Activities
After each service we enjoy coffee and conversation and share other social times together.
We meet regularly to consider matters of social responsibility, religious concern, or of general interest. We have a new Poetry and Meditation series, 'Journeys to Silence', on the third Monday of each month, at 8pm. We hold concerts, 'Music at the Meeting House', on the first Sunday of each month. All profits from these are collected for the children's charity 'Send a Child to Hucklow', to provide holidays for children from deprived areas at a purpose-built community site in the Peak District. The Meeting House is an excellent venue for concerts and community groups. For instance the WEA hold regular classes throughout the year.P R A Y E R
Eternal Spirit of life and love, beauty and truth, goodness and compassion, we would be mindful of your presence now in this time of prayer and contemplation.
In our faith tradition, which has stood for so many years, none would presume to dictate matters of belief or conscience to another.
In our community we strive to be jealous guardians of the right of each and all to commune with the highest and holiest according to the commands of their own reason, conscience and experience.
In our community we seek meaning and purpose in our lives in a spirit of individual freedom, able to declare something true, not becaause someone else has insisted upon it, not because we fear the consequences of unbelief, but because it echoes truly in the chamber of our own innermost soul.
For us, ultimate authority in matters of faith is not the church. It is not a particular body of scripture, or a magisterial of priests, or the accretions of tradition. The ultimate authority is the individual's discernment and communion with the divine.
And yet, as individuals, we gather as congregations. What is it that binds us together if not common articles of belief ?
It is the belief that we need each other. We need each other. We need each other because we need corrective to uncritical thought. Without engagement with others, too easily our own beliefs might become unexamined prejudices and fanciful eccentricities.
We need the corrective of community lest our individual expressions be corrupted into serving our own self-interest.
We need each other because our own small grasp on the eternal is too, too tenuous, to embrace the entire truth.
We each are enriched by the wisdom and faith of others.