The Facts. Why this exists.

Mission.

Organise, in public and on the same search terms, the record that journalists, regulators, courts, and survivors have already put in public about the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. The original reporting is elsewhere. This site is the library that points to all of it, with a citation on every claim.

How every claim is sourced →

The problem.

Since the 2020s rebrand, the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC, formerly the Exclusive Brethren) has built an industrial public-relations operation: a polished microsite, a steady cadence of press releases, dedicated communications staff in multiple countries, and a suite of outward-facing philanthropy brands (Rapid Relief Team, OneSchool Global, Universal Business Team).

The result is that anyone searching “Plymouth Brethren”, “Exclusive Brethren”, or “is the Plymouth Brethren a cult” lands first on pages written by the fellowship’s own communications team. Sourced, public-record accounts produced by academics¹, parliamentary inquiries², investigative journalists³⁴, and survivors get pushed down the page.

That would be a public-information problem on its own. It is a more serious one given what the rebrand is covering for: documented family separation, allegations of sexual and physical abuse within the fellowship, defamation and injunction proceedings against journalists and ex-members, and a 2024 Australian Tax Office raid on UBT offices. This site is the counterweight.

The response.

Aggregator, not originator. Nothing on this site is original reporting. Every claim attributes the outlet that reported it: ABC Four Corners, The Times (London), Stuff NZ, Guardian Australia, Byline Times, Sydney Morning Herald, the NZ Royal Commission, the UK Charity Commission, the Australian Taxation Office, plus named academic and survivor sources. The site organises what already exists; it does not invent.

Sourced facts over adjectives. The site does not call the PBCC a cult. It describes, sentence by sentence, the Doctrine of Separation⁵⁶ and the practices it produces: restrictions on meals, accommodation, marriage, business, and schooling with non-members; the practice of "withdrawing from" members who depart; a global leadership structure under the current "Man of God"⁷⁸. Readers draw their own conclusion.

Name what’s in the reporting. Abuse allegations, defamation suits against critics, and regulatory action are not subtext. They are the current public record. Where the record carries the claim, this site carries it too, with the same citation.

Survivor-first, in-site. First-person testimony is editorial work, not decoration. It lives on this site under consent controls this site publishes: on-record by explicit written consent, reviewed by the contributor before it ships, removable at their request. See Stories for the intake process.

Open by design. The repository is public on GitHub. Every change is a commit. Every claim maps to a row in the public FACTS.md file. Corrections, new sources, and additional facts come in as issues and pull requests. Anyone can read the full editorial history.

What this site will do.

Organise PBCC doctrine and practice on pages that rank for those search terms.
Footnote every factual claim to a public source.
Index abuse-allegation reporting, defamation and injunction proceedings against journalists and ex-members, regulatory findings, and parliamentary-inquiry history as they land.
Host first-person survivor testimony under written consent, and signpost external cult-recovery resources.
Accept corrections in public. If a fact is wrong, the fix is a pull request away.
Update pages when sources change; mark every page with a visible last-modified date.

What this site will not do.

Out identifiable private members of the PBCC who have not chosen to be public.
Use survivors’ stories without their explicit, on-record, written consent.
Fabricate, estimate, or guess at citations. Unsourced claims ship with a visible source-pending marker or do not ship.
Claim original reporting. The journalism happened elsewhere; this site attributes and links out.
Make jokes at survivors’ expense. The subject of every sharp sentence is the fellowship’s rebrand or its leadership, never a former member.
Reuse PBCC photography. Every image here is original or licensed stock.

How to contribute.

This project welcomes contributions from researchers, journalists, ex-members, counsel, and anyone who finds a factual error. The lightest-weight way in is a GitHub issue; the heaviest is a fully-drafted pull request.

File a correction: for a factual error on any page.
Contribute a fact: a sourced claim that belongs on the site.
Request a source: for a claim currently marked source-pending.
Send a confidential tip when a GitHub issue is not appropriate.
Survivors: on-record testimony intake is described at Stories. Identifiable testimony is never published without explicit written consent.

Who’s behind this.

This site is maintained by Trent Waskey, a contributor to ABC Four Corners’ “Big Brethren” follow-up reporting, alongside anyone who contributes on GitHub.

This project is independent. It is not affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, any successor to the former Exclusive Brethren, or any other religious organisation.

Sources and methodology.

Every factual claim on the site carries a numbered superscript linking to an outside source. The numbered links resolve through a typed registry at src/lib/sources.ts, which is the single place where URLs live. No page hardcodes a citation URL.

The registry is seeded from the public FACTS.md intake file. A claim reaches the site only after its FACTS.md row is promoted to one of:

✓ Verified: two independent sources, or one primary (court ruling, inquiry, or regulator finding) plus one journalism source.
🏹 Single source: acceptable for uncontested factual matters (dates, locations, leadership succession). Borderline for severity claims.
🔴 Source pending: the claim is true but no public citation is pinned yet. Such claims ship with a visible ⚠︎ marker, not a hidden gap.

Anyone can read EDITORIAL_GUIDE.md for the full voice and sourcing rules, open an issue to challenge any row in FACTS.md, or submit a PR updating a source URL.