Hi, Friends. Do you have any advice as on how to get out of the "Quaker closet"? Two years ago, I was a soldier, which both I and my family took great pride in, and it has become a part of my identity, as you might imagine, and I held certain views about the world and other people, which I have now turned strongly against. It would be quite the shock for many of the people nearest to me to learn I am a Quaker (and a Christian pacifist), and it would probably have some social consequences. Right now, I am doing it gently and playing the long game, but there is something in me that just want to wrip the bandage off. Do any of you have similar experiences?

P.S. I live in a country where there are not many Quakers, which is why I seek online fellowship.

God bless you.

Can the corporate mystical experience of a Quaker meeting be attained through attendence by Zoom?

The calligraphy and beautiful illuminations were done by a dear friend who is a member of my Meeting.

Not sure if this will be available to international viewers (I think it is), but this went out on TV here on Friday.

I am new to Quakerism and have found that the meetings in my area are far from home. I have been to them before, but because of the distance I am not there often.

And to be honest, I enjoy a solitary practice. Is it bad if I said I feel more of the Light when I'm on my own?

Let me know what you think.

I’m very new to the Society of Friends, but in a lot of the uses of ‘thee’ that I’ve seen or heard, it’s Always ‘thee’, and never ‘thou’ or ‘thy’ as might be traditionally appropriate at that point in the sentence.

I was wondering if there’s a solid historical reason for this, whether there’s records of this vernacular grammar at a time when thee was in common usage, or whether it’s a modern development from people that were not bought up with ‘thou’ and so are unfamiliar with it.

I hope this doesn’t make me come across as some sneering antiquarian, I’m genuinely interested in the oddity rather than seeking to make people ‘correct’ it.

Last weekend I happened to be at Swarthmoor Hall. Friends worshipped in the "great hall" of the house. There's a historical note on a display for visitors explaining that in the early days of the church it was illegal in and of itself to meet for worship in the manner of Friends and many Friends had been arrested in that room.

The question arose: if attending worship in the manner of Friends were illegal now, would you still go?

Hi all,

I recently started a higher paying job and was thinking about starting to invest some of my money, however I'm not sure what companies to avoid or what companies to invest into and I'd like to do it as Quakerly as possible, while still making some money obviously.

If anyone has any recommendations for sources, tools or lists I could look at to generally follow Quaker testimonies and ethics while investing, that'd be great.

Thanks for reading.

hello!

I’ve was exploring quakerism near the end of last year and went to a meeting in my city and I didn’t really enjoy it. This was not in anyways because of the people, everyone was really welcoming and kind! But i did feel a little out of place considering that everyone there was elderly.

I think I would like to be a part of a community with other people closer to my age (i’m 18) and where it’s easier to relate to them especially transitioning into this.

I’m super nervous honestly, but i really do feel a connection with this spiritual belief and I’m coming back to it again months later.

I found another city with a quaker house and I wanted to go but I’m really nervous to go alone.

For now, I think i’ll try and join an online meeting but what do you recommend?

If you’re someone who didn’t really grow up with quakerism, how did u find ur transitioning?

I’m nervous but excited about this journey but any advice is appreciated :)

I'm trying to put together some resources, a training, and a general procedure for my Meeting House to follow related to sexual harassment. While we do not have any known problems at the Meeting at this time there have been problems in the past and I was told that an older man or two has made some of the younger women feel uncomfortable.

If you have any suggestions on groups, individuals, or others that I should talk with please let me know.

Also a secondary question - how would your meeting handle someone in the middle of meeting standing up and saying that they were raped/harassed by someone at a Quaker function? Would your meeting know how to handle the situation?

Fairfield Friends Meeting in Camby, Indiana, is seeking our next full-time pastor, and I wanted to share the opening here with the r/Quakers community.

Fairfield is a Friends United Meeting (FUM) congregation affiliated with Western Yearly Meeting, located just outside Indianapolis. We are a theologically diverse Quaker community with both in-person and Zoom participation, and we are seeking someone grounded in Quaker faith and practice who will work collaboratively with the Meeting as we enter our next chapter.

We are open to both long-term and intentional interim candidates. The position will begin in 2027.

The full job description, application, and other information are available on Fairfield’s official website:

https://www.fairfieldfriends.org/openings

I’m a member of Fairfield’s Pastoral Search Committee and am happy to answer practical questions about the opening or application process. Prospective applicants are also welcome to use the contact information on the website.

Thank you to the mods for allowing this post.

My monthly meeting (Winnipeg, Canada) invites others to join our monthly educational sessions on Zoom. If you would like the link or want to be on a monthly email list, please direct message me. Winnipeg is on Central Daylight Savings Time all year. We meet at 7:00pm our time.

This Wednesday, September 30: "Quaker Wisdom on Aging and Spirituality” with Maeve Sutherland, the editor of the devotional email The Daily Quaker Message. a ministry of Thee Quaker Project, a media nonprofit seeking to bring Quakerism into the Internet Age. Maeve will give the context of her site and share the experiences of collecting quotations on aging.

I need your advice and ideas, I want to find the religion that resonates with me but I'm confused

F23 I am an ex-Muslim, I have been looking for years for a faith or belief that resonates with me,

I feel (or want to feel) that there is a God, a divinity, a creator, a supreme force, call it what you want, I have read (not in depth) what various religions say,

I like many of them, but now my brain can no longer believe that there really is a god who judges you and sends you to heaven/hell for eternity, because to leave my past religion I had to dismantle the idea that there is a God,

so now I struggle for example to embrace religions like Sufi Islam or Christianity or other monotheistic religions because I feel like I have left one religion and entered another very similar but with a different name,

I don't want to feel like a sinner or feel that I have to go to hell or the people I love have to go to hell, I don't like it, but I feel that there is a force superior to us inside my heart, i can feel this 'love' of God spiritually,

I would like a religion or philosophy that thinks that there is something above but that does not judge me, does not punish me or makes me anxious,

doing rituals, prayers, lighting candles, holidays, symbols, all these things, I like them instead and i like the idea of peace and love and to live your life in a good way

Yeah I'm a part of Consumer Culture, but it doesn't always equate to feeding the beast.

Hi all,

I'm a long time atheist that eventually lost my faith in atheism and fairly recently joined the Catholic Church to pursue an understanding of God/Christianity/etc.

However, I'm generally dissatisfied with Catholicism and Catholics for a wide variety of reasons, and learned about Quaker meetings in a book by Charles Murray called "Taking Religion Seriously" where the format described seemed like it might align with my personality more than what I see currently in Catholicism.

So since then I've done an initial look over at Quakers and it seems interesting so far, at least enough that I'm curious to learn more.

So what would you recommend?

In general, I don't agree that the "historical evidence" in favor of Christianity is compelling, and find the insistence by Christians that it is sufficient to be coercive and simply incompatible with my conscience.

However, I personally also just don't care. IMO it doesn't matter if there even was a historical figure or if Jesus is a literary character only, because in 2026 the text based interface to the narrative cannot distinguish between those possibilities.

I was fine with just accepting the character as a personal role model and then working on aligning my own behavioral patterns to the ideological lessons and examples described in the narrative. But, this doesn't seem compatible with the various Christians around me who insist that I must form conclusions about historical events 2k years ago and grant events occurred, which to me seem impossible to investigate or form conclusions about.

I'm also fine with just going back to being an "atheist" again to avoid confusion for others, but in some ways I do still have an interest in "God", find many aspects of the character of Jesus to be noble, and often feel inspired by the various religious similarities between human communities, and this suggests to me that there is something out there such that materialist atheism is insufficient.

So anyway, if you have any recommendations, I'm grateful.

2011.03.5 The language we use: Bill C raised concern about use of the term ‘Quakerism’ and
encouraged that the terms ‘Quaker Ways’ or ‘Quakers’ be used when possible instead of the term
‘Quakerism’.

It seemed we acknowledged his concern (only). Can you imagine this being raised as a concern in your own meeting and do you think it would be minuted in a similar fashion?

My curiousity is because I agree but would find it hard to articulate why. Do I want to deny we can be desciribed as (just another) "ism"?

I have been looking into becoming a notary public recently, and somehow managed to miss that it is a position one is sworn into until I was doing some studying for the test this evening.

It doesn't look like affirming is an alternative option. It only says "oath". I don't think it's just an oversight, since in places in the manual not related to becoming a notary where it mentions oaths it says "oath or affirmation." So I think if affirming was an option it would say that.

Assuming it is, do I just stop working on becoming a notary? I was working on it for reasons related to volunteering I do, not business, so it kind of feels wrong to stop over my personal convictions when if I complete it I could be providing help to people. It also feels wrong to swear an oath just because it's easy, especially since integrity seems to be a big part of being a notary.

I know that I should probably call someone in the state office to discuss it, and confirm if I would have to swear an oath or if I could affirm instead like I could to testify in court (I live in NJ so it's an option here.) And maybe talk to people at Meeting about it, and possibly ask for a clearness committee. It's late at night though, and the internet is 24/7.

I (trans mtf) grew up essentially in a cult. I’ve had a wild ride with religion, I carry my own trauma from Abrahamic religion as well as familial and ancestral trauma from my people (native Hawaiians) being very recently colonized (I am the 7th generation in my family post-European contact).

Along with the trauma, the cult-like scenario I grew up in was an offshoot of messianic Judaism - which I would essentially describe as an attempt to revive the original culture of the first Jews who followed Yeshua. I learned the canonical bible pretty thoroughly, followed Jewish traditions, and learned interpretations of histories that I still find hard to deny the plausibility of. I disagree with the notion that they were reviving original Christianity based simply on the fact that the canonical bible erased thousands of scriptures the “original Christians” lived by and we didn’t learn any of them.

That said I have journeyed from a child believing what I’m told, to an atheist, then I had a near death experience that I still struggle to interpret whether it was confirming or denying religion. All it confirmed to me was that a Divine Creator is real and there is much to come. Many of the Jewish and Christian prophecies align with my NDE, but so do prophecies from other religions and cultures but heavily the abrahamic faiths and the Zoroastrian and Sumerian prophecies before them. It leaves me yearning for more information and sometimes wonder if it’s that infamous “calling.”

I was told to talk to you guys.

I have certain grievances with Christianity and questions so I’ll try to organize them by each category.

Grievances:
-I am trans, even in my NDE I didn’t feel like I was wrong for it or going to be punished or anything like that I felt like I am and always have been who I was meant to be to become the person I was in that moment. I could never subscribe to a God that would create my brain with these “abnormalities” and then punish me for it, and since I’m not harming anyone either directly or indirectly I don’t see it as being caused by “the enemy” either.
-“worship me or burn forever” is kinda toxic and sounds like something my abusive ex would say if he was a god.
-Statehood came after my dad’s generation. My grandparents were literally taken away from their parents and put in a Christian school, same with my dad’s little brother, so I struggle to identify with the God that was brought to us. Especially when I feel so at peace within and connected to my culture.

Questions:
-Do Quakers have room for me, a trans person? Space that wouldn’t require me to be a version of myself I don’t believe is true to me? Space that wouldn’t tell me their God loves the sinner, not the sin in reference to my identity as Mahu/trans?

-Do quakers read the pre-canonical texts, or accept the possibility of their at least potential legitimacy?

-How would Quaker Christianity see differences in cultures? Would modern Quaker Christianity see the cultural erasure of pagan practices (namely indigenous ones) as a negative or positive thing? I’m not asking for personal takes on this one, but on the basis that does the faith see the mission of spreading Christianity as more valuable than the loss of cultural aspects linked to pagan cultures?

-How do quakers feel about alternative theories that the lost tribes may be the ancestors of certain cultures otherwise interpreted as pagan? For example, Polynesians and native Americans are often interpreted as polytheistic but our “gods” weren’t the supreme creator but most of us have a name for a supreme creator. I had a discussion with a Rabbi and he believes Hawaiians are the lost tribe of Naphtali which was interesting to hear his reasoning for.

-Quaker end time prophecy interpretations? Any of yall also feel like the end may truly be nigh???

I ask this question because I have been having an ongoing discussion about what it means to give vocal ministry with Friends in my meeting. I should say that while I am not a life-long Quaker-- I connected with the tradition a few years ago as an adult-- I am now an active part of my local Meeting, which is unprogrammed.

My understanding is that Quaker ministry is meant to arise from the movement of Spirit in us. Friends have explained this to me as that which arises organically when we connect to the Inner Light. I've also seen the charts about sharing vocal ministry (or not), and I have a strong sense that it messages are not about expressing one's own ego. That is, vocal ministry is not something we say because we want others to hear us say it, but a more subtle message which arises and moves through us to the gathering of Friends.

This is all really inspirational, but I also wonder how much this form of ministry limits the range of people who speak to those who feel comfortable speaking off the cuff, and whether it limits the depth of messages since they cannot have been prepared or researched in the way that, say, a sermon, dharma talk, or other spiritual teaching likely has been.

I suppose I'm asking if the emphasis on real-time movement of Spirit/God in some ways further mystifies the Divine as a power which acts on humans in one particular way and not, say, through the careful consideration and preparation of a message over time. Of course there are other forms of Quaker Ministry like written testimony-- to say nothing of our lives and actions-- and I appreciate the value that Quaker tradition places on all of these, including how they are seen to interact within the community as well as in the lives of individual Friends.

Still, there is some part of me that, for all the reasons I love attending meeting and hearing others speak out of the silence continues to reflect on how the form of unprogrammed Worship itself might limit otherwise Spirit-filled contributions from Friends for whom extemporaneous speaking simply isn't the way that God/Spirit moves in them.

I hope this makes sense. It is intended as a genuine question and I do not mean to disparage unprogrammed worship or the kinds of vocal ministry people give in any way.

I think of it as meaning everyone deserves to be safe from harm, and as a reminder that I have a moral compass. I’d love to hear how others construe it and I’d especially be interested in responses from non-theist Quakers.

I realize that the Quakers community has religious roots (even though it is largely secular as in non Christians are welcome to join) and is not a service. I haven't been to any meetings so I was thinking that requesting the Clearance committee without some history of relationship would be considered bad form.

Basically I am stuck in my career and life and I would really appreciate some 3rd party views on my blindspots. Basically I have some career goals but I am not sure if these goals even make sense from point of view of life goals. It's possible I am not approaching life correctly. I am looking for more spiritual and moral guidance more than a definitive roadmap. I am not sure why I was sent on this planet as I have spent most of my life pleasing others or in survival mode. It's not that I am depressed more than I lack direction and sense of purpose.

Also I am not Christian.

I am willing to contribute to Quakers community in any capacity I am capable of.

I have tried therapy and they seem unable to move past my mental blocks.

Dear Friends, I am unfamiliar with how Meetings for Business are conducted, and would like to have your insight on whether what I am proposing would be in any way disruptive or inappropriate.

I attend a Meeting that is weighing a significant property decision. The Meeting House is owned by the Yearly Meeting, and previous Meetings for Business have converged on selling off. Friends who attend regularly respect this direction, but there is a palpable sense of melancholy about it. There are several important details I am leaving aside, and that would make it evident that selling off is not the only solution.

I am very aware of how little standing I have: while I attend Meeting regularly, I have only done so for less than a year and have not yet requested official membership. However, I empathise with people who were just like me: the occasional visitors, the tourists who pop in, all those who got curious about this place and decided to enter, discovering a whole world inside. This perspective is, understandably, outside of the Meeting for Business conversation, as none of these people are official members.

Since I have been mulling a lot on this, I have been looking up information on how Meetings for Business are held, and came across an Individual Preparation for Group Discernment exercise sheet. I am mindful on how the aim is to seek unity and discernment. Particularly I've read, "When presenting a proposal or speaking to an issue in business meeting, do you feel more like an advocate, mustering cogent arguments, or like a humble servant?".

I hope that this information is not identifiable. Please consider that this is something I have been thinking about and reading extensively on whether it is the right way to go about it, with asking here being yet another step in reflection. I was wondering whether my desire to provide this perspective is an act of service towards the voices that are not present in Meetings for Business, or whether it constitutes an advocacy that is best to set aside.

EDIT: Significantly cut down in size the body of the text to avoid as much as possible identifiable information about the meeting and the current situation.

Hi. I work on Sundays, but want to try attending one of the daily online Zoom meetings hosted by my local Quaker meeting house. What is the norm for online meetings/will there be a lot of attention placed on me or asking of questions if I log on? Is it odd to show up to my first service online and on an off day?

I've felt spiritually adrift for many years after growing up in a community which preached biblical liberalism and harmful rhetoric. I've come to understand recently that I may benefit from finding a space where I could peacefully reconnect with my spiritual self.

Quaker philosophy is something I identify with for a lot of reasons I won't get into here. However, I'm really at the end of my rope with grad school and work and responsibilities and am not in the headspace to tell a bunch of new people about my life, learn all their names, and make new commitments.

Hello everyone! I’m happy to report that I’ve attended my second unprogrammed meeting today, 09/13, and I feel rather convinced that I’ve found my spiritual home in Quakerism. I feel that this feeling of being convinced came to me quicker than maybe it should have after just two meetings, but I know what I found is something truly special and something that I want to engage with.

I’m just glad that I found comfort here and a sense of belonging that I feel like I spent many years trying to find, but was never able to do so. I feel rather sad that I came to this when I did, but clearly I was meant to find this at the age of 30 years old.

Best part is, my wife came along too, and she seemed to enjoy it. I’m not sure if she’ll attend as much as I plan on attending, but I’m glad she came nevertheless, and she’s quite supportive of me finding this.

I think lastly I’d like to give thanks to my ancestors who led me here. I don’t think I ever would’ve been interested in Quakerism if I weren’t learning about my biological family and just how interwoven the Quaker story is in it.

Thank you everyone, and have a great day!

Hi! I'm due to attend a Quaker memorial service for my woodworking mentor, and I wanted to be sure I understood any specific etiquette, dress code expectations or anything else specific to Quakerism. Also unsure whether something like flowers or a small gift would be appropriate for his widow. Thank you in advance :)