Westcott Hall, Oldham

We worship with a group of Christians who meet at Westcott Hall, Railway Road Oldham.

What we believe is neatly summarised in Christians Gathered in the Name of the Lord Jesus (PDF File) and elaborated in Truth for Today.

Christian Computing

Some of the most useful things I've come across over the last few years are a series of CD-ROMs containing the writings of the most significant authors amongst those generally known as the "Plymouth Brethren". The first was "The Darby Disk", containing the entire collection of writings of John Nelson Darby (1800-1881). With some 54 volumes contained on one CD, the prospect of freeing up shelf space in my library was immensely attractive! On a more serious note, the ISYS free text retrieval system that's included on the CD makes searching for JND's pearls of wisdom on particular topics a breeze.

Then along came "Truth for Today's Bereans", with the writings of C H Mackintosh, Hamilton Smith, G Davison, W H Westcott, F A Hughes, F B Hole, W W Fereday, N Anderson, J McBroom and H L Rossier (the latter translated into English!) - along with what the compiler describes as "other ministry" by J N Darby, J G Bellett, G V Wigram, A J Pollock, F W Grant, E C Hadley, T Oliver, J W H Nichols, W Kelly, E Dennett, J B Stoney, F G Patterson, L M Grant, W R Dronsfield, H J Vine and J Müller. Also, usefully thrown in, is "The Scripture Quarterly" for 1941-1943, "Truth and Testimony" for 1991-1996, and "Church History" by A Miller. All in all, plenty to get your teeth into there! In fact the disk contains 1500 articles and books, along with 1000 hymns. Thankfully, C H Mackintosh had the highly prized gift of being able to break down the most "meaty" of topics into "milky" chunks, so to speak - and, in my view, he was among the greatest of the 19th century expositors of practical Christianity.

The third in the series is "The Kelly Collection", the ministry of William Kelly - which contains in total over 1000 articles, books, letters and hymns. In all of that, you'll find some 500 answers to questions posed by the readers of "The Prospect" from 1848 to 1850, and "The Bible Treasury" between 1856 and 1906. A great scholar, William Kelly's gift was the clear exposition of quite complex Christian doctrine - the doctrines of the Church, and the Holy Spirit, for example.

The fourth collection is entitled "Mighty Men" and contains some 500 articles and books - all the known writings of  T B Baines, E Dennett, J A Trench, G V Wigram, J G Bellett, A Miller, W Trotter and W T P Wolston. Lesser lights in the Brethren movement than John Nelson Darby, Charles Henry Mackintosh and William Kelly certainly, but gifted expositors none the less. The disk contains hours of excellent reading material.

Finally there's "Spiritual Songs" - "The Hymns Disk" - containing the text of "Spiritual Songs" (1978 edition), music for the 1981 edition in MIDI format, the text of the "Little Flock" hymnbook and MIDI music (1881 edition) and music scores for all the preceding! Also included are Frank Wallace's two books "The History of the Little Flock Hymnbook" and "Biographical Notes of the Authors". If that lot wasn't enough, for the lover of old evangelistic hymns, there's the text of 500 hymns based on Dr W T P Wolston's The Evangelist's Hymnal". And then, thrown in for good measure, is the Morrish Bible Dictionary!

Useful Christian WWW sites

There are lots of them out there - too many to mention and some we wouldn't want to! However, here are some to whet your appetite.