We Quakers have testimonies but, as our Northern Friend Grigor McClelland points out, circumstances alter cases.
Grigor has always endeavoured to act in accordance with the testimony on sacraments but has found himself in two situations over the years where he was obliged to take holy communion. Once in the war when his Friends Ambulance Unit spent a weekend at a black college, and in 1952 attending the Baptist Church in Moscow’s Red Square. ‘In both cases,’ he recalls, ‘the congregation was large and the visitors were specially welcomed and prominently placed. Any refusal to take the bread and wine could have been badly misinterpreted.’