Quakers have been asking some very hard questions about their testimony to peace and their forms of pacifism following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They are hard because there are no simple right answers.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ British Quakers
British Quakers ask if Friends shoudl be be more vegan
July 24, 2018
“One aspect of sustainability that has particular importance for me personally concerns what we eat and how it is made. While the pitiful lives of animals in factory farms have been well-documented, what is also becoming more well-known is the tremendous impact eating animal products has on the environment.”
British Quakers take long hard look at faith
May 7, 2018
Britain Yearly Meeting has decided to undertake a once-in-a-generation rewrite of its Faith and Practice
Regular revision and being open to new truths is part of who Quakers are as a religious society. Quakers compiled the first of these books of discipline in 1738. Since then, each new generation of Quakers has revised the book. A new revision may help it speak to younger Quakers and the wider world.
This possibility of this revision was the basis for the inaccurate and overblown clickbaity rhetoric last week that Quakers were giving up God. Rewriting these books of Faith and Practice is not uncommon. But it can be a big fraught. Who decides what is archaic? Who decides which parts of our Quaker experience are core and which are expendable? Add to this the longstanding Quaker distrust of creedal statements and there’s a strong incentive to include everybody’s experience. Inclusion can be an admirable goal in life and spirituality of course, but for a religious body defining itself it leads to lowest-common-denominationalism.
I’ve found it extremely rewarding to read older copies of Faith and Practice precisely because the sometimes-unfamiliar language opens up a spiritual connection that I’ve missed in the routine of contemporary life. The 1806 Philadelphia Book of Discipline has challenged me to reconcile its very different take on Quaker faith (where are the SPICES?) with my own. My understanding is that the first copies of Faith and Practice were essentially binders of the important minutes that had been passed by Friends over the first century of our existence; these minutes represented boundaries – on our participation on war, on our language of days and times, on our advices against gambling and taverns. This was a very different kind of document than our Faith and Practice’s today.
It would be a personal hell for me to sit on one of the rewriting committees. I like the margins and fringes of Quaker spirituality too much. I like people who have taken the time to think through their experiences and give words to it – phrases and ideas which might not fit the standard nomenclature. I like publishing and sharing the ideas of people who don’t necessarily agree.
These days more newcomers first find Friends through Wikipedia and YouTube and (often phenomenally inaccurate) online discussions. A few years ago I sat in a session of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in which we were discussion revising the section of Faith and Practice that had to do with monthly meeting reporting. I was a bit surprised that the Friends who rose to speak on the proposed new procedure all admitted being unaware of the process in the current edition. It seems as if Faith and Practice is often a imprecise snapshot of Quaker institutional life even to those of us who are deeply embedded.