Letters - 25 October 2013
From disagreements to welcoming visitors
Disagreeing about God
Michael Wright (18 October) describes exactly my own journey over many years within Quakers.
However, we reach different conclusions. Michael is led to nontheism. The feeling that certainly God has left and is not dwelling among us leads me, as a theist, to worship God elsewhere, whilst continuing to appreciate the Quaker community for what it represents.
Janet Perry
Friends’ churches
The question (18 October) is surely a common one: ‘How are Friends’ churches around the world distinctively “Quaker’’? Overseas Friends might ask the same – where is our shared parentage evident now?
Neither of us, I guess, have any direct experience, but, luckily, we have Ben Pink Dandelion, who has, and gave an interesting account of an evangelical Friends’ church in northwestern America in The Liturgies of Quakerism.
Although his thoughtful work was more concerned with a sociological unravelling of the various strands, he does frequently return to one framework – the sense of ‘intimacy’ or, as George Fox termed it, the way ‘Christ has come to teach his peoples himself’ – an experiential spirituality without creed or clergy. The pastors in his case study are not priestly or numerous. They are described as more like our elders in function.
The programme of worship is quite flexible. There is always silence and open worship of fifteen minutes or so towards the end: ‘Communion after the Manner of Friends’. There are many things that set them apart from other churches: there is no water baptism – unlike Methodists or Baptists – it’s something inward and ongoing. Ben points out how African and South American Meetings are not as strictly timed as in the northern hemisphere, making us look in this respect more ‘programmed’ and less spirit-led in form.
I believe it is this ‘intimacy’ that is the global Quaker ‘distinctive’, the foundational belief in the inward teacher, despite how cultural variations may colour outward appearances.
Mike Beranek
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