Parenting & Family Quote by John Nelson Darby

Darby is doing something more pointed than drawing a line between “true church” and “false church.” He’s diagnosing a perceptual problem: once you train yourself to revere “little organised associations” as the Church of God, you lose the ability to recognize God’s people anywhere else. The jab isn’t aimed at unbelievers; it’s aimed at sincere Christians whose loyalty has been captured by structure. He implies their eyesight has been calibrated by paperwork, membership rolls, and sanctioned gatherings. Everything outside that frame becomes “mere meetings of men,” not because it is empty, but because their category system can’t accommodate it.

The phrase “little organised” is deceptively polite. It’s a diminutive with teeth, a way of shrinking institutional confidence down to something provincial and man-made. Darby’s real target is the spiritual prestige that clings to organization: the way a group can smuggle in authority simply by calling itself “the church.” That’s the subtext: ecclesiology as branding, with the power to render rival believers invisible.

Context matters. Darby, a key voice in the Plymouth Brethren movement, lived in a 19th-century Protestant world crowded with denominations, clerical hierarchies, and reform projects. His program was “separation” from compromised systems and a return to the gathered, unadorned unity of Christians as God’s children. The sentence works because it flips the moral expectation: the problem isn’t disorder; the problem is that order can become a spiritual blindfold.