Arch Street Quakers

12/30/2025

In 2025, Arch Street Quakers instituted a new custom: when we worship with another Quaker community on our travels, we snap a photo of the meetinghouse or those we’re visiting to put in our weekly newsletter. It’s a fun way we share with each other how Quakerism touches our lives even when we aren’t at our spiritual home. As this year ends, here are some of the lovely Quaker communities that have welcomed our members and attenders:

→ Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting
→ Charlottesville Friends Meeting
→ Flushing Monthly Meeting
→ Friends Meeting of Washington
→ Germantown Friends Meeting
→ Haddonfield Monthly Meeting - Religious Society of Friends
→ Ithaca Monthly Meeting
→ Merion Friends Meeting
→ Munich Quaker Devotional Group
→ Pittsburgh Friends Meeting - Quakers
→ Plymouth Friends Meeting
→ Saratoga Friends Meeting (Quaker)
→ Seaville Quaker Meeting

We can’t wait to see and visit many more Friends in 2026. Is there a Quaker meeting that’s on your bucket list to visit? If so, we want to know which one it is!

12/14/2025

The first snowfall of the season has come to Arch Street Meeting House! ❄️❄️

11/26/2025

On one of the final warm days, 25 of us took a field trip to Pendle Hill, just a 30-minute drive from Arch Street. As an outing for us to enjoy this amazing Quaker retreat center and deepen our connections with each other, our visit included:

🍁 A campus and arboretum tour, just as leaves reached their peak vibrancy

🥗 Lunch featuring vegetables grown onsite

🌟 Meeting for Worship and conversation with the PH staff

📚 And a necessary stop at the bookstore for Quaker reading!

The Pendle Hill staff were generous and so welcoming. We can’t wait to return again soon!

11/09/2025

343 years ago today, our Quaker meeting’s first-ever recorded minutes — and the first in Philadelphia! — were written during a Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business. Dated to November 9, 1682, this document offers a glimpse into 17th-century Quaker life.

Among the important needs of these opening passages? Considerations of building a meetinghouse in the city and ensuring Friends transfer their membership from the meetings in their home countries to the newly-established one in Philadelphia.

Hundreds of years of Arch Street Quakers’ history is preserved in documents like this one at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections.

11/06/2025

Curious about Quakerism? The AP answers common questions from visitors to Arch Street Meeting House, our spiritual home that also is a museum. Read more 🔗: https://bit.ly/3JzPVcQ

11/04/2025

Picture Day at Arch Street Quakers! 📷 Earlier this fall, almost 100 Friends from our amazing Quaker community gathered on the meetinghouse benches for our first official portrait in many years

11/02/2025

Learn why Arch Street Quakers' vibrant faith community is growing in attendance, with young adults finding a spiritual home in our Quaker meeting. Thanks to AP for sharing our story.

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.

06/22/2025

On June 14, Arch Street Quakers members and attenders participated together in Philadelphia’s No Kings Protest.

We believe in the power of nonviolent action and are guided by our Quaker testimonies, including peace, equality, community, and stewardship. We were proud to be just a few of the estimated 100,000 people protesting in our city for our freedoms and democracy in the United States.

While we didn’t get a chance to photograph our Arch Street group, our attender Rob Symonds captured these images of collective action in Philadelphia.

06/20/2025

Happy first day of summer at Arch Street Meeting House, where the grounds are vibrant and the gardens in full bloom 💐

04/27/2025

What did Meeting for Worship at Arch Street Meeting House look like 125 years ago?

This April 1900 photograph captures worship in our historic West Room at the beginning of the 20th century. While the room’s architecture looks the same today, you’ll notice most Quaker women wear bonnets, while men wear suits (with one gentleman in the Facing Bench’s front row has donned a very tall top hat! 🎩)

📷: Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford College. c. April 1900. HC10-15033.

04/24/2025

What’s the surprising alignment between Quaker faith and modern parenting research?

In her April 2025 article for The Atlantic, Gail Cornish writes that through nurturing children's empathy, honesty, and capacity for reflection, “I saw each child-rearing best practice I’d been writing about line up with a principle of Quakerism.”

The nearly 375-year-old religion’s principles line up surprisingly well with modern parenting research.

04/20/2025

Arch Street Quakers was honored to welcome David Gray, principal of Brummana High School, Lebanon’s sole Quaker school. David spoke to our Meeting about the challenges of providing a Quaker education in the Middle East in these times. His talk underscored the school’s commitment to providing a rigorous education while instilling within its students the Quaker principles of tolerance, respect, nonviolence, and equality.

In 2024, our Meeting proudly provided Brummana High School with financial support. We are grateful that David’s visit to Arch Street today allowed our Meeting to deepen its relationship with the school and further understand its impact in Lebanon.

📷: BHS Principal David Gray (Front Row, Center) with Friends at our Meeting's April 20th Meeting for Business