About Quakers
How did you come by this website? You may frequently walk past an inconspicuous building with a dilapidated sign outside it saying ‘Friends Meeting House’ & wondered just what goes on inside. Or, you may have seen a cluster of banners on a recent peace march declaring ‘Quakers For Peace’. It’s possible that a long standing friend or work colleague recently came out as a Quaker to you, perhaps over coffee or in the pub whilst deep in conversation about some important social issue or other. You could even be my mother, wondering what it is I get up to when I go gallivanting off with all these funny people for frequent ‘committee meetings’! Statistically, it’s most likely you came across us on the internet, probably searching for information about something completely unrelated.
Either way, what has brought this site onto your screen will be a few more questions, which hopefully it will start to answer.
So, who are these Quakers anyway?
In a nutshell, we’re a religious group who try to put our faith into action every day of the week, not just on ‘special’ days & in special places. We don’t have fixed & formal creeds (we try not to put God into a box of our own human making), considering that each of us has our own path to God which we must experience for ourselves rather than having it ‘taught’ to us by an external authority – be that a priest or a book. We put our faith into action through our testimonies – a testimony to peace, to equality, to simplicity, & to truth. In Britain, & in many other parts of the world, we practice a form of worship which follows no set form or pattern, but rather is based on silence in which any or none may be inspired to speak. In practice, Quakerism is not a ‘spectator sport’ – all share in the responsibility for our meetings for worship, & all share in the responsibility of the practical & spiritual work which needs to be done to maintain the local meeting & the wider organisation.
Before we get on to the real nitty gritty of who we are, it’s worth spending just a few lines emphasising just who we’re not. There are a wealth of misconceptions around (a few of which we’ve admittedly built up for ourselves), which it is important to clear up now to save confusion later.
First of all, we’re nothing to do with the man on the porridge packet – we don’t have a particular penchant for eating oats (though you will admittedly find a lot of lentils & nut roasts in Quaker kitchens…), & we have nothing to do with the company which shares our name; in fact the company name was reputedly… ‘borrowed’ from us because they wanted to trade on our reputation for wholesomeness & honest dealing!
Neither are we the people who don’t use much technology – on the contrary, Quakers have often been at the forefront of developments in science & technology, from Abraham Darby’s development of the process for smelting iron at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution & John Dalton’s pioneering work in meteorology, colour blindness, & the theory of gases, right through to James Lovelock’s development of the Gaia Hypothesis & invention of the microwave oven, & Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of the pulsar in modern times. We don’t drive around in a horse & buggy, & neither do we routinely dress in the period clothing of the 17th century. Although there have been some historic similarities, we’re not the same as the Amish, & we’re also not to be confused with another religious group with a similar name, the Shakers – we don’t particularly craft furniture which is stunning in its beautiful simplicity. It does just so happen that the Shakers’ founder, ‘Mother’ Ann Lee, was originally brought up a Quaker in Manchester, England, but Quakerism didn’t really float her boat so off to the USA she sailed to set up her own group.
The woman on the £5 note, Elizabeth Fry (not Elizabeth Windsor, she’s on the other side of it!) was indeed a Quaker who we’re particularly proud of, & has ended up in your wallet by virtue of her sterling work in prison reform. She lived about 200 years ago, & today we dress as little like her as we do like the man on the porridge packet.
Most importantly, we didn’t die out years ago (but hopefully you’ll have gathered that already by now), but are in fact a group of people who feel we have a message which is as modern & as relevant to today’s society as was its message in the days of our founding during the turbulent period of the English Civil War 350 years ago.
Today in the UK there are, according to the official published statistics, about 25,000 Quakers, of whom about 15,000 are in formal membership of the organisation which goes by the name of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. When it comes to numbers they admittedly are not particularly impressive ones – but actually, we’re not really fussed about trying to impress you with our numbers, & are more concerned to impress you with our work & our values.
You’ve read this far & learned who we aren’t, now it is time to learn who we are. Before clicking on, I have to stress that this is specifically about Quakers in Britain, so all references to ‘Quakers’ should really be read as ‘Quakers in Britain’, but that would get tedious both to write & to read after a while. We share a lot with Quakers in the rest of the world, but in parts there are a few important differences where it would be wrong to imply similarity.
So, we’re a religious group. The most obvious question an enquirer might ask of somebody who is a member of a religious group is “what do you believe, then?”
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