Free Study Guide IncludedActs: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
The primitive church in action — the model Friends sought to restore. Spirit-led ministry, communal sharing, and bold witness in the face of persecution are the themes of Acts and of early Quaker history alike.
- 28 chapters · ~80,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read3.6 hours
- Length50,994 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 3.6 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 3.6 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 2.8 hours to 4.9 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 50,994 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 50,994 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
2.8 hours and 4.9 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 3.6 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 146–204 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Early Friends understood themselves as restoring the apostolic church — the church of Acts, before it had been buried under centuries of creed, hierarchy, and ceremony. They read Acts not as ancient history but as a living description of what the church was meant to be and could be again: gathered by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, willing to suffer for the Spirit’s sake. The correspondences between the book of Acts and early Quaker history are striking: both movements were driven by itinerant preachers with no institutional authorization, both faced imprisonment and persecution from religious and civil authorities, and both understood their sufferings as participation in the pattern of Christ’s own suffering.
This commentary moves through the Acts of the Apostles drawing on the writings of George Fox, Edward Burrough, James Nayler, and other early Friends who explicitly read their own experience through the lens of this biblical narrative. It explores the Pentecost narrative (and the Quaker claim to its renewal), the economic sharing of the Jerusalem community (and its resonance with Quaker simplicity), the confrontations with the Sanhedrin and Roman officials (and the Quaker tradition of speaking truth to power), and the missionary journeys that took the gospel to the ends of the earth.
