“Putting language on the experience of that of God within us, I think, is a risky business,” says Christopher Sammond. “Any language is inadequate, and language that I might use will not speak to somebody else.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
The “loudmouth New York Quaker Jew” who’s a second-gen Hiroshima survivor
August 8, 2023
A surprising twist in this story: Leslie Sussan’s father was a U.S. filmmaker who blamed his fatal illness on the atom bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I like her attitude:
Being Quaker hasn’t made me any less Jewish. Ever since I was a young teen, basically, my attitude toward being Jewish has been that I will never argue with a Jew who says I’m not Jewish and I will never deny to a goy that I’m Jewish.
The FGC Gathering today and tomorrow
August 6, 2023
A nice write-up about the Friends General Conference Gathering in Friends Journal by this year’s coordinator, Liz Dykes. The Gathering has been the week-long “summer camp for Liberal Quakers” for over a century but its trend lines have grown worrisome. Even before COVID, attendance has been steadily dropping. This year Liz reports that only 540 people came, which is a good number considering it was at a West Coast location, far from the mass of U.S. Quakers. But it’s a far cry from the high of the 2001 Gathering’s 1,920 attendees (including me and my then-fiancee, who had met at the previous Gathering).
FGC has been watching the trend lines, of course, and writing up reports. COVID turned everything upside down for a few years. But finally there’s some big changes. Next year’s Gathering will be at Haverford College right outside Philly, which puts it within a local train ride of a whole lot of Quakers. There was a time when proximity alone would have nixed the location, as it might have attracted too many Friends (and compete with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions, which have become Gathering-like in recent decades), but times are a’changing. I’m pleasantly surprised that a historically Quaker school like Haverford is host, as I would have thought cost and size would be a problem, but I’m glad for it. Future Gatherings will be every other year, which also seems like a good experiment: being a bit more rare, it can be a treat to go.
I’m glad changes are finally being tried and wish FGC all the best. The Gathering has had an important role in Quaker life — and not just for the meets-cute of future couples.
Spirit-led following is the key to Spirit-led leadership
July 3, 2023
From Steven Dale Davison:
Because leadership is a spiritual practice, its exercise needs spiritual support from the community. To enable good leaders, we need religious education in the faith and practice of listening and ministry. We need to view proactive nurture of vocal ministry as the primary pathway of bringing forth leaders in our meetings. Leadership needs a robust infrastructure for the care of leadings and to support discernment and ministry.
Because we humans are the vehicle for the leadership of the Spirit, and because most of us are not by nature very good at this spirituality, either as leaders or as followers, we have to work at it. We have to learn it, and therefore, we have to teach and model it.
I’ve been feeling as if my own spiritual practice isn’t as centered as I’d like. I want to make more time for spiritual reading, including the Bible, during the week.
Quakers Today asks: What do you desire?
July 3, 2023
The July episode of Friends Journal’s Quakers Today podcast asks: What do you desire?
Leave a voice memo with your name and the town where you live. The number to call is 317-QUAKERS, that’s 317 – 782-5377. +1 if calling from outside the U.S. The deadline to answer is Sunday July 9, 2023.
The question comes from listener Glen Retief. Glen asks us to consider this question, What do you desire? It is a broad question that you can answer in lots of ways. What do you desire for yourself? Your future? Your relationships? It could also be connected to the wider world around you. What do you desire for your community? The place where you worship? Or for other earthlings? What do you desire?
Belong behave believe
July 2, 2023
From Keith B on Reddit:
Recently I came across the Believe/Behave/Belong model, which was new to me, as was the amount of hand-wringing about it in mainstream churches.In British Quaker Meetings the preference seems to be: belong, behave, and the belief will take care of itself.
In the U.S. Quaker context, I’ve long attributed the belong-first model to the twentieth century Friends who brokered a peace between the factions in East Coast Friends 1and affected a reunion within the most of the largest East Coast yearly meetings, while also influencing a West Coast Beanite movement that stressed agreeableness and practice over theology.
Howard Brinton was one of the figures who brought it altogether. He thought membership was a function of feeling like you belonged in the community, he more-or-less invented the modern testimonies (aka “SPICES”), and focused on Quaker process as the glue that holds us together. It was a powerful reformulation that realigned and rededicated modern liberal Quakerism.
But focusing on belongingness does make it hard to state what we collectively believe, as one can belong to a meeting while holding spiritual beliefs unconnected to any historical Quaker beliefs. I think that’s why we rely so much on conversations, like the ones we have on blogs and Reddit.
I recently got into a bit of a Facebook ruffle over a regional Quaker body that put an AI chatbot on its website (and then posted an article full of glaring factual inaccuracies, since deleted). It seems to me that AI circumvents the need to have personal discussions. I’d like to encourage more Friends, and new Friends, and Quaker-curious seekers to talk and debate and synthesize and then talk, debate, and synthesize again. No one’s going to settle the answers. The belong-behave-belief model only works if we keep actively questioning one another.
Update: On Facebook, Melinda Wenner Bradley says that she’s been sharing this Belong-Behave-Believe “great reversal” in outreach workshops and presentations and that the idea comes from Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity After Religion (here’s a 2012 video of her presenting on the book).
Quaker reflections on simplicity
June 30, 2023
From Eileen Kinch:
As followers of Christ, we have been commanded to seek first the Kingdom of God. Simplicity is setting aside anything that gets in the way of seeking the Kingdom. The Book of Discipline of Ohio Yearly Meeting states: ‘The call … is to abandon those things that clutter [our lives] and to press toward the goal unhampered. This is true simplicity.’

As the photo credit states, this was one of my pictures – way back from the 2009 Conservative Gathering at the Lampeter Meetinghouse near Lancaster, Pa.
QuakerSpeak Season 10 begins!
June 29, 2023
A new season of QuakerSpeak and it’s the awesome Windy Cooler bringing an important message about abuse in Quaker communities.
I think fundamentally a safer space for survivors and for everyone would be a space in which there is no anxiety about telling the truth about your experience of the world, whatever it is.
And a big shout-out to new QuakerSpeak videographer Christopher Cuthrell stepping into some big shoes. Glad to have him on board.