Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 6th September 2026

Dear Friends,

A few months ago I wrote here about my visceral discomfort when Quakers overuse the term ‘God’. I know the origins of Quakerism are a wish to worship God but without a preacher saying how to do so, yet something in me associates the term God with preaching. A number of Lewes Quakers responded to my earlier post to say it resonated with them.

Recently I was chatting about this with a friend I can best describe as a secular Hindu. He encouraged me to think more in terms of the Indian concept of Bhagavan, a loose term for God which can be used as a deity but can also mean complete universal knowledge, and is thus something one strives for rather than simply worships. Without getting into the theology of how Bhagavan (or various other spellings) is used in Asian religions, I have found myself wondering whether an ideal to aim for is a better way of defining God than a word that suggests a person.

And by extension, the thought occurs to me that re-imagining the concept of God (whether under that name or another) as an abstract, genderless striving for complete knowledge might be a way of defusing the overtones of traditional didactic religion that Quakerism originally set out to get away from and that ­ for some of us at least ­ the word ‘God’ still incorporates?

Christopher Bowers
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.