Deep Hospitality: Reflections on Welcome to the Quaker Community

By Rhiannon Grant. Pendle Hill Pamphlets (number 487), 2024. 34 pages. $7.50/pamphlet or eBook.

Does your Quaker meeting long to have new people attend and become active in the meeting? Most of us who care about the life and health of the Religious Society of Friends want to welcome and encourage others to experience the community and spiritual life that we have experienced. So how can we truly welcome people to our Quaker communities?

Rhiannon Grant, a British Friend, addresses this central question in her Pendle Hill pamphlet Deep Hospitality: Reflections on Welcome to the Quaker Community. She asks how unprogrammed meetings that are “mostly white and middle class” have “failed to welcome many outside of that narrow group.” It is not necessarily our intention to be less than welcoming, but in probing how we might offer deep hospitality, Grant asks readers to consider how our own identities—culture, age, gender, race, profession—influence how we acknowledge, interact with, and include new visitors.

Grant names radical welcoming as a way to include people, knowing that it will change us. In considering the “tension between wanting to maintain our tradition and wanting to be open to new members and their insights,” she sets out a few ways that we might need to let go of existing structures. The tension between “the way we have always done it” and the openness to try new ways is a live question for monthly meetings, yearly meetings, and Quaker organizations. Do we have to maintain perfect stillness in our meetings for worship? Can we welcome people who arrive late for worship and be happy that they “have arrived in God’s time”? Do we really need all of the committees we have set up?

Can we relax about our history? In this year when we recognize George Fox’s 400th birthday, it’s amusing to read Grant’s description of him:

[He] is not the best china plates. He was a human being with an extraordinary gift for connecting with God in himself and others and encouraging others to do likewise, but he was also deeply wrong about some things.

Ah . . . so we are practicing our Quaker way of being in the world when we stay open to guidance to respond in new situations and when we have humility to admit our own wrongs: racism, exclusion of people on the basis of disability, LGBTQIA+ status, or educational level. We are practicing our faith when we become vulnerable with each other and share our theology. We can become comfortable and confident in talking about God or nontheism or Inward Light or whatever language that brings us to Quakers and makes us want to stay.

This pamphlet might be used by monthly meetings that want to become more intentional in creating a deeper sense of belonging for the people who are curious enough about Quakers to show up at a meeting for worship. It could help meetings think about how to invite people into membership and participation in the life of the meeting and about how not to judge ourselves harshly when we think we are not a “good enough Quaker.” And it will encourage us to make the changes that allow hospitality “to go to the deepest level” and to make our welcome truly radical.

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Diane Randall is a sojourning member of Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.), where she serves on the Ministry and Worship Committee. Diane also serves on the Steering Committee of Quaker Call to Action, the board of Thee Quaker Project, and the advisory board of Earlham School of Religion.