Tag Archives ⇒ communities

The freedom to seek sanctuary

November 1, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Lucy Dun­can at the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Commitee:

What if, instead of char­ac­ter­iz­ing folks seek­ing home as “threats” or “invaders,” we under­stood them to be our neigh­bors, that our futures are inter­locked and that how they are treat­ed is con­nect­ed to the well-being of us all? What if we under­stood love as not con­strained by bor­ders or walls, but abun­dant, and that car­ing for one anoth­er and those most vio­lat­ed by sys­temic oppres­sion is the path­way toward lib­er­a­tion for us all? What if we, as peo­ple of con­science and faith, greet­ed the migrants at the bor­der as our broth­ers, sis­ters, and kin, opened our homes and com­mu­ni­ties to them, and greet­ed them as resource­ful con­trib­u­tors to fig­ur­ing out the plan­e­tary threats we cur­rent­ly face together? 

https://​www​.afsc​.org/​b​l​o​g​s​/​a​c​t​i​n​g​-​i​n​-​f​a​i​t​h​/​f​r​e​e​d​o​m​-​t​o​-​s​e​e​k​-​s​a​n​c​t​u​a​r​y​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​p​e​r​s​p​e​c​t​i​v​e​-​m​i​g​r​a​n​t​-​c​a​r​a​van

Risking Community

April 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Gregg Kosel­ka, a post that rewards read­ing a few times: Risk­ing Community

When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real dif­fer­ences in phi­los­o­phy about how to build com­mu­ni­ty. Some see how much needs to rad­i­cal­ly change so that those who have been mar­gin­al­ized can tru­ly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slow­ly to build it cor­rect­ly. Some see the dam­age hav­ing no com­mu­ni­ty can bring, and want to do what they can to build some­thing as safe­ly as pos­si­ble. I hate that these dif­fer­ences are still caus­ing dam­age to our rela­tion­ships and our com­mu­ni­ties. I don’t have a solution.

I appre­ci­ate the way he tries to under­stand the flip sides of com­mu­ni­ty and insti­tu­tion­al­ism; per­haps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be nego­ti­at­ed. As pas­tor of one of the “most insti­tu­tion­al of insti­tu­tion­al church­es for 15 years,” he was in the cen­ter of the cen­trifu­gal forces that tore apart both North­west Year­ly Meet­ing as a whole and indi­vis­i­ble Friends church­es with­in it. From a dis­tance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverg­ing Quak­er his­to­ry, I’m not in a posi­tion to say whether things could have gone dif­fer­ent­ly or whether indi­vid­u­als always act­ed in their best ways but I can appre­ci­ate that it there must have been a lot of impos­si­ble choic­es and no-good answers as polar­iza­tion gave way to disintegration.

Risk­ing Community

What might Love do?

April 13, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Kath­leen Wooten looks at the heart­break­ing immi­gra­tion sto­ries tak­ing place all around us and asks the clas­sic Quak­er ques­tion, what might Love do?

I’m not quite sure how we got here, in this “Chris­t­ian” nation of ours. Christ says to wel­come the stranger. These folks are not even strangers to many of us – they are woven into the fab­ric of our shared com­mu­ni­ties, their fam­i­lies, their work and ser­vice in the world, and their blessings.

Quakers and Mental Health

March 29, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Well this one hits home for me. The new Quak­er­S­peak talks to Ore­gon social work­er Melody George in the top­ic of Quak­ers and Men­tal Health:

I real­ly see men­tal diver­si­ty as a gift to a com­mu­ni­ty, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their sto­ries about how they’ve got­ten through their trau­mat­ic sit­u­a­tions and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.

My fam­i­ly has had very avoid­able and out-of-nowhere con­flicts at two reli­gious spaces — one a Friends meet­ing and the oth­er a Pres­by­ter­ian church — over easy acco­mo­da­tions for my son Fran­cis. It seems like many of the dynam­ics that we’ve seen are not dis­sim­i­lar to those that keep oth­ers out of meet­ing com­mu­ni­ties. Who are we will­ing to adapt for? Is com­fort and famil­iar­i­ty our main goal?

Melody also wrote for Friends Jour­nal a few years ago, Imag­in­ing a Trauma-informed Quak­er Com­mu­ni­ty.

A chatty email newsletter

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Over the years I’ve noticed var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion break­downs among Friends that have made me wor­ried. It’s often some­thing rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle. For exam­ple, I might be talk­ing to an active Philadel­phia Friend and be star­tled to real­ize they have no idea that a major year­ly meet­ing across the coun­try is break­ing apart. Or some­one will send me an arti­cle bemoan­ing the lack of some­thing that I know already exists.

I’m in this fun­ny posi­tion where I have a quar­ter cen­tu­ry of ran­dom Quak­er fac­toids in my head, have access to great data­bas­es (like instant search­es of Friends Jour­nal’s 60+ years of arti­cles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a dis­cus­sion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have use­ful con­text. Some of it is his­tor­i­cal (I geek out on the Quak­er past) but some of it is just my lived mem­o­ry. I’ve been in and out of Quak­er offices for 27 years now. I’m enter­ing this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird tal­ent to remem­ber things I read years ear­li­er. When the top­ic of clear­ness com­mit­tees recent­ly came up, I remem­bered that Deb­o­rah Haines had writ­ten a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGCon­nec­tions newslet­ter (yes, groan­er of a name but it was a great pub­li­ca­tion in its hey­day). Thanks to Archive​.org I could resur­face the arti­cle and bring it to the discussions.

And so, I’ve been qui­et­ly been chang­ing the idea of Quak­er Ranter from a clas­sic old-school blog to a dai­ly email newslet­ter. I’ll still col­lect inter­est­ing Quak­er links, as I’ve been doing for years with Quak­erQuak­er. But now I’ll anno­tate them and give them con­text. If there’s a side sto­ry I think is inter­est­ing I’ll tell it. I have a long train com­mute and writ­ing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.

I think that some­thing like this could help bring Quak­er new­com­ers up to speed. Our insid­er lan­guage and unex­plained (and some­times dat­ed) world­views cre­ate an imped­i­ment for seek­ers. We kind of expect they’ll fig­ure out things that aren’t so obvi­ous. Learn­ing fac­toids and his­to­ries a day at a time can give them some con­text to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing Sun­day morn­ing. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quak­er fea­ture where peo­ple new to Friends can ask ques­tions. I’ll be lib­er­al­ly pitch­ing Friends Jour­nal arti­cles and Quak­er­S­peak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quak­er media work, but I’m also all about spread­ing the love and will share many oth­er great resources and blogs.

As with all my projects I also hope to get peo­ple con­tribut­ing so it becomes a com­mu­ni­ty water­ing hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free dai­ly email list. At some point, this will prob­a­bly out­grow the free tier of the email ser­vice I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send the­see emails out. For those of you with a lit­tle extra to give, Quak­er Ranter Mem­ber­ship is a way to help off­set these costs.

And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quak​er​ran​ter​.org/​e​m​ail to sign up.

Have Friends lost their cultural memory?

July 12, 2012
· Martin Kelley

In Amer­i­ca today our sense of spir­i­tu­al fel­low­ship in Lib­er­al meet­ings, the feel­ing of belong­ing to the same tribe, is dimin­ish­ing. We no longer live in the same com­mu­ni­ties, and we come from diverse faith tra­di­tions. Our cul­tur­al val­ues are no longer entwined at the roots, as were those of our founders. As a body we share less genet­ic and cul­tur­al mem­o­ry of what it means to be Quak­ers. Dif­fer­ent view­points often pre­vent us from look­ing in the same direc­tion to find a point of con­ver­gence. We hold beliefs rang­ing from Bud­dhism to non-theism to Chris­tian­i­ty, or we may sim­ply be eth­i­cal human­ists. Just imag­ine a mix­ture of wild seeds cast into a sin­gle plot of land, pro­duc­ing a pro­fu­sion of col­or. A wide vari­ety of plants all bloom­ing togeth­er sym­bol­ize our present con­di­tion in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends. Dis­cern­ing which is a wild­flower and which is a weed is not easy. We are liv­ing a great exper­i­ment of reli­gious diversity.

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Russian Old Believers in Millville NJ

March 13, 2012
· Martin Kelley

A few weeks ago we were con­tact­ed by some­one from the St Nicholas Cen­ter (http://​www​.stni​cholas​cen​ter​.org) ask­ing if they could use some pho­tos I had tak­en of the church my wife is attend­ing, Mil­lville N.J.‘s St Nicholas Ukrain­ian Catholic. Of course I said yes. But then my cor­re­spon­dent asked if I could take pic­tures of anoth­er church she had heard of: St Nicholas Old Believ­er’s Church. It’s on the oth­er side of Mil­lville from our St Nick­’s, on an ancient road that dead ends in woods. We had to visit.

The Old Believ­ers have a fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry. They were Russ­ian Ortho­dox Chris­tians who refused to com­ply with litur­gi­cal changes man­dat­ed by the Patri­arch and Czar in the 1650s. As usu­al, there was a lot of pol­i­tics involved, with the Czar want­i­ng to cozy up with the Greek Ortho­dox to ally Rus­sia against the Mus­lim Ottomans, etc., etc. The the­o­log­i­cal charge was that the Greek tra­di­tions were the stan­dard and Russ­ian dif­fer­ences latter-day inno­va­tions to be stamped out (more mod­ern research has found the Rus­sians actu­al­ly were clos­er to the old­er forms, but no mat­ter: what the Czar and Patri­arch want, the Czar and Patri­arch get). The old prac­tices were banned, begin­ning hun­dreds of years of state-sponsored per­se­cu­tion for the “Old Believ­ers.” The sur­vivors scat­tered to the four cor­ners of the Russ­ian empire and beyond, keep­ing a low pro­file wher­ev­er they went.

The Old Believ­ers have a fas­ci­nat­ing frac­tured his­to­ry. Because their priests were killed off in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, they lost their claims of apos­tolic suc­ces­sion – the idea that there’s an unbro­ken line of ordi­na­tion from Jesus Christ him­self. Some Old Believ­ers found work-arounds or claimed a few priests were spared but the hard­core among them declared suc­ces­sion over, sig­nal­ing the end times and the fall of the Church. They became priest­less Old Believ­ers – so defen­sive of the old litur­gy that they were will­ing to lose most of the litur­gy. They’ve scat­tered around the world, often wear­ing plain dress and liv­ing in iso­lat­ed communities.

The Old Believ­ers church in Mil­lville has no signs, no web­site, no indi­ca­tion of what it is (a life­long mem­ber of “our” St Nick­’s called it mys­te­ri­ous and said he lit­tle about it of it). From a few inter­net ref­er­ences, they appear to be the priest­less kind of Old Believ­ers. But it has its own dis­tinc­tions: appar­ent­ly one of the great­est icono­g­ra­phers of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry lived and wor­shipped there, and when famed Russ­ian polit­i­cal pris­on­er Alek­san­dr Solzhen­it­syn vis­it­ed the U.S. he made a point of speak­ing at this sign­less church on a dead end road.

Links:
* Wikipedia: http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​O​l​d​_​B​e​l​i​e​v​ers
* Account of US Lithuan­ian Bespopovt­sy com­mu­ni­ties: http://​www​.synax​is​.info/​o​l​d​-​r​i​t​e​/​0​_​o​l​d​b​e​l​i​e​f​/​h​i​s​t​o​r​y​_​e​n​g​/​n​i​c​o​l​l​.​h​tml
* OSU Library on icono­g­ra­ph­er Sofronv (PDF): http://​cmrs​.osu​.edu/​r​c​m​s​s​/​C​M​H​2​1​c​o​l​o​r​.​pdf
* Solzhen­it­syn’s 1976 vis­it: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f‑news/2057793/posts

In album St Nicholas Old Believ­ers, Mil­lville NJ (9 photos)

 

 

 

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Mega-meetings and missional communities

October 18, 2010
· Martin Kelley

On Twit­ter, C Wess Daniels (@cwdaniels) asks if this arti­cle on the future of Evan­gel­i­cal­ism in North Amer­i­ca by David Fitch applies to Quak­ers. Fitch writes:

The future of the tra­di­tion­al evan­gel­i­cal church as I see it is: a.) mega church­es con­tin­u­ing to grow, con­sol­i­dat­ing what is left of the Chris­ten­dom pop­u­la­tions…; b.) small­er church­es of under 200 slow­ly dying and even­tu­al­ly clos­ing, and c.) the birthing of new mis­sion­al com­mu­ni­ties through  either seed­ing new mis­sion­ary com­mu­ni­ties or tran­si­tion­ing (the afore­men­tioned) dying small church­es into vibrant places of mission.

On the face of it, it’s bizarre to com­pare lib­er­al Friends to main­stream Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals, but there are sim­i­lar­i­ties if you scale back the num­bers. I think some larg­er Friends meet­ings have mega-church-like dynam­ics. They have strong fam­i­ly pro­grams and con­nec­tions to near­by Friends schools and/or retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties. They serve as the local pro­gres­sive lib­er­al hub of their com­mu­ni­ties. They’re not deeply root­ed in Quak­er spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and are proud of the spir­i­tu­al het­ero­doxy. They’re very orga­nized – name tags, “Friend­ly 8” din­ners, expe­ri­enced clerks. They stand in con­trast to the bulk of small­er meet­ings that are dying fast and won’t be around anoth­er generation.

Fitch clear­ly thinks the inter­est­ing work falls under the last cat­e­go­ry, “mis­sion­al com­mu­ni­ties” and argues that a “sig­nif­i­cant part” of church resources should be devot­ed to “efforts in train­ing mis­sion­ary pas­tors.” His big ques­tion is whether the small “b” church­es can evolve into the “c” mis­sion­al communities.

I’m not sure that we real­ly need train­ing pro­grams but for argu­men­t’s sake let’s say Fitch is right. Lib­er­al Friends don’t have any­one to devote church resources to train­ing (the clos­est ana­logue be the Earl­ham School of Reli­gion). We do have small mis­sion­al com­mu­ni­ties spring­ing up but so far there’s been lit­tle sup­port or recog­ni­tion from local meet­ings or larg­er Friends bod­ies. What would it look like to equip these efforts in an unpro­grammed Quak­er set­ting? Is it all but inevitable that they’ll have to rely on self-organized asso­ci­a­tions? Will they remain as wor­ship groups? Is that fine?