I realized today that God is not holding anything back from me. So often, I have conceived of my life with God as being a series of steps and long waits in between. The Holy Spirit would show me the next step I was to take, I would (ideally) take it, and then I would …
I recently received an email from an American Quaker who had read my recent post, Freelance Ministry or the Body of Christ? They wrote:“I am totally in agreement with what you advocate — and my behaviors as minister among Friends are strictly Lone Ranger-mode. It’s not only my culture, it’s how I survived childhood. Those …
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One of the most obvious features of the early Quaker movement was its emphasis on the spiritual reality of the Holy Spirit, preferring it to outward forms and holidays that the Church had long observed to call attention to these spiritual realities. In seventeenth-century England, these forms were abused horrendously, with the state church demanding …
Now you are the Body of Christ and individually members of it. – 1 Corinthians 12:27 Since becoming a Christian in the Quaker tradition, I have witnessed the wide range of character of many different congregations. There are the obvious differences, like attendance, geography and theology. There are differences in class background, age and the …
A friend of mine recently told me a useful story. The tale itself is almost certainly inaccurate, but the principle involved rings true. Long ago, before Europeans came to the New World, there was a tribe who had never seen the large, wind-powered boats employed by the people of Europe. This kind of vessel was …
So many today are totally turned off by institutionalized faith. For many years now, “spiritual but not religious” has been a popular mantra. Many of us are interested in a life of faith, but not one that is connected to a particular community or tradition. The Emergent Church movement has borne the marks of this …
In the first generation of the Quaker movement, news of the gospel spread across Britain from house to house, city to city. Quickly, the message was taken abroad to the continent of Europe and to the British colonies in the Americas. These early years of Quakerism were characterized by an untamed passion for sharing the …