Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 4th June 2023

Dear Friends,

Last Sunday was Pentecost in the church calendar. If Quakers observed such “times and seasons”, I think this would be the one we would recognize as key to our experience. Acts 2 records how the early community of Jesus’ followers were gathered together when they had a profound shared spiritual experience which they could only describe by using words such as “a strong wind” and “tongues of fire”. They felt they were “filled with the Holy Spirit” and able to communicate with one another and those around them despite the usual barriers of language and backgrounds. It was a transforming experience resulting in their becoming a closer fellowship “holding everything in common” and gaining the desire and courage to share their faith with others.
 
Quakers have a very different style of worship to those called Pentecostalists today but both are categorised as “Spirit-led Churches”. Whilst living in Birmingham I did have experiences of worship in a Pentecostal Church with a warm friendly congregation made up largely of people of Caribbean origin. There was plenty of noise, liveliness and involvement of everyone in the worship with times of open prayer. The Spirit of Christ was invoked with passion. At one level it was far from our quiet hours but at another it was another community openly sharing and expressing their faith, needs and hopes together.
 
I have also been remembering times in international ecumenical groups when everyone has been invited to say the Lord’s Prayer in their own language and a glorious cacophony of sounds have emerged from dozens of people using a dozen or more different languages. Not quite the same as the experience of those at the event described in Acts when people with a wide variety of origins and “native languages” heard the “telling in our own tongues the great things God has done” but a good feeling of praying in the language that comes most naturally to each of us. Similarly in our meetings for worship we accept that there will be different expressions with which we share the ways we are touched by something beyond ourselves that does “great things” for us.
 
The first Friends knew of all this too. The passage from Francis Howgill that was shared in these messages a few weeks ago speaks of it with resonances of that first Pentecost: “And holy resolutions were kindled in our hearts as a fire which the Life kindled in us to serve the Lord”. These days in our more restrained wordings Friends tell of it too. George Gorman’s book with its bold title “The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship” gives his memories of his first meetings for worship:
 
“… I discovered the way to the interior side of my life, at the deep centre of which I knew that I was not alone, but was held by a love that passes all understanding. This love was mediated to me, in the first place, by those with whom I worshipped. For my journey was not solitary, but one undertaken with my friends as we moved towards each other and together travelled inwards. Yet I knew that the love that held me could not be limited to the mutual love and care we had for each other. It was a signal of transcendence that pointed beyond itself to the source of all life and love” (QFP 2.03)
 
May that be our experience too,
 
Chris,



On behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms, Nancy Wall)