Letters – 2 July 2010
30 06 2010 | by The Friend | Read 710 times
From questioning Christian discipline to queries about English
Christian discipline?
I’d like to invite Ruth Milne (‘Christian Discipline?’, 25 June) to come to weekly Meetings for Worship and get involved in her local Quaker community. There she might find quiet reflection, not on theology, but on the things that Jesus found important: whether it’s possible to be both rich and good, how to forgive people who have hurt you, how to stay still for long enough to discern the way forward. She might also find people who are trying not to ‘be nice’ but to know each other at a deep level; to accept – and occasionally to challenge – what they find there, and are prepared to be accepted and challenged themselves.
The Quaker way is not in the thinking – what George Fox called ‘notions’ – but in openness to the promptings of love and truth as they arise in our hearts. Ruth, if you despise this as ‘trying to be nice’, you may miss out on a great deal. Come and join us. Give it time, and if in the end you give it up, please let it be for deeper reasons than shock headlines about declining theological rigour.
Alison Leonard
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