Now It’s Personal - Margaret Fell

1614–1702

Margaret had a good life—married to an influential judge and member of Parliament, living in a spacious home with a gaggle of children—and then that Quaker showed up and changed everything.

The Quaker in question was George Fox, founder of that movement, who was traveling through England preaching a new style of Christianity. When Margaret Fell heard his message, she wrote later, “This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly; and I cried in my spirit to the Lord: ‘We are all thieves . . . we have taken the Scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.’”

Dig through the archaic phrasing to find the gist of the Quaker argument. Scripture is not just a collection of words, but a reality. It’s a light that needs to shine from the page and into our hearts, into our lives. The message is as old as James 1:22 (be doers, not just hearers) and Hebrews 4:12 (the “alive and powerful” Word). The Quakers didn’t make this up. In fact, many other groups throughout history have tried to awaken sleepy Christians to this reality. In the mid-1600s this approach was new and different—and threatening to the status quo. (“Quaker” was actually a term used by enemies to mock the call to “tremble before the Word of God.”)

Margaret Fell bought into it, big time. She opened her house for Quaker meetings and used her high-class status to plead the cause of arrested preachers. Sometimes her pleas worked, sometimes not, and sometimes she herself was thrown in prison. During one incarceration she wrote a pamphlet titled Women’s Speaking Justified, a Bible-based argument defending the Quaker practice of allowing women to preach. And after her husband died, she married George Fox. Because of this marriage, her courageous protection, and her loving hospitality, she became known as the “Mother of Quakerism.”

Does God’s light shine in your life? The question is worth considering. Have the routines and rituals of your religious observance ever gotten inside you? Has your Christianity become personal?

Don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.

James 1:22