What’s the polite and constructive thing to do if someone doorsteps you to talk about faith? I missed the doorbell yesterday but found a cheery – somewhat psychedelic – card with a handwritten message and Bible quotation.

I drafted a reply but the email address given didn’t work. So here’s an open message to Richard, a Jehovah’s Witness.

A psychedelic card with contact details and a Bible quote

Richard hi

Thank you for your card. Had I caught you I’d have been OK to spend a couple of minutes explaining our household’s faith practice with you. Happy to do it my email instead. 

A key insight of Quakerism is that – happily – outward forms such as sacred texts, buildings, robes, doctrines and creeds are not necessary for us to have a direct personal relationship with God. This is extremely liberating. Quakers enjoy great freedom of speech; when there are no rules and forms to be bound by one can be moved by the Spirit. This supports independent thinking which is why Friends have made such an exceptional contribution to social justice through history. When they suppress dissent and independent thinking organisations and bureaucracies just ossify, and become not only authoritarian but faintly ridiculous, even dangerous (eg failing to report sexual abuse…it happens everywhere but the question is how an organisation responds to it). 

Quakers have testimonies to peace, sustainability, integrity and equality. This last one supports gender equality and makes it a matter of faith to avoid things like the homophobia to which some churches are horribly prone. Why on earth should anyone try to tell people who to love and how, when God is clearly in some cases calling people of the same sex to be together in sustained loving relationships?

I was interested to learn that Quakers (and Buddhists) enjoy the best mental health and longevity of all religious groups. I think it’s significant.

There’s a long history of predicting the second coming of Christ. The real good news is it happened already, and that there is something of God in all of us. Recognising that and responding to it helps as we try to do our best to receive divine guidance and focus on what is really important. As Quakers we find this is best done with silent waiting rather than evangelising and hectoring people. 

Many institutions, including religious ones, promote dreadful inequality behind a facade of good intentions. It has to be challenged. This is not meant as a personal rebuke and please don’t take it as such. A Friend reminds me at this point of the words of Isaac Penington “Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.” (QFP 10.1)