New Garden Friends Meeting, Greensboro NC
Today (Seventh Month 12, 2015) New Garden Friends Meeting approved the following minute:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)
“For the hour is coming, and now is, when those who worship God will worship in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23)
“For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:30)
“You are my friends if you do what I command.” (John 15:14)
As a monthly meeting of the Christian people called Quakers, New Garden
Friends takes seriously these and other scriptural passages which help
us understand the ways of God. With the early Friends, we hold that
Christ is present, leading, guiding, and directing, and also with them
we understand that Real Presence to be our primary authority. Thus, our
worship centers on the Word which John's Gospel proclaims is that Light
of Christ, and in the spoken & written word and silence, we attend
to that Presence for leadership and inspiration. With the confidence
that where Christ is, the Reign of God is present, we go with
confidence into the world seeking by our actions to give testimony to
the transformational power of that Light in our own lives and to mend
the world through our integrity, peace, simplicity, equality, and
community.
We have found that this is not a burden but a privilege, and in the
community of diverse gifts and understandings in our meeting we are
yoked together joyously, each person's experience of that “way, truth,
and life” adding to each individual's limited understandings. We also
gladly seek through a wider community of Friends' knowledge of that
saving and empowering Light to expand and refine our own experience.
Thus, we remain committed both to our vital presence in North Carolina
Yearly Meeting of Friends (FUM) in its current or somewhat modified
form and our fellowship among the worldwide community of Friends. As
the host of NCYM for all but a few years from the 1790s into the late
20th century, our ties are deep and meaningful, and we will maintain
them to the best of our ability. We will do so, not with a feeling of
being “unequally yoked,” but as a member of a team, sharing our
distinctive talents and abilities for a common purpose.
Nor do we seek to impose on others a burden of how we experience being
yoked with Christ. We know the cost of discipleship but also the cost
of seeking to bend others to our own attempts to be obedient to God. As
our own beloved member Mary Mendenhall Hobbs said 100 years ago,
“Before we enter upon the attempt to endorse a creed, either the
Richmond Declaration of Faith or another, we should seriously and
honestly consider....‘Why do I wish to have a creed adopted by our
denomination? Is it that I myself may thus express to the world my own
belief in God and in Christ and bear witness to their saving power? Or
is it that I thus may help compel someone else to say just what I wish
them to say in my way or to persecute them?’” (M.M. Hobbs, “Creeds”)
Our faith is that God has not left any without a witness, a universal
saving Light whose efficacy “lieth not in a literal interpretation but
in an experiential knowledge.” (Robert Barclay, “Apology, Proposition
V”). It is our desire to share with others our encounter with that
Light and, in the words of George Fox, to “walk cheerfully in the
world, answering that of God in everyone.”
It is our hope that, together, we will come into a fuller understanding
of that saving Light and, together, will seek an earth (and community
of Friends) restored.
- - - - - - -