Tag Archives ⇒ faith

Youth Ministries 2: What Do Young Friends Want?

April 28, 2005
· Martin Kelley

I was giv­en per­mis­sion to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Min­istry Con­sul­ta­tion that took place Third Month. A num­ber of goals and projects had been brain­stormed before­hand. The thirty-or-so par­tic­i­pants at the Con­sul­ta­tion were each giv­en ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pur­sued. Every star act­ed as a vote that there was one per­son inter­est­ed in that top­ic. The stars were cod­ed to indi­cate the age range of the vot­er: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18 – 37 years old) and old­er Friends.

One of the “stars” charts at the consultation

Being the infor­ma­tion design geek, I con­vert­ed the resul­tant votes to into qual­i­ties and col­ors and put them into a chart show­ing inter­est lev­el. Projects that received no votes from a par­tic­u­lar age range are labeled “none,” for no inter­est; 2 – 3 stars is “weak” inter­est and so forth, up to “HOT” which are projects which received over 7 stars from an age group.

As an exam­ple, take “devel­op spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.” Sev­en adult young Friends (aged 18 – 37) put a star down for this, indi­cat­ing they thought it was some­thing FGC should pro­mote, hence “strong” (bright red) inter­est from this age group. No Friend over forty used one of their stars to indi­cate inter­est in this work, indi­cat­ing that none of them thought FGC should be pro­mot­ing spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment. Here are the results:

High-School
Voters		 YAF
Voters		 Old­er Adult
Voters

Expecially for Adult Young Friends
Com­mu­ni­ty weak strong weak
Devel­op spirituality none strong none
Out­reach & how to explain our faith none strong weak
Crit­i­cal mass at MM, QM, YM none weak strong
Men­tor­ing by old­er Friends none strong none
Men­tor­ing to younger Friends none strong none
Men­tor­ing to old­er Friends: none strong none
Help with transitions none *HOT* weak
Adver­tis­ing programs none weak none
Sug­ges­tions:
Trav­el­ing Min­istries for AYF none lukew weak
Groups through­out the year for support none lukew weak
Sup­port for AYF groups at the YM levels none weak weak
Data­base to help iso­lat­ed friends none none none
Clearness/discernment process:
For HS to College none lukew none
For work transitions none weak none
For rela­tion­ships none weak none
For par­ent­hood none weak weak
Inter­gen­er­a­tional Spir­i­tu­al Conversations
About Vital Friends Issues none lukew none
Vision of Quak­erism in 50 years none lukew weak
Finan­cial sup­port for AYF weak *HOT* lukew
Retreats for youth workers none none weak
Mate­ri­als specif­i­cal­ly designed for AYF, none none none
Gen­er­al Questions:
How do we han­dle the broad age span? none weak none
How do we tap the ener­gy and pas­sion of this group MMs, YMs & FGC? none lukew strong
How do we meet the needs with­out sep­a­rat­ing AYF from larg­er community? none lukew none
How do we sus­tain com­mu­ni­ty when we only meet once a year? none lukew weak

Especially for High Schoolers
Needs:
Adults who are bet­ter pre­pared to work with them… weak lukew strong
FAP�s that have self confidence none none weak
Help with dis­cern­ment process around college none none none
Help with disc: C‑O none none weak
Help with dis­cern­ment around life choices none none weak
Dis­cern­ment ques­tions: #3, #4, & #5: none weak strong
Build­ing community weak weak weak
Net­work­ing weak none none
Bible study, RE curriculum none none weak
Train­ing how one per­son can have impact none none none
Train­ing on how to devel­op group dialogs weak none weak
Help to get more teens involved weak none lukew
Pro­gram­ming help none none none
Lead­er­ship Development weak weak weak
Sug­ges­tions:
Youth newslet­ter lukew weak none
Email forum lukew weak none
Email data base none weak none
Event b’ween Young Quakes and Gathering weak none none
Youth exchange weak none none
Pro­grams to facil­i­tate rites of passage weak none none

Things Younger Friends want­ed more than Old­er Friends:
In order by AYF popularity:

  • MENTORSHIP: The AYFs real­ly want cross-generational men­tor­ing rela­tion­ships. When the ques­tions were first posed, there only “men­tor­ing by old­er Friends” and “men­tor­ing to younger Friends.” Check the math and you’ll see that’s the same ques­tion (who­ev­er put the ques­tions togeth­er for­got that the Quak­er under­stand­ing of elder­ship is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a func­tion of age, hmm). I grabbed a pen­cil and added “men­tor­ing to old­er Friends” and it was instant­ly pop­u­lar. Even though the men­tor­ship issue was spread over three ques­tions, AYF’s vot­ed “strong­ly” for each of them, show­ing ter­rif­ic pop­u­lar sup­port. Almost no over-40 Friend vot­ed for this. This is not some­thing that can be forced onto dis­in­ter­est­ed old­er Friends, which means I think we young-in’s are going to have to rely on one anoth­er for mentorship.
  • SUPPORT FOR AYF CONFERNCES: Younger Friends want to spend more time togeth­er. Note should be made that the vot­ers were Friends attend­ing a con­fer­ence and that we were a select­ed and self-selected group who pre­sum­ably like to attend con­fer­ences. Still, this is popular.
  • TALKING ABOUT OUR FAITH: It’s sad that only two old­er Friends thought explain­ing the faith was worth­while. At the same time it’s encour­ag­ing that 13 AYFs want­ed this. It’s very clear that younger Friends aren’t as afraid of talk­ing about seri­ous faith issues as the Baby Boomers (it’s nice to see some of my essays confirmed!).

Things Old­er Friends want­ed more than Younger Friends:

  • TAPPING THE YOUTH: There was what I thought was a semi-obnoxious ques­tion about how to “tap the ener­gy and pas­sion” of younger Friends. This is very close to the all-too-common gen­er­a­tional mind­set that sees “val­ues young peo­ple as a resource” (as a ad in heavy-rotation at NPR pro­claims). We are not a resource for extrac­tion. Young peo­ple are too often seen mere­ly as a source of cheap labor for projects ini­ti­at­ed, designed and run by old­er Friends; they are want­ed as pas­sive audi­ence mem­bers for old­er Friends’ pon­tif­i­cat­ing lec­tures; they are end­less­ly pro­claimed a far-off “future” of Friends rather than the very much here-and-now present of Friends.While old­er Friends at the con­sul­ta­tion felt strong­ly that young peo­ple should be tapped, Adult Young Friends had luke­warm inter­est in being tapped and high school Friends showed no inter­est what­so­ev­er. While not all old­er Friends think of young Friends as “resources,” it’s a common-enough theme that we need to flag it as a part of the gen­er­a­tional gap. I sus­pect that pow­er issues will sur­face when Quak­er insti­tu­tions try to pull togeth­er projects that “tap” youth: twenty-something Friends are going to want more involve­ment in the design and oper­a­tion of these projects than old­er Friends will be will­ing to give.Similarly, old­er Friends seem to be more inter­est­ed that younger Friends attain “crit­i­cal mass” at Quak­er insti­tu­tions like month­ly, quar­ter­ly and year­ly meet­ings. The phras­ing of the ques­tion is a lit­tle ambigu­ous and I see two like­ly expla­na­tions. One is that younger Friends don’t feel they need crit­i­cal mass to be involved in Quak­er insti­tu­tions and want inte­grat­ed inter­gen­er­a­tional par­tic­i­pa­tion rather than “AYF ghet­tos.” The oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty (the scari­er one) is that younger Friends sim­ply aren’t as com­mit­ted to Quak­er insti­tu­tions. I sus­pect the gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in respons­es are the result of both these fac­tors, plus oth­ers perhaps.

Things no one par­tic­u­lar­ly cared about:

  • No one wants mate­ri­als specif­i­cal­ly designed for AYF. No one wants adver­tis­ing pro­grams. No one wants a data­base to help iso­lat­ed Friends.
  • An AYF trav­el­ing min­istries was luke­warm, 4 YAF stars, 3 over-40. This sur­pris­es me.
  • Any oth­er pat­terns that should be lift­ed up?

Dis­claimer
I should note that this was not a sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey. Though the orga­niz­ers of the Con­sul­ta­tion tried hard and the par­tic­i­pants were sur­pris­ing­ly diverse for an col­lec­tion like this, they weren’t rep­re­sen­ta­tive. There were only four high school par­tic­i­pants and I did­n’t adjust their votes: “luke­warm” sup­port from them should real­ly be relabled “strong” support.

While this is a small sam­ple size, this is one of the few recent sur­veys of it type in FGC Quak­erism and it bears close study. It con­firms a lot of what I’ve been say­ing all these years (yea!, I’m not crazy) and echoes what I hear a lot of high school and twenty-something Friends talk­ing about. Take it for what its worth!

Relat­ed:

The Quaker Peace Testimony: Living in the Power, Reclaiming the Source

January 1, 2005
· Martin Kelley

The Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny is one of the pop­u­lar­ly well-known out­ward expres­sions of Quak­er faith. But have we for­got­ten its source?

In a meet­ing for wor­ship I attend­ed a few years ago a woman rose and spoke about her work for peace. She told us of let­ters writ­ten and meet­ings attend­ed; she cer­tain­ly kept busy. She con­fessed that it is tir­ing work and she cer­tain­ly sound­ed tired and put-upon. But she said she’d keep at it and she quot­ed ear­ly Friends’ man­date to us: that we must work to take away the occa­sion of war.

Read con­tem­po­rary Friends lit­er­a­ture and you’ll see this imper­a­tive all over the place. From one brochure: “We are called as Friends to lead lives that ‘take away the occa­sion of all wars.’ ” Yet this state­ment, like many con­tem­po­rary state­ments on Quak­er tes­ti­monies, is tak­en out of con­text. The actor has been switched and the mes­sage has been lost. For the peace tes­ti­mo­ny doesn’t instruct us to take away occasions.

The Quaker Peace Testimony: Living in the Power

The clas­sic state­ment of the Quak­er peace tes­ti­mo­ny is the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion. Eng­land was embroiled in war and insur­rec­tion. A failed polit­i­cal coup was blamed on Quak­ers and it looked like Friends were going to be per­se­cut­ed once more by the civ­il author­i­ties. But Friends weren’t inter­est­ed in the polit­i­cal process swirling around them. They weren’t tak­ing sides in the coups. “I lived in the virtue of that life and pow­er that took away the occa­sion of all wars,” George Fox had told civ­il author­i­ties ten years before and the sign­ers of the dec­la­ra­tion elab­o­rat­ed why they could not fight: “we do earnest­ly desire and wait, that by the Word of God’s pow­er and its effec­tu­al oper­a­tion in the hearts of men, the king­doms of this world may become the king­doms of the Lord.”

For all of the over-intellectualism with­in Quak­erism today, it’s a sur­prise that these state­ments are so rarely parsed down. Look at Fox’s state­ment: many mod­ern activists could agree we should take away occas­sion for war, cer­tain­ly, but it’s a sub­or­di­nate clause. It is not refer­ring to the “we,” but instead mod­i­fies “pow­er.” Our instruc­tions are to live in that pow­er. It is that pow­er that does the work of tak­ing away war’s occasion.

I’m not quib­bling but get­ting to the very heart of the clas­sic under­stand­ing of peace. It is a “tes­ti­mo­ny,” in that we are “tes­ti­fy­ing” to a larg­er truth. We are acknowl­edg­ing some­thing: that there is a Pow­er (let’s start cap­i­tal­iz­ing it) that takes away the need for war. It is that Pow­er that has made peace pos­si­ble and that Pow­er that has already act­ed and con­tin­ues to act in our world. The job has actu­al­ly been done. The occa­sion for war has been end­ed. Our rela­tion­ship to this Pow­er is sim­ply to live in it. Around the time of the Dec­la­ra­tion, George Fox wrote a let­ter to Lord Pro­tec­tor Oliv­er Cromwell :

The next morn­ing I was moved of the Lord to write a paper to the Pro­tec­tor, Oliv­er Cromwell; where­in I did, in the pres­ence of the Lord God, declare that I denied the wear­ing or draw­ing of a car­nal sword, or any oth­er out­ward weapon, against him or any man; and that I was sent of God to stand a wit­ness against all vio­lence, and against the works of dark­ness; and to turn peo­ple from dark­ness to light; and to bring them from the caus­es of war and fight­ing, to the peace­able gospel.

The peace tes­ti­mo­ny is actu­al­ly a state­ment of faith. Not sur­pris­ing real­ly, or it shouldn’t be. Ear­ly Friends were all about shout­ing out the truth. “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self” was a ear­ly tagline. It’s no won­der that they stretched it out to say that Christ has tak­en away occa­sion for war. Hal­lelu­ji­ah!, I can hear them shout. Let the cel­e­bra­tion begin. I always hear John Lennon echo­ing these cel­e­brants when he sings “War is over” and fol­lows with “if we want it.”

Obvi­ous­ly war isn’t over. Peo­ple must still want it. And they do. War is root­ed in lusts, James 4:1 – 3 tells us. Mod­ern Amer­i­can greed for mate­r­i­al things with ever more rapac­i­ty and blind­ness. We dri­ve our S.U.V.s and then fight for oil sup­plies in the Per­sian Gulf. We wor­ry that we won’t be pop­u­lar or loved if we don’t use teeth-whitening strips or don’t obsess over the lat­est T.V. fad. We aren’t liv­ing in the Pow­er and the Deceiv­er con­vinces us that war is peace.

But the Pow­er is there. We can live in that Pow­er and it will take away more than occa­sions for war, for it will take away the lusts and inse­cu­ri­ties that lead to war.

Speaking Faith to Power

When you’ve acknowl­edge the Pow­er, what does faith become? It becomes a tes­ti­mo­ny to the world. I can tes­ti­fy to you per­son­al­ly that there is a Pow­er and that this Pow­er will com­fort you, teach you, guide you. Ear­ly Friends were pros­e­lytis­ing when they wrote their state­ment. After writ­ing his let­ter to Cromwell, Fox went to vis­it the man him­self. Cromwell was undoubt­ed­ly the most pow­er­ful man in Eng­land and any­thing but a paci­fist. He had raised and led armies against the king and it was he who ordered the behead­ing of King Charles I. And what did Fox talk about? Truth. And Jesus.

George Fox stood as a wit­ness just as he promised, and tried to turn Cromwell from dark­ness to light, to bring him from the cause of war to the peace­able gospel. By Fox’s account, it almost worked:

As I was turn­ing, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day togeth­er, we should be near­er one to the oth­er”; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admon­ished him to hear­ken to God’s voice, that he might stand in his coun­sel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hard­ness of heart; but if he did not hear God’s voice, his heart would be hard­ened. He said it was true.

This then is the Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny. I don’t think it can be divorced from its spir­i­tu­al basis. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, many lead­ing Friends tried to dilute the Quak­er mes­sage to make it more under­stand­able and palat­able for non-Friends. A line of George Fox was tak­en out of con­text and used so much that most Friends have adopt­ed “that of God in every­one” as a uni­fied creed, for­get­ting that it’s a mod­ern phrase whose ambi­gu­i­ty Fox wouldn’t have appre­ci­at­ed. When we talk about peace, we often do so in very sec­u­lar­ized lan­guage. We’re still try­ing to pros­e­ly­tize, but our mes­sage is a ratio­nal­ist one that war can be solved by tech­no­crat­ic means and a more demo­c­ra­t­ic appor­tion­ment of resources. Most con­tem­po­rary state­ments have all the umph of a floor speech at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, with only throw-away ref­er­ences to “com­mu­ni­ties of faith,” and bland state­ments of “that of God” hint­ing that there might be some­thing more to our message.

The freedom of living the Power

We actu­al­ly share much of the peace tes­ti­mo­ny with a num­ber of Chris­tians. There are many Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians who read­i­ly agree that there’s a Pow­er but con­clude that their job is just to wait for its return. They define the pow­er strict­ly as Jesus Christ and the return as the Sec­ond Com­ing. They fore­see a world­ly Armaged­don when peace will fail and thou­sands will die.

That’s not our way. Friends pulled Chris­tian­i­ty out of the first cen­tu­ry and refused to wait for any last cen­tu­ry to declare that Jesus is here now, “to teach his peo­ple him­self.” We keep con­stant vig­il and rejoice to find the returned Christ already here, deep in our hearts, at work in the world. Our way of work­ing for peace is to praise the Pow­er, wait for its guid­ance and then fol­low it’s com­mands through what­ev­er hard­ship await us. When we’re doing it right, we become instru­ments of God in the ser­vice of the Spir­it. Christ does use us to take away the occa­sions for war!

But the wait­ing is nec­es­sary, the guid­ance is key. It gives us the strength to over­come over­work and burn-out and it gives us the direc­tion for our work. The slick­est, most expen­sive peace cam­paigns and the most dra­mat­ic self-inflating actions often achieve much less than the sim­ple, hum­ble, behind-the-scenes, year-in, year-out ser­vice. I sus­pect that the ways we’re most used by the Spir­it are ways we bare­ly perceive.

Quak­er min­istry is not a pas­sive wait­ing. We pray, we test, we work hard and we use all the gifts our Cre­ator has giv­en us (intel­li­gence, tech­nolo­gies, etc.). There are prob­lems in the world, huge ones that need address­ing and we will address them. But we do so out of a joy. And through our work, we ask oth­ers to join us in our joy, to lift up the cross with us, join­ing Jesus metaphor­i­cal­ly in wit­ness­ing to the world.

The modern-day Pres­i­dent order­ing a war suf­fers from the same lack of faith that George Fox’s Cromwell did. They are igno­rant or impa­tient of Christ’s mes­sage and so take peace-making into their own hands. But how much do faith­less politi­cians dif­fer from many con­tem­po­rary peace activists? When I block­ade a fed­er­al build­ing or stand in front of a tank, am I try­ing to stop war myself? When I say it’s my job to “end the occa­sion for war,” am I tak­ing on the work of God? I feel sad for the woman who rose in Meet­ing for Wor­ship and told us how hard her peace work is. Each of us alone is inca­pable of bring­ing on world peace, and we turn in our own tracks with a qui­et dis­pair. I’ve seen so many Quak­er peace activists do real­ly poor jobs with such a over­whelmed sense of sad­ness that they don’t get much sup­port. Detached from the Spir­it, we look to gain our self-worth from oth­ers and we start doing things sim­ply to impress our world­ly peers. If we’re lucky we get mon­ey but not love, respect but not a new voice lift­ed up in the choir of praise for the Cre­ator. We’ve giv­en up hope in God’s promise and despair is our ever-present companion.

Our testimony to the world

It doesn’t need to be this way. And I think for many Friends it hasn’t been. When you work for the Pow­er, you don’t get attached to your work’s out­come in the same way. We’re just foot­sol­diers for the Lord. Often we’ll do things and have no idea how they’ve affect­ed oth­ers. It’s not our job to know, for it’s not our job to be sucess­ful as defined by the world. Maybe all the work I’ve ever done for peace is for some exchange of ideas that I won’t rec­og­nize at the time. We need to strive to be gra­cious and ground­ed even in the midst of all the undra­mat­ic moments (as well as those most dra­mat­ic moments). We will be known to the world by how we wit­ness our trust in God and by how faith­ful­ly we live our lives in obe­di­ence to the Spirit’s instructions.

Related Reading

Again, the link to the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion is the first stop for those want­i­ng to under­stand Friends’ under­stand­ing on peacemaking.

Quak­er His­to­ri­an Jer­ry Frost talked about the peace tes­ti­mo­ny as part of his his­to­ry of twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Quak­erism (“Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for lib­er­al Friends seek­ing polit­i­cal­ly and social­ly rel­e­vant peace work”). Bill Samuel has writ­ten a his­to­ry of the peace tes­ti­mo­ny with a good list of links. Lloyd Lee Wil­son wrote about being a “Chris­t­ian Paci­fist” in the April 2003 edi­tion of Quak­er Life.

If wars are indeed root­ed in lust, then non­vi­o­lent activism should be involved in exam­i­nat­ing those lusts. In The Roots of Non­vi­o­lence (writ­ten for Non​vi​o​lence​.org), I talk a lit­tle about how activists might relate to the deep­er caus­es of the war to tran­scend the “anti-war” move­ment. One way I’ve been explor­ing anti-consumerism in with my re-examination of the Quak­er tra­di­tion of plain dress.

For rea­sons I can’t under­stand, peo­ple some­times read “Liv­ing in the Pow­er: the Quak­er Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny Reclaimed” and think I’m “advo­cat­ing a retreat from direct­ly engag­ing the prob­lems of the world” (as one Friend put it). I ask those who think I’m posit­ing some sort of either/or dual­i­ty betwen faith vs. works, or min­istry vs. activism, to please reread the essay. I have been a peace activist for over fif­teen years and run non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: ran, I laid it down in 2008), a promi­nent web­site on non­vi­o­lence. I think some of the mis­un­der­stand­ings are generational.

Quaker Testimonies

October 15, 2004
· Martin Kelley

One of the more rev­o­lu­tion­ary trans­for­ma­tions of Amer­i­can Quak­erism in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry has been our under­stand­ing of the tes­ti­monies. In online dis­cus­sions I find that many Friends think the “SPICE” tes­ti­monies date back from time immemo­r­i­al. Not only are they rel­a­tive­ly new, they’re a dif­fer­ent sort of crea­ture from their predecessors.

In the last fifty years it’s become dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate Quak­er tes­ti­monies from ques­tions of mem­ber­ship. Both were dra­mat­i­cal­ly rein­vent­ed by a newly-minted class of lib­er­al Friends in the ear­ly part of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and then cod­i­fied by Howard Brin­ton’s land­mark Friends for 300 Years, pub­lished in the ear­ly 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brin­ton comes right out and says that the test for mem­ber­ship should­n’t involve issues of faith or of prac­tice but should be based on whether one feels com­fort­able with the oth­er mem­bers of the Meet­ing. This con­cep­tion of mem­ber­ship has grad­u­al­ly become dom­i­nant among lib­er­al Friends in the half cen­tu­ry since this book was pub­lished. The trou­ble with it is twofold. The first is that “com­fort” is not nec­es­sar­i­ly what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first gen­er­a­tion of Friends had used Brin­ton’s mod­el there would be no Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends to talk about (we’d be lost in the his­tor­i­cal foot­notes with the Mug­gle­to­ni­ans, Grindle­to­ni­ans and the like). One of the clas­sic tests for dis­cern­ment is whether an pro­posed action is con­trary to self-will. Com­fort is not our Soci­ety’s calling.

The sec­ond prob­lem is that com­fort­a­bil­i­ty comes from fit­ting in with a cer­tain kind of style, class, col­or and atti­tude. It’s fine to want com­fort in our Meet­ings but when we make it the pri­ma­ry test for mem­ber­ship, it becomes a cloak for eth­nic and cul­tur­al big­otries that keep us from reach­ing out. If you have advanced edu­ca­tion, mild man­ners and lib­er­al pol­i­tics, you’ll fit it at most East Coast Quak­er meet­ings. If you’re too loud or too eth­nic or speak with a work­ing class accent you’ll like­ly feel out of place. Samuel Cald­well gave a great talk about the dif­fer­ence between Quak­er cul­ture and Quak­er faith and I’ve pro­posed a tongue-in-cheek tes­ti­mo­ny against com­mu­ni­ty as way of open­ing up discussion.

The Feel-Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also rein­vent­ed the Tes­ti­monies. They had been spe­cif­ic and often pro­scrip­tive: against gam­bling, against par­tic­i­pa­tion in war. But the new tes­ti­monies became vague feel-good char­ac­ter traits – the now-famous SPICE tes­ti­monies of sim­plic­i­ty, peace, integri­ty, com­mu­ni­ty and equal­i­ty. Who isn’t in favor of all those val­ues? A pres­i­dent tak­ing us to war will tell us it’s the right thing to do (integri­ty) to con­truct last­ing peace (peace) so we can bring free­dom to an oppressed coun­try (equal­i­ty) and cre­ate a stronger sense of nation­al pride (com­mu­ni­ty) here at home.

We mod­ern Friends (lib­er­al ones at least) were real­ly trans­formed by the redefin­tions of mem­ber­ship and the tes­ti­monies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our cur­rent tes­ti­monies are the ancient ones. I think an aware­ness of how Friends han­dled these issues in the 300 years before Brin­ton would help us nav­i­gate a way out of the “eth­i­cal soci­ety” we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for uni­ty was behind the rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the tes­ti­monies. The main accom­plish­ment of East Coast Quak­erism in the mid-twentieth cen­tu­ry was the reunit­ing of many of the year­ly meet­ings that had been torn apart by schisms start­ing in 1827. By the end of that cen­tu­ry Friends were divid­ed across a half dozen major the­o­log­i­cal strains man­i­fest­ed in a patch­work of insti­tu­tion­al divi­sions. One way out of this morass was to present the tes­ti­monies as our core uni­fy­ing prici­ples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Chris­tians (even as post-Christians), our core com­mand­ment is sim­ple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neigh­bor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great com­mand­ment. And the sec­ond is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neigh­bour as thy­self. On these two com­mand­ments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37 – 40 and Mark 12:30 – 31, Luke 10:27.

The Quak­er tes­ti­monies also hang on these com­mand­ments: they are our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. While they are in con­tant flux, they refer back to 350 years of expe­ri­ence. These are the truths we can tes­ti­fy to as a peo­ple, ways of liv­ing that we have learned from our direct expe­ri­ence of the Holy Spir­it. They are intri­cate­ly tied up with our faith and with how we see our­selves fol­low­ing through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I’m sure that Howard Brin­ton did­n’t intend to sep­a­rate the tes­ti­monies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a mod­ern lib­er­al audi­ence. By pop­u­lar­iz­ing them he made them so acces­si­ble that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin tes­ti­monies of plain­ness and sim­plic­i­ty. First the ancient tes­ti­mo­ny of plain­ness. Here’s the descrip­tion from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world’s cor­rupt lan­guage, man­ners, vain and need­less things and fash­ions, in appar­el, build­ings, and fur­ni­ture of hous­es, some of which are immod­est, inde­cent, and unbe­com­ing. And that they avoid immod­er­a­tion in the use of law­ful things, which though inno­cent in them­selves, may there­by become hurt­ful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are cal­cu­lat­ed more to please a vain and wan­ton mind, than for real use­ful­ness; and let trades­men and oth­ers, mem­bers of our reli­gious soci­ety, be admon­ished, that they be not acces­sary to these evils; for we ought to take up our dai­ly cross, mind­ing the grace of God which brings sal­va­tion, and teach­es to deny all ungod­li­ness and world­ly lusts, and to live sober­ly, right­eous­ly and god­ly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his bless­ing, and be instru­men­tal in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there’s noth­ing in there about the length of one’s hem. The key phrase for me is the warn­ing about doing things “cal­cu­lat­ed to please a vain and wan­ton mind.” Friends were being told that pride makes it hard­er to love God and our neigh­bors; immod­er­a­tion makes it hard to hear God’s still small voice; self-sacrifice is nec­es­sary to be an instru­ment of God’s love. This tes­ti­mo­ny is all about our rela­tion­ships with God and with each other.

Most mod­ern Friends have dis­pensed with “plain­ness” and recast the tes­ti­mo­ny as “sim­plic­i­ty.” Ask most Friends about this tes­ti­mo­ny and they’ll start telling you about their clut­tered desks and their annoy­ance with cell­phones. Ask for a reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­gram on sim­plic­i­ty and you’ll almost cer­tain­ly be assigned a book from the mod­ern vol­un­tary sim­plic­i­ty move­ment, one of those self-help man­u­als that promise inner peace if you plant a gar­den or buy a fuel-efficient car, with “God” absent from the index. While it’s true that most Amer­i­cans (and Friends) would have more time for spir­i­tu­al refresh­ment if they unclut­tered their lives, the sec­u­lar notions of sim­plic­i­ty do not emanate out of a con­cern for “gospel order” or for a “right order­ing” of our lives with God. Vol­un­tary sim­plic­i­ty is great: I’ve pub­lished books on it and I live car-free, use cloth dia­pers, etc. But plain­ness is some­thing dif­fer­ent and it’s that dif­fer­ence that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called “SPICE” tes­ti­monies (sim­plic­i­ty, peace, integri­ty, com­mu­ni­ty and equal­i­ty) and you’ll find the mod­ern notions are sec­u­lar­l­ized over-simplications of the Quak­er under­stand­ings. In our quest for uni­ty, we’ve over-stated their importance.

Ear­li­er I men­tioned that many of the ear­li­er tes­ti­monies were pro­scrip­tive – they said cer­tain actions were not in accord with our prin­ci­ples. Take a big one: after many years of dif­fi­cult min­is­ter­ing and soul search­ing, Friends were able to say that slav­ery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep com­mu­nion with God; this is dif­fer­ent than say­ing we believe in equal­i­ty. Sim­i­lar­ly, say­ing we’re against all out­ward war is dif­fer­ent than say­ing we’re in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of cast­ing every­thing in pos­ti­tive terms, some­times we need to come out and say a par­tic­u­lar prac­tice is just plain wrong, that it inter­feres with and goes against our rela­tion­ship with God and with our neighbors.

I’ll leave it up to you to start chew­ing over what spe­cif­ic actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our min­is­ters and meet­ings found that a par­tic­u­lar prac­tice was against our tes­ti­monies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of min­is­ter­ing with them and labor­ing with them. It would be hard. Feel­ings would be hurt. Peo­ple would go away angry.

After a half-century of lib­er­al indi­vid­u­al­ism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is some­thing to Quak­erism, that it does have norms and bound­aries. We would need all the love, char­i­ty and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, espe­cial­ly because it’s work with mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty, peo­ple we love and hon­or. We would have to fol­low John Wool­man’s exam­ple: our first audi­ence would not be Wash­ing­ton pol­i­cy­mak­ers , but instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, pover­ty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our val­ues in sec­u­lar terms. An abil­i­ty to talk about paci­fism with our non-Quaker neigh­bors in a smart, informed way is essen­tial (thus my Non​vi​o​lence​.org min­istry [since laid down], cur­rent­ly receiv­ing two mil­lions vis­i­tors a year). When we affirm com­mu­ni­ty and equal­i­ty we are wit­ness­ing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we’ve con­tributed to the nation­al and inter­na­tion­al dis­cus­sions on these topics.

But for all of their con­tem­po­rary cen­tral­i­ty to Quak­erism, the tes­ti­monies are only second-hand out­ward forms. They are not to be wor­shiped in and of them­selves. Mod­ern Friends come dan­ger­ous­ly close to lift­ing up the peace tes­ti­mo­ny as a false idol – the prin­ci­ple we wor­ship over every­thing else. When we get so good at argu­ing the prac­ti­cal­i­ty of paci­fism, we for­get that our tes­ti­mo­ny is first and fore­most our procla­ma­tion that we live in the pow­er that takes away occas­sion for war. When high school math teach­ers start argu­ing over arcane points of nuclear pol­i­cy, play­ing arm­chair diplo­mat with year­ly meet­ing press releas­es to the U.S. State Depart­ment, we loose cred­i­bil­i­ty and become some­thing of a joke. But when we min­is­ter with the Pow­er that tran­scends wars and earth­ly king­doms, the Good News we speak has an author­i­ty that can thun­der over pet­ty gov­ern­ments with it’s com­mand to quake before God.

When we remem­ber the spir­i­tu­al source of our faith, our under­stand­ings of the tes­ti­monies deep­en immea­sur­ably. When we let our actions flow from uncom­pli­cat­ed faith we gain a pow­er and endurance that strength­ens our wit­ness. When we speak of our expe­ri­ence of the Holy Spir­it, our words gain the author­i­ty as oth­ers rec­og­nize the echo of that “still small voice” speak­ing to their hearts. Our love and our wit­ness are sim­ple and uni­ver­sal, as is the good news we share: that to be ful­ly human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neigh­bors as we do ourselves.

Hal­lelu­jah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

“Conservative Liberal Quakers” and not becoming a least-common-denominator, sentimental faith

July 13, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Over on beppe­blog, occas­sion­al QR com­menter Joe Gua­da talks about start­ing a Bible study group in his Friends meet­ing. It’s a great post, which real­ly pulls togeth­er some of the issues of those of us try­ing to be both con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­al in our Quakerism.

None of their con­cerns were a sur­prise to me; I’ve had many of the same myself. What did sur­prise me was how long it took mem­bers to final­ly approach me with their “con­cerns” (a Friend­ly euphemism for being in com­plete dis­agree­ment with anoth­er). They seemed to be tak­ing the Bible too literally…

I doubt that I changed any minds dur­ing our lengthy, but respect­ful con­ver­sa­tion. But, unlike what seems like the opin­ion of the major­i­ty of lib­er­al Friends, where per­son­al and cor­po­rate rev­e­la­tion is the sole arbiter of faith, I believe that indi­vid­u­als and groups need far more than that to keep us from dete­ri­o­rat­ing into a “least-common-denominator”, sen­ti­men­tal faith that tries to be all things to (most) every­body (as long as they agree with our pol­i­tics). I believe that Friends have a rich his­to­ry to draw from, which includes our present Faith & Prac­tice (along with past F&P’s), the writ­ings and tes­ti­mo­ny of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions, and (hold your breath) the Bible.

This past week I’ve been won­der­ing whether the best descrip­tion of my spir­i­tu­al state is a “con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­al Friend,” i.e., some­one in the “lib­er­al” branch of Friends who holds “con­ser­v­a­tive” val­ues (I mean these terms in their the­o­log­i­cal sense, as descrip­tive terms that refer to well-defined his­tor­i­cal move­ments). I feel a kin­ship with Joe and with some of the peo­ple I met this year at the FGC Gath­er­ing. There is a small-scale “con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­al” move­ment going on and it seems like we should fig­ure out a name for ourselves.

Back in the 1970s and 80s there was a group dubbed “neo­con­ser­v­a­tive Quak­ers,” lib­er­al Friends who moved to con­ser­v­a­tive year­ly meet­ings (espe­cial­ly Ohio) and out­did the home­grown con­ser­v­a­tives, adopt­ing plain dress and gain­ing a rep­u­ta­tion for being stick­lers on con­ser­v­a­tive the­ol­o­gy and practice.

But although I’ve picked up plain dress, I’m not a 1970s “neo­con­ser­v­a­tive” Friend. First off, I’m not mov­ing to Ohio (it’s a love­ly state I’m sure, but roots trump ide­ol­o­gy for me any day of the week). I’m not even seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing leav­ing Lib­er­al Quak­erism. For all the some­times muddied-thinking, I’m proud of our branch. I’m proud that we’ve said yes to gay and les­bian Friends and I see it as our pos­i­tive come­up­pance that so much of our reli­gious lead­er­ship now comes from the FLGBTQC com­mu­ni­ty (so many of whose mem­bers are sol­id Chris­tians dri­ven out of oth­er denom­i­na­tions). I see us as one of the most dynam­ic, forward-thinking branch of Friends. Besides, lib­er­al Quak­erism is my home. I’ve been giv­en enough hints that I think my min­istry is here too. Not that I’m not grate­ful for all the branch­es of Quak­erism. I am graced with new Friends met through this blog from all the branch­es of Amer­i­can Quak­erism and I’ve found that there are those seek­ing out to reclaim Quak­erism in each of them. I have broth­ers and sis­ters through­out Quak­er­dom, blessed be! But my role, my home, and my min­istry is to be a Conservative-leaning voice among Lib­er­al Friends. And it’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly clear that I’m not alone. Some­thing is afoot in lib­er­al Quakerism.

So what might we call our­selves? Is “con­ser­v­a­tive lib­er­al Friends” a use­ful term?

Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule

December 26, 2003
· Martin Kelley

A review of Michael Sheer­an’s Beyond Major­i­ty Rule. Twen­ty years lat­er, do Friends need to expe­ri­ence the gath­ered condition?

Beyond Major­i­ty Rule has one of the more unique sto­ries in Quak­er writ­ings. Michael Sheer­an is a Jesuit priest who went to sem­i­nary in the years right after the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Coun­cil. Forged by great changes tak­ing place in the church, he took seri­ous­ly the Coun­cil’s man­date for Roman Catholics to get “in touch with their roots.” He became inter­est­ed in a long-forgotten process of “Com­mu­nal Dis­cern­ment” used by the Jesuit order in when it was found­ed in the mid-sixteenth cen­tu­ry. His search led him to study groups out­side Catholi­cism that had sim­i­lar decision-making struc­tures. The Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends should con­sid­er itself lucky that he found us. His book often explains our ways bet­ter than any­thing we’ve written.

Sheer­an’s advan­tage comes from being an out­sider firm­ly root­ed in his own faith. He’s not afraid to share obser­va­tions and to make com­par­isons. He start­ed his research with a rather for­mal study of Friends, con­duc­ing many inter­views and attend­ing about ten month­ly meet­ings in Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing. There are sec­tions of the book that are dry expo­si­tions of Quak­er process, sprin­kled by inter­views. There are times where Sheer­an starts say­ing some­thing real­ly insight­ful about ear­ly or con­tem­po­rary Friends, but then backs off to repeat some out­dat­ed Quak­er cliche (he relies a bit too heav­i­ly on the group of mid-century Haverford-based aca­d­e­mics whose his­to­ries often pro­ject­ed their own the­ol­o­gy of mod­ern lib­er­al mys­ti­cism onto the ear­ly Friends). These sec­tions aren’t always very enlight­en­ing – too many Philadel­phia Friends are uncon­scious of their cher­ished myths and their inbed­ded incon­sis­ten­cies. On page 85, he express­es the conun­drum quite eloquently:

If the researcher was to suc­cumb to the all too typ­i­cal canons of social sci­ence, he would prob­a­bly scratch his head a few times atjust this point, note that the ambi­gu­i­ty of Quak­er expres­sion makes accu­rate sta­tis­ti­cal eval­u­a­tion of Quak­er believes almost impos­si­ble with­out invest­ment of untold time and effort, and move on to analy­sis of some less inter­est­ing but more man­age­able object of study.

For­tu­nate­ly for us, Sheer­an does not suc­cumb. The book shines when Sheer­an steps away from the aca­d­e­m­ic role and offers us his sub­jec­tive observations.

There are six pages in Beyond Major­i­ty Rule that com­prise its main con­tri­bu­tion to Quak­erism. Almost every time I’ve heard some­one refer to this book in con­ver­sa­tion, it’s been to share the obser­va­tions of these six pages. Over the years I’ve often casu­al­ly browsed through the book and it’s these six pages that I’ve always stopped to read. The pas­sage is called “Con­flict­ing Myths and Fun­da­men­tal Cleav­ages” and it begins on page 84. Sheer­an begins by relat­ing the obvi­ous observation:

When Friends reflect upon their beliefs, they often focus upon the obvi­ous con­flict between Chris­to­cen­tric and uni­ver­sal­ist approach­es. Peo­ple who feel strong­ly drawn to either camp often see the oth­er posi­tion as a threat to Quak­erism itself.

As a Gen-X’er I’ve often been bored by this debate. It often breaks down into emp­ty lan­guage and the desire to feel self-righteous about one’s beliefs. It’s the MacGuf­fin of con­tem­po­rary lib­er­al Quak­erism. (A MacGuf­fin is a film plot device that dri­ves the action but is in itself nev­er explained and does­n’t real­ly mat­ter: if the spies have to get the secret plans across the bor­der by mid­night, those plans are the MacGuf­fin and the chase the real action.) Today’s debates about Chris­to­cen­trism ver­sus Uni­ver­sal­ism ignore the real issues of faith­less­ness we need to address.

Sheer­an sees the real cleav­age between Friends as those who have­ex­pe­ri­enced the divine and those who haven’t. I’d extend the for­mer just a bit to include those who have faith that the expe­ri­ence of the divine is pos­si­ble. When we sit in wor­ship do we real­ly believe that we might be vis­it­ed by Christ (how­ev­er named, how­ev­er defined)? When we cen­ter our­selves for Meet­ing for Busi­ness do we expect to be guid­ed by the Great Teacher?

Sheer­an found that a num­ber of Friends did­n’t believe in a divine visitation:

Fur­ther ques­tions some­times led to the para­dox­i­cal dis­cov­ery that, for some of these Friends, the expe­ri­ence of being gath­ered even in meet­ing for wor­ship was more of a for­mal rather than an expe­ri­en­tial real­i­ty. For some, the fact that the group had sat qui­ety for twenty-five min­utes was itself iden­ti­fied as being gathered.

There are many clerks that call for a “moment of silence” to begin and end busi­ness – five min­utes of for­mal silence to prove that we’re Quak­ers and maybe to gath­er our argu­ments togeth­er. Meet­ings for busi­ness are con­duct­ed by smart peo­ple with smart ideas and effi­cien­cy is prized. Sit­ting in wor­ship is seen a med­i­ta­tive oasis if not a com­plete waste of time. For these Friends, Quak­erism is a soci­ety of strong lead­er­ship com­bined with intel­lec­tu­al vig­or. Good deci­sions are made using good process. If some Friends choose to describe their own guid­ance as com­ing from “God,” that their indi­vid­ual choice but it is cer­tain­ly not an imper­a­tive for all.

Maybe it’s Sheer­an’s Catholi­cism that makes him aware of these issues. Both Catholics and Friends tra­di­tion­al­ly believe in the real pres­ence of Christ dur­ing wor­ship. When a Friend stands to speak in meet­ing, they do so out of obe­di­ence, to be a mes­sen­ger and ser­vant of the Holy Spir­it. That Friends might speak ‘beyond their Guide’ does not betray the fact that it’s God’s mes­sage we are try­ing to relay. Our under­stand­ing of Christ’s pres­ence is real­ly quite rad­i­cal: “Jesus has come to teach the peo­ple him­self,” as Fox put it, it’s the idea that God will speak to us as He did to the Apos­tles and as He did to the ancient prophets of Israel. The his­to­ry of God being active­ly involved with His peo­ple continues.

Why does this mat­ter? Because as a reli­gious body it is sim­ply our duty to fol­low God and because new­com­ers can tell when we’re fak­ing it. I’ve known self-described athe­ists who get it and who I con­sid­er broth­ers and sis­ters in faith and I’ve known peo­ple who can quote the bible inside and out yet know noth­ing about love (haven’t we all known some of these, even in Quak­erism?). How do we get past the MacGuf­fin debates of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions to dis­till the core of the Quak­er message?

Not all Friends will agree with Sheer­an’s point of cleav­age. None oth­er than the acclaimed Haver­for­dian Dou­glas V Steere wrote the intro­duc­tion to Beyond Major­i­ty Rule and he used it to dis­miss the core six pages as “mod­est but not espe­cial­ly con­vinc­ing” (page x). The unstat­ed con­di­tion behind the great Quak­er reuni­fi­ca­tions of the mid-twentieth cen­tu­ry was a taboo against talk­ing about what we believe as a peo­ple. Quak­erism became an indi­vid­ual mys­ti­cism cou­pled with a world-focused social activism – to talk about the area in between was to threat­en the new unity.

Times have changed and gen­er­a­tions have shift­ed. It is this very in-between-ness that first attract­ed me to Friends. As a nascent peace activist, I met Friends whose deep faith allowed them to keep going past the despair of the world. I did­n’t come to Friends to learn how to pray or how to be a lefty activist (most Quak­er activists now are too self-absorbed to be real­ly effec­tive). What I want to know is how Friends relate to one anoth­er and to God in order to tran­scend them­selves. How do we work togeth­er to dis­cern our divine lead­ings? How do we come togeth­er to be a faith­ful peo­ple of the Spirit?

I find I’m not alone in my inter­est in Sheer­an’s six pages. The fifty-somethings I know in lead­er­ship posi­tions in Quak­erism also seem more ten­der to Sheer­an’s obser­va­tions than Dou­glas Steere was. Twenty-five years after sub­mit­ting his dis­ser­ta­tion, Friends are per­haps ready to be con­vinced by our Friend, Michael J. Sheeran.

Post­script: Michael J Sheer­an con­tin­ues to be an inter­est­ing and active fig­ure. He con­tin­ues to write about gov­er­nance issues in the Catholic Church and serves as pres­i­dent of Reg­is Uni­ver­si­ty in Denver.

Are Catholics More Quaker?

November 16, 2003
· Martin Kelley

I guess folks might won­der why the son of the Quak­er Ranter is get­ting bap­tized in a Roman Catholic church…

[box]An updat­ed note before I start: I don’t want this to be seen as a cri­tique or put-down of any par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­u­als but to point out what seems to me to be a pret­ty obvi­ous larg­er dynam­ic with­in Quak­erism: our reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­grams have not been doing a very good job at trans­mit­ting our faith to our young peo­ple. One mea­sure of such pro­grams is how many chil­dren we retain as actively-participating adults; by such mea­sures I think we can say Quak­ers are failing.

And, a few per­haps obvi­ous dis­claimers: 1) there are deeply faith­ful peo­ple who grew up in Young Friends pro­grams; 2) there are reli­gious ed instruc­tors who are wor­ried about the mes­sage we’re giv­ing our young peo­ple and fret as I do; 3) there are a lot of mem­bers of the RSoF who just don’t think teach­ing dis­tinct­ly Quak­er faith­ful­ness is impor­tant and would­n’t agree that there’s a problem.

I don’t think it’s use­ful to read this with­out also look­ing to my ear­ly arti­cle, The Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion, which mourns the friends I’ve seen drop out of Quak­erism (many of them “birthright,” i.e., born into Quak­er fam­i­lies), and We’re all Ranters Now, which argues that our soci­ety of seek­ers needs to become a soci­ety of find­ers if we are to be able to artic­u­late a faith to transmit.
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On June 30, 2000, Julie and I met at a nation­al gath­er­ing of Quak­ers. Four­teen months lat­er we were mar­ried at the Wood­stown Friends Meet­ing­house under the care of the Atlantic City Area Friends Meet­ing. Rough­ly four­teen months lat­er, when the sparkles in our eyes were meet­ing with an approv­ing nod from God and our baby was con­ceived, I was co-clerk of Atlantic City Area Meet­ing and Julie was clerk of its Out­reach Com­mit­tee. Ten months lat­er, our infant son Theo was bap­tized at Mater Eccle­si­ae Roman Catholic Church in Berlin, N.J. It’s Julie’s new church; I myself remain Quak­er, but with­out a Meet­ing I can quite call home. What happened?

I don’t want to try to speak for Julie and why she left Friends to return to the faith she was brought up in. But I do have to tes­ti­fy that the rev­er­ence, spir­it and authen­tic­i­ty of the wor­ship at Mater Eccle­si­ae is deep­er than that in most Friends Meet­ing­hous­es. It’s a church with a lot of mem­bers who seem to believe in the real pres­ence of Christ. A dis­claimer that Mater Eccle­si­ae is unusu­al, one of the few church­es in the coun­try that uses the tra­di­tion­al Tri­den­tine Mass or Roman Rite, and that it attracts ardent fol­low­ers who have self-selected them­selves, in that they’re not going to their local parish church. I don’t think it’s the Catholi­cism alone that draws Julie – I think the pur­pose­ful­ness of the wor­shipers is a large piece. Despite all the dis­trac­tions (chants, Latin, rote con­fes­sions of faith: I’m speak­ing as a Friend), the wor­ship there is unusu­al­ly gath­ered. But more: there’s a ground­ed­ness to the faith. In a one-on-one con­ver­sa­tion the priest explained to me the ways he thought Quak­erism was wrong. I was­n’t offend­ed – quite the con­trary, I loved it! It was so refresh­ing to meet some­one who believed what he believed, (Hey, if I did­n’t believe in the degen­er­a­tion of the Roman Catholic Church or the emp­ty pro­fes­sions of hireling priests, I might join him. I also feel com­fort­able pre­dict­ing that he would wel­come my joust­ing here.)

What I can talk about is my mis­giv­ings about the prospect of rais­ing up Theo as a Quak­er in Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing. The weak­est ele­ment of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is its chil­dren’s reli­gious edu­ca­tion. This is some­thing I’ve seen man­i­fest­ed in two dif­fer­ent kinds of ways: con­tent and results.

Quak­ers have remark­ably few expec­ta­tions of their chil­dren. It’s con­sid­ered remark­able if old­er chil­dren spend a whole ten min­utes in Meet­ing for Wor­ship (I’ve heard adult birthright Friends boast that they’ve nev­er sat through a whole hour of Quak­er wor­ship). Quak­ers are obsessed about lis­ten­ing to what chil­dren have to say, and so nev­er share with them what they believe. I’ve known adults birthright Friends who have nev­er had con­ver­sa­tions with their par­ents about the basis of their faith.

Quak­er reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­grams often for­go teach­ing tra­di­tion­al Quak­er faith and prac­tice for more fad­dish beliefs. The base­ment walls of the Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing youth cen­ter is paint­ed over with danc­ing gods, while of the big events of the Young Friends’ annu­al cal­en­dar is a “Quak­er sweat lodge”. A cul­ture of touch and phys­i­cal­i­ty (“cud­dle pud­dles”, back­rubs) is thought charm­ing and immod­est dress is con­sid­ered a sign of rebel­lious indi­vid­u­al­i­ty. Quak­er schools pub­lish brochures say­ing Meet­ing for Wor­ship is all about “think­ing, with God giv­en lit­tle notice.” When Quak­ers want to have “inter­gen­er­a­tional” wor­ship, they feel they have to pro­gram it with some sort of attention-keeping play­time activ­i­ty (Mater Eccle­si­ae echoes Quak­er tra­di­tion here: “inter­gen­er­a­tional” means chil­dren sit­ting through and par­tic­i­pat­ing in Mass with the adults).

Too many of the peo­ple my age and Julie’s who were brought up at Friends are igno­rant of basic Quak­er beliefs and are unaware of Quak­er tra­di­tions (FUM, EFI, Con­ser­v­a­tives) out­side the easy-going East Coast lib­er­al­ism they were raised in. For them being a Friend is act­ing a cer­tain way, believ­ing a cer­tain brand of polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and being part of a cer­tain social group. Too many Young Adult Friends I’ve known over the years are cliquish, irre­li­gious, and have more than their share of issues around inti­ma­cy and sexuality.

Don’t get me wrong: these kids are often real­ly good peo­ple, chil­dren to be proud of, doing great things in the world. Many of them are open-hearted, spiritually-sensitive, and in deeply ground­ed rela­tion­ships. But only a very few are prac­tic­ing Quak­ers. And when I look at the reli­gious edu­ca­tion they get, I can’t say I’m sur­prised. If I were to raise Theo as a Quak­er, I would have to “home school” him away from most of the reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­grams offered local­ly. When all the kids scram­ble out of wor­ship after ten min­utes I’d have to say “no” and tell him to keep sit­ting – how weird would that be?

Theo has a bet­ter chance of shar­ing the tra­di­tion­al Quak­er val­ues of the pres­ence of Christ, of Holy Obe­di­ence, and of bear­ing the cross by being raised as a Catholic in a tra­di­tion­al­ist church. It’s more like­ly he’ll turn out Quak­er if he’s bap­tised at Mater Eccle­si­ae. Julie and I will be teach­ing him rev­er­ence by exam­ple. I’ll share my Quak­er faith with him. I’m sure he’ll par­tic­i­pate in Quak­er events, but con­scious­ly, selec­tive­ly, guard­ed­ly (in the old Quak­er sense).

If Friends believe they have a faith worth holdling, they should also believe they have a faith worth pass­ing on. Do we?

Related Reading

  • Beck­ey Phipps con­duct­ed a series of inter­views that touched on many of these issues and pub­lished it in FGCon­nec­tions. FGC Reli­gious Edu­ca­tion: Lessons for the 21st Cen­tu­ry asks many of the right ques­tions. My favorite line: “It is the most amaz­ing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quak­er] lead­er­ship pro­grams – they’ve disappeared.”
  • I touch on these issues from the oth­er side in The Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion, which is about the twenty- and thirty-something Friends that have drift­ed away

Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?

October 15, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Obser­va­tions on the first Philadel­phia Indie Allies Meet­up. “Just about each of us at the table were com­ing from dif­fer­ent the­o­log­i­cal start­ing points, but it’s safe to say we are all ‘post’ some­thing or oth­er. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our church­es have been pro­vid­ing aren’t work­ing for us. We are all try­ing to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one anoth­er in our church communities.”

The infor­mal net­work of younger Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians cen­tered around web­sites like theooze​.com and Jor​dan​Coop​er​.sk​.ca has start­ed spon­sor­ing a month­ly Indie Allies Meet­up of “Inde­pen­dent Chris­t­ian Thinkers.” Unlike pre­vi­ous months, there were enough peo­ple signed up for the Octo­ber meet­ing in the Philadel­phia area to hold a “meet­up,” so two days ago Julie & I found our­selves in a Cen­ter City piz­za shop with five oth­er “Indie Allies.”

Accord­ing to Robert E. Web­ber’s The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals, I fall pret­ty square­ly into the “Post Lib­er­al” cat­e­go­ry, a la Stan­ley Hauer­was. While it’s always dan­ger­ous label­ing oth­ers, I think at least some of the oth­er par­tic­i­pants would be com­fort­able enough with the “Post Evan­gel­i­cal” label (the one pas­tor among us said that if I read Web­ber’s book I’d know where he’s com­ing from). One par­tic­i­pant was from the Cir­cle church Julie & I attend­ed last First Day.

Just about each of us at the table were com­ing from dif­fer­ent the­o­log­i­cal start­ing points, but it’s safe to say we are all “post” some­thing or oth­er. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our church­es have been pro­vid­ing aren’t work­ing for us. We are all try­ing to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one anoth­er in our church com­mu­ni­ties. There’s some­thing about build­ing rela­tion­ships that are deep­er, more down-to-earth and real. Per­haps it’s find­ing a way to be less dog­mat­ic at the same time that we’re more dis­ci­plined. For Friends, that means ques­tion­ing the con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al ortho­doxy of liberal-think (get­ting beyond the cliched catch phras­es bor­rowed from lib­er­al Protes­tantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pec­u­lar­i­ly Quaker.

The con­ver­sa­tion was real­ly inter­est­ing. After all my Quak­er work, it’s always amaz­ing to find oth­er peo­ple my age who actu­al­ly think hard about faith and who are will­ing to build their life around it. There were times where I think we need­ed to trans­late our­selves and times where we tried to map out shared con­nec­tions (i.e., Richard Fos­ter was the known famous Quak­er, I should read him if only to be able to dis­cuss his rela­tion­ship to Con­ser­v­a­tive and Lib­er­al Friends).

It was real­ly good to get out­side of Quak­erism and to hear the lan­guage and issues of oth­ers. One impor­tant les­son is that some of the strong opin­ions I’ve devel­oped in response to Quak­er cul­ture need to be unlearned. The best exam­ple was social action. As I’ve writ­ten before on the web­site, I think the Friends peace tes­ti­mo­ny has become large­ly sec­u­lar­ized and that social action has become a sub­sti­tute for expressed and lived com­mu­nal faith. Yet my Meet­up cohorts were excit­ed to become involved in social action. Their Evan­gel­i­cal back­ground had dis­missed good works as unnec­es­sary – faith being the be-all – and now they want­ed to get involved in the world. But I very much sus­pect that their good works would be root­ed in faith to a degree that a lot of con­tem­po­rary Quak­er activist projects aren’t. I need to remind myself that social wit­ness (even my own) can be fine if tru­ly spirit-led.

Com­mit­ted reli­gious peo­ple switch­ing church­es often bring with them the bag­gage of their frus­tra­tions with the first church and this unre­solved anger often gets in the way of keep­ing true to God’s call. Even though I’m not leav­ing Quak­erism I have to iden­ti­fy and name my own frus­tra­tions so that they don’t get in the way. Hang­ing out with oth­er “Inde­pen­dent Chris­t­ian Thinkers” is a way of keep­ing some per­spec­tive, of remem­ber­ing that Post-Liberal is not exact­ly anti-Liberal.

Rec­om­mend­ed I check out: N.T. Wright, at allelon​.net. I just saw him ref­er­enced as a per­son­al friend of some of the Repub­li­can par­ty lead­er­ship in Con­gress, so this should be interesting.

Jesus goes Lo-Fi

October 13, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Last night my wife Julie and I (and baby Theo) went to a ser­vice at Cir­cle of Hope church at 10th and Locust. Very Gen‑X ori­ent­ed, it goes to some trou­ble to not look or feel too churchy. It meets on Sun­day night on fold­ing chairs in a spar­tan room above a con­ve­nience store. The min­is­ter gave a low-key non-sermon, played a clip from a pop movie, gave out index cards with scrip­ture vers­es for peo­ple to read aloud while music played. There are gui­tars and tam­borines but it’s more lo-fi/punk than folksy twelve-string. The lan­guage is Chris­t­ian but not churchy. It’s big into house-church “cells” as the small-scale com­mu­ni­ty build­ing block. The­ol­o­gy seemed sec­ondary to com­mu­ni­ty, which could also be described as the prac­tice of liv­ing a Chris­t­ian life.

The ele­ments I found inter­est­ing were the same ones I would find wor­ri­some were I to stay. Almost every­one was a twenty- and thirty-somethings and it had the feel of a “scene,” in that there was a dom­i­nant style and demo­graph­ic to the par­tic­i­pants. While I sus­pect there’s a lit­tle too much of a social com­po­nent to the com­mu­ni­ty, I have to admit to a cer­tain intox­i­ca­tion to being in the midst of so many age peers. There was a def­i­nite sense that I could belong there and that my par­tic­i­pa­tion would be wel­comed and encour­aged. It was quite a change from the invis­i­bil­i­ty I often feel among Friends as a con­vinced thirty-something with a con­cern for tra­di­tion­al Quakerism.

While I have been in large gath­er­ings of “young adult” Friends, they’ve tend­ed to be dom­i­nat­ed by non-practicing kids of Quak­ers who are there pri­mar­i­ly to see their high-school-era friends. The group at Cir­cle of Hope chose to be there and their pri­ma­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with one anoth­er is through this wor­ship group, which allows for deep­er (and bold­er) fel­low­ship than the young adult Friends gath­er­ings I’ve been to.
But could I belong at a place like Cir­cle of Hope? Prob­a­bly not. I’m too Quak­er, crazy enough. I did­n’t join in their com­mu­nion since I don’t believe in out­ward sacra­ments. I would­n’t like the idea of a pre­pared min­istry, and the enter­tain­ment of show­ing video clips and play­ing music would grate on my beliefs. While I know there are many paths to the divine, I agree with Friends’ expe­ri­ence that the path least like­ly to become encum­bered with false idols and bar­ri­ers is the one that is most stripped of arti­fice and pro­gram­ming, the one that allows an unmedi­at­ed direct expe­ri­ence and obeyance of Christ as man­i­fest­ed in the moment.

But am I too hung up on Quak­er prac­tice? Many local Friends meet­ings could be more accu­rate­ly described as med­i­ta­tion groups, there being lit­tle com­mon faith and many mem­bers who don’t believe in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the divine pres­ence dur­ing wor­ship. With Cir­cle, I’m con­front­ed with the one of the cen­tral dilem­mas behind the last 150 years of Quak­erism, name­ly: is it bet­ter to par­tic­i­pate with:

  • the pro­grammed (often younger) peo­ple bold­ly espous­ing faith who might be too social­ly ori­ent­ed and flighty; or
  • the silent wor­ship­pers who threat­en to replace faith with process , are tone-deaf to gen­er­a­tional change and have trou­ble trans­mit­ting faith to their chil­dren or respon­si­bil­i­ty to their sucessors.

You can’t quite reduce all the splits between Hick­sites, Gur­neyites, Bean­ites, etc. to this dichoto­my but it is a fac­tor in most of the schisms. I sus­pect I would even­tu­al­ly be as frus­trat­ed by Cir­cle as I cur­rent­ly am with cul­tur­al Quak­erism but for entire­ly dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Per­haps I should fol­low the advice of a cur­rent arti­cle in theooze and offi­cial take some time to “detox from the church.”