We Are Not the First

We are not the first to follow Jesus.

Others have gone before us. Did they always get it right? No. Neither do we. Our goal is to follow Jesus, not those who have gone before us. But we have much to learn from those who have followed far on the way to a deeper life with Jesus.

A decade ago, I walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain. I followed a guidebook by John Brierly who had walked the Camino six times. I benefited from his insights that he had discovered by walking himself. That is the spirit of these Sunday posts: to introduce you each Sunday to someone who, before us, found the way to a deeper life with Jesus and later shared with us what they learned as they navigated the interior journey.

This week, a community worth knowing: The Children’s Meeting of 1653

I write The Compass to help you navigate the interior journey toward a deeper life with Jesus. There are lots of options available to you here: just keep showing up an read, or sign up for a free subscription to get The Compass in your email whenever I publish a new resource about the that deeper life.

Share

Now, back to Kent, England, the year 1653, and the children of Reading Street.

I spent a little less than half of my 4 decades in pastoral ministry among Quakers. It was an experience that formed and shaped my interest and affinity for the contemplative stream of spirituality within Christian faith. No tradition sees everything, and no tradition does not need other traditions to help it find and navigate the way to a deeper, more transformative, more faithful life with God. But I valued much of what I discovered within this contemplative community and its quiet resolve to live faithfully and courageously in a culture that intends to co-opt, twist, and bend the community of faith to its own purposes. And when unable to alter the faith community in order to use it for its own purposes, the surrounding culture has always shown signs of intolerance and bias against communities of faith. This is why the actual story of the children of Reading Street Meeting (church), a Quaker community in Kent, England, in 1653, has always piqued my curiosity. There are romanticized stories of this Quaker community and its children, and some have dismissed the story because of the overly romanticized stories written much later, but I stand on the fact that there is much to learn from the real moment.

After all of that as a long runway to this story, here’s what happened.

By 1653, George Fox had been making great headway with his simple message that the original spirit of the first Christian church, described in the Book of Acts, had been lost in the church of England. He had been feeling this for a decade, and in the last half-decade, he had been saying it outloud, and had attracted a growing number of people who agreed. Further, it wasn’t just the compromise settlement that formed the original Church of England, it was the entire Protestant reformation that he believed had not gone far enough to restore back to Christianity what was so obvious in that first church that met in Jerusalem following the resurrection of Jesus.

A group of men and women in Kent, England, agreed with Fox, and began to gather near there homes around Reading Street in what would be known as Quaker meetings. The fusion of authority between state and the Church of England was threatened by this option that was attracting attention. Fox and his followers attempted to say they were doing nothing more than attempting to restore that original Acts 2 spirit of Christianity. But the turn of the century, they would land on a phrase that captured their intent: “primitive Christianity revived.” But the message was following on hard hearts and deaf ears.

Laws were passed to reign in counter movements such as the one that was growing up around Fox. Harsh punishments were attached to those who refused to conform to the prevailing ideas and ways of the recognized church. One of those laws said it was against the law for unauthorized groups of more than five to meet for religious purposes. “Unauthorized” should be interpreted here as meaning any group that did not conform to the doctrines and practices of the Church of England. Breaking this law could mean that the law-breakers would spend time in harsh conditions in the prisons of the 17th century.

The Quaker families around Reading Street were undeterred. They kept gathering on First Days (Sundays). They were warned. They kept meeting. And one day, authorities came with force and took all the adults to prison. Problem solved, the authorities thought. No more adults who refused to conform to the church. No more unauthorized meetings for worship outside of the state-sanctioned church.

The authorities were wrong. The children kept meeting. For three months while their parents waited to be released from prison.

Here is what I want to point out. There is nothing perfect about these families in Kent. They were human like us. But something formative was happening in that gathering, in those homes and families, and in those hearts so that when the adults were removed for three months, the children did not fade away and quit practicing their faith.

I don’t write these Sunday posts to make any great points. I simply want to say that now we know it is possible to create gatherings where the formation is so deep and so real that all, from the oldest to the youngest, are becoming able to live and grow a deeper life with Jesus in spite of whatever happens in their surrounding communities. This seems like an especially important thing to know in a world where intolerance and discrimination against Christianity is showing signs of growing in western cultures. The fact that happened in 1653 means that it can happen again, in 2026, or in 2053. The shallow spirituality that has marked so much of contemporary Christianity need not be the way personal faith and gatherings of faith is experienced and expressed.

Now we know there is an alternative.

In His Grip,

— Gene