Airton Quaker Meeting House

On a recent march from Malhamdale to Hetton I called at Airton, an attractive village which boasts a still-used Friends’ Meeting House, whereat my eighteenth-century ancestors were inclined to worship. Like many ancient buildings, it has been much fiddled with restored, although one still feels a sense of its vintage. It is not so attractive, large or evocative as Brigflatts in Westmoreland but it is certainly worth a call.

Curiously, an anonymous, unsubstantiated though exciting claim is made in its entry in the National Churches Trust website:

Airton Friends Meeting House is, so far as can be discovered, the oldest extant Quaker meeting house. Most likely, and even more significantly, it started out early in the 1600s as a purpose-built place of worship for the secretive group of dissenters called the Seekers, many of whom joined the emerging religious movement called the Quakers in the 1650s. As the Seekers left very little documentary evidence, this building is a physical link to these early dissenters. There is good documentary evidence that Quaker meetings were well established at Airton by the mid-1650s.

It is true that many Seekers became Quakers, though I am a little surprised at the notion of them constructing their own buildings. Seekers were seventeenth-century folk who were disillusioned or unpersuaded by the religious currents of their day, be they high, Laudian Anglicanism, or low-church puritanism. Knowing that there was spiritual truth to be found, but unwilling or unable to commit to that which was on offer, many remained on the fringes of church. Today, perhaps, they would be the folk who accrue crystal collections and Buddha statues for the pond. Not Christian, but aware of some spiritual dimension. This sounds rather like modern Quakerism, though its original blueprint was somewhat clearer and overtly Christian, if slightly heterodox in some theology and practice.

I should be pleased to see evidence that this was a Seeker Meeting House before it was a Quaker Meeting House, though I doubt they possessed their own buildings, nor had any kind of organisation which administering such a project would have demanded. Furthermore, there are rival claimants for the title of oldest Quaker Meeting House, too, which are not easily dismissed.

‘Seekers’ with a capital S are no more, but of seekers in the general sense there are a great many. Perhaps without knowing it, it is Jesus Christ they are desiring. Mainstream church might be off-putting, and strict, formal religion few fancy, but that is not Jesus Christ. He, and he alone, is the true meaning of life.

And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13

Jesus said “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28