What Do Quakers Believe?

What do Quakers believe? As an experiential religion with no creed, there isn’t always an easy answer. We asked 26 Quakers about belief, and the resulting conversations were powerful.

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Music, Filming and Editing by Jon Watts
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Transcript:

George Lakey: I believe that there is a spirit that delights to do no evil. (laughs) A spirit that yearns for me to be happy and to be able to connect on deep levels with other people. A spirit that wants me to search and to find, and to act. A spirit that wants me to be responsible and at the same time to be bold and take risks.

What Do Quakers Believe?

Max Carter: Quakers describe themselves as a non-credal religious body. We don’t have our beliefs set out in formulaic expressions, like the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene creed. The experience of Friends is that religion and spirituality ought to be a direct, immediate experience of one’s own encounter with God.

Patricia McBee: George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, one of the earliest Friends, said that “You can say that Christ sayest this and the scriptures sayest that, but what canst thou say?” What do you know from your own experience?

“That of God in Everyone”

Jane Fernandes: Quakers see that of God in every person. I think that’s fundamental, and when you see that of God in everyone—that’s everyone—that changes everything.

Valerie Brown: The christ consciousness—the belief that each person has within them an energy that is unalterable of goodness—that is available to every single person, no matter your circumstance, no matter what you have done or not done or said or did or had or didn’t have. You don’t have to dress fancy on Sunday; you don’t have to speak a certain way; you don’t have to study a certain kind of text. Who a person is, by their very nature, we have that availability of God.

Mark Judkins Helpsmeet: So I would put that right at the core: this universal experience. And, that we’re usually distracted from that experience by something that grabs our attention, and our world is set up to distract us. So I think that at the center of Quaker belief, if you will, is this common-held knowledge, is that the way that you get to what’s real is that you clear off the distractions.

Waiting Worship

Lloyd Lee Wilson: For many folks coming into Quaker meeting for worship who aren’t already familiar with it, there aren’t many cues to indicate what’s going on, and it sometimes seems like we’re having worship based on silence but in fact something very different is going on. Sometimes this is called “expectant waiting;” in my yearly meeting, it’s more often called “waiting worship.”

Greg Williams: The uniqueness is that you’re sitting, waiting to be touched and to be moved. God is there, and God may not come to you in the way that you expect. If you’re centered, you can have a sense of that presence that’s within you.

Laura Goren: Through quieting ourselves, quieting our ego, quitting our racing mind, we can access that truth for ourselves and together as a community, that truth of where we are being led together. And that’s a mystical thing, I can’t explain that logically.

Kevin-Douglas Olive: When we come together in that reality, and we seek to be humble in that reality, we find ourselves connected in an intimate way. Sitting in silence with a group of people Sunday after Sunday, that’s as intimate as I can think of within a community like that.

We Are All Ministers

Ingrid Lakey: As a Quaker, I believe that we all have access to the divine, that spirit is available to us, there is God in everyone—including me—and that we don’t need an intermediary to be in contact with the divine. The divine is always with us.

Margaret Webb: Quakers believe that each person has a ministry, has a call, has something that the spirit is calling them to do, and because of that we believe that each of us has gifts, and that we each have a role in our meeting community. So we each minister to each other, within a Quaker community.

Deborah Suess: We believe that Christ is present, that Christ will speak directly to us, that you sure don’t need a pastor to do it for you.


More: https://fdsj.nl/belief

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The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.