We extend a warm welcome to you and hope that you will find strength and peace while sharing in our meeting for worship. We gather in silence to seek communion with God and to search for divine will and guidance for ourselves, the group, and society.
Please feel free to sit anywhere and to ask the greeter any questions you have.
After the meeting concludes (at about noon) please join us for refreshments and conversation in our social room.
The hour of worship may be entirely silent or there may be spoken messages. Those who worship with us should not come with a determination either to speak or not to speak, but rather to be responsive to the inner light. When the worshiper feels called upon to speak, he or she rises and shares the message as simply and briefly as its nature permits. When others feel in unity with the message, it may become seed for further meditation.
Worship begins as Friends enter the meeting room and are seated in quiet. We feel that there is need for a considerable period of unbroken silence at the beginning of the meeting for worship. A somewhat briefer period of silence at the end is customary. After the meeting ends with a shaking of hands, we hope that you will linger with us, and take part in our fellowship.
The Friends' way of life ideally emphasizes simplicity, humility, loving kindness toward all people, recognizing no boundaries of occupation, race or creed. We are particularly concerned with the avoidance of war, and seek those ways of life that will remove the causes of conflict. George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, expressed his discovery of the way of our Quaker worship with the following words:
When all my hopes in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, oh then, I heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition." And when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.
John Woolman, the most influential early American Quaker, wrote :
There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any, where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they become brethren.
