British Quakers: Mission and message - Early Friends
Stuart Masters and Simon Best begin a new eight-part series on Quakerism. In this article Stuart writes about early Friends and the Quaker message
During the 1650s the new and emerging Quaker movement launched one of the most vigorous and widespread evangelical missions in the history of Christianity. Within a few years a preaching campaign, led by a group of itinerant Quaker ministers and preachers, left no part of Great Britain and Ireland untouched. It swept across continental Europe, to Turkey and Palestine, and across the oceans to Barbados and the American colonies.
Although the impact was uneven, in a number of places they gathered large numbers of people into the community of Friends. It is said that, by the late 1650s, something like one per cent of the population in England identified with the movement and in places such as Bristol this rose to around ten per cent. Here were a people who were utterly convinced that they had a message that needed to be shared with the world as a matter of urgency, and they pursued this mission tirelessly and fearlessly.
So, what was it that prompted ordinary people to leave their homes and families and set off on foot, on horseback or by ship in a dangerous and hostile world? What was this urgent message and what were they trying to achieve?
Primitive Christianity
When interpreting their transformational spiritual experiences, first-generation Friends came to believe that they had rediscovered the one true way of primitive Christianity that had been lost for some 1,600 years. These Friends were convinced that they were being sustained by the same spiritual air that Peter, Paul and John had breathed in the first century and were living as a community under the direct leadership and inspiration of Christ Jesus himself, whose Spirit had been poured out on all people at Pentecost and who was, therefore, available to everyone as an inward teacher, Lord and saviour.
This prompted the great proclamation of the early Quaker movement that ‘Christ is come to teach his people himself!’ The Spirit of Christ was present with the power required to crucify the old fallen self and to give birth to a new creation. It was by this transformative power that the Lamb of God would have victory over all evil in the world and finally establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. Early Friends had experienced this transformative power and had then heard the call to join the great spiritual struggle of the Lamb’s War.
One true way to Christ
The urgency of their mission was driven by two key factors: the desire to share with others their rediscovery of the one true way of Christ; and to proclaim the coming victory of the Lamb as the ‘Day of the Lord’ began to dawn. In his 1657 tract The Lamb’s War, James Nayler wrote:
The Lamb’s quarrel is not against the creation, for then should his weapons be carnal, as the weapons of the worldly spirits are: “For we war not with flesh and blood”, nor against the creation of God; that we love; but we fight against the spiritual powers of wickedness, which wars against God in the creation, and captivates the creation into the lust which wars against the soul, and that the creature may be delivered into its liberty prepared for the sons of God. And this is not against love, nor everlasting peace, but that without which can be no true love nor lasting peace.
Given the context of religious and social turmoil from which the movement emerged, it is not surprising that the early Quaker message also had a radical political dimension.
A deeply unequal society
Friends broke down rigid gender divisions, took up popular causes such as the abolition of tithes and railed against the iniquity and injustice of a deeply unequal society. Their denunciation of the oppression of the poor echoed the words of the Hebrew prophets. In 1653, James Nayler wrote:
God is against you, you covetous cruel oppressors who grind the faces of the poor and needy, taking your advantage of the necessities of the poor, falsifying the measures and using deceitful weights, speaking that by your commodities which is not true and so deceiving the simple, and hereby getting great estates in the world, laying house to house and land to land till there be no place for the poor; and when they are become poor through your deceits then you despise them and exalt yourselves above them, and forget that you are all made of one mould and one blood and must all appear before one judge, who is no respecter of persons, nor does he despise the poor; and what shall your riches avail you at that day when you must account how you have gotten them and whom you have oppressed?
(from A Discovery of the First Wisdom from Beneath and the Second Wisdom from Above)
The inward work of Christ
The message of early Friends was crystal clear: neither the established church nor the ‘holy scriptures’ could regenerate humanity and establish the kingdom of heaven; indeed, these forms tended to be used by the principalities and powers to keep people in darkness. Only the Light of Christ, who had returned in Spirit, had the transformative power required to achieve this, and so all outward human religious practices and institutions needed to be rejected in favour of a single-pointed focus on the inward work of Christ in each human heart.
Finally, a pathway had been revealed that could lead humanity out of the age-old darkness of war, cruelty, injustice and greed and into the paradise of God’s shalom, righteousness and justice. This was indeed good news and early Friends proclaimed it with all their might!
Stuart is a senior programme leader at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre.
Simon is nurturing Friends and Meetings tutor at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.