Warwick Friends’ Meeting House

Warwick Friends’ Meeting House is a pleasant little place with the essential, well-tended garden. Although the building was itself sadly locked, the grounds offered a degree of compensation.

George Fox himself had come to Warwick in 1655 preaching in a widow’s house and within the year a meeting of Friends had been established. Even in the dreadful years of persecution under Charles II, they obtained the freehold of some land and began to build…

“...in trust, for the use of the people of God, gathered in the light and spirit of truth out of the world to worship God in spirit and truth, who walk in fear of God, and are commonly called Quakers”.

Always somewhere to the Left of the wider puritan movement, I have considered their early adherents part of our evangelical faith, something that can rarely be said about their modern members. That structure from the 1670s was destroyed in Warwick’s great fire of 1694. It is testament to the early Quakers that they managed to get their meeting house rebuilt so quickly; they were a people who knew what they were about.

The phrase ‘walking in the fear of God’ is an excellent one which offers us today valuable instruction, both in our churches and as individual followers of the Lord Jesus.

Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil. Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few. For a dream cometh through the multitude of business; and a fool's voice is known by multitude of words. Ecclesiastes 5:1-3

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