Last night my wife Julie and I (and baby Theo) went to a ser­vice at Cir­cle of Hope church at 10th and Locust. Very Gen‑X ori­ent­ed, it goes to some trou­ble to not look or feel too churchy. It meets on Sun­day night on fold­ing chairs in a spar­tan room above a con­ve­nience store. The min­is­ter gave a low-key non-sermon, played a clip from a pop movie, gave out index cards with scrip­ture vers­es for peo­ple to read aloud while music played. There are gui­tars and tam­borines but it’s more lo-fi/punk than folksy twelve-string. The lan­guage is Chris­t­ian but not churchy. It’s big into house-church “cells” as the small-scale com­mu­ni­ty build­ing block. The­ol­o­gy seemed sec­ondary to com­mu­ni­ty, which could also be described as the prac­tice of liv­ing a Chris­t­ian life.

The ele­ments I found inter­est­ing were the same ones I would find wor­ri­some were I to stay. Almost every­one was a twenty- and thirty-somethings and it had the feel of a “scene,” in that there was a dom­i­nant style and demo­graph­ic to the par­tic­i­pants. While I sus­pect there’s a lit­tle too much of a social com­po­nent to the com­mu­ni­ty, I have to admit to a cer­tain intox­i­ca­tion to being in the midst of so many age peers. There was a def­i­nite sense that I could belong there and that my par­tic­i­pa­tion would be wel­comed and encour­aged. It was quite a change from the invis­i­bil­i­ty I often feel among Friends as a con­vinced thirty-something with a con­cern for tra­di­tion­al Quakerism.

While I have been in large gath­er­ings of “young adult” Friends, they’ve tend­ed to be dom­i­nat­ed by non-practicing kids of Quak­ers who are there pri­mar­i­ly to see their high-school-era friends. The group at Cir­cle of Hope chose to be there and their pri­ma­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with one anoth­er is through this wor­ship group, which allows for deep­er (and bold­er) fel­low­ship than the young adult Friends gath­er­ings I’ve been to.
But could I belong at a place like Cir­cle of Hope? Prob­a­bly not. I’m too Quak­er, crazy enough. I did­n’t join in their com­mu­nion since I don’t believe in out­ward sacra­ments. I would­n’t like the idea of a pre­pared min­istry, and the enter­tain­ment of show­ing video clips and play­ing music would grate on my beliefs. While I know there are many paths to the divine, I agree with Friends’ expe­ri­ence that the path least like­ly to become encum­bered with false idols and bar­ri­ers is the one that is most stripped of arti­fice and pro­gram­ming, the one that allows an unmedi­at­ed direct expe­ri­ence and obeyance of Christ as man­i­fest­ed in the moment.

But am I too hung up on Quak­er prac­tice? Many local Friends meet­ings could be more accu­rate­ly described as med­i­ta­tion groups, there being lit­tle com­mon faith and many mem­bers who don’t believe in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the divine pres­ence dur­ing wor­ship. With Cir­cle, I’m con­front­ed with the one of the cen­tral dilem­mas behind the last 150 years of Quak­erism, name­ly: is it bet­ter to par­tic­i­pate with:

• the pro­grammed (often younger) peo­ple bold­ly espous­ing faith who might be too social­ly ori­ent­ed and flighty; or
• the silent wor­ship­pers who threat­en to replace faith with process , are tone-deaf to gen­er­a­tional change and have trou­ble trans­mit­ting faith to their chil­dren or respon­si­bil­i­ty to their sucessors.

You can’t quite reduce all the splits between Hick­sites, Gur­neyites, Bean­ites, etc. to this dichoto­my but it is a fac­tor in most of the schisms. I sus­pect I would even­tu­al­ly be as frus­trat­ed by Cir­cle as I cur­rent­ly am with cul­tur­al Quak­erism but for entire­ly dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Per­haps I should fol­low the advice of a cur­rent arti­cle in theooze and offi­cial take some time to “detox from the church.”