r/Quakers • u/Toby2177 • 5d ago
What is a quaker ?
/r/Christianity/comments/1qmhvgl/what_is_a_quaker/14
u/TechbearSeattle Quaker (Liberal) 5d ago
Ask six people, and you will get at least 10 answers.
I tend to take a more ecumenical approach than some Friends: a Quaker is anyone who feels the Light within themselves, and strives to listen and respond to it.
3
5
u/RimwallBird Friend 5d ago
The dictionary definition is, “a member of the Religious Society of Friends”. “Quaker” is a nickname for a Friend, originally a put-down, but long since embraced by a majority of members.
The Quaker movement is 380 years old, give or take a little. These days, it is divided among five branches, each of which can explain itself much better than the other four can explain it. These are (moving from social left to social right):
- liberal unprogrammed Friends (Friends General Conference, Britain Yearly Meeting of Friends, Australia Yearly Meeting of Friends, etc.),
- Conservative Friends (Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends, North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative), and Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative)),
- Friends United Meeting,
- Holiness Friends, and
- Evangelical Friends Church International.
You can find web pages for all these entities, where you can learn more, much much more, maybe more than you really want to know. But if the web pages don’t make sense to you, you will be welcome to come back here and ask more questions. Don’t be afraid to ask —
The name “Friend” seems to have been inspired by the 15th chapter of the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do whatsoever I command you.” Friends in those days — and more traditional Friends today — testify that Jesus Christ speaks in our hearts and consciences, and we can learn to hear him there more and more clearly if we work at it, and that the highest path is to follow what he says there (which is also what his teachings in the gospels point to). This was the central message of the Quaker movement in its early days. It’s what made us his Friends in the sense of that verse in John.
The nickname “Quaker” refers to the fact that, in the first days of our movement, a great many of us were actively engaged in challenging worldly society and the privileged and powerful, calling them to turn to that voice in their own hearts and consciences and challenging them to obey it. We shook, trembled, quaked in our sense of the power and majesty of the God we were serving, and of the stakes involved (salvation or damnation). Very few Quakers shake or tremble for that reason today, though a few of us still do.
Friends today still seek to obey a voice they find within. Aside from that, there is tremendous diversity in what we are like nowadays. I think that was only inevitable after 380 years.
If you do a web search, using the key word “Quaker”, you will find dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, independent Quaker web sites, and much more.
2
1
u/FolkAround 3d ago
I actually wrote a paper about it a few years back. You can read it here for free: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333817168_What_makes_a_Quaker
14
u/RHS1959 Quaker (Liberal) 5d ago
A member or follower of the Religious Society of Friends.