If spiritual life is allowed to be the controlling, directing, molding force in Quakerism I have no fear for our future. We shall put in the forefront of our Church work the things that belong to life, the gathering of disciples, the raising of leaders and prophets, the maintenance of warm fellowship, the encouragement of service, the fostering of growth. This means that our Church arrangements will be so made and modified as to promote and secure the expression through them of the living forces which we have at our command. Those living forces are the spiritual force of the individual, which we call individual responsibility, the living force of the group, which we call fellowship, and above all, the Divine vitality, the incoming of the life of Jesus Christ, which we call spiritual power and spiritual guidance. Church arrangements, important in themselves, must be regarded as simply machinery through which forces can work, and the more efficiently the machinery allows the forces to work, the richer will be the service of the Church.
Let us consider the way in which these great forces get to work. I will take the meetings of the Church as my illustration. I am not one who says that the only kind of Friends’ meeting is a meeting for worship. I believe that there are three or four types of Friends’ meetings, in all of which we may have personal responsibility and group fellowship and the spiritual power and guidance of Jesus Christ.
Take first—it comes first—the evangelistic service, the meeting which seeks to do the primary work of the Church, by bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to man, the living gospel of a living Savior. For such a meeting you want a man who feels his personal responsibility, who feels that he is speaking as the ambassador of Jesus Christ, called, chosen, faithful, with a freshly given message of truth on his lips, but you want also behind him to back him the fellowship and sympathy of a group of earnest souls, who are helping the meeting by their prayer and sympathy, and who perhaps themselves will have some share in the delivery of the message or in the other outward service of the meeting. Moreover, the ingathering of disciples is a matter not only for evangelistic services, but for individual personal influence. Andrew findeth his own brother Simon: Philip findeth Nathanael. The men and women reached will need from the first to be surrounded with a new set of companions and to be brought into a new fellowship. They will need, not simply one service on a Sunday stimulating them to follow Jesus Christ, but the helpful comradeship of a group bringing them into a knowledge of what it means to live according to the will of God. In the redemptive work which our Adult Schools in England have done in hundreds of cases amongst men and women who had lost their own respect and were down in the gutter, the most fruitful work has been done by bringing men and women a new set of companions, in whose fellowship they may learn what the love of Jesus Christ means.