Friends from a neighboring local meeting are uprooting themselves to follow a leading at an age when most of us are looking at brochures for retirement venues.   Another Friend couple try to follow their hart in establishing a Christ centered Friends Meeting in a major metropolitan area but can't find a neighboring Quaker Meeting to help them because of their belief that Jesus has something special to offer to the World as much today as He did back in the day.  It is refreshing to see someone sell all that they have and do their best to follow their hearts.  I recently attended a meeting where a call to follow a leading was met with mostly practical objections.  All of which brings me to ponder the same question Jesus pondered in Luke 18:8 where he asks if when the Son of man comes shall he find faith on the earth only in this case shall He find faith among Quakers?

Is there room for Faith in a community that extolls a history launched by men and women of Faith but has become a group of bureaucratic organizations loosely united by that history?  Organizations that spend much more time and money on maintaining their own "brand" of Quakerism, their historical buildings and burying their dead,  than in seeking the face of God and selling all they have to follow Him?  This might sound like I am condemning Quakers but that is not my intent.  My intent is to call Quakers to do what a Catholic Pope did years ago - to open the windows of our Meeting Houses and invite the Holy Spirit to enter and blow away the dust and cobwebs and to quicken the hearts of all who enter those buildings.  My intent is to call all who consider themselves to be Friends to ask what role faith plays in their lives and are they satisfied with that role.  There is a simple solution to those who would seek to be a people of faith for as Paul says at Rom 10:17 So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

The Bible isn't the best selling book because the church mandated that it be read.  In fact the organized church has a history of being afraid of the Bible as shown by the death of so many who were instrumental in enabling it's distribution.  When they failed at preventing its printing and distribution they used other means of limiting its power by convincing us they could be trusted with deciding which parts we should hear on a Sunday or which parts were anointed and which ones weren't.  My intent is to repeat what George Fox has been quoted as saying.  There is one Jesus Christ that speaks to our condition and and I would add that He alone is the one we should trust in deciding which part of the Bible is anointed and in this day and age can quicken our faith.  I ask you to consider that Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.  Don't settle for being a doubting Thomas insisting on being able to see and feel the open wounds of that one who spoke to George Fox's condition but strive to be one  who is blessed though they have not seen, and yet  have believed.