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Do you have a yearning for God and
a keen sense of spirituality,
yet you can't quite find a fit with traditional churches?
Do you have a relationship with God that brings you peace,
but you don't know how to be part of church-as-you-know it?
Over 350 years ago,
Friends shed the trappings of their traditional church.
They knew that the heart of Christianity
was a direct, experiential relationship with Jesus.
If a person had this relationship, they didn't need anything else.
If a person didn't have it, nothing else would satisfy.
It started a movement in which people
gathered to know God together
--and waited to hear from God directly.
This began the custom of waiting in Silence
for ministry to emerge
rather than depending upon clergy to do the God-work.
More than just changing worship,
it changed the way Friends conducted business together.
In fact, it changed a lot of things,
leading us to beliefs of equality among all people,
peacemaking, simplicity, and social justice.
North Seattle Friends Church
is the evangelical Friends presence in Seattle.
This just might be what you have been looking for in a church.
Join us for the God-adventure.
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"Quakers have never had a creed as something to be repeated
or as a standard of admission to membership.
This deliberate omission is not to be understood as an indication
of the judgment that convictions are unimportant.
The deepest difficulty with a fixed creed is
that it inevitably becomes formal, and, consequently,
can be repeated without conviction.
Even with the best of intentions, the formula is artificial
and external, and therefore something for which the sincere Christian
dare not settle...
God, Quakers believe, is real."
"The People Called Quakers",
by D. Elton Trueblood, Friends United Press, 1980, page 65
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Even in the Apostles' days, Christians were too apt to strive
after a wrong unity and uniformity in outward practices and observations,
and to judge one another unrighteously in these matters;
and mark, it is not the different practice
from one another that breaks the peace and unity,
but the judging of one another because of different practice.
For this is the true ground of love and unity,
not that such a man walks and does just as I do,
but because I feel the same Spirit and Life in him,
and that he walks in his rank, in his own order,
in his proper way and place of subjection to that;
and this is far more pleasing to me than if he walked
just in that track wherein I walk.
Isaac Pennington
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