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Retro Quaker Vocal Ministry Flowchart

June 16, 2022
· Martin Kelley
“Speaking into the Silence” from the August 1991 Friends Journal.
“Speak­ing into the Silence” from the August 1991 Friends Journal.

Peo­ple have been com­ment­ing a lot on this chart Friends Jour­nal shared on social media last week. Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the August 1991 issue, what I love most about it is its 1990s-era flow­chart design. What would it be today — some punchy info­graph­ic per­haps? We dove into the archives because this mon­th’s issue is all about Quak­er vocal min­istry and at least two of the fea­ture arti­cles men­tion these kinds of charts.

From Paul Buck­ley:

There is a fre­quent­ly repro­duced dia­gram that graph­i­cal­ly guides poten­tial speak­ers through a series of ques­tions they are to con­sid­er when they feel an urge to rise and speak. These exam­ine whether a poten­tial mes­sage is divine­ly inspired; whether it is intend­ed for the speak­er alone or for oth­ers present; and whether this is the right time and place to deliv­er it. These resources are all use­ful, but they only address one half of the act of vocal min­istry: one that is, by far, the small­er and per­haps less impor­tant por­tion. The oth­er part is the min­istry of lis­ten­ing, and we are all called to be lis­ten­ing ministers.

From Edna Whit­ti­er:

Since the begin­ning of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, writ­ten advices have guid­ed Friends. Year­ly meet­ings’ faith and prac­tice books, Pen­dle Hill pam­phlets on vocal min­istry, and indi­vid­ual month­ly meet­ings’ “Wel­come to Quak­er Wor­ship” hand­outs have guide­lines for speak­ing or not speak­ing in meet­ing for wor­ship. In 2019, Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence even pub­lished a poster of a cir­cle flow chart with guide­lines for deliv­er­ing a mes­sage dur­ing worship.

Brent Bill has sub­se­quent­ly shared the graph­ic Whit­ti­er men­tions [link was on Twit­ter and is dead] and yes, it is very 2020’s info­graph­i­cal in design!

But I link to the arti­cles because these kinds of when-to-speak kind of charts can always become prob­lem­at­ic. As Bet­sy Caz­den replied on Twit­ter: “The peo­ple who need it least will spend the full hour obsess­ing about the flow-chart and will nev­er speak. The peo­ple who need it most nev­er will.” Just a few weeks ago I was sit­ting on a bench in Crop­well (N.J.) Meet­ing test­ing and retest­ing my moti­va­tions and lead­ings to rise and give min­istry. I gave a final breath to stand up when I heard the “good morn­ing Friends” fol­lowed by the sounds of hands slap­ping on hands in rise-of-meeting hand­shakes. Over the years I have learned not spend my whole hour obsess­ing but had not real­ized this meet­ing’s wor­ship was only 45 minutes!

Fur­ther read­ing: An Expect­ed Mir­a­cle, a 2023 post about the (often unnec­es­sary) pres­sures of Quak­er ministry.

Updating as I find more

Chest­nut Hill Meet­ing in Philadel­phia, Pa., cir­ca 2014.
West­min­ster Meet­ing, in Lon­don, which in turn got it from a 2015 book by Zélie Gross, With a Ten­der Hand.

Hey y’all, let’s start a blog!

January 2, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Okay, it’s not specif­i­cal­ly Quak­er – it’s not actu­al­ly at all Quak­er – but I like the think­ing behind Why You Should Start a Blog in 2019 by Ernie Smith in Tedi­um. Long-time read­ers will know I usu­al­ly have at least a post a year in which I blog about blog­ging. This time I’ll let Ernie talk about the ratio­nales and needs for a blog­ging culture:

We could use a lit­tle momen­tum. A decade ago, as I was get­ting start­ed with this, plat­forms like Face­book took advan­tage of our desire for a sim­pler option and used it to silo up our data, lock and key. We lost an excit­ing blo­gos­phere in the midst of all of this — and the first step towards get­ting it back is by real­iz­ing that own­er­ship should be a first class cit­i­zen, whether or not we even­tu­al­ly give away those words, sell them, or keep them close to our chest. A blog that you own, that you pay the host­ing bill for? That’s the first step — a form of expres­sion that should be the future (because after all, how awe­some is it that any­one can own a print­ing press?!?) but some­how became the past.

I haven’t been updat­ing this Quak­er Dai­ly Read as much as I’d like over the last month or so. That’s part­ly the result of an ear­ly Decem­ber vaca­tion and then the chaos of late Decem­ber hol­i­days with the fam­i­ly. I’m sure I’ve missed some great posts that I should have shared but there’s also days when I run through my RSS col­lec­tion (I use Feed­ly to fol­low about a hun­dred or so blogs) and find noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly fresh or inter­est­ing. I’d love to see more of us trad­ing the Face­book dopamine-rush imme­di­a­cy for some more thought­ful writ­ing and conversation.

https://​tedi​um​.co/​2​0​1​9​/​0​1​/​0​1​/​2​0​1​9​-​i​n​d​e​p​e​n​d​e​n​t​-​b​l​o​g​g​i​n​g​-​t​r​e​n​ds/

In the New Yorker, an article on atheism leads with a Daniel Seeger’s 1965 Supreme Court case

October 30, 2018
· Martin Kelley

A review of two books on athe­ism starts with the take of Dan Seeger, who’s land­mark Supreme Court case extend­ed the right to con­sci­en­tious objec­tor sta­tus to agnos­tics and atheists:

Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have con­clud­ed that war, from the prac­ti­cal stand­point, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more impor­tant moral stand­point, it is uneth­i­cal.” Some time lat­er, he received the Unit­ed States Selec­tive Ser­vice System’s Form 150, ask­ing him to detail his objec­tions to mil­i­tary ser­vice. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first ques­tion: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” Unsat­is­fied with the two avail­able options — “Yes” and “No” — Seeger final­ly decid­ed to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.”

Seeger’s vic­to­ry helped mark a turn­ing point for a minor­i­ty that had once been denied so much as the right to tes­ti­fy in court, even in their own defense. Athe­ists, long dis­crim­i­nat­ed against by civ­il author­i­ties and derid­ed by their fellow-citizens, were sud­den­ly eli­gi­ble for some of the exemp­tions and pro­tec­tions that had pre­vi­ous­ly been restrict­ed to believers. 

Daniel Seeger has writ­ten for and been fea­tured in the pages of Friends Jour­nal many times over the ensu­ing decades but last year he wrote a great fea­ture for us about the court case, An AFSC Defense of the Rights of Con­science. A tip of the hat to Car­ol Holmes Alpern for send­ing this New York­er arti­cle way!

https://​www​.newyork​er​.com/​m​a​g​a​z​i​n​e​/​2​0​1​8​/​1​0​/​2​9​/​w​h​y​-​a​r​e​-​a​m​e​r​i​c​a​n​s​-​s​t​i​l​l​-​u​n​c​o​m​f​o​r​t​a​b​l​e​-​w​i​t​h​-​a​t​h​e​ism

New neofascist conspiracy targets Quakers

October 24, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I won’t link to the rightwing Dai­ly Caller web­site on prin­ci­ple but in a week in which some of their favorite tar­gets are being served with explo­sives (the homes of the Oba­mas, Clin­tons, and George Soros have been tar­get­ed with IEDs), an opin­ion piece by Raheem Kas­sam, a Bre­it­bart alum and assis­tant to UKIP leader Nigel Farage, tries to cook up a Quak­er conspiracy.

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It’s hog­wash top to bot­tom, thin­ly con­nect­ed dots meant to look like an evil plot. Appar­ent­ly some peo­ple who were involved in Casa de los Ami­gos in Mex­i­co City lat­er donat­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns and Casa lat­er rent­ed office space to a migrant rights orga­ni­za­tion in 2012 and… well, that’s pret­ty much it. Proof that the “inter­na­tion­al Quak­er move­ment” is the orga­niz­ers of the refugee car­a­vans aimed at the “destruc­tion of U.S. borders.”

The lan­guage is florid in the man­ner of rightwing con­spir­a­cies. They specif­i­cal­ly call out Brigid Moix, a for­mer Casa de los Ami­gos direc­tor and well-respected Quak­er peace advo­cate who Friends Jour­nal pub­lished just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote some­thing rather obvi­ous about immi­gra­tion that sounds like some­thing rather obvi­ous oth­er peo­ple have since wrote about immi­gra­tion. Oh and the one guy is now a Mex­i­can ambas­sador to Greece. And some­one was on a con­fer­ence call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seri­ous­ly, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coher­ent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after anoth­er bridg­ing togeth­er ran­dom­ly Googled triv­ia, all care­less­ly run togeth­er because the author obvi­ous­ly assumes Dai­ly Caller read­ers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laugh­ably obtuse in its over­reach except that these con­spir­a­cies are get­ting less and less fun­ny every day. The AFSC reg­u­lar­ly gets con­spir­a­cy webs spun around its work in Pales­tine but I haven’t seen much try­ing to tie Friends to the bian­nu­al con­spir­a­cies around immi­gra­tion. Hope­ful­ly it will fade away and Kas­sam will find some oth­er bogey­man. The only stitch of truth can be found in the com­ments. There, buried near the bot­tom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

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Why Do Quakers Worship in Silence?

October 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Catch­ing up with last week’s Quak­er­S­peak, which was a great one with Lloyd Lee Wil­son explain­ing how Quak­er silence is dif­fer­ent from indi­vid­ual meditation:

From the exte­ri­or, there may not appear to be very much dif­fer­ent between a group of indi­vid­u­als doing indi­vid­ual med­i­ta­tion or indi­vid­ual con­tem­pla­tion in the same room and a group of Quak­er wor­ship­ing togeth­er. But there are a num­ber of things that are, as we expe­ri­ence them, dif­fer­ent. One is that these prac­tices that have as their goal achiev­ing still­ness of mind or per­fect qui­et or single-pointed aware­ness, as a goal, are actu­al­ly quite dif­fer­ent from what we are attempt­ing and achiev­ing in meet­ing for wor­ship. For Friends, this point of still­ness is only a way sta­tion, and we pass though that. It is not our goal, but it is how we get to a point of encounter with God.
 
http://​quak​er​s​peak​.com/​w​h​y​-​d​o​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​s​-​w​o​r​s​h​i​p​-​i​n​-​s​i​l​e​n​ce/

Self-reinforcing Cycles

September 28, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Gregg Koskela, the lead pas­tor of New­berg (Ore.) Friends Church until last year, has a heart-felt piece about learn­ing how to lis­ten to abuse stories:

For us who’ve walked this road (our­selves or with oth­ers), it all fits with the world we now live in, the one where our eyes have been opened and our hearts are filled at times with despair. This is the world where abuse hap­pens, where per­pe­tra­tors so often get away with it, where it’s so hard to risk reveal­ing it, where we see with crys­tal clar­i­ty that if you do dis­close, the ques­tions and doubts and the char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion will overwhelm. 

https://​greg​gkoskela​.org/​2​0​1​8​/​0​9​/​2​7​/​s​e​l​f​-​r​e​i​n​f​o​r​c​i​n​g​-​c​y​c​l​es/

Quaker cultures and young Friends

September 6, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Emi­ly Provance is back talk­ing about the dis­con­nect between dif­fer­ent Quak­er subcultures:

In oth­er words, as far as your per­son­al expe­ri­ence tells you, Quak­er meet­ing is sup­posed to be about fun and excite­ment — but sud­den­ly, you’re see­ing plan­ning and struc­ture instead. Quak­er meet­ing is sup­posed to be about light-heartedness — but sud­den­ly, you’re see­ing method­i­cal rule-following. Quak­er meet­ing is sup­posed to be about play­ful­ness — but sud­den­ly, you’re see­ing cau­tious cooperation. 

Last month I talked a lit­tle bit about the prob­lem when Quak­er youth cul­ture and meet­ing cul­ture don’t quite line up.

Tran­si­tions: An Appli­ca­tion of Cul­tur­al Theory