Most people are unfamiliar with the Quaker religion, or they confuse us for the guy on the Quaker Oats box. In this video, we ask 6 Friends what it means to be a practicing Quaker.
Resources:
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- Music composed by Jon Watts
- Explore the Quaker way to see if it could be right for you
- Read Friends Journal to see how other Friends describe the substance of Quaker spirituality
- Worship with Friends! Find Quakers near you on QuakerFinder and Friends Journal’s meeting listings
Discussion Questions:
In this video, the Friends describe three levels of understanding and being that Quakers share. The first is willingness to listen for and be faithful to something that Friends variously call by several names—the Light, the holy spirit, presence of God, goodness, the infallible guide, or Inward Christ, for example. The second is willingness to listen—to worship—together in community with other listeners. The third level is the effect on individual’s relationships with others in the world in recognition of a fundamental spiritual equality. What are your reflections on these levels of understanding and being? What is it like to listen for the spirit? What changes when you do that with others, together? How does a recognition of our equality change how you interact with others?
Transcript:
Noah Merrill:
A Quaker is someone who is seeking to be faithful to the deepest truth that we can encounter, to be guided to that truth by the guidance of the holy spirit, by the presence of God in our lives, and by the understanding that that’s a real experience that we can encounter.
O:
A Quaker is someone who is willing to be still, enter a silence, and actually be penetrated by that silence.
Paul Buckley:
Penn said, a Quaker is defined by one fundamental principle, and that was that God had placed within each person an infallible guide, that if followed would lead you to righteousness and salvation. Anyone who follows that guide, who attends to it and does what it leads you to, is a true child of God and, by definition, then, is a Quaker.
C. Wess Daniels:
For me, one of the things that means to be Quaker is to be together in a community of people who gather and listen together. We can have spiritual practice outside of meeting, outside of worshipping, but there’s something about coming together and listening together to God as a community that is full of life, and full of conflict and challenge, and to me, that’s what makes Quakerism beautiful.
Faith Kelley:
I think there’s also some Quaker distinctives that come out of that experience of Christ alive and in the world with us, and those are things about, you know, sacraments being inward, and our experience of worship— the understanding that God is there in the worship and is with us. And so those things, I think, make someone a Quaker.
Monica Walters-Field:
So by definition, your communication changes, because you know, if we’re all, then, therefore that of God, we’re therefore all equal, and so by definition our relationships with each other must change, and will be different.
O:
There is a way of trusting the innocence of that power, so that one is not afraid of it—not afraid of the power—but is willing to walk intimately into that power… and be informed by it. Informed. Reformed. Transformed. And in the transformation, of being touched by God, behaviors change. Something different happens.
Noah Merrill:
But it’s more than that, right, because there are many people in many traditions who are seeking to do that. So then what’s a Quaker? I think a Quaker is someone who is part of this living stream, this sense of being a people who’ve been on this journey for more than 350 years, traveling together as a community, supporting one another with these traditions and these practices that we have found. We didn’t create them; we discovered them. That help people along that journey of faithfulness, as we help each other to be set free and to grow more fully alive. And to me, that’s the Way we’re inviting people into.
The background music to this week’s video made it hard for me to hear what was being said and its heavy bass was quite distracting. I am hearing impaired and use hearing aids in both ears but suspect other hearing impaired Ffriends may experience the same difficulty hearing what is said against ambient noise. I do enjoy these weekly videos and wish we had something similar here in the “old country”. Keep up the good work!
Hi Noel!
Thanks for the feedback, and we’re sorry that you found the music distracting. The transcript is always below the video if you need it, and we’ve recently added closed captioning. Just click the “CC” button at the bottom of the video.
Beautifully produced, spoken with grace and Life. With much gratitude for this effort. I pass along the link regularly.
—Chris
This was a well presented statement. I showed it to a relative that is a conservative, fundamentalist Southern Baptist minister.
He still didn’t get it! His most pertinent comment was to say that God also is present in the hearts of those in his services. His next comment was to wonder if Quakers really were Christians.
It has been very difficult for me to explain Quaker beliefs to non-Quakers, especially the more fundamental. It is easy to tell how we worship and the origin of those practices but harder to get across as to what we believe theologically.
Many of these non-Quaker churches have completely codified creeds and look upon Quakerism, with our lack of same, as anarchy; one even referring to my liberal, programed meeting as the Church of Whatever.
I could only reply that as for a being Christian is concerned, Quakers are lot like Baptists. Some of us are. May God forgive me!