From: The Wine Gave Out

When I look back at the time in that library in Eng­land where it appeared that maybe Quak­erism was already dead, I found out­side those walls a move­ment of the Spir­it that was renew­ing Friends, lead­ing Friends in faith­ful­ness to chal­lenge their year­ly meet­ing struc­tures and the exclu­sion of some of God’s chil­dren, new meet­ings aris­ing to meet con­tem­po­rary needs, and young peo­ple tak­ing lead­er­ship roles often reserved for Quak­ers twice their age. There is good wine among Friends being faith­ful to Jesus. 

It seems to me that his­to­ry became a par­tic­u­lar­ly favorite Quak­er past time for two rea­sons: our avoid­ance of any­thing resem­bling a creed, and our post-schism desire to authen­ti­cate “our brand” of Quak­erism as the “real Quakerism.”

As the Friends move­ment splin­tered into a dozen or com­pet­ing sects in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry (most notably espe­cial­ly Hick­site vs. Gur­neyite vs. Wilbu­rite), we could mine and inter­pret the his­to­ry of “ear­ly Friends” to divine which branch they would have favored. And by col­lect­ing and inter­pret­ing old Quak­er jour­nals and epis­tles we could map out an “authen­tic” Quak­er set of beliefs and practices.

The prob­lem is that most ear­ly Friends didn’t go about to cre­ate a new sect: they were Chris­tians get­ting back to the basics. Part of the thrill of hear­ing George Fox’s ser­mons is that he wasn’t just recit­ing or proof-texting scrip­ture, but speak­ing it as if it were new and fresh and true. That’s hard to do. I know I often reach for the rhetor­i­cal crutch of the “ear­ly Quak­ers,” but the irony is that those very Friends weren’t stuck on his­to­ry. I think part of this is a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ty: those of us brought up in West­ern aca­d­e­m­ic tra­di­tions think about time and change dif­fer­ent­ly than mid-seventeenth cen­tu­ry British sheep­herders. But as Wess points out, it’s just as much a result of wine that’s sat out too long and gone a bit vinegary.

I used to be a reg­u­lar at Mid­dle­town Meet­ing¹ and always felt fed by Chris Stern’s ministry.

I’ve often wished that meet­ings might embrace what­ev­er unique cir­cum­stances they might be in to cul­ti­vate a col­lec­tive min­istry. Sit­u­at­ed in a col­lege town? Make sure the wor­ship space is close to cam­pus and net­work with fac­ul­ty, staff, and stu­dents. In an urban set­ting get­ting lots of first-time vis­i­tors every week? Insti­tute a lowkey, ongo­ing, drop-in Quak­erism 101 class or oth­er type of activ­i­ty to give them a next-step in the Quak­er path. Do mem­bers have more of some kind of diver­si­ty (race, age, the­ol­o­gy)? Then use that to edu­cate and advo­cate. The meet­ing can con­tin­ue to do every­thing else, of course, but it could look to see if there’s a lead­ing among mem­bers to do some­thing special.

Mid­dle­town — and specif­i­cal­ly the Mid­dle­town Men’s Group as I under­stand it — does that by reg­u­lar­ly pro­vid­ing events to share the Friends Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive in Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing. This past June they held a Zoom work­shop called “Faith, Hope, and Wit­ness With­in” as part of the year­ly meet­ing’s “Run­way to Annu­al Ses­sions” series, with Chris Stern one of the speakers.

It was a nice event but as always, I kind of won­dered who it was reach­ing. Many of us on Zoom were already quite com­fort­able with a Chris­t­ian Quak­er wit­ness. What about all the kids on Red­dit and Dis­cord and YouTube who might appre­ci­ate a Quak­er voice that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly hear about PYM events or know that this was like­ly to be a not-to-be-missed one?

Read­er, it took me a week to remem­bered that I work with the Quak­er­S­peak video­g­ra­ph­er, Rebec­ca Hamilton-Levi and that Chris might make a good inter­vie­wee. You don’t need to be on a Slack chan­nel with Rebec­ca to make a sug­ges­tion. If you know some­one who should be con­sid­ered for Quak­er­S­peak, you can let her know.

I like how Chris takes the famil­iar sto­ry of a young George Fox and makes it his own. It’s a nice tes­ti­mo­ny that there’s still that one, even Christ Jesus, ready to speak to our conditions.

ps: Chris has also been fea­tured the mag­a­zine, most recent­ly in 2013 for Find­ing a Way to Peace.

Wess Daniels just wrote a use­ful piece on Quak­er excep­tion­al­ism and a form of Quak­er bullying

I have heard oth­ers refer to the “Quak­er val­ues” of as being used as a “sword and a shield,” a sword to attack oth­ers wise, and a shield to pro­tect and jus­ti­fy ones own actions. Bogus reli­gion of any kind, Quak­er or not, is often used as a cov­er for bullying. 

How do we hold our core val­ues while remain­ing invitational?

Tech writer Anil Dash has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on Coop­er­a­tive Over­lap, the obser­va­tion that dif­fer­ent cul­tures have dif­fer­ent for­mats and expec­ta­tions in con­ver­sa­tion. With over­lap, peo­ple talk over one anoth­er in a way that is encour­ag­ing and expect­ed and con­ver­sa­tion­al. It’s dif­fer­ent from inter­rupt­ing, in that it actu­al­ly demon­strates engage­ment. The con­cept comes from Deb­o­rah Tan­nen via Tik­tok (because: 2021) and Dash relates talk­ing over one anoth­er was com­mon in his Indi­an Amer­i­can fam­i­ly grow­ing up. He men­tions that:

Some­times it’s ascribed to eth­nic­i­ty or com­mu­ni­ty instead of geog­ra­phy, like folks who’ve told me it’s part of Jew­ish tra­di­tions (or sim­i­lar to the ubiq­ui­tous Yid­dish influ­ence on speech in New York) or the var­i­ous South Asian com­mu­ni­ties that I’m part of. 

If we were going to encode this, we might say that “coop­er­a­tive over­lap” is eth­nic. Tan­nen describes the reac­tion from peo­ple who did­n’t grow up with over­lap as a cul­tur­al background:

Those who aren’t used to coop­er­a­tive over­lap­ping can end up feel­ing inter­rupt­ed, silenced, maybe even attacked — which clouds their minds and ties their tongues. 

I think it’s safe to declare that his­tor­i­cal­ly Friends are decid­ed­ly in the no-overlap camp. In our wor­ship, a gap between min­istries is con­sid­ered essen­tial; many Friends con­sid­er it bad form to even speak in direct response to a pre­vi­ous mes­sage in wor­ship. But it’s not just some the­o­log­i­cal posi­tion. We can be an uptight peo­ple, our lan­guage even in con­ver­sa­tion full of unwrit­ten rules.

So what hap­pens when some­one used to coop­er­a­tive over­lap shows up at a Quak­er fel­low­ship hour? They’re going to talk a lot, in a way that’s going to make the no-overlappers among us uncom­fort­able. Both Tan­nen and Dash stress that there’s no right or wrong way to con­verse but that we should under­stand our dif­fer­ent styles. But do we? I’m in a posi­tion that I’ve heard prob­a­bly hun­dreds of sto­ries of peo­ple pas­sion­ate about the val­ues of Friends who had trou­ble fit­ting in. I sus­pect norms of con­ver­sa­tion­al style is some­times a big part of that.

Back in 1987, Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing’s gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Samuel Cald­well, gave a talk at the Pen­dle Hill retreat cen­ter called “The Time Has Come to Choose.” It became col­lo­qui­al­ly known as the Quak­er Faith vs Quak­er Cul­ture essay. Cald­well exag­ger­ates some things for effect and his descrip­tion of Quak­er cul­ture is of a very par­tic­u­lar Philadelphia-area man­i­fes­ta­tion and so parts of the talk haven’t aged well. But his main the­sis is worth remembering:

It doesn’t take a rock­et sci­en­tist to size up our sit­u­a­tion. Our num­bers have dwin­dled to a few. There aren’t enough Quak­ers left even to effec­tive­ly gov­ern our insti­tu­tions. Many of our meet­ings are strug­gling just to sur­vive. Our voice is no longer heard – at least, any­where that mat­ters [more from him on this]. We have become pet­ty and peev­ish. We bick­er about what is Quak­er and what is not. We are total­ly dis­tract­ed by issues of orga­ni­za­tion, struc­ture and bud­get. Let us not deceive our­selves. We have become a pathet­ic, irrel­e­vant cult. Like the ser­vant in the para­ble, we’re so afraid of los­ing the orig­i­nal prin­ci­pal that we’re los­ing all our oppor­tu­ni­ties, too. We have become ardent con­ser­va­tors of an arid tra­di­tion, not ambas­sadors of a liv­ing faith.

And that, Friends, is the crux of the prob­lem. On the one hand, we have the Quak­er faith — a pre­cious trea­sure giv­en to us by God. On the oth­er hand, we have Quak­er tra­di­tion and cul­ture — the ground, if you will, in which we have buried our trea­sure. The first spells life; the sec­ond spells death. Like the ser­vant in the para­ble, if we mere­ly con­serve our tra­di­tions and cul­ture, what faith we have will be tak­en away and giv­en to oth­ers. And, this is pre­cise­ly what is wrong with Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing today – we are focused on con­serv­ing our cul­ture, not ven­tur­ing with our faith. What’s worse, we are con­fused between the two. 

This essay went viral among the Quak­er blo­gos­phere about 15 years ago. Johan Mau­r­er ref­er­enced it in a post about insti­tu­tions for­get­ting the why of their work. Chris Mohr wrote about it, Rich Accetta-Evans had a two part. I can only find Cald­well’s talk via Archive​.org; because I don’t like things dis­ap­pear­ing on the inter­net I’ve put it up on Google Docs.

I’m sure that the no-overlap Philadel­phia Quak­er con­ver­sa­tion­al stereo­type is not uni­ver­sal. I should think that more diverse meet­ings have worked through this already and I know that Quak­er cul­tur­al norms has always more relaxed the fur­ther you get from Philly. But I think it’s still worth ask­ing if a par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion of ours is faith or cul­ture. And whether main­tain­ing it is intrin­sic to our prac­tice or mere­ly a stum­bling block to shar­ing faith.

Since Friend­sJour­nal pub­lish­es a com­bined June/July issue there aren’t any new fea­ture arti­cles com­ing out until August 1, so our social media guru Ron Hogan has been curat­ing inter­est­ing arti­cles he’s found in our archives. Eric Moon’s 2013 arti­cle, Cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly Not the Tes­ti­monies has had a bit of a sec­ond life, spark­ing new com­ments. Oth­er archival finds he’s curat­ed include Bashō Joins Our Strug­gle by Jeff Rob­bins and Coun­selor Ori­en­ta­tion ’99 by Pete Dybdahl.

And new on Quak­er­S­peak: The Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of Sto­ry­telling. “My art,” Cai Quirk says, “is an expres­sion of my faith.” They also co-wrote an arti­cle with Alli­son Kirkegaard ear­li­er this year, “A Wit­ness to Teth­ers and Trans­for­ma­tion,” full of obser­va­tions about 16 year­ly meet­ing ses­sions only pos­si­ble because they were held over Zoom.

My Friends Jour­nal col­league Ron Hogan is the sub­ject of a new Quak­er­S­peak. I espe­cial­ly like his take on repen­tance and for­give­ness and requir­ing a true change of heart to grow as a person.

Chang­ing Course for the King­dom of the Heavens