How to Start a Quaker Meeting

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Discussion Questions:

1. Brent Bill suggests we must ask if a leading comes from our own “discontent” or a true “movement of God”. How do you personally discern the difference between the two?
2. Kristin discovered that “structure can sometimes choke out the spirit” and that her group had to unlearn their “muscle memory” of what church is supposed to look like. In your experience, when does structure support a community, and when does it become an obstacle to authentic connection?
3. Do you feel a spiritual hunger in your own community, and what are those seekers actually looking for?

Zack Jackson  

In the middle of the 17th century, the English countryside was filled with people gathering in fields and barns looking for a spirituality that they couldn’t name. They were called “the seekers”. They had walked out of their local churches because the stone walls felt cold and the sermons felt hollow. They were waiting on a power that they knew existed, but just couldn’t find in the institution. And then a young man named George Fox climbed Pendle Hill. He saw a vision of a great people to be gathered, and he came down to find them. He didn’t draft plans for a new religion. He didn’t try to be an architect of a new movement. He simply recognized that the fire was already burning, and he called people to stand around it. 

Almost 400 years later, the landscape looks different, but the hunger is exactly the same. We’re living in a new age of seekers. We see it in the data, but more importantly, we feel it in our bones. The trust in institutions is vanishing, but the desire for spirit is stronger than ever. Most of us respond to that hunger by looking for a place to belong. We want to find a seat at the table, but what if the Spirit is asking you for something else? What if you aren’t being called to find a meeting, but to form one? How do you start a Quaker Meeting?

Zack Jackson  

To answer that question, we are following the stories of two women from two very different corners of the Quaker world.

Jackie Joy  

My name is Jackie Joy Ho Shing. I live in South Texas, which is McAllen, Texas. I work as a community health worker, educator at a nonprofit family planning clinic.

Zack Jackson  

Now you may remember Jackie from earlier in the season during one of our mid roll supporter sections. Jackie is a thoroughly modern seeker. Her journey didn’t start in a pew. It started online.

Jackie Joy  

So back in November, last November 2024 I was not in a good mind, my heart, my soul, my brain, all of them was just really pissed off. If I’m going to be honest, that was irate. That was mad. And I think I downplayed it when we talked a couple of months ago, especially living in Texas where they’ve constantly like they’ve piled on to the anti immigration, anti LGBTQ, anti women rhetoric. I wanted to find a community that was rooted in love and has some sort of spiritual aspect, because I really did not want the hatred to win in my heart. So then I found Quakerism through some research, and I actually did my Spotify wrap, and then thee Quaker was, like, my number one podcast. Like, I think I’m like, your top five listeners, right?

Zack Jackson  

She found the wisdom and teachings that she was looking for, but she was missing the community. She connected with the closest meeting that she could find, Friends Meeting of Austin, but it was still over an hour away. As people in the modern era discover Quakerism through the internet. This is becoming more and more common.

Brent Bill  

A lot of our folks were isolated. They had some connection with Friends, or had been learning about Friends, but there was nothing close.

Zack Jackson  

That’s Brent Bill. He’s our voice of institutional wisdom, a lifelong friend who has spent considerable time in both evangelical and liberal Quaker circles and was the coordinator for the new meetings project through the Friends General Conference.

Brent Bill  

They found that they really desired a worshiping community based on Friends, and wanted to see if they thought it would be attractive to others. And so they wanted to do something like that. A lot of them wanted places that were theologically hospitable across the spectrum, that evangelicals would welcome liberals and could speak their own language without being censored for using God talk or not using God talk. And so mostly it was, you know, they just really wanted to have a community to belong to, and there was nothing all that close

Zack Jackson  

Looking around at her own neighborhood, Jackie realized that Zoom wasn’t going to be enough,

Jackie Joy  

And then I realize there’s other people like me who are like this, and we deserve to have a community just as much as other people can gather in their own other spaces. And a spiritual space is a very special, soft space that is different, that safe space to be in with other people, because you love God, you love your community. And I was thinking, we need this space. How can I make this happen? Yeah, I think it was then someone kind of passively gave me permission, and was like, well, you can just gather a group of people at your house, but you should, you should, you should try, like, doing something small, you know, in South Texas, I really contemplated about it, and I was like, I have the ADHD audacity, right? So I was like, why not? Let’s do it, right?

Zack Jackson  

Discomfort is one way the Spirit moves, but sometimes the leading isn’t a fire that pushes you out, it’s a gentle constriction that tells you you can no longer stay in. This brings us to our second guide.

Kristin Aull  

I’m Kristin Aull and I am a pastor in the Evangelical Friends Eastern Region. I am the Lead Pastor of a house church network. The network is a bit aspirational at the moment. We are currently one meeting and then with a new meeting that we’re growing, that we’re growing online. And it is pretty unusual. My friend, Pastor Brian is building an online faith community for Star Trek fans, and he has deep roots, and that’s a whole nother story.

Zack Jackson  

That is a whole other story, and we’ll follow up with Brian at a later date today. However, we’re talking with Kristin, and unlike Jackie, Kristin wasn’t responding to anger and frustration. She was a leader in a comfortable, established Quaker church in Ohio. She had security, she had history, but she realized that safety and growth aren’t the same thing.

Kristin Aull  

My husband and I started to look back on our roles in the church, our relationship, and realized that God had really already been moving us, and we didn’t know it, but just things had shifted. The ground had shifted around us, and we really hadn’t realized it. And when I look back now, I realized I was very spiritually kind of root bound, and I had no idea that I was as root bound as I was. I really needed to be picked up and put in some some fresh ground,

Zack Jackson  

Whether it’s the audacity of the new or the constriction of the old. The question remains, is this God, or is it just me? We live in a culture of startups and entrepreneurs, where every good idea is supposed to become a business, but a meeting is not a business and a leading is not a business plan.

Brent Bill  

I think one of the things that we have to do with any leading is going, Where’s this coming from? You know, is this coming from my discontent or my problem solving, or is it true? Movement of God in my spirit? I did, I hate to plug it, but I did write a book called “Sacred Compass”, and it is about discernment and how to test the leading. And part of it is, is it recurring? You know, not just did it happen today and so now I’m ready, but does it keep nudging? And another is, is it making me perhaps feel a little uncomfortable, like I might be moving outside my comfort zone to do this?

Zack Jackson  

Discomfort is often the first confirmation. The Spirit rarely calls us to the couch. It calls us to the edge. And once you confirm that the itch is real and the leading is true, you are faced with a terrifying, practical reality. You have to actually do something. You have to give this spirit a body. You have to gather a people and create something new, and that is where the trouble usually begins. More on that after the break.

Zack Jackson

Every so often, we get to hear a story from a listener that reminds us why we make this show. A little while back, we spoke with AJ and Rihanna, two Friends from Berkeley, California. They told us about how they bonded over Thee Quaker Podcast at a really significant moment in their lives.

AJ Fox  

We were on our honeymoon, driving around Northern California and Southern Oregon and spending a lot of time in the woods and in our car. And because we were in our car, we were listening to various things. And I said to Riana, “Hey, I found this new podcast that’s really, really interesting, and I think you would dig it.” And we just turned it on, and it became this kind of really great thing to listen to, it was a big, for me anyway, like a big part of what we were doing up there on our honeymoon was listening to this podcast together.

Zack Jackson

AJ and Riana had just been married under the care of their meeting. They were still full of the energy from that experience, talking a lot about their relationship to Quakerism and the joy that comes from a true sense of belonging. 

Riana Fox
So it, I think it felt really like tender and sweet to like, be able to have this like media we could consume that like related to this kind of like, niche aspect of our life.

Zack Jackson

That’s what we aim to do. To explore and articulate the many different ways of being a Friend in the world today, and how those stories can unite us as a global community. But that work, this podcast, it only exists because of the support of listeners who value it. AJ and Rihanna decided to become supporters right there on their honeymoon. 

AJ Fox  

You know, I have a very vivid memory of becoming a monthly donor. I remember that we were in Arcata, and I think we were just about to roll out of town to our next destination, and Rihanna ran into a bagel place, and we were like, right in the middle of some, I think it was the board games episode, which we both really liked, and like, we had paused right on the kind of appeal for membership portion of that episode. And while Rihanna was in buying bagels, I was like, leaning on the car, looking at a bunch of redwood trees and thinking, you know, like this makes sense to me. This feels right. So I just did it on my smartphone in the five minutes that she was in the bathroom, and she came out and gave me some bagels, and I said, Hey, we’re members of Thee Quaker podcast.

Zack Jackson

If this podcast frames and articulates something important for you, if it helps you feel connected to the wider world of Friends, I hope you’ll consider following their example and becoming a monthly supporter.

You can help us to continue telling these stories by going to Quakerpodcast.com and clicking support in the top right corner. That’s quakerpodcast.com. And now. Back to the show 

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Zack Jackson

Once you accept the leading you have to decide what form the new meeting will take, and sometimes the Spirit starts building while you’re busy looking at the blueprints. When Kristin and her team first gathered, they weren’t trying to be a church yet. They were just the planning committee. They were meeting in the living room to figure out logistics of how to eventually launch a real church.

Kristin Aull  

We started to meet with our core team in Brian’s house, not having worship, but having time together to start to talk about, what has God called us to do? Who are we called to be? We started to meet together, then as a core team. And there were 12 of us, I think, and we began to pray and talk to the denomination and try to discern, you know, what we were supposed to be. Very quickly found that we were worshiping together, and so by the end of that summer, we were inviting people to come to our meeting in quotes, which is also a Sunday worship service, because we’re like, you know, we don’t know who we are or what we are yet, but you’re welcome to come with us, and you know, you know, you might have to sit through some meeting after we sing and hang out together, but we, you know, come on in. And so we were surprised at how quickly we were a church, unofficially, I guess, from a denominational standpoint. But we were a church.

Zack Jackson  

They had accidentally started a church, but the experts, the church planting consultants, told them that a living room wasn’t enough to be successful, they needed to scale it up.

Kristin Aull  

We had met with some church planting organizations that had trained us, and they were giving us very much that launch big kind of mentality that was the accepted wisdom you know, that you need to have a prayer list of 200 people. And you need to have, you know, that many at your first service, and then you’ll have 100 and then, you know, like this whole different road, you should spend 10s of 1000s of dollars on a media marketing when you have your first launch service, like just a whole completely different mindset.

Zack Jackson  

So they followed the advice. Well, some of it, they moved out of the house, they rented a building, they set up the children’s ministry, and they prepared for growth. But according to Brent Bill, who has watched dozens of meetings try to launch, this is the most common mistake that new groups make

Brent Bill  

Perhaps moving a little too fast after starting, you know, an actual group meeting regularly they began, some of them thinking bigger and worried about structure instead of getting grounded and forming a community where they had a shared vision.

Zack Jackson  

Kristin’s group had moved quickly into the form that they thought they needed to take, but that was December of 2019 and little did they know that everything was about to change.

Kristin Aull  

So we made, you know, we just launched, we were like, Okay, we’re making plans. We’re working on it. And then 2020, pandemic hits. Yeah, pandemic hits. And so that space basically became a recording studio. And it was during that time that we really felt the Lord as we were praying and talking about our plans, say, you know, I had you start in a house with a communal meal for a reason beyond this is an easy way to start. And as much as we tried to make the building feel the same as it did when we were in someone’s home. And in spite of the fact that there was more space and there were, you know, logistic things we’d have to deal with, and we could set up a kid’s space, it didn’t feel the same. And we really became convinced through that time that when we regathered, we were called to be a network of house churches that that experience that God had given us had a lot more meaning than we had attributed to it in the beginning.

Zack Jackson  

But when you’re forced to strip it all down and get to the very basic center of a gathered worshiping community, you start to notice all of the preconceptions you didn’t realize that you had,

Kristin Aull  

Someone would say, Aren’t you going to have a youth group? And we’d be like, oh, yeah, we probably should figure that out. And then we would be like, Wait a minute. Why do we need a youth group? Do we actually need a youth group? Is this just something that we’re trying to do because that’s what churches do, or is this actually part of what is essential for us, and you know, for us, we’ve decided no, we don’t think we need a youth group. We are one body. We love that the little kids know the teenagers, and the teenagers know the old people, and we all participate in the conversation and learn from each other like we’ve decided no, we it’s not that youth groups are bad, but we don’t feel called to provide that like that is, you know, we are that’s not part of what we’re doing. So that muscle memory of this is what church is supposed to be versus what are we called to be? Was a is a continuing conversation that we have over and over.

Zack Jackson  

Brent has had these sorts of conversations with churches and meetings of all kinds, and he offers his wisdom to those faith communities with an important caveat,

Brent Bill  

Yes, you have to allow room for the Spirit. And if the Spirit’s saying, do something different, then do that. You have to work what works in your situation. These are just things we found that were helpful in starting a new meeting. And if you jumble the process, it’s really not linear, even though it shows it on a process thing, so people can just kind of grasp, perhaps a way that they could go. The key thing is to always be sensitive to the leading of God in what you’re doing, you know, what are you being called to do, and with whom?

Zack Jackson  

Kristin learned that structure can sometimes choke out the spirit. But Jackie, she didn’t have any structure to begin with. She didn’t have a building, a budget or a consultant. She just had the audacity to believe that she was following a call that she couldn’t quite shake. She connected with another local Quaker, and despite being brand new to the tradition, Jackie went all in. She didn’t wait for a building or a board. She just started evangelizing.

Jackie Joy  

I started looking stalking everyone’s Instagram pages that had Quaker pages and then made my own version of your posts, like the daily Quaker message. I would find your message and then also make a Spanish one, because I wanted it to be bilingual. And through this process, I’ve made flyers and I posted them in the library. I’m thinking, Where would potential Quakers hangout? So the library. I’m going there to study, Cool. I’ll post it there. I am, ironically, although I am a very straight woman in a lot of queer spaces, so when I go to coalition meetings with other groups that work with the LGBTQ community. I say, hey, come to our meetings, right? So whatever community, somewhat space I’m in, or like, if I’m tabling for work and I’m wrapped up, I get my flyers and my bag and I just pass it out to people. And I don’t want to sound like a multi level marketing person for Quakers, but after a while, I started to feel like I was an MLM for Quakers, and I like, we don’t have any merch, like anything cool. All I can offer you is peace and justice, anger that we can collectively be angry with each other, and food and and a little chaotic energy when we plan our next meeting,

Zack Jackson  

She is building the ship as she sails it, meeting in a queer teen center, figuring it out week by week. It’s a beautiful, chaotic energy. But Jackie’s terrified. She worries that by making it up as she goes, she’s doing it wrong.

Jackie Joy  

I know. I don’t know if I jumped too many guns here, because we’ve already met six times, and I’m so worried, because I just base this all on someone saying, yeah, why don’t you just meet them? And so cool, like, Kumbaya. And I’m like, Kumbaya? Yeah, yeah. I’m like, Kumbaya no. Like, I like procedures. But so far, nobody’s said anything.

Zack Jackson  

Starting a faith community is hard enough. If you add the burden of forming a 501c3 buying insurance and writing bylaws, you’re going to burn out before you even really begin. That’s why Jackie is working to bring her group under the care of an established meeting. It allows the new group to lean on the older one for the logistical heavy lifting, but more importantly, it connects them to a source of wisdom and encouragement. It ensures that they don’t have to carry the spiritual weight alone. It’s not about asking for permission. It’s about ensuring survival.

Brent Bill  

Most of the meetings that we worked with wanted to be affiliated with a larger body of friends so that they weren’t just out there on their own. It could have connection with the wider social justice, the wider outreach, all the things that come with numbers, the ones that tended to stay independent didn’t tend to last as long, though, because it was dependent on just a few people who began it, and they never gathered anybody else very much. So it kind of petered out others that work more intentionally and especially, found some support from Yearly Meetings were the ones that continued the longest, even if the yearly meeting was two and a half hours away. 

Zack Jackson  

But the work of the meeting isn’t manufacturing, it’s gardening, and you can’t grow life in a sterile environment. You need some dirt. You need to get a little messy.

Kristin Aull  

He had challenged us in a way we never saw coming, but he had been preparing us all along, because we knew how beautiful it was to just be a community together in a house, the personal nature of that, how you get to know each other, how you relate differently in a house. Thing you do in a formal space, the authenticity that comes with, you know, the dog, my dog, usually misbehaving in the middle of prayer, like, like, it’s, it’s a whole different it is surprising how much the form changed who we were being in people’s homes versus being in a building. Yeah, it’s just a fundamental it’s a huge shift. Huge shift.

Zack Jackson  

Yeah, when you’re trying to create a perfect form, those seem like distractions. But for Kristin, those became the whole point. The messiness was the proof that they were bringing their whole real selves to the table. And Jackie found this too. She didn’t have a first day school or a library. She just had a room in a teen center, and a lot of anxiety about whether she was doing it right. But when she stopped worrying about the procedure and just opened the door that first Sunday, she found the one thing that she was actually looking for.

Jackie Joy  

I am so grateful for finding this community, it has been a good grounding force in the chaos of grad schools and working full time in a weird, fascist world that we live in. But there is a community out there, and I think there’s a lot more of us out there than we realize.

Zack Jackson  

I asked Jackie if she had any advice for someone who thinks they might be called to start a new meeting, and she simply said,

Jackie Joy  

Just do it like, wait, what? Like, what’s gonna what’s the worst gonna happen?

Zack Jackson  

Right? But for most of us, that’s terrifying, because we’re afraid to fail. But you are not responsible for the success or the failure of any spiritual community, nor can you fully grasp the impact that it may have despite attendance numbers or any other metric of success that we use. Your job is to be faithful to what is right in front of you. Brent Bill has seen meetings start and flourish. He has also seen meetings start and fade away, and his advice is to stop measuring the outcome entirely.

Brent Bill  

If, if you’re sensing a leading really work on the discernment and be faithful. We’re called to be faithful. We’re not called to results. So George Fox once said Our role is to bring people to the feet of Christ and leave them there. And by that, I take him to mean all we have to be is prepare a place and then trust spirit to work.

Zack Jackson  

Thank you so much for joining us, and a deep thank you to our guests, Jackie Joy, Kristin Aull, and Brent Bill.

Check out our website at Quakerpodcast.com for a full transcript and links to more resources. If this episode stirred something in you—if you are feeling that “itch” we talked about—then head over to our Discord server where you can engage in thoughtful conversation with likeminded folks. My wife and I started a new faith community a few years ago, so this episode has a personal connection for me, and I’d love to connect with anyone who is thinking about starting a new meeting. 

If this podcast has been meaningful to you, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can click “Support” at QuakerPodcast.com. Every bit helps to build this community. 

This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by me, Zack Jackson. The music was written and produced by Jon Watts.

And now, your daily Quaker message, as read by Richard Stibbard

Richard Stibbard  

Isaac Pennington, 1675. “Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that.”

Zack Jackson  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day. Go to dailyquaker.com. That’s dailyquaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)