Also interviewed this month: Matt Rosen, whose distinctions between membership and convincement seem spot-on to our condition today. Matt’s also part of a group of British young adults planning a very grounded conference. The Friend profiled the organizers recently.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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)
Steven Dale Davison: Challenges and Gifts in Quaker Meetings
May 23, 2024
Steven was *that guy* when he joined Friends, combative and judgy about other people’s ministry. In retrospect, he wishes his meeting’s clearness committee had laid down the line when he joined. Even after talking with him I’m a little skeptical and hope they saw something in his initial arrogance that was ready to be overturned by Quaker experience.
What does it mean to be a member of a Quaker meeting?
May 2, 2024
Friends Journal’s May issue on “Membership” is out. In my opening column I talk about some of the different types of members, official and unofficial:
As the clerk of a small meeting, I find myself frequently juggling these multiple categories of membership. When we had plumbing issues a few months ago, there were lots of emails with a core half-dozen regulars who I can depend on to help with logistics and contacts with local contractors (this group is so consistent that when I go to send a message to one, my email program asks me if I want to include all the others).
When there’s an event coming up, the email list expands to include a small group of recent newcomers who make it to worship a few times a month. Every so often I look over this list to see if there’s someone who’s dropped away, and I’ll take a minute to write them a special email asking how they are and inviting them to attend. I would hate for a semi-regular to drop away and think we hadn’t noticed.
There’s also a wide constellation of people who attend once in a proverbial blue moon. Some are members of nearby meetings who occasionally hit us up for a change of pace. Others are local history buffs who will come to hear a particular speaker but make sure to come early because they like their once-a-year Quaker worship. Few of these visitors will ever become regulars but they probably know someone who might, and their word-of-mouth recommendation could help connect a new seeker with our small band.
When it’s time to send out the annual fundraising appeal, I’ll reach out to another, rather special class of members, those at a distance, many of whom I’ve never met. They might hail from one of the founding families of the meeting; perhaps they grew up there themselves and have fond memories. It might be easy to forget about these members but that would be a mistake, as they remind us of the long line of faithful servants who have kept this special community going in the past.
“A Membership That Is Ever Flowing”
I even give a shoutout to the red-shouldered hawk family living in one of our sycamore trees.
Looking back in the archives, we’ve been putting out an issue on membership every four years: Membership and the Generation Gap in 2012, Almost Quaker in 2016, Membership and Friends in 2020. I’m actually surprised at the clockwork precision of our issues, but there’s a good reason we keep coming back to it. The definition of who “we” are is an essential part of our self-identification as Friends. Pretty much everything we do (or fail to do) reflects our implicit assumptions about who’s in and who’s out. Many, perhaps most, of the debates that roil Friends have membership as an element.
Links
May 2, 2024
In 2020, online worship went from a fringe novelty to a mass phenomenon. It’s definitely an option that’s here to stay and British Friends have now integrated one online worship group fully into the monthly meeting structure (has any other yearly meeting done this already?). It’ll be fascinating to see how this continues to develop.
I was remiss in sharing the March Quakers Today podcast, which looked at Quakers, Birds, and Justice. Friends have long been especially interested in the natural world. One of the interviewees is Rebecca Heider, who wrote A Quaker Guide to Birdwatching in last month’s issue of FJ.
Rightwing Quaker-lovers in the Washington Post
April 15, 2024
It’s so bizarre that some of the people most rocking the old do-no-wrong Quaker mythologies today are non-Quaker political conservatives. Exhibit A has to be Christian nationalist Abby Abildness’s obsession with William Penn but this week The Washington Post profiled “anti-woke” dingbat Kali Fontanilla (non paywalled link).
She told her students how Quakers formed some of the first anti-slavery organizations in American history. How Quakers boycotted sugar, cotton and other goods produced through slave labor. She spoke about how Quakers lacked official clergy and advocated spiritual equality for men and women.
She did not mention that 19th-century slaveholding Quakers sometimes offered financial compensation to the enslaved people they freed. Or that, in 2022, British Quakers committed to make reparations for their past involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism.
Asked about this, Kali said in an interview that she knows not all Quakers were perfect, and that some owned slaves, but that her lesson was meant to give a contrast and a balance to the “overemphasis” on reparations coming from the left. She also noted that some Quakers have become “very left-leaning now.”
So does this mean we’ve retconned the Underground Railroad as a right-leaning enterprise? Perhaps. I think intentionally confusing political terms like left and right and playing dumb about history of U.S. political parties changing positions is part of the so called “anti-woke” agenda. It also an attempt to delegitimize modern-day Friends who might a) know their history (surprise!, there were eighteenth century Friends advocating reparations) and b) have well-informed and contrary opinions.
I’m glad the article does actually push back at some of the Fontanilla’s half-truths but it’s bad journalism to put the counter arguments near the end of the article where casual readers might miss them.
It’s even worse journalism to not have bothered to interview a Quaker historian. When profiling someone spewing inaccurate information, it’s common journalistic practice to let them go on for the first three or so paragraphs — enough time for them to incriminate themselves — and then bring in some experts to provide a series of quotes that will take down the preceding nonsense. Just a few minutes on the phone with a legit historian of early Quaker slaveholding and abolition — and some better pacing — would have made this a far better article. The mainstream press really needs to commit to practice aggressively fact-based reporting, even on throw-away profile articles like this, even if it risks being called woke.
As I’ve said many times before, there’s a lot of lot of things to be proud of in Quaker history but we’ve also gotten a lot of things wrong. Our positions on issues like slavery, native relations, and prison reform all have had mixed results. In the past it was common for Friends to over-emphasize and over-mythologize the good, as these modern-day non-Quakers continue to do. Nowadays some Friends over-emphasize the bad history, which also has its problems. I think it’s important to embrace both so we can understand how our traditions have led us to past discernments that were radically liberatory and also how our process has backfired on a number of issues.
John Andrew Gallery: The Gospel Model of Fatherly Love
April 15, 2024
I got to talk with frequent Friends Journal author John Andrew Gallery this week. His latest article for us explores a gospel model of parenthood. I most appreciated his take that many of the figures in the parables were not necessarily metaphorical fill-ins for God but faithful people already living in the power of the kingdom. I’ll be chewing on his take on the prodigal son’s forgiving father for awhile.
Friends Journal There’s a page in Friends Journal with other recent author chats. You can subscribe to the Friends Journal YouTube channel and watch interviews going back to 2011 all our Quaker Author Chat playlist.
Links
April 14, 2024
We’re looking for articles on relationships for the September issue of Friends Journal—family relationships, romantic ones, mentorships, or spiritual Friends.
Pendle Hill’s The Seed podcast has a great interview with Adria Gulizia this week. Some good stuff. Here’s a sample: “Petitions and demands is how the world works. That’s how the political system works. That’s not how the religious Society of Friends is supposed to work. And yet, they felt like the stakes are too high to do things the Quaker way. ‘We can’t do it the Quaker way.’ ”
Really great article in The Verge about the cables that route internet traffic across the oceans and the people who keep them in repair. Well written, amazingly illustrated, with gripping personal stories.
Quakers and “the Church”
April 11, 2024
Johan Maurer examines a classic Quaker dilemma from a new angle. Are we something unique and radical or are we just another brand of Christianity? Describing Britain Yearly Meeting, in particular, though it could describe many Liberal Quaker spaces:
In particular, Christian language and God language are often held at arm’s length. Quakers’ ethical discipleship (a.k.a. the “testimonies”) are held in high regard but are often described without reference to their Christian origins. The customs and folkways of meeting for worship and meeting for business are likewise faithfully maintained but their connections with what early Friends called “Gospel order” are often not emphasized.
This is one of those definitional conundrums that have no easy answers. For me personally, yes, I’m part of the larger church. I think pride is often at the root of some of our denials. Early Friends also experienced corrupted and hypocritical established churches but didn’t abandon the project so much as call for a renewal back to basic principles. The history of Friends is our institutions likewise getting frequently mired in insular thinking and moral corruption but being drawn back by prophetic figures calling us to do better. That said, the spark of the Quaker message is the call to listen to the inward Christ and that can easily be done (and is frequently done) by people outside the Quaker movement.
There’s a lively discussion of Maurer’s post happening on Reddit if you’d like to share your two cents.