Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches

The Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches, before 1976 known under the name of National Fellowship of Brethren Churches, is a theologically conservative fellowship of Brethren churches that was founded in 1939 as a conservative split from the Brethren Church. The church traces its roots back to the Schwarzenau Brethren movement of Alexander Mack, founded in 1708 in Schwarzenau, Germany.

For the early history see Church of the Brethren.

The Brethren (at the time called German Baptist Brethren) suffered a three way division early in the 1880s, and the more progressive group organized the Brethren Church in 1883. Led by charismatic leader Henry Holsinger, they maintained the standard Brethren doctrines, but wanted to adopt new methods, and desired more congregational autonomy and less centralization. These more progressive Brethren moved into the direction of the mainstream of Christian evangelicalism in America. Several events in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including the Bible Conference movement, emphasis on foreign missions, and the rise of fundamentalism, affected the church. The Foreign Missionary Society of the Brethren Church was formed on September 4, 1900, in Winona Lake, Indiana.

But, also in the early 1900s, two different viewpoints began to emerge. As Robert Clouse writes about this event “the Progressives showed considerable agreement in what they opposed, but were less united in what they wished to create.” The Brethren Church had rejected classical liberal theology in 1921 with "The Message of the Brethren Ministry," written by J. Allen Miller and Alva j. McClain. However the aggressive approach of fundamentalism, led by Louis S. Bauman and McClain, conflicted with the drawn out approach of traditional Brethrenism. The fundamentalists desired strongly worded statements of faith, the traditional Brethren stressed non-creedalism. The classic dispensationalist belief held by the fundamentalists largely disregarded the Sermon on the Mount as a law for an earlier age, while the traditional Brethren statement "the New Testament is our Rule of Faith and Practice" placed a high emphasis on this passage in Matthew 5–7.

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