The True Life of Our Meetings Is in the Power of God
I was recently asked to lead a program for a meeting’s weekend retreat. After lunch, I joined Friends for an open discussion. A new attender of that meeting who came from a long line of Mormons had a lot of great questions about Friends. To me, her most poignant question was: “Is there anything that you Friends actually believe in common?” Friends acknowledged that this was a tough one to answer!
Experiential Knowledge of God versus Doctrines and Principles
In the middle of the seventeenth century, England was convulsed both by Civil War and by religious ferment. The Seekers of northern England and the small band of the early Friends that sprang up around Elizabeth Hooton and George Fox in Leicestershire both failed to find answers to their hunger for God in the doctrines and ceremonies of the priests and theologians of the English state church. In 2003, Paul Lacey wrote in The Authority of Our Meetings Is in the Power of God:
George Fox’s message was as simple as it was radical. When all outward authorities had proven untrustworthy and his hopes in all men were gone, he heard a voice which said: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,” and his heart leapt up in recognition of this truth. We can know God directly, by experience, “experimentally,” because, as the Gospel of John tells us, the Light is placed in us as a birthright, a capacity, and potentiality.
These first Friends firmly believed that the new faith community they were building was in full harmony with the life and teachings of “primitive Christianity.” This had sprung up in small communities around the Mediterranean after the execution of Jesus by the Romans and during the persecution of his followers. Yet they had ample reason to be deeply leery of an overemphasis on doctrinal purity. They were well-aware of the religious wars and persecutions that had wracked Europe stretching back to the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by Christian Crusaders who believed that the Eastern Orthodox Church was the wrong kind of Christianity. Early Friends constantly had to defend themselves against charges of heresy from the leaders of the dominant church.
If there is one early Friend that you might expect to emphasize doctrine over inner experience, it might be Robert Barclay, who was the closest person Friends have ever had to a systematic theologian. Barclay studied theology at a Catholic college in Paris and wrote the first edition of An Apology for True Christian Divinity in 1678 in Latin! He wrote:
Not by strength of arguments or by a particular disquisition of each doctrine and convincement of my understanding thereby, [I] came to receive and bear witness of the Truth, but by being secretly reached by this Life: for when I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people I felt a secret power among them which touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up, and so I became thus knit and united unto them, hungering more and more after the increase of this Power and Life whereby I might feel myself perfectly redeemed. . .
Two hundred years later, the Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote:
They fail to read clearly the signs of the times who do not see that the hour is coming when . . . the letter and the outward evidence will not altogether avail us; when the surest dependence must be upon the Light of Christ within, disclosing the law and the prophets in our own souls, and confirming the truth of outward Scripture by inward experience; when smooth stones from the brook of present revelation . . . the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, as proclaimed by George Fox and lived by John Woolman, shall be recognized as the only efficient solvent of doubts by an age of restless inquiry.
The Great Schism of 1827
We are rapidly approaching the 200th anniversary of a pivotal moment in our history as Friends: five of the eight yearly meetings in North American Quakerism split into rival bodies. The Orthodox side of this split believed that the followers of Elias Hicks had abandoned the fundamental doctrines and principles of Christianity, which they saw to be at the heart of Quakerism. The Hicksite party, in turn, felt that Orthodox Friends had been seduced by the revival movements sweeping this continent and had turned away from the central Quaker principle of direct reliance within the present moment of our meetings on God as an Inner Teacher. Each party not only refused to have anything to do with the other but told the non-Quaker world around them that “those” Friends over there were not really Friends at all.
The late Ohio Yearly Meeting minister Bill Taber felt that the splintering of Friends that resulted represented a kind of ripping apart of the whole cloth of Quakerism: that each branch of Friends lost a critical portion of the original Quaker message.
The branches of Quakerism have continued to diverge since that great schism. Many of the descendents of the Orthodox side of the schism appear to rely more on traditional Christian doctrines and the written Hebrew and Christian Scriptures than on the inward “experimental” relationship with God that Fox and Barclay experienced and wrote about.
On the other hand, the Quaker historian Larry Ingle has written:
The Hicksite traditionalists who opposed Orthodox Gurneyite Quakerism helped feed discontent with established authority, and in doing so . . . ushered deep into the heart of Quakerism a modern principle that would gradually crowd out the traditional idea that in the bond of truth, unity could be found. The Hicksite principle . . . put little stress on unity or authority. Instead it allowed freer range to individualism and encouraged each Friend to interpret faith and practice in the light of each one’s unique experiences.
Ingle has suggested that “the Hicksites drew [in] the kind of Quaker who sees the Society as primarily a refuge for those who want freedom to follow their own individual bent in an atmosphere that is mildly religious and fiercely tolerant.” John Punshon has written:
Contemporary liberal Quakerism tends to become a needs-centred movement with an essentially harmonizing and reinforcing role in the lives of its members, and like a supermarket where each Quaker may pick and choose what configurations Quakerism will take.
I share Ingle’s and Punshon’s view that many (so-called) Liberal unprogrammed meetings in North America and Britain seem averse to sharing—much less articulating—a common understanding of what we are about as a faith community. This is in large part a reaction to the negative experiences many Friends have had with Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity, which are being made worse by the rising evils of Christian nationalism today. It is also a result of the strong currents of individualism in the culture around us. (“Don’t tell me how or what to think, or how to live my life!”) Yet how can we be a covenant community seeking to follow God together if we have no shared understanding of what it actually means to be a faith community together?
The 1985 World Gathering of Young Friends
Something extraordinary happened 40 years ago this past July. Over 300 Young Adult Friends from 34 countries, 57 yearly meetings, and from all branches of Quakers spent a week together in Greensboro, North Carolina. The week did not begin auspiciously! Unprogrammed Friends from North America and England were appalled when Bolivian Friends made an altar call during a meeting for worship and many Friends went to the front of the room to declare their personal devotion to Jesus. Many Friends from Latin America and East Africa were equally shocked to discover that there were many Friends present who did not consider themselves Christian.
A significant portion of each day, however, was spent in groups of eight to ten Friends from all branches of Friends with translators in each group. Little by little our fears and biases began to melt as we shared openheartedly about our own very different journeys with Spirit. By the end of the week, we discovered to our amazement that there was, in fact, much that we shared with each other and could even agree on. We were able to write an epistle together that said a great deal:
Our differences are our richness, but also our problem. One of our key differences is the different names we give our Inward Teacher. Some of us name that Teacher Lord; others of us use the name Spirit, Inner Light, Inward Christ, or Jesus Christ. . . . We have been struck this week, however, with the experience of being forced to recognize this same God at work in others who call that Voice by different names, or who understand differently who that Voice is.
We have often wondered whether there is anything Quakers today can say as one. After much struggle we have discovered that we can proclaim this: there is a living God at the center of all, who is available to each of us as a Present Teacher at the very heart of our lives. We seek as people of God to be worthy vessels to deliver the Lord’s transforming word, to be prophets of joy who know from experience and can testify to the world, as George Fox did, “that the Lord God is at work in this thick night.”
We call on Friends to rediscover our own roots in the vision and lives of early Friends whose own transformed lives shook the unjust social and economic structures of their day. . . . And we call upon Friends across the earth to heed the voice of God and let it send us out in truth and power to rise up to the immense challenge of our world today.
Listening in Tongues
Friends in my yearly meeting, New England Yearly Meeting, have grown increasingly fond of the term “listening in tongues.” This somewhat odd, fairly new Quaker expression is derived from the story of the Pentecost: Jews from many different countries were amazed to discover that they were able to understand Jews speaking in their own native tongues after the Holy Spirit descended upon them (Acts 2:1–21). This new term refers to our capacity to understand the deeper spiritual Truth in other Friends’ words about the life of the Spirit, even if their language and even theology is very different from our own. The words that speak to our own condition may be Spirit, God, Inward Christ, Light, Seed, Jesus, Lord, Yahweh, Allah, Mother, Father, Living Water, Ground of Our Being, or just Beloved, but these all may and often do refer to one living Spirit moving and working among us.
What I believe is that the core belief we share as Friends is not what happens in our minds or through our tongues but in our hearts. It is not our ways of thinking or talking about God but our actual shared living relationship with the Spirit at the heart of creation. The most important thing we share, if we share anything, is that the same Spirit (God, Christ) has come to dwell among us and is shaping and guiding us together as a faith community.
Perhaps we can also agree that, as a result, the most important shared activities are the following:
- gathering in expectant waiting silence with open hearts ready to allow the Beloved to knit our hearts together;
- allowing the Inward Teacher to provide words of prayer, prophetic ministry, teaching, and song that draw us deeper into the gathered silence; deepen the life of our meeting in Spirit; and increase our capacity for faithfulness;
- being able to discern together God’s voice and to allow it to guide the decisions we make in our meetings for business; and
- being called to witness to the world around us, rising from the same wellspring of divine Truth.
This life we share in God is in no way limited to the formal members of any given meeting. It is secret inward activity that can and is happening among people across countless meetings, in every corner of Quakerism, across many faiths, in company with those of no formal faith, and perhaps even with non-human and non-animate parts of creation.
This can happen if many of us in our meetings have come to have such direct experience of the Heart at the heart of all: the source of love, truth, and hope. And if those who have not (at least as yet) had that experience can trust that those who affirm that they have had this experience are not self-deluded and are engaged in something that is at the center of our life as a meeting.
A shared understanding of what we are about enables us to make a commitment to each other to seek to let the Inward Light of God lead us in all we are doing as a faith family. If we can acknowledge that this is, in fact, what we share with each other in our meetings—and the wider world family of Friends—then I believe that God has a far better chance of gathering and knitting our hearts together and gifting us the capacity to respond together to what God is calling us to be and do as Friends in this time. May it be so.
Resources:
● Paul Lacey, The Authority of Our Meetings is in the Power of God, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #365, 2003. (includes quotes in this article from Larry Ingle and John Punshon)
● Let Your Lives Speak: The Report of the 1985 World Gathering of Young Friends
● Samuel Caldwell, The Inward Light: How Quakerism Unites Universalism and Christianity, published in 1997 by the Religious Education Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
● Robin Mohr, Listening in Tongues, QuakerSpeak video, August 2016
● Primitive Quakerism Revived: Rediscovering Friends’ Roots as a Radically Transformative Prophetic Movement—a course at Pendle Hill as part of Spring Term 2026, being co-taught by Peter Blood-Patterson (on site) and Matt Rosen (online).
Friend speaks my mind. May it be so.