Setmurthy & Whelpo

What do these two peculiar-looking homes have in common? They are both former Friends’ Meeting Houses in Cumbria. The top one is at Setmurthy, near Cockermouth, the bottom at Whelpo, near Caldbeck. What is now a pleasant country get-away or retirement dream was once a place of worship, where the Lord God, after a fashion, was worshipped. Indeed, a member of our own chapel lives in a seventeenth-century farmhouse in which Quakers gathered in the 1690s. Wherever the Lord’s people have lived, their homes have become places of worship, little synagogues, for the assembling of their families for godly fellowship. When we move house, atheistic hedonists or idolaters may occupy them, yet while we worship God in our homes, we sanctify the very brickwork. Worship should not be confined to chapel, much less to religious TV and YouTube recordings. May we worship God in our homes, and turn those stones and mortar into veritable altars of praise, worship and thanksgiving.

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went home. And in his upper room, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, he knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days. Daniel 6:10, NKJV