Friends meeting house

A Friends meeting house is a meeting house of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), where meeting for worship is usually held.

Typically, Friends meeting houses are simple and resemble local residential buildings. Ornamentation, spires, and steeples are usually avoided.

When Quakers speak of a "church," it generally refers to the persons of the worshipping community, rather than the building itself.^{[citation needed]}

Generally, Quakers believe that meeting for worship can occur in any place - not just in a designated meeting house. Quakers have quoted Matthew 18:20 to support this: "Where two or three meet together in my name, there [is God] in the midst of them." Therefore, theoretically, meeting for worship may be held anywhere.

Before the advent of meeting houses, Quakers met for worship outdoors, in homes, or in local buildings.^{[citation needed]}

In the late 17th century, Welsh Quaker Richard Davies (1635–1708) described his experience meeting Friends outdoors:

I went to visit [four] young men, my former companions in profession of religion. Two of them were convinced [Quakers]...we agreed to meet together; but none of us had a house of his own to meet in. We determined therefore to meet on a hill in a common, as near as we could for the convenience of each other, we living some miles apart. There we met in silence, to the wonder of the country. When the rain and the weather beat upon us on one side of the hill, we went to the other side. We were not free to go into any neighbours' enclosures, for they were so blind, dark, and ignorant, that they looked upon us as witches, and would go away from us, some crossing themselves with their hands about their foreheads and faces.

In 1662, John Bowne was arrested by Peter Stuyvesant for holding Quaker worship at his 1661 house in Flushing, Queens, then part of New Netherland. Bowne was deported to Holland and placed before a panel from the Dutch West India Company. After claiming that the Dutch colony had reached a religious-freedom agreement with his community, Bowne was set free. Two years later in 1664, the British took control of New Amsterdam and promised more religious freedom for colonists.