Fancy Gap Friends Fellowship is a Quaker meeting. That’s what Quakers call their gatherings because we understand the church to be the people in whose hearts Christ dwells, rather than a building or a specific gathering place. We began as a Bible study/discussion group in the summer of 2004 with a dozen or so folks. After about nine months together, it became clear to us that we had become a faith community, so in April of 2005 we asked to become a preparative meeting (that’s what Quakers call their church plants) and are still working on all the requirements we have to meet in order to be a full fledged Quaker meeting.
We’re a house church, or really a houses church, since we meet for worship and Bible study in the homes of several of our members. And that’s not because we can’t find or afford a church building. It’s because that’s the way we believe it should be. That’s how the early church in Acts met, in homes. We like the idea of doing away with the division between sacred and secular space, recognizing that since God is everywhere, every place becomes holy ground.
The early church didn’t use their money for fancy buildings. And they didn’t spend it for staff salaries, or church programs either. The tithes and offerings that were brought to the apostles were used to take care of those in need. And we try to follow that example by sharing our resources with our local community and beyond that to other places we feel called to help. In the last few months, we have given $1,000 to the Red Cross for their food pantry and emergency relief program, $500 to Yokefellow for similar things, and $500 to the Quaker mission among the Choctaws in Alabama for food and back to school supplies for the children there.
We don’t have a lot of programs. We believe that God puts people where he needs them to be without our help. Among our fellowship we have teachers and counselors, and people who work hard, but have a lot of opportunities to be salt and light right where they are. So like the old sign says “Enter to Worship, Depart to Serve”, we gather to be renewed and encouraged in our faith, so that we can minister to the people around us wherever our lives take us rather than trying to come up with a program for doing so. Here’s a quote that sums our understanding up pretty well:
My friend Jim Henderson has a wonderful way of putting things. He knows that religious systems out on people more and more pressure: give more, read more, pray more, evangelize more, attend more, learn more, try more, work more, rest more, and fail less. It’s a treadmill; it’s a wonder people keep coming back for more of this kind of abuse, So, Jim says, let’s stop adding more things to the divinely inspired to-do list. Instead, let’s start counting what we’re already doing. Or put differently, let’s make the things we’re doing already count.
We’re just now entering our 4th year as a fellowship and we’re still about 12 or so, but not the same 12. Two of the folks in our original group felt called into full time ministry and went on to pursue opportunities that opened up for them. All four of our regular youth attenders left us in 2006 when they graduated from high school (I had the opportunity to do the baccalaureate address at the local high school that year which was really cool) and they are all at college now pursuing higher education, so we don’t see nearly as much of them. One of our older members had to move into a retirement home and is no longer able to meet with us. And we all still miss our dear Virginia who at 85 was the youngest at heart among us when she was called home. She taught us a great lesson about loving one another and celebrating the joy and wonder of being together as fellowship and simply living in community with one another.
We’re a user friendly group. We don’t have it all together, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers (we don’t even have all the questions yet). We’re just a group of folks on a journey together, learning as we go, encountering God along the road in ordinary people, places, and situations in ways that make them all extraordinary which is verily, verily awesome.
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