At Your Service: Worship with no words

FIVE minutes until the service starts. The Anglicans would insatiably be catching up on seven days' gossip, the Methodists would be passing the Polos. The Roman Catholics, most of them, still wouldn't have arrived.

Save for the tick-tickling of the clock and for an elderly chap gently sipping a mug of tea, the Friends Meeting House at Norton-on-Tees is seamlessly slipping into silence.

There are no hymns to announce because the hour long Meeting for Worship will go quietly about its business, no leaders because the Quakers are non-hierarchical. There is no litany, no reading, no robes; no dogma, no creeds.

It' s a very special occasion for all that. Just as they have at Durham, this is the Norton Big Meeting.

Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Friends in the Norton and Stockton area discerned the need for a children's meeting room, what elsewhere would be called a Sunday School. Last weekend, at last, it opened.

A dozen nippers are present. Were they the Quakers of Darlington FC, it would be the youth policy and they'd be the stars of the future. Here, perhaps, they are hush puppies.

Around £65,000 has been spent on the new room and on other improvements and refurbishment, the development delayed several months after they inadvertently dug up a skull.

While work progressed they had met in different homes. Now, as it were, they were Friends reunited. "It' s wonderful," says Chris Gwilliam, "exceeds everything we thought possible."

The single storey building, originally an Elizabethan barn, was given by a sympathetic farmer shortly after George Fox founded the Quakers in the 17th century.

Not everyone was so tolerant. Norton' s Quakers could be imprisoned, or have their goods seized, for refusing to pay a tithe to the parish church. Others, says Mr Gwilliam, were thrown into the duck pond across the green.

Doubtless evidence of the spirit moving on the face of the waters, none is thought to have drowned.

Mr Gwilliam is himself a former Anglican. "The only time there was silence in a Church of England service was when something had gone wrong," he says. "I love the breathing space here."

Britain has just 16,000 Quakers, about as many again classed as "attenders" . Many are pacifists, involved in high level negotiation. "It' s not a very Quakerley phrase," says Mr Gwilliam, "but I certainly think we punch our weight."

Misconceptions abound, nonetheless. "Some think we live on only in history or on the back of porridge packets," says a Quaker leaflet. "Others believe we wear strange clothes or are quite impossibly strict. Or even more impossibly good."

At Norton they're unobtrusively welcoming, clearly relaxed. The strangest clothing is a little lad in a Middlesbrouh shirt.

The meeting room has benches around three sides, a cloth covered table at one end containing Quaker literature - most of that concise, too, they are people of few words - and a lower table in the middle.

On it are a Bible, a copy of Quaker Faith and Practice and a dozen candles in a bowl, to be lit when the bairns come cascading in at the end.

The decor is simply attractive. A portrait of Elizabeth Fry, given by Darlington' s Quakers to mark the weekend, stands at one end.

Fifteen adults are present, others with the children in their new quarters. Numbers are growing. There'd have been 16 but one' s expecting a baby, in labour as they speak (or not, as the case may be.)

They may speak, of course, and are by no means discouraged. "Last week people were up and down like yo-yos," says Chris Gwilliam; on Sunday they seem more reticent.

One or two nod wakefully. Others mimic the Thinker, or similarly pensive pose. One just stares straight into the middle distance; you can hear the trees rustling on Norton' s verdant, vernal green and almost wish that they'd give over.

Another Quaker book calls it "silent waiting on God" , suggesting that the Meeting House should "enclose and shelter without distraction" .

Thirty five minutes have passed, 11.05am, before Mr Gwilliam stands to observe that "a new breed of very small Quakers are beginning their quest to find God in silence and simplicity" .

Kathleen White, clerk to the Norton meeting, rises ten minutes later. There'll be change and some of it might be quite difficult, she says - "but oh, the joy that the children are here".

Just as the column supposes that there may be a vocal late rush, a sort of spiritual last orders, the bairns breeze in - remarkably well behaved save for the little lad intent on exploring the world beneath the book table cover.

There are candles to light, celebration cake to cut, non-alcoholic wine - though Quakers are free to smoke or drink. Light from whatever source.

Kathleen White says afterwards that she was an Anglican, too, but became ever more uncomfortable over delays in ordaining women to the priesthood. "I still love the Church of England in many ways, but I feel absolutely at home with the Quakers."

The meeting ends with spontaneous handshakes, as Friends should. "We speak," says Kathleen, "through the

silence."

* All are welcome at the Norton Friends' Meeting House, on the green, at 10.30am every Sunday. The children's meeting is on the third Sunday at the same time. A website covering Friends' Meeting Houses at Norton, Shildon, Osmotherley, Darlington, Middlesbrough and Cotherstone is at www.gn.apc.org/darl-quakers; email darl-quakers@maximpact.net

CHRIS Gwilliam' s name rang bells like a campanologists' convention. He' d worked on religious broadcasting at Radio Tees in the 1980s, he said, later with Radio Nottingham and Radio 4 in Manchester.

Still something seemed missing from the script: we found it in Crockford' s 1998-99 Clerical Directory and, as a result, in the Northern Echo cuttings library.

Ordained an Anglican priest in 1968, he' d been Vicar from 1975-82 of St Oswald' s in Hartlepool - where he produced an award winning parish newspaper - and Rector of the parishes around Longnewton, west of Stockton, in the 1980s while still working in radio.

He left the church of England, he says, because he thought it was "pinching" him a bit after working on ecumenical and inter-faith radio programmes.

"I began to find Anglican services too 'busy' and too full of creeds which were cut and dried for my new, wider vision. It was also a time when women were prevented from a full ministry, which I found shocking.

"I found the largely silent worship provided me with a wonderful pool of tranquility I could bathe in after a frantic week at work. I think there' s a spiritual hunger out there and we' re trying to meet it. Doing our best to, anyway."

MATTHEW Atherton, upon whose wonderful organ playing we commented last month after visiting Topcliffe parish church, near Thirsk, gives a recital in Newcastle Cathedral at 1pm on Monday. The programme includes everything from Widor' s toccata from the Fifth Symphony to the Blaydon Races.