C Wess Daniels has a good “post following up the Quaker Heritage Day events”:http://gatheringinlight.com/2007/03/08/learning-a-new-language-while-building-a-house-reflections-on-quaker-heritage-day/ last weekend in Berkeley. The featured speaker was Brian Drayton, a New England Friend in the liberal unprogrammed tradition who’s been doing a lot of good work around reclaiming traditionally-minded Quaker ministry (at least that’s how _I’d_ pigeon-hole him from afar, I’ve never actually met him!).
It’s interesting to hear how Wess, a programmed Evangelical Friend, experienced the event. Part of Drayton’s appeal to us liberals is his unashamed use of Christian language (at least in his writings), something that’s just a given in Evangelical communities. His post reminds me of the time I “went to a Indie Allies Meetup”:/postliberals_postevangelicals.php in Philadelphia (pre-kids!) and shared pizza and good conversation with an interesting table-full of non-Quaker Christians. I wrote then:
bq. Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it’s safe to say we are all “post” something or other… We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There’s something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real.
A few more links on Quaker Heritage Day “over here”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley/quaker.qhd (URL subject to change!).
we are all “post” something or other
The “emerging” movement, where I hang out these days, considers itself post-modern, post-liberal and post-conservative. To that, I could say I can add post-Quaker, as someone who was Quaker for 4 decades but now is “post” that (see On Resigning from Friends Meeting for something about me becoming post-Quaker).
It occurs to me that I know a great many post-Quakers. In fact, in looking at the new Directory from my former Friends meeting, I quickly noticed three names of people who have become members of my church (Cedar Ridge Community Church) in the past two years. And I know many others who have left in search of Christian community, some landing somewhere and some not.
Just felt to post about being “post”!
Hey Bill, Thanks for checking in, I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to. I guess I might qualify as a post-Quaker too. I had the opportunity to follow my eight years at Friends General Conference with employment at another venerable Philadelphia Quaker institution but turned it down. It wasn’t a bad job and I have great respect for the executive director but I just didn’t want to work for institutional Quakerism again.
A lot of people have left. And let’s be honest: a lot of the most interesting people have left. Each one should be a wake-up call but it’s amazing how little those remaining seem to care.
If we could just gather together everyone who’s left we’d actually have an interesting little denomination going. And you know, I half-suspect that there are more interesting ex-Quakers than currently-attending Friends. We’re so worried about who we currently are that we’re afraid to be who we could be. I suspect the internet might change that equation some, which is the only reason I’m not fully a post-Quaker yet.
(Shrug.)
Even if all the most interesting people left, I’d still be a Friend.
It may be just my own opinion; it may even be mistaken — but all the differences Bill has mentioned, in the postings he has written that I have read, between the church he’s joined and traditional Quakerism, strike me as differences that are to the credit of traditional Quakerism.
— (signed) from one of the boring people who are still Friends
Hi Marshall: I’m glad you’re boring and I’m glad you’re still a Friend. I was thinking mostly of the 20-something crowd I used to hang with back when I myself was 20-something. There was some really great energy in there, not always directed in quite the most Quakerly way, but still there was a lot of possibility in there. Few of those people are regular attenders anywhere. At the last FGC Gathering, 30-somethings were very underrepresented: when I ran the numbers I think I determined that there were nine 60-somethings for every 30-something in attendance. Few of the old dreamers were among them.
Still, I was thinking about your comment while I was out with the kids at the park this afternoon. There are at least two ways of looking at a religious community: what ideals and principles it holds up and how it actually lives out its life in community. I tend to look at Friends from the former perspective – I’m an idealist, an old Philosophy major in college – and I suspect you and Bill might have tendencies in that direction. I didn’t define “interesting” but would you be happy being the last Friend in a meeting?
Just to clarify, whatever post-Quakerism I’m experiencing isn’t about finding some other church somewhere but just separating out the Quaker bureaucracies and embedded cultures from what _we might be_.
I’ve long thought Quakerism could be much more widespread that it currently is – by magnitudes – but it’s partly held back by our own unimaginiativeness. If that’s true then shouldn’t our focus being on those Friends who aren’t Friends yet? Should we sell out the great-people-who-could be for the the community-that-is? What would it look like to invent Quakerism again and how would that reinvention deal with the Quakerism that exists?
Well, Martin — a lot of us are asking how to revitalize the Society of Friends. I’ve spent much of my life asking.
Here in my late fifties, I feel I’ve finally stumbled onto the secret of how to revitalize myself. I guess I never previously realized that that was the necessary first step. But it is.
Would I be happy being the last Friend in a meeting? Why, I think such a thing is impossible. The last Friend in a meeting is always Christ himself, the Presence in the Midst, palpable to anyone who is willing to come humbly and receptively into the place of conscience and be instructed.
Yes, I have been in some very dead meetings, where no one ever had any true ministry to share and the conversation afterward was always about jobs and vacations and real estate and the like. In places like that, it felt to me that the room was lifeless, it felt like the situation was putting me to sleep, and the Presence in the Midst — the true last Friend in the Meeting — seemed very very hard for me to find.
(Some of the great early Quaker ministers wrote in their journals about visits to such meetings, and it looks like their experience was much the same as mine in this respect.)
My own sense is that a situation of this sort is precisely when I really have to buckle down and focus, until there’s nothing left of me but the waiter-upon-the-Lord, and let Christ handle the matter in his own way. This has often proved very hard work, and there’ve been times when I’ve done it and I could have sworn that nothing was happening — but looking back from a time years later, it’s clear to me that it never failed to help me.
And then I have to accept that I have some responsibility for letting Christ come through me so the others in that meeting can find him, too. And the way to let him come through me seems (at least in my own case) to be not so much by preaching as by emulation — letting love and thoughtfulness and so on shine through me at least a little bit as they might have shone through Jesus, and practicing sensitivity and unselfishness and willingness to take the initiative as best I can. Things of that sort, as the Guide in my own heart and conscience point them out to me.
I won’t claim I’m good at it — I’m not. But I will say right here that every little bit of it I do seems to make a considerable difference.
I guess it’s when we see Christ modeled in another that we rediscover him in ourselves. Thinking back, I can see that this is how others made Christ visible for me. It wasn’t any sermons that brought me around; it was the modelling. No wonder it’s also the best thing I can do in my own turn.
I don’t know what to say about the people you knew, who no longer attend. I’m a little suspicious, though, of “great energy, not always directed in the most Quakerly way”. I believe I know what you’re referring to, and if I’m right, it is indeed something almost addictive in its delightfulness — but it’s human, not divine, and for that reason, if I lean on it, it always seems to fail me sooner or later.
If my strength comes from the divine within and above me, others seem drawn to me; but if I draw my strength from something in the company of others whom I love, there will always come a time when I need it and it’s not there.
I was interested, and somewhat startled, to see Marshall’s comment that “all the differences Bill has mentioned, in the postings he has written that I have read, between the church he’s joined and traditional Quakerism, strike me as differences that are to the credit of traditional Quakerism.”
It’s a strange comment. In the first place, what I more comment on is the differences between my current faith community and a contemporary form of Quakerism that is far from traditional Quakerism, and on similarities between the emerging church movement of which my church is a part and traditional Quakerism.
So I don’t have a clue as to what Marshall is referencing. Marshall, could you give me some clues?
Some of the things I like about where I am now are a focus on the living Word of God — Jesus Christ — transforming our lives here and now, and on being authentic (not putting on religious airs or pretending to more than we’ve come to in our spiritual lives).
Hi, Bill! I haven’t kept a log of your comments on your new church, and my memory is not terribly reliable, but as I recall, you said it has a paid pastor and a fairly programmatic service, practices the so-called sacraments of water baptism and material communion, and is “joyful” unlike Friends. In all these matters I honestly prefer the position of traditional Friends.
Probably the only one of those differences I need to speak to further is the “joyful” part. To me this speaks of a cult of the ecstatic, much like the mystery cults of the late Hellenistic era. Traditional Friends didn’t emphasize joy (they didn’t rule it out, but they didn’t make a cult of it either), but they did emphasize sobriety and watchfulness as Paul had done before them, as befits a constant reliance on the subtle nudges of the Spirit.
— Speaking of which, I visited your church’s web site and saw no mention of the guidance of the Spirit there. That is another difference from early and traditional Friends which I personally think reflects more favorably on Friends.
It is neither my desire nor my intention to get into some big debate with you about which path is better. But I’ve noticed that you’ve written quite a few postings in the last couple years on various websites, criticizing the current Friends communities, and I don’t think it hurts for a Friend like myself to say that some of see things very differently.
Judge not, lest ye be judged, and all that.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see the Friends in Iowa (Conservative) pretending to be anything they’re not. They’re very honest and straightforward folk.