All Blog Posts Tagged 'Worship' (7)

Now I'm retired and for various reasons that I will not bore you with, I've found myself going over material that I produced in the past.



I came across this piece that I wrote back in 1998, which as far as I can recall was written to introduce Quaker Worship to people who had no prior experience of worship.



One of the aims of the New Foundation is to understand and explain the distinctiveness of our understanding of who Christ is and how he teaches man and women. For…

Before I became a Christian, I met Janet at the office where we both worked. I was between my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Janet and I became friends and, since she lived close to the office, we frequently walked to her apartment for lunch. During that year, I’d been reading the Bible, and was encountering many passages I couldn't understand.

Exod. 4:21 begins the story of how God delivered the…

Gretchen was a college friend. All went well with our relationship until after that Meeting for Worship in the Name of Jesus. We’d both been Christians prior to that Meeting, and were accustomed to tell each other about our spiritual lives.

After that pivotal Meeting, I next stayed with my father at our family cabin in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Prior to this visit, I’d experienced unmistakable signs that my relationship with him was…

2 P. M. FIRST-DAY MEETINGS NOW SET FOR THIRD FIRST DAY OF EACH MONTH: 11/15, 12/20, ETC.

A group of Indiana Friends have reopened the Sugar Grove Meeting House in Plainfield, just west of the Indianapolis Airport, for a monthly hour of waiting worship after the manner of Conservative Friends. The time was chosen with a view to letting Friends worship at their home meetings in the morning and then travel to Sugar Grove without pressure to hurry. The Meeting House, a…

In Meeting this morning I sat in a different spot so I would be near someone, anyone. I realized what missed greatly about the old Meeting Houses in Pennsylvania were the benches. It seems people were less inclined to sit alone on a bench, but with chairs as seating there's no choice. Were there more people attending early Meeting, I'm sure the sense of isolation would be different. Were there only one Meeting per First Day, nearness to one's neighbors would erase a feeling of isolation, it…

Quaker Worship and ‘Centering down’

I was recently asked a question about the term ‘to center down’ in the context of Quaker worship, and whether, as a phrase, it had been used by early Friends. A few checks confirmed my suspicions that it was not used by them, and I have not found any references to ‘centering down’ in George Fox’s writings (with which I am the most familiar). My questioner did come back to me with some examples of the use of the phrase used by…

Yesterday (26-9-2010), at our Quarterly Gathering at Ely, we used a piece from George Fox as a way of sharing and nurturing our faith as Christian Friends.

This piece is a sermon preached by Fox to Ministering Friends at a very early Yearly Meeting held at…