I had a few min­utes before wor­ship at Crop­well Meet­ing this morn­ing and so turned to the book­case — a place you’ll often find me in in-between times at church­es of all sorts. There was a slim, dark vol­ume with no dis­cernible title on the spine, a mys­tery book. I pulled it out and it was a 1935 copy of Philadel­phia Faith and Prac­tice.

On the inside-front cov­er was the name of its orig­i­nal own­er, who had a sur­name famil­iar to any­one who has wan­dered the grave­yard out front. Near the begin­ning was a his­to­ry of Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing which abrupt­ly end­ed in the ear­ly 1800s, just before the Great Schism. It’s as if his­to­ry end­ed there. Only the pub­li­ca­tion address let on to those in the know that this was the Ortho­dox Year­ly Meeting.

As I start­ed read­ing pas­sages I was struck by how well writ­ten it is. I don’t know why that should be sur­pris­ing as Philadel­phia Ortho­dox had Friends like Rufus Jones, Thomas Kel­ly, and Howard Brin­ton. I guess I wasn’t expect­ing the offi­cial pub­li­ca­tion to be free of stilt­ed nine­teenth cen­tu­ry prose.

Here’s a pas­sage from the begin­ning of its “Wor­ship and Min­istry” sec­tion that spoke to me:

Our con­cep­tion of wor­ship is based on a deep-seated faith that God is Spir­it, as Christ taught at Jacob’s well, and that man, as spir­it, can respond to Him and enter into direct com­mu­nion and fel­low­ship with Him. This faith in the near­ness of God as Spir­it sprang out of a fresh and won­der­ful expe­ri­ence of God in the lives of George Fox and the ear­ly Friends. They felt that they found Him as they walked in the fields or as they sat in the qui­et of their meet­ings and they arrived at an unwa­ver­ing cer­tain­ty of the real pres­ence of God in the lives of men, which gave them unusu­al inner strength and spir­i­tu­al power.

I appre­ci­ate that it clear­ly maps out how God and Humana inter­act, tying it with­out much arti­fice to a par­tic­u­lar pas­sage in the gospels. And then it gets real with the image of seek­ers walk­ing the fields look­ing to com­mune with God: such a human depic­tion. I’ll be check­ing out whether I have a copy of this F&P in my home library. It seems we’ll worth a read.

A ran­dom Google search while wait­ing for my fam­i­ly to pick me up from Crop­well turned up this 1922 edi­to­r­i­al in The Friend. This appar­ent­ly is the dis­cus­sion lead­ing up to the new F&P that sur­prised me!