George Fox

For several years in the late '90's, my wife and I worshipped on Sunday afternoons with the Society of Friends, after I had played services at the Presbyterian church in the morning. It was the only period in our thirty-plus years of marriage that we have been able to attend church together, and it was good to be there with her, to share the long silences, the listening.

George Fox, who died yesterday (13 January) in the year 1691, is unlikely to appear on any Anglican calendar of saints. I suspect he would be displeased with the very idea. But I commemorate him, and revere his memory. In a tumultuous age, he preached nonviolence. In an aristocratic society, he considered all to be equal before God, women and children as well as men. He called both Anglicans and Dissenters to account, and neither group would attend to his message.

Fox, and the Society of Friends which came into being around him, are, I think, an important corrective to the Anglican Way. Our clergy (and sometimes church musicians) too easily become enamored of our Perogatives, our fat pensions and comfortable salaries and medical insurance and fine pipe organs and lovely old buildings and clerical finery and all the rest. I cannot think of many Episcopal clergypersons who live a life of humble simplicity, and if they did, I suspect they would have a hard time finding a parish that would hire them. The musicians are no better – we love our AAM and AGO conferences where we stay in the finest hotels and eat at the finest restaurants. George Fox reminds us that this is not the path that Christ walked.

Worse still, we too easily become enamored of our Liturgy and our Music. We come to believe that they give us a direct line to God. Fox reminds us that the whole business – Prayerbook, Liturgy, church buildings, pipe organs, choirs, clergy, even the Holy Sacraments – is superfluous in comparison to the Inner Light, the simple following after God, the love for one's neighbor.


I believe that the Friends are not without their problems. In my experience, by throwing out Sacraments and Liturgy, they have also gradually lost connection with Scripture and (I would say) any recognizable belief in Christ. The Friends I was around are in belief essentially Unitarians, and most of them have not opened a Bible in decades, if ever. I would submit that without grounding in Scripture and a conversion experience in Christ (which Fox himself considered essential), it all becomes like chaff, blown about by the winds.

But there is nothing like a burial service among Friends. Or a wedding. And by comparison, Episcopalians know nothing about Silence, or waiting for Clearness. And there remains the steadfast nonviolence of the Friends, even at great personal cost.

Perhaps we need each other, we Anglicans and the Friends.