John Laswell shares the story of his family's journey to Friends. They are members of Crossroads Friends Worship Group, a group of Christian Friends in Michigan, USA, under the care of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Recorded 6/21/09 at the Conservative Friends Gathering in Lancaster County, Pa. Note from Martin: my apologies about the quality here: the sun's glare made the screen almost invisible and I didn't realize I was videoing my neck for much of the interview!

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JOHN: Originally I was born LDS, into the Mormon chruch. My parents were there but they fell away from it about the time I time I was eight, right before the time I would have been baptised. We spent some time in a First Christian church but quit going. I had a friend at school who asked if I would be interested in going back [to the Mormon church] right after I got my license at 16 so I started doing that. After a period in there I found Christ and was baptised. I was attached to a very small portion of their doctrine, but the basic way I lived my life matched what they said for the most part. Then my wife converted... well, before she was my wife, I converted her, got married, had five children then quit going for no particular reason.

We homeschool and try to eat right. We did a lot of research on the schooling and on the eating and on a lot of other things we do in our life and we realized we had never actually done any research on our religion. We had seen Quaker Jane and some other people primarily due to my daughter looking for modest dresses. They were very hard to find anyplace. After a period of time my wife decided we should really start researching the church we belong to. The more we researched it the more we realized it didn't match our beliefs.

We started to actively looking for a group that did match our beliefs and started going back to some of the Quaker websites. After a period of time we found that truly was the path we were being led on by God. We became "anonymous" Quakers. We had no meeting, we didn't know any other Quakers. We just started dressing plain and effectively became Quaker. I was transferring from my job in California to my job in Michigan and we got here we dicided to find a Quaker meeting that was Christ-centered and unprogrammed. There aren't a whole lot of them out there. It just so happens that when we moved to Michigan we were an hour and a half of a worship group that was unprogrammed and Christ-centered. After another year and a half we became members--that was just a few weeks ago.

MARTIN: But you had known of this worship group's website earlier. Their website have a lot of Quaker resources (Michiganquakers.org)

JOHN: Luckily we moved right by it, as far as the distances I'm used to traveling. We've been attending there regularly now and are very happy with the choice and the children are doing very well. (less info)