as 'the Aberdeen incident'. In the 1960s, the Church's leader was James Taylor Jr, the US-based son of an Irish linen merchant, who had also led the Brethren. He decreed that members could no longer eat or drink with non-members, ending mixed marriages, splitting families and ruining livelihoods virtually overnight. In 1970, the year he would die from an alcohol-related illness, Taylor Jr was staying with a local Brethren member in Aberdeen. He was found in bed with another member's wife and, on the Saturday, drunkenly gave a strange and scatological address to the congregation. About 8,000 Brethren left the Church in the aftermath. The Church today looks very different. The current leader – Bruce Hales of Sydney, Australia – is no longer referred to as the 'Man of God', or 'the Elect Vessel', but simply as 'Mr Hales'. In 2002, he described the Aberdeen incident as 'a test of loyalty to the truth'. Hales is interested in business and education, the Church says, rather than tightening restrictions on his congregants. Under his leadership, a thriving and surprisingly far-reaching network of Brethren businesses and private schools has flourished, as well as a Church-run charitable organisation, the Rapid Relief Team (RRT), which provides food and support to organisations working in disaster relief, and supports homeless missions, among other causes. Church members attend conferences and seminars run by the business arm, Universal Business Team (UBT), and Brethren-linked businesses were awarded as much as £2.2 billion in government Covid contracts. Many of the Brethren's 'rules' are left to personal discretion, the Church says. And the division of the day is not between errant leaders and a faithful flock, but between members and ex-members, who have, in the Church's view, taken to smearing them online. In November 2024, long before I met the Hereford assembly face to face, I spoke to an ex-member who goes by the pseudonym Maria Compton. Last year, she published a memoir: Out of Faith: A Mother, a Sect, and a Journey to Freedom. 'Fear overruled my life, really, from about the age of four,' she said over Zoom. 'Not just about the Rapture' – in Maria's day, Brethren believed that Christ would return and take true believers before the end of the world, leaving the rest of humankind to face something called the Tribulation on Earth – 'but I was really scared to step out of line.' Her memoir details a life in the Church that was puritanical, cruel and restrictive for those who strayed. Her aunt, who had left, was shunned; her photos cut out of the family albums by her grandmother. Her sister, she says, was punished for watching the royal wedding of Charles and Diana on a TV through a shop window, as television was banned. Maria says she was separated from other children at school for assemblies and religious education, and was not allowed to take swimming lessons or cut her hair. When she grew up, she endured years of marriage to a man who she claims controlled and abused her, trapped by the Church's rules against divorce. She plucked up the courage to leave in 2013, aged 44. She was subsequently cut off from her family and her children, two of whom she had custody of until they were 16, but who chose to return to the Church afterwards. She heard from another ex-Brethren member that they had married. She has no idea how many grandchildren she has. In Facebook groups and online forums, hundreds of people have posted similar stories: of estrangement, separation and silencing. The Church rejects Maria's claims, and the claims of other leavers like her. From the outside, in some ways, life in the Brethren community harks back to a golden past always just out of reach. The Church helps young couples buy their first home. Poverty is virtually unheard of. The elderly are cared for – at home, wherever possible. The family unit is sacrosanct and the community is tight-knit, so much so that the members-only supermarket, Campus&Co, where Ross and Charlotte mainly shop, runs on trust alone and has no cashiers. Ross has seen both sides, having left the Church and repented. He had his eyes opened to the ways of the world, he says, and he did not like what he saw. 'I was very naive, I took the things we had for granted,' he says. 'I didn't realise how much my parents did for me. I turned my back on all [these] good things… I know I'm only alive today because of this place.' The 'good things' Ross refers to are the social, spiritual and material riches available to those living within the Brethren ecosystem. Brethren marry other Brethren, and the divorce rate is negligible. It is permitted – but frowned upon – in the case of infidelity. On his 21st birthday, Ross married Charlotte, a family friend. 'I was friends with her brothers,' he says, 'so I was often visiting, but actually I was there to see her… Quite a few of my friends said, 'You're way too young to get married,' but I just wanted to crack on in life, having come back and had a conversion. Life took on a different dimension.' Their first three daughters arrived in quick succession, their fourth, a late addition, 12 years later. Brethren children are baptised into the faith as young infants, then start attending meetings. They are educated in well-equipped Brethren-only schools, called OneSchool Global (OSG) campuses, with low fees subsidised by donations from Brethren businesses. Students often travel long distances on buses driven by parent volunteers, as Amina does. If a family can't afford the fees, which is rare, but not unheard of, then another family might pay on their behalf. 'We tend to support each other and know each other's circumstances fairly well,' the Church's spokesperson says. There are just seven students in Amina's year, and 142 at her school in total, drawn from a catchment that stretches from Hereford to Swindon. Business acumen is highly prized in the Church and a tour of the OSG campus near Gloucester demonstrates that this is introduced to students from an early age. There is no religious education at school, other than the basics mandated by the national curriculum. That is best left, they believe, to parents. On-campus attendance at university is considered 'incompatible with [the Church's] beliefs and practices', although Church members can pursue a degree through distance learning. Few do. Exact figures aren't available when I ask, but a spokesperson says that while a majority go on to gain a tertiary qualification – CIM marketing courses are popular – about 10 per cent will study for a degree. On leaving school, young Brethren are all but guaranteed well-paid jobs in Brethren-run companies. Ross went into business with his father and brother and now runs two successful companies in the business park where the Brethren in Hereford is based. The larger of these has a turnover of £16 million. A happy family life, a happy marriage, and success at work. What's the secret, I ask? 'Just keep your head down and have a good life,' Ross says. It is all within reach for those within the bounds of the Church. The question is, though, what happens when you leave. Ross Markham grew up in Guildford, Surrey, in the cloistered life of the Brethren assembly. When he briefly left the Church in 2000 and moved to Woking, it was 'to experience the world', he says. But that is where his life unravelled. 'I got caught up in all sorts of stuff,' he remembers, smoking 40 cigarettes a day and partying, behaviours that he says 'aren't aligned with Christian values'. Ross sees this time spent outside the fellowship as the root cause of health issues he has struggled with ever since. In early 2001, he was hospitalised with what turned out to be Crohn's disease, having lost three stone in a month. 'Dad reached out to me regularly, appealing to me to come back,' he says of that time. 'He didn't turn his back on me. But I respected the separation.' Everything I had previously read regarding the Church was about this, the controversial 'doctrine of separation' that forms the bedrock of Brethren theology. It is based on 2 Timothy 2:19 which, in Darby's translation, reads: 'The Lord knows those that are his; and, Let every one who names the name of the Lord withdraw from iniquity.' It is that last phrase – 'withdraw from iniquity' – that is taken literally, and has informed two centuries of the Church's history. Over time, and under different leaders, the exact interpretation of what it means to 'withdraw from iniquity' – to separate oneself from the evils of the world – has varied considerably. The Church's rigid code of conduct has, at points in its surprisingly recent history, prohibited television, pop music, radio, tabloids, membership of professional bodies and unions, miniskirts, voting in elections, pet ownership (deemed a distraction from God), and visiting pubs, restaurants and cinemas. It is challenging to discern which rules remain in place within the Church and which have been relaxed. Each time I ask, I feel I get a slightly different answer. Probing on the specifics, I am told that members can exercise their own moral judgment, but it is the job of Church elders to provide 'warnings' and 'instruction', including to specific households and individuals. In an official statement, the Church then says 'there are no specific rules as such – we follow a Christian life and are guided by Christian teaching and values'. In practice, the biggest and most significant U-turn of recent years has been on technology. The most senior leader in the Church once called the internet a 'torrent of filth', yet Brethren schools are now almost ostentatiously hi-tech. Their classrooms (which are called 'studios') are tablet-controlled. Amina shows me a Brethren-only app on Ross's phone (she, like most Brethren teenagers, has no phone of her own). It lists every Brethren family in every assembly in the world, with their address, photograph and children's names; a live calendar of social events and services; plus a register of births, marriages and deaths. Quite something, for a church that until a few years ago eschewed technology almost entirely. Social-media use is discouraged, although the Brethren are curiously well represented on LinkedIn, as it has a business focus. There are now smartphones and computers in all Brethren businesses, and most Brethren homes, although it is unclear to what degree their usage is monitored. I have read online that all devices must have 'Streamline3' installed – internet filtering software provided by the Church's business arm, UBT. The first time I ask about this, I am told it is at parents' discretion. But the Church later clarifies in writing: 'Our members would ensure their electronic devices are protected with appropriate anti-virus and filtering software, particularly in cases where they are accessed by children.' Devices can be purchased from UBT directly with this software pre-installed. Perhaps other rules have persisted, albeit in unwritten form. Members still do not eat with non-members, although Brethren visit restaurants, provided they can eat separately from other diners. Ross's family, he assures me, likes to visit Nando's. In the Markham home, there are no books on display apart from Brethren index books, the Bible, and a vast number of pocket-sized books of Brethren ministry, arranged by date in revolving cabinets: the ministries of Bruce Hales are transcribed virtually verbatim and distributed to Brethren households for a subscription fee. As well as reflections on scripture and theological musings, these volumes include esoteric lifestyle advice. One entry, titled 'BEACHES: UNCLEAN AND UNSUITABLE PLACES', reads: 'What can you say about it? People are there half naked. Well, let the Brethren judge. Is it right to go to an unclean place?' That seems harsh, I say. Would Ross take his family to the beach? 'There's nothing wrong with the beach… But if I took my kids to the beach, they wouldn't wear bikinis… because it's kind of just the thin end of the wedge…' The Church's communications office, in a slightly terse follow-up, tells me it is not the beach that is the issue per se, but what humans have made of the beach – the 'moral depravity' and nudity, later adding, 'Any ministry, including the one referred to here, requires context which members of the Church would understand.' They later issue me with a picture of Ross's family smiling at the seaside, as if to prove a point. I am no closer to understanding whether the rules are written, or unwritten, compulsory, or discretionary, and I feel a little uneasy. And we haven't even got to the biggest question of all. When Ross returned to the Brethren, he says, he was welcomed back with open arms after he put in a conciliatory call to Church elders to persuade them his motives were pure. The controversial practice of 'withdrawing from' members of the Church who break the rules has drawn more criticism than anything else related to the Brethren. Historically, those who broke the rules would first be banned from meetings, and then cut off entirely, but the Church says this is now rare. For ex-members, it is what seems to have caused the most hurt of all – cleaving parents from children, sisters from brothers, and husbands from wives. The Church is insistent that family and friends are free to be in contact with those who have left. A spokesperson says that 'sometimes, when harmful or upsetting actions have been taken, members may feel the need to distance themselves from a former member. In rare cases, when no common ground can be found, stepping away from a former member can be a necessary last resort.' He continues, 'Fortunately, such actions are rare.' I do not ask Ross what he would do if his daughters decided to leave. What I ask, instead, is what his biggest hopes for them are. 'The aspiration would be simple,' he answers. 'That they marry a good guy who's devoted his life to Jesus. I don't want to be too prescriptive.' Getting ready for the evening meeting with Ross's daughters is not dissimilar to getting ready for a night out, not that a night out would be allowed. Their parents open a bottle of wine with dinner, while I eat separately at the long dining room table. The girls – Ross and Charlotte's daughters and a visiting niece – come downstairs wearing dresses and heels with handbags that match their outfits. They help me do my hair, carefully pinning on a silk headscarf. Compared with the giddy atmosphere at home, the mood in church is altogether more solemn. A Brethren minister begins to speak. 'Lovely scripture that, isn't it?' he says, and other Brethren men chip in with their thoughts as they see fit. The Prodigal Son, one explains, 'thought there was something better out there'. He discovered there wasn't. A group of 200 Brethren are gathered, and I have lost sight of Ross in the sea of blue shirts. But I imagine, at that moment, he is nodding. 'I'm incredibly thankful I was born into the fellowship,' he said to me earlier. For him, there is nothing better. Life in the Brethren is the best there is.
