Thought for the Week: A religion of the Spirit

Ian Kirk-Smith reflects on Quakerism as a religion of the Spirit

by Ian Kirk-Smith 3rd October 2014

When he began his travels around England in the 1650s George Fox, who is regarded as the founder of Quakerism, did not set out to create a new sect – nor did those who gathered with him.

The early ‘Friends of the Truth’, as they were known, felt that an urgent responsibility had been laid upon them: to bring the Christian church back from error to truth. Christianity had lost its way. It needed to rediscover the correct one. They had no ambition to add a new sect to the various Christian groups of the mid-seventeenth century: the Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and Independents.