Johan Mau­r­er exam­ines a clas­sic Quak­er dilem­ma from a new angle. Are we some­thing unique and rad­i­cal or are we just anoth­er brand of Chris­tian­i­ty? Describ­ing Britain Year­ly Meet­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, though it could describe many Lib­er­al Quak­er spaces:

In par­tic­u­lar, Chris­t­ian lan­guage and God lan­guage are often held at arm’s length. Quak­ers’ eth­i­cal dis­ci­ple­ship (a.k.a. the “tes­ti­monies”) are held in high regard but are often described with­out ref­er­ence to their Chris­t­ian ori­gins. The cus­toms and folk­ways of meet­ing for wor­ship and meet­ing for busi­ness are like­wise faith­ful­ly main­tained but their con­nec­tions with what ear­ly Friends called “Gospel order” are often not emphasized.

This is one of those def­i­n­i­tion­al conun­drums that have no easy answers. For me per­son­al­ly, yes, I’m part of the larg­er church. I think pride is often at the root of some of our denials. Ear­ly Friends also expe­ri­enced cor­rupt­ed and hyp­o­crit­i­cal estab­lished church­es but did­n’t aban­don the project so much as call for a renew­al back to basic prin­ci­ples. The his­to­ry of Friends is our insti­tu­tions like­wise get­ting fre­quent­ly mired in insu­lar think­ing and moral cor­rup­tion but being drawn back by prophet­ic fig­ures call­ing us to do bet­ter. That said, the spark of the Quak­er mes­sage is the call to lis­ten to the inward Christ and that can eas­i­ly be done (and is fre­quent­ly done) by peo­ple out­side the Quak­er movement.

There’s a live­ly dis­cus­sion of Mau­r­er’s post hap­pen­ing on Red­dit if you’d like to share your two cents.