Category Archives ⇒ Quaker

As the blog name implies, I am a mem­ber of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, known col­lo­qui­al­ly as Quak­ers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our soci­ety and its inter­ac­tions with the larg­er world. I gen­er­al­ly only include my own posts in this list. I share many many Quak­er links in my Links Blog cat­e­go­ry and on Quak­erQuak­er.

Impor­tant Posts:
The Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion (2003)
Peace and Twenty-Somethings (2003)
We’re All Ranters Now (2003)
Pass­ing the Faith, Plan­et of the Quak­er Style (2004)
Quak­er Tes­ti­monies (2004)
Hey, Who Am I To Decide Any­thing? (2007)
The Biggest Most Vibran­ty Most Out­reachi­est Pro­gram Ever (2010)
Get­ting a Horse to Drink (on Philadel­phia YM) (2010)
Tell Them All This But Don’t Expect Them to Lis­ten (2010)

Quakers Today asks: What do you desire?

July 3, 2023
· Martin Kelley

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
· Martin Kelley

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 church​es​.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
· Martin Kelley

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.’

Five things Friday roundup: Quaker reflections on simplicity | Anabaptist World
Five things Fri­day roundup: Quak­er reflec­tions on sim­plic­i­ty | Anabap­tist World 

Men­non­ites and Friends (Quak­ers) are dif­fer­ent groups with dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al and the­o­log­i­cal his­to­ries. Yet these groups have some…

Anabaptist World Anabap­tist World 

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
· Martin Kelley

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.

Heal­ing From Abuse in Quak­er Communities
The March 2022 issue of Friends Jour­nal looked at Safe­ty in Meet­ings and includ­ed a lot of brave voic­es speak­ing up about these con­cerns for the first time. I’m so proud of all of the con­trib­u­tors that month.

And a big shout-out to new Quak­er­S­peak video­g­ra­ph­er Christo­pher Cuthrell step­ping into some big shoes. Glad to have him on board.

QuakerQuaker migration starting soon, can you help?

June 8, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Quak­erQuak­er fans, it’s time to start the migra­tion of Quak­erQuak­er to a new online plat­form. It start­ed on Ning in almost 15 years ago. That’s for­ev­er in inter­net years!

The first stage will be archiv­ing the con­ver­sa­tions cur­rent­ly on Quak­erQuak­er. There are many year’s worth of great blog posts and invalu­able dis­cus­sion threads. A recent tool built to exam­ine the source mate­r­i­al for all the new AI chat bots found that Quak­erQuak­er is the inter­net’s sec­ond largest online Quak­er archive. I want to try to keep that — not for the bots, but for Friends and seek­ers want­i­ng to learn about Quakerism.

I will need your help. Dona­tions are down this year. And there are new costs if we are to keep this work going: one-time costs for archiv­ing apps and dis­cus­sion plat­forms, and new ongo­ing bills for get­ting us all con­nect­ed by email again.

Back when Quak­erQuak­er start­ed I wrote a bit of a mis­sion state­ment. I’ll leave it here for you to re-read. If you think this work con­tin­ues to be impor­tant, please help. You can do so here: https://​www​.pay​pal​.com/​d​o​n​a​t​e​/​?​h​o​s​t​e​d​_​b​u​t​t​o​n​_​i​d​=​R​W​9​6​R​E​8​6​Y​E​FJA

Quak­erism is an expe­ri­en­tial reli­gion: we believe we should “let our lives speak” and we stay away from creeds and doc­tri­nal state­ments. The best way to learn what Quak­ers believe is through lis­ten­ing in on our conversations.

In the last few years, dozens of Quak­ers have begun shar­ing sto­ries, frus­tra­tions, hopes and dreams for our reli­gious soci­ety through blogs. The con­ver­sa­tions have been amaz­ing. There’s a pal­pa­ble sense of renew­al and excite­ment. Quak­erQuak­er is a dai­ly index to that conversation.

Functional theology

May 26, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Johan’s book group is read­ing an old lec­ture by Jones, The Nature and Func­tions of the Light in the Thought of George Fox and he reflects on the approach:

Can­by exem­pli­fies a typ­i­cal Quak­er approach to the­ol­o­gy: it’s often func­tion­al. He does­n’t spend time defin­ing “light,” he finds the dis­tinc­tion between “nat­ur­al light” and the Light of Christ unhelp­ful; he does­n’t cling to or gen­er­ate doc­trines. Instead, he describes how the Light of Christ actu­al­ly seems to work in our lives.

Source

I appre­ci­ate Johan’s dis­tinc­tion of func­tion­al the­ol­o­gy here. Every so often my wife will ask me what I think about some spe­cif­ic point of doc­trine, say the nature of Christ. As a Catholic, ana­lyt­i­cal thinker, and reli­gion nerd, this is the kind of thing she nat­u­ral­ly pon­ders, but I rarely give her a very sat­is­fac­to­ry response. I often know the “right” answer accord­ing to tra­di­tion­al ortho­dox Chris­t­ian creeds and I’m always curi­ous what oth­ers make of ques­tions like these, but what I myself believe is shaped and large­ly bound­ed by my own expe­ri­ences of Christ work­ing in my life. I’m adding Jones’s arti­cle to my read­ing list.

The Friendly Mennonite

May 8, 2023
· Martin Kelley

From Nathan Per­rin: “When my Quak­er friends heard I was going to Chicagoland to min­is­ter at Lom­bard (Illi­nois) Men­non­ite Church, they asked sev­er­al ques­tions. One ques­tion that they asked was whether or not I renounced Quak­erism by tak­ing this call­ing. The brief, less com­plex answer is: No.”

The friendly Mennonite | Mennonite Church USA
The friend­ly Men­non­ite | Men­non­ite Church USA 

This blog post is part of the “I choose to be Men­non­ite because …” series. See the call…

Mennonite Church USA Men­non­ite Church USA