I go to an Evangelical Friends (Quaker) church, and my experience is that it is different than the Baptist church in several ways. Our pastor once remarked that his dad did not want him to be a Calvinist, and from what I understand of Calvinism I would say that the Evangelical Friends (EF) doctrine to be different than Calvinism and closer to Arminianism. EF put a lot of emphasis on the light within, according to John 1:4. The name of "Friends" comes from John 15:14. George Fox originally started the Friends movement in the 1600s with an emphasis on the Spirit, which some later took to even take precedence over the Scriptures. I do not know enough about the Quaker history to say much more about this. But I do know that in our EF church, there is a great respect for the Scriptures as well as great respect for the guidance of the Spirit and the power of prayer and that they should be consistent since they are both from the source of Truth. So in the sense of great respect for the Scriptures, I think that it is similar to what I know about the Baptist church. But there is probably less of an emphasis on evangelism than the Baptist church and more of an emphasis on social justice (speaking in general terms of course, e.g., instead of strong evangelists like the Baptist Billy Graham, the Quakers had strong abolitionists like John Woolman who got all of the Quakers to give up their slaves in the 1700s). I was raised in the Methodist church and am reminded more of that church than the Baptist churches that I have visited. However, I also attended a Church of Christ in the same community as this Friends church for about 7 years, and there were many parallels as well as many differences also, but the nice thing is that there seemed to be great camaraderie among the churches in the community.
I am rambling a bit here, but I will close with the fact that there is a popular EF writer by the name of Richard Foster who wrote a book called Streams of Living Water, where he chronicled what he saw as 6 "Streams" or traditions in the Christian Church - contemplative tradition, holiness tradition, charismatic tradition, social justice tradition, evangelical tradition and incarnational (simplicity) tradition. In this perspective, EF would probably be best known for their social justice traditions, and actually probably weakest in the traditional evangelical tradition (e.g., having crusades). They tend to evangelize through just trying to be good examples and such. I see Baptists as strongest in the evangelical tradition, however. I have not attended enough Baptist churches to know what their weakest tradition is, and would not want to offend and/or show my ignorance on this matter anyway.
So that is my experience. Hope it helps.
