Excerpt from the new QuakerPress pamphlet Coming into Friendship as a Gift

I came to the Religious Society of Friends the hard way. I’d left my close-knit fundamentalist Pentecostal church at 16, still in love with the Holy Spirit, but quite out of love with doctrine, pastors, and manufactured worship services. Since I was in the habit of attending church three times a week, I kept up the habit for the next five years, seeking a place where I could sit in worship without feeling like a liar. It took five years, several continents and dozens of churches, temples, mosques, and gurdwaras, but I found my spiritual home when Spirit guided me into New Delhi Friends Meeting on a sweltering June day in 2001.

I have stayed in the Religious Society of Friends the easy way. The initial way opened by Spirit has been followed by scores of Friends opening the way further through gifts of sincerity, trust, affirmation, accountability, practical support, friendship, play, and love. Friends have helped me to organize protests, write press releases, teach First Day School, and reach clearness on big decisions. They’ve taught me how to can tomato sauce, hoe corn, and plant runner beans. Friends have offered me their spare rooms, their car keys, and their money.

They have asked me what is on my heart, and held me close as I’ve cried my eyes out. They have sat by me and held me in the Light as I spoke in ministry, and they have listened and talked to me when I’ve outrun my guide.

I wish I could say that along my journey over the last six years I have met scores of other young adult Friends who have been nurtured and supported as deeply and as thoroughly. I have not. In some areas of the United States that I have visited, there are hardly any young Friends in meeting for worship. I do not believe that it is because young people are bored with the nature of Quakerism. Quakerism, at its core, is vibrant, exciting, and deeply moving. It is a way of worship, a way of living, a way of working towards coming into oneness individually and corporately.

It can be tempting to look at the absence of young faces in our meeting houses and blame it on the “digital age” or on young people needing “something more lively.” However, I would like to hold up the possibility that people coming into Quaker meetings are not looking for a certain prevailing skin phenotype or age presence, but for the Spirit to be evident in the lives of the Friends who are there. I believe that they, like me, ache to have a spiritual community where they feel truly seen, truly held, and deeply challenged.

This story isn’t meant as a rebuke to the meetings who have not engaged their visitors and their young people as much as mine have, but as a love-letter to my own monthly meetings and as a story of possibility. What happens when you treat the young stranger (or the known young person) in your meeting as a gift with enormous potential? I do not know what will happen to you, or to the young people you encounter in your meeting, but this is what happened to me.

• • •

My first meeting for worship was at New Delhi Friends Meeting in India. I had been in India for a month studying comparative religion, and had just learned that Quakers existed (I’d thought them all deceased) the day before. There were no messages that broke the silence, profound or otherwise. There was no music, no beautiful pictures on the wall, and no one was within a decade of my twenty years. There were just four people around a card table in a YWCA in a room that looked suspiciously like a former supply closet, and a whole lot of silence that was only broken once by Cheryl Heneveld telling me it was okay to blow my nose. I’d been sniffling for at least ten minutes by that time, trying to avoid nose blowing because I was nervous that Quakers would find it offensive. The silence was extremely uncomfortable and comforting at the same time. It felt heavy, but oddly familiar.

I don’t remember if the meeting had cookies or juice or what when it broke, but I do remember the conversation. Everyone drew me into the dialogue, gave me their business cards, and found out what I was interested in (literature and spirituality). We talked for an hour, trading ideas and stories of our spiritual journeys back and forth.

As I prepared to find my way back to my hotel, they tried to figure out ways to connect me with Friends in the States. One of them knew that Lorna Jarvis, who was a former ballerina and Friend in Mexico City, had moved to western Michigan and went to meeting there. They told me to give her a call.

• • •

After a mind-shattering week of culture shock upon my return to the United States and no Religious Society of Friends or Quakers in the phone book, I sat on my bed at home with the phone book open to the JA’s trying to psych myself up enough to start cold calls. I didn’t see a Lorna Jarvis. Plenty of other Jarvises, but no Lorna. I decided to go down the list starting in the middle, and called a Bruce Jarvis:

“Hello.”

“Hi . . . umm . . . do you ummm know anything about where the Quakers meet?”

“Yes. They meet at our house.”

“Can visitors come?”

“Of course. Do you want directions?”

I know it’s ridiculous that the first Jarvis I called was the right one, but sometimes that’s what happens.

The gift of trust requires mutuality. I had to have trust enough to call, and the Jarvises had to have trust enough to be listed in the phone book, host meeting for worship in their living room, and give directions to strangers.

But that initial trust needs to be accompanied by more and more trust. In the ensuing conversation after my first meeting (still in silence—I didn’t hear a message for six months), the members of Holland Preparatory Meeting and myself got to know each other. After I’d come regularly for several weeks, they asked me if I had a way to get to meeting when school started again. One of the Friends who lived near my campus offered to pick me up every First Day. Another Friend offered to pick me up so I could go to Grand Rapids Monthly Meeting for a regional retreat.

These Friends did not know me. They did not know my parents. They didn’t know if I liked to pilfer small objects or do drugs. They knew nothing but that I felt drawn to the meeting and was discerning my spiritual path.

I do not know how to explain their commitment to me, but I am grateful for it. I believe that just by virtue of my choice to come and worship with them, they felt an intrinsic commitment to me and my journey. Their commitment to my journey helped strengthen my own commitment. Their trust opened me up to the possibility that there was a spiritual community that could walk alongside me for the long haul.

Coming Into Friendship as a Gift: The Journey of a Young Adult Friend is available now from QuakerBooks.org. By naming the gifts she has received from her meetings, Christina Van Regenmorter offers a resource both for young adult Friends and for meetings striving to welcome, support and nurture the young people in their midst. The pamphlet is a project of the Youth Ministries Committee and Quaker Press of FGC, and also includes queries and a resource list.

Christina Van Regenmorter lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is a member of Nashville Friends Meeting. She has served Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association (SAYMA) as a recording clerk, and also serves as a member of the Ministry and Nurture Committee of Friends General Conference.