Welcoming Friends serve as a gateway for newcomers into a Quaker community, offering spiritual hospitality, helping build relationships, and attending to the varying needs of newcomers. Offering attenders a warm welcome and sincere invitations can promote spiritual growth of the Meeting and the individual. Being open to transformation to meet newcomers’ needs can help a meeting stay limber.
Queries for Reflection:
- Think of a time when you felt welcomed and embraced by an individual or a community. What did welcoming look like? What did being welcomed feel like? How might you offer this authentic welcoming to a newcomer in your meeting?
- Think about your own experience of being a newcomer to your Quaker meeting. What did the meeting do to help you move from being a newcomer to seeing the meeting as your spiritual home? How did you build relationships with other Friends?
- In what ways can you support a newcomer in forming relationships with Friends in the meeting? Who might this newcomer want to meet? Is the person generally an introvert or extrovert?
- Consider a newcomer’s experience with a Quaker meeting at different points in time: walking through the door for the first time on a Sunday morning, during coffee hour after that first visit, after 3-4 visits, and after attending for six months. What support and information might the newcomer need at these various points in time?
- What’s happening in your meeting that newcomers may be invited to join? Part of offering spiritual hospitality is directly inviting people to social opportunities, religious education opportunities, shared meals and activities, actions in the community, and programs for children. If invitations go out to some new attenders but not others, take steps to correct that.
- What basic information about the meeting can be shared to help a newcomer feel at ease? (For example: bathroom locations, borrowing materials from the library, decoding “Quaker jargon” terms like First Day School or Second Hour)
Advice on Offering a Warm Welcome:
- Welcoming Friends need to listen intently to Newcomers to see what they want, what they think they need, and how they want to be treated.
- We can assume that we are all on a spiritual journey and Newcomers may have had deep spiritual experiences before walking through our doors.
- Not everyone wants to be aggressively “welcomed.” Pay attention to body language and cues from the person to see if they might like some space. If you’re unsure, ask the person what would be good for them.
- When someone new walks in the door, Friends need to ask gentle, open-ended questions rather than assume someone is or is not already a Quaker or familiar with Quakers.
Additional Resources
What’s the Difference Between a Welcoming and an Inclusive Space? QuakerSpeak video with perspectives from several Friends
Asking Powerful Questions, a series of resources by Will Wise and Chad Littlefield. Learn how to build trust and rapport, be aware of your intentions, and to build reflective listening skills
Why Introverts Excel at Reading Body Language, an article in Introvert, Dear from 2024
Sharing Our Faith with the Nones, article by Thomas H. Jeavons, published in Friends Journal in 2013
