from the Committee on Ministry and Counsel
This reading comes via the Friends Meeting of Bury St Edmunds, UK. It is included in the preface to a booklet about this Meeting that was shared with a Friend in our Meeting prior to his visit there this month.
Faith
True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known. Quakerism should not claim to be a religion of certainty, but a religion of uncertainty; it is this which gives us our special affinity to the world of science. For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth.
Charles Carter, 1971
In Quaker Faith and Practice, 2nd ed., 26.39
Britain Yearly Meeting