Welcome To The Quakers World

BASHI LETSIDIDI
Correspondent | Monday July 12, 2010 00:00

About the church first. On this Sunday morning the bite of winter cold has kept a good many congregants away but meetings of the Religious Society of Friends (or Quakers) begin when two or more people come together to be in the presence of God.  Jesus Christ himself said: 'Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the  midst of them.' The language of Quakers is as unique as their style of religion. Their worship session is called a meeting, not a service. They worship in 'meeting houses', not churches. The word 'Friends' was inspired by another Jesus' quote: 'You are my friends if you do what I command you.' The meeting begins with the Friends sitting outside a meeting house in Kagisong Conference Centre. They are facing each other and 'waiting in silence.' Quakers have no hierarchical structure and this sitting arrangement symbolises their equality.

What is most unusual about this worshipping is that there is no priest, no sermon, no reading from the Bible, no praying, no singing and no collection plate being passed around.  The explanation for the absence of the priest is that Quakers believe that there is no need to transact your faith through a third party because 'there is something of God in every person.'

The worship allows for any participant who has been moved by the spirit to stand up and speak. Each speaking is followed by a period of silence. The silence is an important part of the worship because it enables the participants to get closer to God and each other. William Penn, an American Quaker said the following of this silence: 'True silence ... is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. 'The silence worship lasts some 20 minutes after which the Friends troop inside the conference room to watch a video on a laptop.  This too is part of the worship but it is so relaxed that one member takes out a flask from his bag and pours himself a cup of tea. The video opens with the voice of Martin Luther King and also features a descendant of Harriet Tubman, the iconic African American abolitionist who helped more than 300 slaves escape. A fair bit of time is also allocated to a Holocaust survivor who escaped from a Nazi concentration camp and fled to the US. Afterwards, congregants critique the video. Minus the video and on any other Sunday, the meeting would have been just one hour of silent worship. In addition to all that unusualness, Quakers neither practise baptism nor celebrate Christian festivals like Christmas and Easter. Their belief is that God can be found in the middle of everyday life and need not be worshipped on special days.

They view rituals as an unnecessary distraction and so their worshipping is completely devoid of elaborate religious ceremonies and rituals. Besides being distractions, rituals are also seen as barriers that impede direct experience of God.

Quakers take the most elastic live-and-let-live views on a host of issues from gender to abortion to contraception to euthanasia.

Donning one's Sunday best is nothing that Quakers have to worry about because they generally lead simple lives. One of their own, a man called Richard Foster, recommended among a set of principles that he drew up that Quakers should 'develop a habit of giving things away.' While they reject the pageantry of programmed worship found in mainstream Christianity, Quakers fully embrace the social activism that defined the ministry of Jesus Christ.

Before its current use, Kagisong Conference Centre was used as a transit centre for refugees, some of whom came from as far afield as Ethiopia.  Local Quakers also co-sponsor the Women's Shelter Project in Gaborone. The Quaker movement traces its history to the 17th century when an Englishman called George Fox rebelled against mainstream religion - its elitism and hierarchical structure, its cumbersome rules and its hypocrisy. Fox contended that God could speak to anyone and that for that reason there was no need to channel his message through third parties - like priests. While his message fell on receptive ears in some sections of English society, he incurred the wrath of the political and religious establishments who wanted to preserve the classist, racist and sexist order that prevailed at the time.

Fox's message threatened mainstream churches who sought to retain the right and privilege of being God's messengers on earth. As a result, some 6,000 Quakers were imprisoned between 1662 and 1670. The movement would later spread to America where people like Penn became its leading lights. Penn acquired a large land grant and found present-day Pennsylvania (named after his father) which became a sanctuary for Quakers. The movement grew over centuries and across continents which is why there is a meeting house in Mogoditshane.

How Friends helped Obama become president is a connect-the-dots mental exercise and in that matrix is the origin of Christian abolitionism which can be traced to the Quaker movement of the late 17th Century.  If as Fox, you believed that everyone is equal in the sight of God, you were bound to see an awful lot of wrong with the enslavement and commodification of black people.

At a time when other churches were quoting verses from the Bible to justify slavery, Fox and other founders of this movement spoke out against this practice and encouraged other Quakers to stop owning slaves. In 1688 German and Dutch Quakers in Philadelphia pioneered the first abolitionist organisation.

Eight years later, Quakers in Pennsylvania officially declared their opposition to the importation of enslaved Africans into North America. Over the years, this activism led to the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865 which freed the last 40,000 slaves, to the Reconstruction Era, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the Democratic Party nominating a black presidential candidate, and to the magical moment on November 5 when CNN announced: 'Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States.' The 31st (Herbert Hoover) and 37th (Richard Nixon) were Quakers.