Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 15th August 2026

Dear Friends,

A comment I seem to have heard often recently is “Meeting is not satisfying my spiritual needs these days”. A natural consequence is that the person stops coming.  This is not a new phenomenon. The root cause may lie in Meeting, or in the individual himself.  Quaker Faith and Practice offers this advice:-

Isolation of spirit … comes to most – perhaps all of us – at one time or another. There are times in our lives when the tides of faith seem far out, times of dryness, times when we do not feel the comfort and guidance of God’s hand. At such times we may stay away from meeting feeling that it does not give us the spiritual help that we need; or it may be that we continue to go and are to outward appearance actively engaged on the meeting’s life and business, while, within, we feel the agonies of isolation and the longing for light to lighten our darkness. I can think with thankfulness of Friends who have brought light to my darkness – perhaps a single sentence, a friendly letter, a walk on the downs: their help was perhaps given unconsciously, but it was because they were sensitive to God’s leadings that they were able to do it. Do we seek to be the channels of God’s love and caring? ‘Caring matters most.’

Edward H Milligan, 1951 Quaker Faith and Practice 21.20

This passage says to me that how others experience Sunday Morning or other devotional time,  private or communal, may depend on how far we all succeed in being not just a Society of Friends of the Truth (to use the old phrase), but also a society of friends of each other.

Know each other in the things that are eternal   George Fox  Quaker Faith and Practice 2.35

Bob Harwood

Quakers value diversity. We share this Friend’s message in the hope it will speak to others.

Pastoral Care and Eldership Team: David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Emily Slater.