One of the Exclusive Brethren’s founders was a well-educated Englishman who grew up in Ireland by the name of John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). Darby taught that the Church of Ireland, and by extension the entire Anglican Communion, had failed the current dispensational testing by God and fallen into deep apostasy. The state church perpetuated false doctrine, gave cover to millions of nominal Christians, and subsumed its authority to worldly British imperial interests.
