I wrote up some­thing about Chris Stern’s vis­it to my meet­ing on Sun­day. I’ll share one extract on where he thought ear­ly Friends found their faith:

Chris said part of the answer came from Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gath­ered togeth­er in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” He said this is what ear­ly Friends were wait­ing for: “All of the prac­tices and rit­u­als didn’t have any mean­ing any more. They start­ed wait­ing because Jesus had said he’d show up. Ear­ly friends were averse to doc­trines but had a recog­ni­tion that there was some­thing inside urg­ing them to con­nect with God and urg­ing them con­nect with each oth­er — urg­ing them to love. They real­ized that this was Jesus.”

I was glad that he and trav­el­ing com­pan­ion, Joe Strat­ton, came out to share this min­istry with us. Not includ­ed there is a nice aside about his­toric meet­ing­hous­es. As Friends, we de-emphasize out­ward signs of faith — cross, steeples, altars. This includes our build­ings, yet there is a cer­tain feel­ing one gets step­ping into some of our meet­ing­hous­es. As Chris told us:

When you walk into an old meet­ing­house like this to get a sense of his­to­ry. I felt was trans­port­ed into anoth­er cen­tu­ry. But what is it that res­onates from these walls. Isn’t it the faith­ful lives of the peo­ple who inter­act­ed here all those years? Does­n’t that just draw us in to do that too? To enter that stream of faith­ful lives?