Winchester Friends' Meeting House

Perhaps in keeping with their city’s sense of sophistication, the Friends’ Meeting House in Winchester is rather more elegant than the low, plainer examples in the counties of Lancashire and Cumbria with which I am more familiar. There is a lack of obvious information about its age and circumstances, though I will wager it was not originally built for plain, Quaker worship but is a converted gentleman’s house, probably from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Better informed people shall communicate their corrections.

Be that as it may, we who are more used to church buildings being converted to secular or pagan use might take heed of those buildings also being converted for God’s. If you live in a house old enough (mine was built in 1890, for instance) then I hope that your purchase did not just add a new name to the deeds, but that you converted its use from mere dwelling to place of worship. Worship God in your home; may its bricks and plaster echo to His praises, its ceilings through which your prayers ascend to God’s heavenly throne.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:15

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