Mid-October Links

October 10, 2023

From the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee: 5 Things You Need to Know About What’s Hap­pen­ing in Israel and Gaza. The always-thoughtful Tim­o­thy Sny­der has a good piece, Ter­ror and Count-Terror, on what dri­ves ter­ror­ism (“For the vic­tim, ter­ror is about what it is. For the ter­ror­ist, it is about what hap­pens next.”). Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing has a brief update on Ramal­lah Friends School.

Quak­er­S­peak inter­views JT Dorr-Bremme on the Quak­er prac­tice of dis­cern­ment. Friends Jour­nal’s fea­tures Chester Free­man’s Bag­gage and Bless­ings: An African Amer­i­can Man’s Expe­ri­ence as a Friend.

This Code Break­ing Quak­er Poet Hunt­ed Nazis. Just that title was enough to make me stop and click.

Traddy Quakers?

October 4, 2023

Relat­ed to last week’s dis­cus­sion of a lack of what one ex-Friend calls “punk-rock Quak­erism,” there’s always been a small sub­set of younger Lib­er­al Friends who have want­ed to go deep­er into Quak­er faith and prac­tice. Some joined Friends just for this, hav­ing devoured the Jour­nal of George Fox or Pen­n’s No Cross No Crown or Kel­ly’s Tes­ta­ment of Devo­tion before ever step­ping into a meet­ing­house, while oth­ers have slow­ly evolved as they learned more about Friends. Some­times they go plain for a spell; most of the time they even­tu­al­ly leave.

In her Sep­tem­ber Friends Jour­nal arti­cle, Young Friends Want What Ear­ly Quak­ers Had, Olivia Chalk­ley talks about the young Catholic tra­di­tion­al­ist scene (aka “the tradddies”):

As a Twit­ter user, I have a front row seat to the bizarre wave of tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholi­cism that’s sweep­ing New York’s Dimes Square arts scene and gar­ner­ing media atten­tion. In my own life, I have numer­ous friends and acquain­tances who were raised with lit­tle to no reli­gion and are now start­ing Bible study groups, attend­ing church reg­u­lar­ly, and even tak­ing cat­e­chism classes.

What would this look like for Friends? Olivia says it would have pro­gres­sive val­ues (her 2020 Quak­er­S­peak inter­view is A Quak­er Take on Lib­er­a­tion The­ol­o­gy). How could we do out­reach to young adults who might want a more seri­ous and nerdy Quak­erism with­out alien­at­ing spiritual-but-not-religious seek­ers look­ing for a spiritually-neutral hour of silence? (See Pare­to Curve out­reach.) Also the big ques­tion: is this just a fever dream for a few of us stuck in a bub­ble? Is there real­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty for some­thing wide­spread enough to call a move­ment? Youth-led Quak­er move­ments have hap­pened before: New Swarth­moor, Young Friends North Amer­i­ca, and Move­ment for a New Soci­ety all cre­at­ed hip sub­cul­tures (albeit with­out overt spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in the lat­ter’s case). On a small­er, decid­ed­ly less-hip fash­ion, net­works like New Foun­da­tion Fel­low­ship, Quak­er­Spring, Ohio YM’s out­reach efforts, and School of the Spir­it all con­tin­ue to pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties for nerdy Friends want­i­ng to go deep into Quak­er spirituality.

I’m a bit skep­ti­cal, to be hon­est, but some things in the wider spir­i­tu­al cul­ture have been chang­ing the calculus: 

  • As Olivia points out, Gen­er­a­tion Z is more unchurched than any in recent mem­o­ry; some of its mem­bers are look­ing for some­thing more sub­stan­tial and directive;
  • The inter­net con­tin­ues to make non-mainstream move­ments ever eas­i­er to find and com­mu­ni­ties eas­i­er to organize; 
  • Online wor­ship has made it eas­i­er for seek­ers to “shop around” for a non-local spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty that might bet­ter “speak to their con­di­tion,” to use the Quak­er lingo.

These cul­tur­al changes aren’t lim­it­ed to youth, of course. A reg­u­lar Quak­er Ranter read­er emailed me a few weeks ago to say that she’s start­ed attend­ing online wor­ship hun­dreds of miles away after her long­time meet­ing “become less and less a wor­ship­ing com­mu­ni­ty and more and more a  col­lec­tion of nice indi­vid­u­als.” The at-a-distance meet­ing “it is the spir­i­tu­al home I had stopped look­ing for!” I’m kind of curi­ous where these cur­rents are going to be tak­ing Friends of all generations.

Olivia and I talk about much of this in the lat­est FJ Author Chat.

Jesus said he’d show up

October 2, 2023

I wrote up some­thing about Chris Stern’s vis­it to my meet­ing on Sun­day. I’ll share one extract on where he thought ear­ly Friends found their faith:

Chris said part of the answer came from Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gath­ered togeth­er in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” He said this is what ear­ly Friends were wait­ing for: “All of the prac­tices and rit­u­als didn’t have any mean­ing any more. They start­ed wait­ing because Jesus had said he’d show up. Ear­ly friends were averse to doc­trines but had a recog­ni­tion that there was some­thing inside urg­ing them to con­nect with God and urg­ing them con­nect with each oth­er — urg­ing them to love. They real­ized that this was Jesus.”

I was glad that he and trav­el­ing com­pan­ion, Joe Strat­ton, came out to share this min­istry with us. Not includ­ed there is a nice aside about his­toric meet­ing­hous­es. As Friends, we de-emphasize out­ward signs of faith — cross, steeples, altars. This includes our build­ings, yet there is a cer­tain feel­ing one gets step­ping into some of our meet­ing­hous­es. As Chris told us:

When you walk into an old meet­ing­house like this to get a sense of his­to­ry. I felt was trans­port­ed into anoth­er cen­tu­ry. But what is it that res­onates from these walls. Isn’t it the faith­ful lives of the peo­ple who inter­act­ed here all those years? Does­n’t that just draw us in to do that too? To enter that stream of faith­ful lives?

Early October links

October 1, 2023

Accord­ing to a new poll by AP-NORC Cen­ter for Pub­lic Affairs Research, “Peo­ple with­out a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion lack faith in orga­nized reli­gion, not in spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.” A key find­ing: “30% describe them­selves as hav­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. But about half of them, 54%, still con­sid­er them­selves as spir­i­tu­al, reli­gious, or both.” The top rea­sons for dis­sat­is­fac­tion are dis­agree­ment with the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al stances of reli­gious groups, a dis­like of orga­nized reli­gion, and abuse and mis­con­duct by church lead­ers. That works out to some­thing like 50 mil­lion peo­ple who might be recep­tive to a dif­fer­ent kind of spir­i­tu­al home.

The Dar­by (Pa.) Meet­ing­house has been rec­og­nized by the Nation­al Park Ser­vice for its Under­ground Rail­road his­to­ry. The self-emancipating escapees deserve the most recog­ni­tion but I’m glad Friends could pro­vide some cov­er. I don’t think it’s easy to defin­i­tive­ly doc­u­ment an UGRR stop (the activ­i­ties were of course secret) so I’m hap­py to see the meet­ing get it.

The Octo­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal looks at Ecu­meni­cal and Inter­faith Friends. We were a bit over-ambitious, per­haps, with four­teen fea­ture arti­cles. The first fea­tured arti­cle being shared comes from my friend Peter Blood-Patterson, Many Paths to the Light: Quak­er Uni­ver­sal­ism and Inter­faith Sol­i­dar­i­ty.

Punk-rock Quakerism?

September 28, 2023

Over on the Quak­ers red­dit, a post I would­n’t nor­mal­ly share (“Is Quak­erism in decline or thriv­ing in the U.S.?”) except for the snip­pet at the end: “As for me, I left Quak­erism to become East­ern Ortho­dox (Anti­ochi­an) some years ago. A num­ber of the young Quak­ers I grew up with have also con­vert­ed to some fla­vor of east­ern orthodoxy.”

I can’t let an aside like that go. I answered that while it seems to be the norm for kids brought up as Lib­er­al Friends to not be active par­tic­i­pants at meet­ing much into adult­hood, I haven’t seen a ten­den­cy toward East­ern Ortho­doxy.1 I asked for details and the poster, tarxvzf, gave them:

Punk rock con­vert­ed me to ortho­doxy. More pre­cise­ly, my inner rebel­lious­ness made me love punk rock as a teenag­er moti­vat­ed my move to ortho­doxy. The mod­ern west has embraced ‘you do you’ and ‘if it feels good do it.’. The ideals of tol­er­ance and kind­ness espoused by Quak­erism are the main­stream, to an excess in my opin­ion. The most punk rock thing you can do today is to be an Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian. Fit­ting­ly, many of our church lead­ers in the US are for­mer punk rock­ers or met­al heads.

It’s quite the tale. In the­o­ry one should­n’t have to leave Quak­erism to have a “punk rock” Chris­t­ian expe­ri­ence. My wife and I are re-reading William Pen­n’s No Cross No Crown in the evenings now and it’s bold and opin­ion­at­ed and glo­ri­ous. While Friends may occa­sion­al­ly share a bit of out-of-context Penn (like the ubiq­ui­tous “Let us see what love can do”), you won’t get this kind of bare-knuckle, com­plete­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly (yet still uni­ver­sal­ist) Chris­t­ian Penn2 in a lot of Quak­er cir­cles. Quak­erism was found­ed as a very inter­est­ing (dare I say “punk rock”?) take on Chris­tian­i­ty but it’s hard to find much of that in most Quak­er spaces today.

Quak­erism was a kind of qui­et rebel­lious­ness for me when I first walked into a meet­ing­house at age 20. I was look­ing for rad­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties where peo­ple were build­ing counter-cultural lives based on mutu­al coop­er­a­tion and direct ser­vice, an alter­na­tive to late-capitalist com­mer­cial lifestyle I was expect­ed to embrace as a late-80s young adult. I found these com­mu­ni­ties on the mar­gins of Quak­er spaces and it took a long while – years real­ly – for me to real­ize that Quak­ers had a his­to­ry of a the­ol­o­gy and rebel­lious­ness to match this. 

If that part of our per­son­al­i­ty weren’t so hid­den away or inac­ces­si­ble maybe some Quak­er kids and bold seek­ers would stay with us into their 20s, though of course oth­ers would run even faster for the exits. It’s a hard balance. 

What are we waiting for?

September 24, 2023

I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to this Sun­day’s talk by Chris Stern at Crop­well Quak­er Meet­ing. I reg­u­lar­ly wor­shipped with him when I attend­ed Mid­dle­town Meet­ing a num­ber of years ago and I always knew when he rose to speak that we were in for unusu­al­ly thought­ful and Spirit-led min­istry. We talked on the phone prepar­ing for this event a few weeks ago and I real­ly like the sim­ple prompt, “What are we wait­ing for?”

Late September links

September 23, 2023

On Friends Jour­nal, an account from Bruce Bir­chard of Cen­tral Philadel­phia Meet­ing’s response to a sense that wor­ship had got­ten too chat­ty. They want­ed to effect a “spir­i­tu­al ground­ing of Friends wor­ship” and so for­mal­ly record­ed eight min­is­ters and asked them to pre­pare ser­mons for semi-programmed wor­ship ses­sions. Oh wait, this is Cen­tral Philly, HQ of Lib­er­al U.S. Quak­er insti­tu­tion­al­ism, so they could­n’t call them min­is­ters or ser­mons, and while they repeat­ed­ly call it a pro­gram they go out of their way to insist this isn’t any kind of pro­gram­ming. You can read their eight pre­pared ser­mons… *checks notes* eight pre­pared mes­sages here. They’re good, and well worth reading.

Also on FJ, Greg Woods and Jen New­man fin­ish off Sep­tem­ber fea­tures’s with an arti­cle about their work on voca­tion­al dis­cern­ment for young adult Friends.

Work­ing on some arti­cles on Quak­er tes­ti­monies and re-reading Antho­ny Manousos’s 2009 blog post, “How Howard Brin­ton Invent­ed SPICE, the Quak­er Tes­ti­monies,” and Paul Buck­ley’s 2012 talk, “The Ori­gin of the SPICES.” Both gems.

Sad to read of the pass­ing of Mariellen Gilpin in What Canst Thou Say? She was a con­sis­tent­ly thought­ful writer on Quak­er mys­ti­cism, min­istry, and elder­ship for many decades.

A new Quak­er­S­peak this week: Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty on the Road: Five Years of Quak­er RV Liv­ing, an inter­view with Bet­sey Kenworthy.

An expected miracle

September 20, 2023

One of the dis­tinc­tive qual­i­ties of my Friends meet­ing1 is that there is a lot of vocal min­istry, espe­cial­ly for such a small group (we aver­age about 10 – 20 peo­ple depend­ing on time of year and sched­ules). It’s does­n’t feel “pop­corny,” the mild­ly derog­a­tive Quak­er term for mes­sages that come one after anoth­er in rapid fire suc­ces­sion. There is ample time left between mes­sages and they often have the kind of unin­ten­tion­al syn­chronic­i­ty that is one sign of “a gath­ered meeting.”

There are occa­sion­al Sun­days in which we’ll spend the whole wor­ship in silence. It’s usu­al­ly quite sweet. When we break wor­ship, our clerk will acknowl­edge that spe­cial feel­ing but then say with a gen­tle defin­i­tive­ness that Quak­er wor­ship should always have min­istry and that there should always be some­thing from the Bible.2 What our clerk has done is set the expec­ta­tion that min­istry is nor­mal and easy. We’ve had wor­ship in which half of the peo­ple gath­ered have spoken.

I’m get­ting a migraine just look­ing at this flow­chart from 2014. At least it pre­sumes that God and Holy Spir­it might be involved, unlike some of these charts.

I’ve been try­ing to under­stand this approach. See, I’m some­one who tends to over­think min­istry and I’m not alone. Some Friends have gone to the trou­ble to cre­ate elab­o­rate flow charts, a multi-step check­list to deter­mine whether a mes­sage ris­ing in our hearts is one we should speak aloud. Seri­ous­ly, how is any­one expect­ed to get to “Speak!” in under an hour’s time?

There’s per­haps even more pres­sure in Friends meet­ing with pro­gram­ming. There’s often the expec­ta­tion that the min­is­ter will be trained and cre­den­tialed and their ser­mons con­struct­ed the week before over many hours. I appre­ci­ate this sort of lec­ture for­mat and get a lot from them but the bar to par­tic­i­pa­tion is incred­i­bly high.

I was talk­ing recent­ly with Chris Stern, a sea­soned min­is­ter from Mid­dle­town Meet­ing in Lima, Pa.; I reg­u­lar­ly attend­ed there for awhile cir­ca 2006. He’s going to be giv­ing a talk at Crop­well in a few weeks and I was try­ing to explain to him what I’ve been experiencing. 

I think what it boils down to is a con­fi­dence that God (the Holy Spir­it, the Inward Light) is present in our wor­ship. And of course that’s true. God is every­where, all the time: “And remem­ber, I am with you always, to the end of the age.“3 If we expect that the Spir­it is present, we should also expect it to speak to us and through us while we sit togeth­er. We can expect a nudge from the Inward Christ to rise and give ministry. 

Vocal min­istry can be an expect­ed mir­a­cle. The bar to par­tic­i­pa­tion can be just our faithfulness.