Editor's note: This story is part four of a five-part series examining the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, its beliefs, practices and its role in the North Dakota town of Neche, population 344. NECHE, N.D.
— As former accountant turned “universal leader” Bruce D. Hales prepares the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church for the theoretical Rapture, his family and church members are buying up luxury properties and expanding homes around the world. From Neche, North Dakota, to Sydney, Australia, the Brethren — an isolated yet global religious group with about 54,000 members — has poured millions of dollars into grand estates, according to data obtained by Forum News Service.
In tiny Neche, population 344, the Brethren are bankrolling home and office expansions and massive houses. Additional lavish spending by Brethren members in Australia was the subject of an investigative report by The Age , a leading Australian newspaper. The developments are new as Brethren members once preferred to live frugally, according to former members.
The church and their members now have a large financial stake in businesses, government contracts and real estate and are collectively worth about $65 billion, according to one source. “Money in the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church has replaced faith in Jesus Christ,” said Cheryl Bawtinheimer Hope, a former Brethren member. An ongoing financial investigation in Australia and scrutiny of the Brethren elsewhere prompted Forum News Service to learn more about the religion and its role in Neche.
Interviews and research paint a picture that shows a group with a vast financial reach. The church is facing allegations of blurred lines between its religious organization and Brethren-linked businesses. Stephen Kent, a retired Canadian professor considered an expert in alternative religions, receives information about the Brethren fairly regularly.
In 2007, elders within the Brethren told Kent that: "The Brethren would normally, on a monthly basis, give gifts to Mr. Hales as well as other people in responsible positions, and that money would be carried by what we jokingly would've called the Brethren Express,” Kent said. “An elder (also) said that Hales used the money to assist the needy, but critics said that it was to lobby the Australian (Prime Minister John Howard) and American (President George W.
Bush) governments,” Kent said. “Another source said that he [Hales] must give his permission before members are allowed to marry, requires all members' internet access to be controlled by devices leased from a Brethren company and, most of all, does not tolerate any doubting or questioning of authority," Kent said. Excessive time for indoctrination, financial manipulation and dependence are some of the aspects that lend credence to claims that the Brethren is a cult — as outlined by cultic expert Steven Hassan’s BITE Model of Authoritarian Control — a four-part checklist on how cults recruit and maintain control over members’ behavior, thoughts, information and emotions.
Despite multiple efforts, Forum News Service was denied face-to-face interviews with Brethren leaders or entry to its Neche meeting hall. A Brethren representative responded by email to some questions, and many of those responses are included below. All her adult life Zelda Hartje has worked with Brethren members.
As the assessor for Pembina County, Hartje is also the administrator of Pembina County Historical Museum, and was once a public school teacher in Neche before the Brethren began their own educational system, OneSchool Global. She remembered the days when Neche was a religious center for the sect. When she was younger, Brethren houses were modest and smaller, she said.
Based on data alone, it’s clear something has changed. There’s more money in Neche these days. Houses in Neche can be bought for as low as $20,000, Hartje said, but new Brethren houses are the costliest ones in the county.
Two large newly-built homes in Neche are worth more than $800,000 each, Hartje said. A red two-story house near Campus & Co. store, the Brethren’s exclusive grocery and liquor store, was sold over market value of about $215,000 to a Brethren family for more than $400,000, Hartje said.
“No other home in the county has sold for that price. It’s been in the last 10 years, and those two big new ones are brand new. They’re the kind of homes you would see in a nice part of Fargo,” said Hartje, adding that in Fargo the estates would be worth well over $1 million.
Hartje said she also hasn’t seen anything from a tax perspective that raises her eyebrows yet. Overall, the disparity between Brethren investments and non-Brethren residents is good for the town’s economic outlook, said Hartje, adding that Brethren members aren’t allowed to sleep in hotels, so they need larger houses to accommodate guests. “The most valuable homes in Pembina County right now are in Neche.
And the others are just modest with modest people living in them,” Hartje said. A Brethren spokesperson told Forum News Service that all businesses operate separately from the church and that the success Brethren members have had around the world can be attributed to a good work ethic. “We can observe that Brethren families work very hard, and as a result some have become very successful, leading to their hiring lots of people and contributing significantly to the towns around them,” the spokesperson said.
Carl Symington, a Brethren member from Pembina, North Dakota, acknowledged the Brethren’s deep pockets, which works as a safety net for the church’s members, he said in an interview with Forum News Service. “A lot of things get blown out of proportion, and our organization has a lot of support, financial support, even credit card debt support. They will help us out but on the condition that it doesn’t happen again,” Symington said.
Recently, the Brethren’s expenditures and government contracts attracted media attention, and also the scrutiny of the Australian Tax Office, or ATO, which launched a no-notice raid in March this year into what former members describe as the Brethren’s financial wing based in Sydney, known as the Universal Business Team, or UBT. Shortly afterward, the Brethren’s Australian accounting firm, UBTA, announced it was closing. Prior to the ATO raid, Australian and New Zealand media outlets reported that Brethren members are taking advantage of tax breaks in their countries through a complicated network of charitable trusts — like the Brethren’s charitable arm known as Rapid Relief Team — and that members are told to have an “investor mindset” ready to take advantage of crises.
Hales, who travels in a private jet, encourages his flock to “charge the highest price to the worldly people” in a doctrine called “spoiling the Egyptians,” which was his direction through his 2002 published works called white books. “The world is there to take what we want from it, and leave everything we don’t want. Spoil the Egyptians as quick and as fast as you can,” Hales is quoted as saying.
Twenty years later, speakers at a Brethren-linked international business conference in Sydney in September 2023 lectured attendees on how to continue generating profits and take advantage of times of crisis, The Post reported late last year. Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine , both international events from which Brethren members have reaped millions of dollars, according to a Forum News Service review of available data. Before money is made, however, Brethren members need a trailblazer to help foster good will in beleaguered markets, said Damian Hastie, a researcher and founder of Open & Candid website, which started in 2020 after he began looking into government contracts.
“The RRT and the Brethren are disaster capitalists,” he said. “Everywhere RRT is working there is a Brethren company picking up business. And that seems odd to me to have a charity that works on disasters, and then all their businesses make a profit later.
” Acting as the Brethren’s public relations branch or charitable arm, RRT provides services to areas of natural disasters, according to the Brethren spokesperson. “When catastrophe[s] take place, the Rapid Relief Team is equipped to step in at a moment’s notice, and support emergency services with quality food and refreshments, and provide tangible support to those affected,” the RRT reported on its website. When the global COVID-19 pandemic hit, RRT was there, helping families with food boxes.
After the war between Russia and Ukraine began, RRT was also there, driving 51 trucks of food during Operation 322 – Delivering Aid to Ukraine . “The charities associated with our church fund the Rapid Relief Team, which supports emergency first responders, the OneSchool Global school system, and initiatives ranging from donating hay to drought-stricken farmers [to] raising millions for aid in Ukraine,” the Brethren spokesperson told Forum News Service. In 2023, the RRT supported 1,387 events, served 374,900 meals and contributed 61,533 volunteer hours around the globe, according to numbers provided by the Brethren.
Of that number in the United States the RRT supported 161 events, served 24,975 meals and contributed 7,142 volunteer hours. “The total expenditure for RRT was more than $525,000 for the year,” the Brethren spokesperson told Forum News Service. Information provided to Forum News Service, which was leaked to Hastie by a Brethren member who attended a Sydney business conference in September 2023, called Strive Seminar, reported that Brethren businesses boasted of $46 billion in turnover, or annual income, which is nearly three times what they earned in 2014.
The accumulated wealth of the Plymouth Brethren is about $65 billion, and profit for Brethren companies in 2023 was about $6.3 billion, according to information shared with attendees during the Strive Seminar. “They [RRT] do good work, but it’s costing them a minimal amount of money compared to their overall worth,” said Hastie.
The spokesperson for the Brethren told Forum News Service that there is a distinct separation between church and business, and that the church does not employ anyone. “In addition, our partners such as UBT (called the Brethren’s financial wing by former members) are not owned and operated by the church. Instead, they have been set up and are run by church members for the benefit of other church members and non-members,” the spokesperson said.
But as Hastie points out: Why would UBT, the church’s financial wing, which until last year reported on its website that it was owned by the Brethren, boast of its financial earnings? “I’ve seen examples of charities getting 500% return on their investment. All tax free. That’s where the charities are really making the money, it’s not in the meeting rooms.
They’re using religion to make money,” Hastie told Forum News Service. A spokesperson for UBT, Adam Speed, told Forum News Service that UBT profits are reinvested into the group’s school, the Rapid Relief Team and other charitable causes. “UBT’s primary role is to provide cutting-edge business advice and services to its customers,” Speed said.
Much of Hastie’s research is focused on the Commonwealth countries (such as Australia and New Zealand and Canada), but in the United States, Forum News Service found multiple companies with ties to the Hales family who began winning procurement bids at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At Open & Candid, Hastie tracked Brethren member companies across the globe and found out they were awarded nearly $4 billion in COVID-19 contracts with over 85% of those contracts linked to “Bruce Hales and his family.” In America, some of the companies with ties to Bruce Hales or his family profited from the COVID-19 pandemic, Department of Defense contracts and the U.
S. Mission to Ukraine. So far, Forum News Service has not found any evidence linking businesses owned by Brethren members in Neche to government contracts.
Business dealings in the USA included: Steve Simmons, a former trustee of OneSchool Global, the Brethren’s educational system, in Auckland, New Zealand, approached the Get A Life podcast team to share his experience in early 2024. OneSchool Global has about 120 campuses in 20 countries teaching about 10,000 students, said Simmons. Before he left the Brethren, Simmons received a directive from the Brethren in 2014 that the school needed renovations and they were to use a construction company called Unispace Global, which at the time was owned in part by Bruce D.
Hales’s sons, Gareth and Charles. Although Brethren leaders originally said the project would be done at cost, the invoice grew to $650,000 New Zealand dollars, more than three times the price it would have been from a non-Brethren licensed construction crew, Simmons said. “They hadn’t even asked for any competitive quotes, and all proceeds were going to the Brethren,” Simmons said.
“We were under pressure,” to agree to work with Unispace, Simmons said, adding that he used to believe: “Bruce Hales is so close to Jesus Christ that he can hear his heartbeat. How could he be wrong?” After Simmons received outside help and a different quote of $120,000 for the same project, nothing could have prepared him for the response he received after calling for a special meeting. His actions were condemned.
He was accused of being disloyal to the school’s trust and to the Hales name, Simmons said. “I had a sense there was a guillotine swinging over my head,” Simmons said. “From that point on I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I was trying to stand up for the Brethren who I was representing as a trustee,” he said. Simmons said that similar renovation projects were forced upon all Brethren’s schools at more than 120 campuses. “Each campus only has to launder about $600,000.
All Unispace had to do was calculate a sensible cost price for the job, add $600,000 and push it through. Anyone who objected was cut out of the profits or threatened with excommunication,” Simmons said. “Repeat the formula 135 times, and voila, $80 million has been laundered from tax exempt charitable funds donated for children, right into the pockets of Unispace directors.
Everything is invoiced, the books all balance and if nobody squeals they will get away with it,” Simmons said. A regional director for OneSchool Global in America who wished to remain anonymous because he was not allowed to speak on behalf of the educational system, told Forum News Service that OSG school boards are expected to work with established laws and regulatory standards, including contracts and procurement processes. “OSG does not direct our schools to use any provider for the contract work they undertake.
And we do expect that schools will always seek to obtain the best value for money in any contracts,” said the regional director in an email, but neglected to fully answer additional questions. Questions were also sent to UBT departments in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and to a Brethren spokesperson as well as other OneSchool Global representatives, but they did not reply. Simmons was “shut up” and then excommunicated from the Brethren in 2022, he said.
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