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.

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. 

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?”

One of the dis­tinc­tive qual­i­ties of my Friends meet­ing³ 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.⁴ 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’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.“⁵ 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.

The Quak­erQuak­er social media site has been offline for a few months but is some­what back now. I made an archive of the old Ning-powered site and put it up. There have been a lot of impor­tant con­ver­sa­tions there since 2006, includ­ing much of the dis­cus­sion that became the “Con­ver­gent Friends” dis­course, so I’ve want­ed it pre­served. Even­tu­al­ly Google will suc­cess­ful­ly re-index the site and there won’t be so many page-not-found errors. 

The sec­ond phase will be putting a new social media site up. It’s going to be built on Word­Press, so this ver­sion of Quak­erQuak­er should stay use­ful for a while. It will retain the “Prim­i­tive Chris­tian­i­ty Revived, Again” tagline and I will try to repli­cate some of the dis­cus­sion groups. I need to pur­chase some plug-ins for this to work; the ini­tial cost will be $228. If any­one can help out with that with a dona­tion, that would be won­der­ful; there’s also ongo­ing month­ly serv­er bills so if mul­ti­ple peo­ple help out it will all go to good use.

In The Friend, Geof­frey Durham recounts the “reli­gious white-knuckle ride” of his first Quak­er wor­ship expe­ri­ence—and what led him to come back again and again. Fun­ny and pro­found, glad they made it a free article.

Friends Jour­nal cov­er­age of Indi­ana Year­ly Meet­ing’s deci­sion to leave Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing (I gave some back­ground a few weeks ago).