There’s been an unprecedented surge in the numbers of attendees at Sunday worship at the Quaker Arch Street Meeting House in Old City Philadelphia.
At the Arch Street Meeting House in Philadelphia’s Old City, more and more young people are seeking respite from a clamorous technological age in the silent worship of a centuries-old faith.
Like other Quaker houses of worship, it follows values of simplicity and equality. There’s no clergy, pulpit or altar. No statues of saints, no stained-glass windows. No one sings or chants, burns incense or lights candles. They simply sit in silence in 200-year-old wooden pews — and wait for a message from God to move through them until they speak.
“This feels different in that it’s so simple. It’s set up in a way that makes you feel like your internal world … is equally as important as the space that you’re in,” says Valerie Goodman, a pink-haired artist reading her Bible outside the meeting house on a recent Sunday before going inside. Goodman, 27, grew up Southern Baptist but left the evangelical church in college.
“It feels like I can have a minute to breathe. It’s different than having a moment of meditation in my apartment because there’s still all of the distractions around. … And it’s crazy being in a room full of other people that are all there to experience that themselves.”
It has been called the “Westminster Abbey of Quakerism.” Yet for years, attendance at Arch Street was so low, and its historic 300-seat West Room felt so empty, that the few people present began to meet in a smaller room. But recent years have produced an unprecedented surge in the number of attendees at Sunday worship — from about 25 before the coronavirus pandemic to up to 100 today.
“One of the things that I’m very excited about is the number of people that we have coming to meeting, and the fact that the majority of them are young,” says Hazele Goodrich, Arch Street’s clerk.One couple’s story
Among them: Emily Philbrook, 24, and Benjamin Barger, 27, who recently married at Arch Street in a traditional Quaker wedding. The couple moved from Washington to Philadelphia so he could attend veterinary school and began to worship at Arch Street three years ago.
He in a dark suit, she in a white wedding dress, they sat on chairs upfront facing hundreds of guests in wooden pews. Eyes shut, they held a long period of silence broken only when they stood to exchange their vows. Like other Quaker weddings, it was a self-uniting ceremony: They married each other, without an officiant. At the end, the guests lined up to sign, as witnesses, a marriage certificate.
Two days later, the couple returned to Arch Street for Sunday worship, wearing jeans, sneakers and Philadelphia Eagles T-shirts.
“It’s really nice to have that hour of silence when so much is going on in the world,” Barger says.
