I very occasionally do a book review for the magazine. My colleague Gail thought I might be interested in this biography of the longest-serving editor of our British counterpart, The Friend, so I reviewed A Friend in Deed: The Life of Henry Stanley Newman.
The part of Henry Stanley Newman’s life that I found most fascinating was his generation’s ability to bend technicalities almost to the breaking point in order to maintain formal unity. As a young man, he rebelled against the stodgy and insular Quakerism of his upbringing and found a way to create a parallel spiritual life based on Evangelical principles. In middle life, established and respected, he faced challenges from a rising young Liberal faction and managed to stay engaged enough to keep them within the fold of mainstream British Quakerism. In the United States, these same shifts toward first evangelical and then liberal theologies resulted in schisms, many of which still divide Friends.
Almost twenty years ago I visited a small Midwestern U.S. yearly meeting that really felt like a family, both in its bonds and its dysfunctions. I liked it. One of the most respected members was gay and at some point in earlier sessions he had been nominated to be the yearly meeting clerk. This was a non-starter for a member church that was also affiliated with an Evangelical yearly meeting. After some back and forth he was was approved as an assistant clerk, a solution everyone could live with. Logically it makes absolutely no sense — if gayness precludes one from one yearly meeting leadership position it should preclude them from any. But the yearly meeting wanted him and found a way to make it work and he cheerfully accepted the logical irony of the situation. (The situation didn’t last and the dual-affiliated meeting eventually had to make a choice and disaffiliate from one of its yearly meetings.)
There’s an impulse toward purity that wouldn’t have allowed these kinds of negotiated compromises. A young Newman, starting Evangelical organizations left and right that were nominally outside of Quaker structure but full of Quakers, would have been disowned. The Midwest yearly meeting would have splintered over the Liberal’s insistence of a clerk status or the Evangelical’s insistence on no status. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly understand purity: sometimes we need to make a stand. But sometimes it’s more important to be a logically inconsistent family than to be alone in our correctness. Henry Stanley Newman’s compromises is an interesting model for us, still.
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