Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, October 5, 2025, on the occasion of Durham Friends Meeting’s 250th Anniversary and also World Quaker ay 2025
Today, October 5, is World Quaker Day, a day for Quakers around the world to recognize and celebrate one another – and worship, too, in one worldwide community. Across the globe, Quakers are gathering today, holding hands with one another across the miles. Kenya to Kansas; Norway to New Zealand; Bolivia to Brigflats in England; Durham in England to Durham in North Carolina to Durham in Maine. We join in that celebration.
We are also gathered today to celebrate 250 years of this Meeting. This Meeting began before people in this country declared their Independence and founded a new nation. We do not know the exact date, but sometime in 1775, Quakers first gathered here in Durham, Maine for worship. Those first members worshipped in the house of one or two of those earliest members. So we have chosen to celebrate this 250th anniversary on World Quaker Day 2025.
A celebration: is this what we are having? We celebrate birthdays. We do that with a cake and candles. We celebrate the 4th of July, the beginning of our new nation. We do that with hot dogs and fireworks. We celebrate triumphs. We do that with parades and cheers. But how about a Quaker Meeting that has existed for centuries? Is this a celebration? Is it an occasion for taking pride? It’s hard not to feel some pride, but should that we the center of our experience of the day? I think we celebrate such a day with gratitude and with worship.
There is a story here, a story of faithfulness, I’m thinking. Just like the Bible, read cover to cover, is a story of faithfulness. We should tell that story, but no one can tell the whole story and certainly not in fifteen minutes. It is a story of a shared journey, and no one of us was present for the whole journey. Certainly none of us gathered here today were present at these beginnings. We are inheritors of those who journeyed before us, seeking and striving to build a Beloved Community. And for that inheritance we are grateful.
Where does the journey begin? A long, long time ago.
Each week when we gather, we remind ourselves that we gather on Abenaki land. The Abenaki were here in this place for thousands of years before there were Quaker settlers here. And we are grateful to them for their stewardship of this beautiful place. These were our first neighbors; we’ve had many others.
We are grateful for those neighbors, and for the many others who have been our neighbors here in the Androscoggin Valley, in a place we today call Durham. We have neighbors farther afield, too: those who have worshipped here once or many times and now live elsewhere. For instance we have neighbors in Cuba, at Velasco, our sister Meeting, and in Cuba Yearly Meeting. “Love Your Neighbor” is the theme of this year’s World Quaker Day around the globe.
A little closer to the present, in 1652, George Fox preached at Firbank Fell in England to a large gathering of seekers. Perhaps that’s the beginning of what we know as Quakerism. He gathered people in worship. In 1657, just five years later, the small ship Woodhouse took eleven Quakers on a voyage to the Americas that eventually landed them in Rhode Island. I think that’s a part of the story.
Those on the Woodhouse had a fitful journey. Robert Fowler, who built the boat and was their captain, wrote about going ashore one day. He says, “they gathered sticks and kindled a fire, and left it burning.” That’s pretty dodgy as a contemporary environmental practice, but it’s an arresting metaphor of tending and spreading the Light. It’s what we do week by week, year by year: We gather sticks, we kindle a fire, we leave it burning. It’s a welcome we offer, and an invitation to know God’s will, gathered here with others.
In 1661, just four years after the Woodhouse, we have the first gathering of New England Yearly Meeting. We are grateful to be a part of New England Yearly Meeting all these years.
1775, 250 years ago, is the first gathering of Friends in worship here in Durham. 1790 we acquire this land, purchasing this plot from a Quaker family that had purchased a larger plot. In 1800 we built a new larger Meetinghouse. In 1829, we built this new brick Meetinghouse, where we have gathered in worship ever since – and gathered, too, for pot-luck suppers, for singing hymns and singing folk songs, for plant sales, for fellowship – and for many, many other purposes. We invite others to use our Meetinghouse as well.
There is so much that has happened here over our 250 years of worship together.
For many years there were separate entrances for men and women. Men and women also sat separately, and they held business sessions separately, at least until 1881. This despite women being leaders in this meeting, and among Quakers generally, right from the beginning. I do not know when we removed the separate entrances or the sliding partition: sometime in the 19th century.
Over the 250 years, there were schisms in Quakerism, sometimes bitter divisions. Hicksite Quakers contended with Orthodox Quakers in the 1820s and for decades after. But not so much here in New England. At Durham we were relatively untouched by that schism. A few decades later, a visit from English Quaker Joseph John Guerney brought a revitalized evangelical thrust to American Quakers, and that was felt here in Maine. Our fondness for hymn singing probably stems from that renewal.
In 1914, we hired a pastor for the first time, a woman named Laura Ellison In doing that, we were a minority among Friends in the east coast of America, but joined with a majority of Friends around the world. We had a pastor for about 100 years, until recently, when we decided that we would continue having a prepared message most First Days, but have no pastor. Through all our years, we have especially wanted a time of still and silent worship in which anyone present may feel called to rise and speak as they are led by God, by the Holy Spirit, by the Inner Light. We do not insist on any one way of speaking of the source.
We remember fondly many of those pastors: Dwight Wilson, Ralph Greene, Jim Douglas, Peter Crysdale, Daphne Clement, Doug Gwyn, just some of these pastors. We have also been blessed by our elders, people we regard as unusually faithful and wise. This morning I’ll just name a few who departed from this life in the memory of those present: Beatrice Douglas, Louis and Clarabel Marstaller, Margaret Wentworth, Sukie Rice. For all these Friends, we are grateful.
Throughout our history, we seem to have been a Meeting with a relatively wide tolerance for differing theological understandings. Quakers in general, and this Meeting in particular, have no Creed. There are no beliefs to which one must swear allegiance. We trust one another in our faith journeys, our lifelong efforts to find God’s will. We gather in silence to hear what God is saying to us, and speak what we find when we feel moved to offer ministry.
An 1899 history of Durham describes the Friends as “quiet, industrious, honest and devout.” I suppose that was accurate as far as it went, but we’ve always been more than that.
In our shared worship, many of us find ourselves compelled to take action. That has been a thread throughout Durham Meeting’s history, but there has been quite a variety in the ‘leadings’ (that’s what we call them) to which we find ourselves drawn. Many from Durham Friends served as missionaries both here in the U.S. and abroad, in Ramallah Palestine, for example, and in Africa. For many years we had a vacation Bible school. Friends from this Meeting have served important leadership roles in New England Yearly Meeting and with other Friends organizations. We have supported an orphanage in Kenya.
Today, our Woman’s Society offers a monthly meal at Tedford housing. We support the LACO Food Pantry; we donate to Women’s Shelters in Maine. We maintain three cemeteries that provide for simple burial of those departed. (Just this weekend, a man named Po, born in Hong Kong, was buried in Lunt Cemetery.). We donate mittens and coats in the winter, and to funds to provide home heating for those in need. Friends from this Meeting are active in prison ministry efforts, in peace vigils, in efforts to end gun violence, in efforts to improve education in social justice, in support for migrants and refugees. I could go on.
We worship as a community; have done for all our history. We’re not just a collection of individuals; what we do, we do together. We support one another; we gather strength in being together. I especially appreciate what Noah Merrill, the superintendent of New England Yearly Meeting, had to say at Annual Sessions this year. He voices our hope, our commitment:
“The Religious Society of Friends, our local meetings, were never meant to be places for the welcoming, respectful practice of hyper-individualism. The discovery and nurture of these fellowships, centered in worship, was always intended to help Friends gather and be gathered by the Spirit into local covenant communities—
- anchored and shaped in worship,
- nourished in fellowship and mutual care,
- formed in exploration of our living tradition, and
- sent forth by the overflowing of Love in our hearts into service and love of neighbor in the whole of our lives.
And all of this, all these fruits of this journey together, however imperfect, are our Testimony.
“But there is one thing needful. We must not allow ourselves to fall into despair of the living water, even in this parched wilderness. It is the witness of countless generations, who like us suffered and struggled and mourned and rejoiced and lived and died in faith, that the Life and Power we seek is closer than breath to us, always seeking new channels through which Love might continue to come into the world.”
We’ve been here 250 years. A long time. We celebrate that new beginning in 1775 here today. This morning, this beautiful morning, however, I’m thinking the story doesn’t begin 250 years ago. It doesn’t begin a few thousand years ago with the coming of the Abenaki into this valley. It doesn’t begin at Firbank Fell with Fox speaking to gathered seekers. It doesn’t begin with the voyage of the Woodhouse or the founding of New England Yearly Meeting. The story begins with time itself. It begins, as it always does and always should, with God.
From their beginnings, Quakers have been especially drawn to the Gospel of John. Most of you know the beginning of that Gospel, that telling of the story.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
This day is an occasion for recommitting ourselves to what was done on that First Day when Friends gathered in Durham 250 years ago, and on the First Day a week later, and on the First Day after that, and so on for about 13,000 First Days. We gather here in worship. We gather to hear what God has to say to us. We gather to hear what God would have us do after the rise of worship.
Like those who voyaged on the Woodhouse, “we gather sticks and kindle a fire, and leave it burning.”
As we prepare to settle into silent worship in the manner of Friends, will you join with me in reciting a very special song of gratitude, the 100th Psalm. It seems especially appropriate this day:
Psalm 100 (King James Version)
100 Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
2 Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing.
3 Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
4 Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise:
be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
5 For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.
Also posted on River View Friend
Another person who offers me wisdom and hope is a Penobscot leader and activist, Sherri Mitchell. I heard her speak right after the election about feeling hope that we’ll finally realize that building community is paramount to saving the earth and each other.
The North American and Caribbean Board of Friends United Meeting write:
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