The Message and Mission of QuakerismBraithwaite, William C. (William Charles)
Religion
The Message and Mission of Quakerism
Braithwaite, William C. (William Charles)
Society of Friends
In England, wherever you get earnest-hearted groups of persons
together at a special gathering, as an Adult School week end, or a
lecture school, or a conference, you find, whether they are Friends or
not, that a Friends’ meeting of a free, open kind, with prayer and
praise and speech and silent worship all mingled under the guidance of
the Spirit, comes as the great crown of all our fellowship and our
intercourse, the benediction of all that has taken place, the
perfectly natural means through which the common fellowship and
purpose are lifted into communion with the life of God. We hardly
sufficiently understand the great value in deepening character and
consolidating fellowship of meetings of this kind, where there is a
common purpose.
The poverty of many Friends’ meetings for worship has lain, I think,
in the poverty of common purpose in the congregation. Where there is a
common purpose, a sincere waiting upon the Lord in fellowship, their
value is very great.
It is the place for withdrawing awhile from the things of outward
sense and exercising the faculties of spiritual sense; the place where
to the awakened soul the vision of truth may be seen, the Word of the
Lord may be heard, the guidings of His hand may be felt; the place
where the heart may become aware of its waywardness and want and may
gain strength to repent and come to Christ and choose the narrow road
of life and dedicated service; the place where many have been able to
say, with Isaac Penington, “I have met with my God, I have met with my
Savior, and He hath not been present with me without His salvation,
but I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings.”
But it is also the place where the worship we render and the life we
receive are parts of a fellowship of worship and of life which comes
to the meeting as a whole and finds its natural expression through the
lips of one and another as the Spirit touches them to utterance.
There is a third type of meeting, which we may call a teaching
meeting, sometimes a Bible class and sometimes a service in which
teaching ministry is to the front. There, again, surely you get the
same forces in operation. The most vital teaching meetings are those
which best combine inspiration, personal influence and fellowship. In
true educational work the character and the faculties of a group of
scholars are being trained by vital contact with one another and with
the teacher. The contact of life with life is going on all the time.
My friend, Rufus M. Jones, is quite right in saying that the central
weakness of the Friends in the past lay in their failure to appreciate
the importance of the fullest education of human personality in mind
and soul, and the attention that is now being given to education in
the Society of Friends is of the highest value. We cannot overestimate
the promise to American Quakerism and to English Quakerism of our
great educational institutions.
V.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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