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.
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.
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.
Twenty-two years ago I was on my honeymoon, whale watching off the coast of Maine, oblivious to the world. My wife and I had stopped in a cute little market when a few snippets of words broke through my consciousness from the radio playing in the background. I first noticed the hushed solemnity of the NPR hosts, then disjointed words: plane, crashed, towers.
Like everyone, we quickly pieced together the horror happening in real time: second plane, jumpers, collapsed. I was publishing Nonviolence.org then, a peace portal, and felt I had to say something, anything, so I rushed to the public computer at the local library. There was a queue of worried patrons wanting to message loved ones. In a few moments I typed out some rushed words:
Today’s terrorist attacks are simply horrendous, thousands of innocents might well lose their lives. Most important now is to sit patiently, to pray and to not call for massive indiscriminant attacks that might only kill thousands more. Our character as a nation is being tested now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, global injustice
We know how that turned out. Three thousand dead in New York and Western Pennsylvania, followed by hundreds of thousands in Western Asia. Decades of wars in Afghanistan. A second war in Iraq prompted by the flimsiest and most unlikely of excuses. Today, after all the blood, those countries are hostile and unstable. Yet two of the countries co-responsible were U.S. allies, are still U.S. allies. The 9/11 attacks was planned and largely executed by Saudis; Osama bin Laden was finally found living out in the open in Pakistan in an upper class compound a short walk from the gates of the country’s military academy. I’m glad we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan but it makes one wonder what the other wars were meant to accomplish.
This week many people are gathering to remember 9/11, as they should. It was a horrific attack. It struck our sense of safety and fueled nightmares and tears. But when do we as U.S. citizens gather to think about how we reacted? When do we remember hundreds of thousands who have died since 9/11 in the name of retribution and a fearful revenge we’ve called freedom?
I can relate to Kathleen Wooten’s metaphor about searching for the perfect pencil that would make her efficient enough to do everything she wanted (for what it’s worth, Kathleen always seems to be accomplishing a lot regardless of magic tools).
The massive digitalization of old newspapers in recent years has allowed historians to determine the source of the “Underground Railroad” name.
Twenty years ago this week I wrote one of my most widely shared blog posts, “The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal.”
I was on fire that summer, making connections with a bubbling up, grassroots “emergent church” movement and finding oh-so-many unexpected similarities between these frustrated, authenticity-seeking younger Evangelicals and my super-Liberal East Coast Quaker world. A lot of the problems were clearly generational and I was lapping up new posts by Canadian blogger Jordan Cooper. One day he shared a chart from theologian Robert E. Webber’s new book, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World, that showed the “differences between the moderns (traditional and pragmatic evangelicals) and the postmodern (the younger evangelicals).”
The chart was like a secret decoder ring for me. Webber might have been thinking of more traditional churches, but with a little translation it lot of it sure explained a lot of what I was seeing in Quakerism. Older Friends wanted youth ministry that was a “Church-centred program” while I and my disaffected cohorts wanted “prayer, Bible study, worship, social action.” Older Friends thought of Christianity as a “rational worldview” or a form of “therapy” whereas I longed for a “community of faith.”
Not much happened after I clicked post. Facebook and Twitter weren’t around to promote it. My blog was more-or-less me talking to myself. But over the course of the next few years people found it. They must have been asking similar questions and seeing what Google turned up. The comments have some future Quaker bloggers (was this the first post Chris Mohr found and fan-emailed me about?). Even more remarkable, it includes some very unlikely Evangelical Friends, like the then-youth pastor at First Friends Canton and the then-general secretary of Iowa Yearly Meeting. At the time I was answering the bookstore phone at Friends General Conference, the most Liberal institution bastion of U.S. Quakers. To find common cause across this theological spectrum was quite unusual then (and alas, probably now).
What’s changed after twenty years? Well, after a number of false starts there are programs to train younger Friends and bring them into institutional Quakerism (Quaker Voluntary Service, Pendle Hill’s Continuing Revolution conference, and the 1992-founded Guilford College’s Quaker Studies Program deserve special shoutouts). Blogs and later social media have created forums for disparate Friends to talk together in informal conversations. I’m continually amazed that Friends Journal magazine (of which I’m senior editor) and QuakerSpeak videos can be accessed anywhere without paywall, making our stories widely accessible. But some things haven’t changed. We’ve had rounds of Quaker schisms, especially in Northwest, Indiana, and North Carolina Yearly Meetings.
And how much has changed for individual young adult Friends? The September issue of Friends Journal is devoted to younger Friends and one breakout article is Olivia Chalkley’s “Young Adults Want What Early Friends Had.” Olivia came to Friends as a teen and has had the advantages of the newer youth programs — attending Guilford QLSP and working at a Quaker Voluntary Service fellow — yet so much of her article felt like topics I discussed on Quaker Ranter back before my temples went gray. For example:
We often don’t think about the potential Friends who slip through the cracks because there’s not much to grab hold of: those who don’t know where to turn in the silence, not having a solid foundation in Scripture, Christian ethics and social teachings, or even Quaker history; those who feel alienated by the meetings in which Friends cringe if you talk about Jesus Christ, or even about God; and those who simply can’t figure out if we are Christian or not, due to mixed messaging and lack of conviction among members of their meetings. These obstacles must be recognized and addressed as part of our efforts to present accessible pathways to entry, not only for the young adults hungry for religious community but also for the poor and working classes among which religious belief tends to be high, according to recent Pew studies.
I guess it’s some progress that this article is published by Friends Journal and not sitting barely read on a personal blog. But as I look back at this twenty-year anniversary I find it a little sad we’re still struggling with identity and messaging. Maybe this is a perennial, never-answerable issue for a denomination, especially one as decentralized as ours. Or maybe it’s something we can continue to figure out. Mid-twentieth century Friends were able to work out a modern vision of Quakerism that was powerful enough to reunite and regalvanize a dwindling Quaker movement; what would our vision look like?
The Black Quaker Project seems to publish its best stuff on its email list (if you visit its homepage you’ll see a form to sign up). This week’s tackles the uncomfortable question, “Why Are There So Few African American Quakers.” They break the answers down into six answers (e.g., “Skepticism of Non-Violence” and “Dissatisfaction with the Quaker Process.”)
Quaker Ranter