Quakers believe in that of God in everyone.
The focus of our faith is in our Meeting for Worship.
In the silence we feel drawn towards each other and towards God.
Our meetings are open to everyone and we ask nothing more of you than to sit with us. You will be most welcome.
Our first 'Advice' sums up our approach:
Take heed , dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts.Trust them as the leadings of God whose light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.
These time honoured words still inspire us today..
The example of the life and teachings of Jesus has traditionally helped guide us to the Light, which is how some Quakers prefer to describe God.
But Quakerism does not rely on priests, liturgy, physical sacraments or sacred buildings. It is much more a way of life.
Friends and the Christian church
For the Church … is really the people – the children and followers of God. Manses and moderators, sermons and synods are the mere packaging of this people, perhaps inevitable, anyway historical, but not to be mistaken for the thing itself. The thing itself, the believing and worshipping people, has two important characteristics which the individual Christian must never forget. The Church is a community, and it is a continuity… Quakers may be an experimental sect – both in the modern sense of pushing forward the frontiers of faith, and in the older sense of insisting upon experience as the basis of their faith – but if we are honest we must admit that we build upon the foundations laid for us over many centuries by the Church.
Gerald Priestland, 1982 Quaker Faith & Practice 27.18
Myth, Ritual & Symbol
I personally believe that there is a quality in the bareness of Christian Quakerism, which may act as a bridge between the past and the future, allowing space for Friends to dare to search within… To be a Quaker is by no means to say goodbye to myth, ritual and symbol, but rather to find myself set free to discover them as the very essence of the way I now experience… Quakers are bridge people. I remain on that bridge, part of my roots reaching back into the Christian past and part stretching forward into the future where new symbols are being born.
Damaris Parker-Rhodes, Quaker Faith & Practice 27.44
The Light that shines for all
The Universal Light
Within the Society of Friends we have our own problems with the traditional language of Christian spirituality… There are those who can comfortably talk in Christian language, because they experience it deeply as expressing truth and reality as they perceive it. For them it is not ‘just a language’; it is the truth. The words used are inseparable from the underlying truths, the stories, the tradition, the nature of God as revealed in Jesus. There is no ‘gap’ between their experience of faith, their beliefs and the language used by the Christian tradition.
There are those who just cannot use that language at all, because for them it precisely does not express their deepest truths, and may in fact be felt to deny or even violate them. For these people, their deepest experiences of spiritual reality, as they have encountered it, cannot be encompassed by a language that has acquired so many historical accretions and distortions that it has become at best meaningless and at worst a falsification of truth. So they must grapple with the equal inadequacy of contemporary language to express the depths of their searching.
Pam Lunn, 1990 Quaker Faith & Practice 26.76