‘Maybe we get the God we need.’ Photo: by Michael Preston of BYM
On the record: Paul Parker, interviewed by Joseph Jones
‘I don’t think my job’s about being comfortable.’
Perhaps we should start with where Quakerism begins for you, personally.
I was a young teenager. I’d grown up in a household where one parent came from a non-conformist background and ran the Sunday school in the village chapel. The other was (and is) a fundamentalist atheist of the Richard Dawkins type who hopes ‘everybody will see the dark one day’. So religion was always a bit of a talking point. I used to go along to Sunday School but increasingly felt that I was being told I believed things that I didn’t believe. So I went looking for a religious experience that was a better fit. Eventually I went to a Quaker Meeting because some friends suggested it. It was the first time anybody asked me what I believed rather than telling me. Then, when I asked them what they believed, they didn’t know either. There was a sense of a shared journey. You could get into a real discussion about what God is, whether God is, and what that means in your life. I found that intriguing, as was the silent worship. That was really difficult at first – it’s not an easy thing to do – but the lack of rigidity and structure and certainty appealed to me enormously.
