To the best of my knowledge this is the first Quaker Google Maps hack, showing the meetinghouses of downtown Philadelphia. Click on the thumbtacks for details; click on the satellite view for a cool view! Like much of the web it looks much better in “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Hack courtesy of the extremely experimental “MyGmaps”:http://mygmaps.com, data from “Quakerfinder.org”:www.Quakerfinder.org. Here’s my short list of “Google Map Hacks”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley/map.
Although I love Quakerfinder, it should be noted that Google does almost as good a job listing area “Friends Meetings” via their “local search” feature.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ philadelphia
What’s God Got to Do, Got to Do With It?
April 18, 2005
This essay is my hesitant attempt to answer the questions James R. posted a few weeks ago, I Am What I Am.
Loving God with All Our Hearts
My religion teaches me that the first commandment is to love God above all else. The primary mission of a religious community is to serve God and to facilitate the spiritual growth and discernment of its members in their search for God. For me, this needs to be an explicit goal of my meeting.
I very much appreciate James’s honesty that for him to use the term of “God” would be “misleading, even dishonest.” One of the central openings of Quakerism is that we should not profess an abstract understanding of God. We believe in the necessity for “deep and repeated baptisms” and for every testimony and act in the ministry to come from the “immediate influence of his Spirit” in a “fresh annointing” (wonderful language from a Irish memorial minute for Job Scott). I would wish that more Friends would follow James’s example and not speak without that immediate direct knowledge of the divine. (How many plenary speakers at Quaker events are reading from a prepared speech? How many of us really find ourselves turning to prayer when conflicts arise in business meeting?)
I don’t think one does need an experience of God to be a part of a Quaker community. Many of us go through dry spells where the Spirit’s presence seems absent and this certainly doesn’t disqualify us for membership. But God is the center of our faith and our work: worship is about listening to God’s call; business meeting is about discerning God’s instructions. This has to be understood. For those who can’t name God in their lives, it must be just a bit bizarre to come week after week to participate with a group of people praying for God’s guidance. But that’s okay. I think all that is good in our religious society come from the Great Master. We are known by our fruits and the outward forms of our witnesses constantly point back to God’s love. This is the only real outreach we do. I’m happy spending a lifetime laboring with someone in my community pointing out to the Spirit’s presence in our midst. All that we love about Quakers comes from that source but part of my discipline is the patience to wait for God to reveal Herself to you.
I joined Friends via the fairly common route of peace activism. I could sense that there was something else at work among the Quaker peace activists I knew and wanted to taste of that something myself. It’s taken me years to be able to name and articulate the divine presence I sensed fifteen years ago. That’s okay, it’s a normal route for some of us.
The other piece that the comments have been dancing around is Jesus. I’m at the point where I can (finally) affirm that Christianity is not accidental to Quakerism. As I’ve delved deeper I’ve realized just how much of our faith and work really does grow out of the teachings of Jesus. I don’t want to be part of a Friends meeting where our Quaker roots are largely absent. I want to know more about Friends, which means delving ever deeper into our past and engaging with it. We can’t do that without frequently turning to the Bible. Liberal Friends need to start exploring our Christian roots more fully and need to get more serious about reading Quaker writings that predate 1950. There have been many great figures in human history, but whatever you think about the divinity of Jesus, he has had much more of an impact on Quakerism than all of the heroes of American liberalism combined. We’ve got a Friend in Jesus and we’ve got to get on speaking arragements with him again if we’re going to keep this Quakerism going.
Shaking the Sandy Foundation
James asked if the regulars at Quaker Ranter wanted a purging. I certainly don’t want to kick anyone out but I don’t think some of the people currently involved in Quakerism would be with us if we were truer to our calling. We need to start talking honestly and have a round or two of truth-telling and plain speaking about what it means to be a Friend. Yes, there are some delicate people who are offended by terms like God and worship, Christ and obedience. And many have good reasons to be offended (as Julie pointed out to me this weekend, one of the greatest sins our religious and political leaders have done over the centuries is to commit evil in the name of God, for they not only committed that evil but have so scarred some seekers that they cannot come to God). One can know Jesus without using the name and God does hold us in His warm embrace even through our doubts. But for those of us lucky enough to know His name shouldn’t be afraid to use it.
Many people come to us sincerely as seekers, trying to understand the source of Quakers’ witness and spiritual grounding. I appreciate James’s asking “why I feel so irrestibly drawn to a community and religious society in which the central term is God.” As long as that’s where we start, I’m happy to be in fellowship.
But fellowship is an immediate relationship that doesn’t always last. There are people involved in Quakerism for reasons that are incidental to the mission of our religious society. We know the types: peace activists who seem to be around because Quakers have a good mailing list; Friends from ancient Quaker families who are around because they want to be buried out with great-grandma in the cemetery out back; twenty-something liberal seekers who like the openness and affability of Quakers. These are sandy foundations for religious faith and they will not necessarily hold. If Quakers started articulating our beliefs and recommitting ourselves to be a people of God, we will have those who will decide to drift away. They might be hurt when they realize their attraction to Quakerism was misplaced.
Naming the Trolls
We’ve all met people who have walked into a meetinghouse with serious disagreements with basic fundamental principles of Quakerism. This is to say we attract some loonies, or more precisely: visitors who have come to pick a fight. Most religious institutions show them the door. As Friends we have a proud tradition of tolerance but we’re too quick nowadays to let tolerance trump gospel order and destroy the “safe space” of our meetinghouse. This is a disservice to our community. Every so often we get someone who stands up to angrily denounce Christian language in a Quaker meeting. It’s fine to challenge an in-group’s unexamined pieties but I’m talking about those who try to get the meeting to censor ideas by claiming victimhood status whenever they hear a Christian worldview expressed. The person’s motivations for being there need to be questioned and they need to be lovingly labored with. We attract some people who deeply hurt and come with axes to grind. Some of them will use non-theism as their rallying call. When they are eldered they will claim it’s because of their philosophy, not their action. These kind of conflicts are messy, unpleasant and often confusing but we need to address them head on.
There are plenty of professing Christians who also need to be called on their disruptive behavior. They too would claim that any eldership is a reaction to their Christian theology. (Actually, I know more professing Christians than professing non-theists who should be challenged this way (Julie asked “who?” and I came up with a list of three right off the bat)). But there are disrupters of all flavors who will trumpet their martyrdom when Friends finally begin to take seriously the problems of detraction (a fine Quaker concept we need to revisit). If we suffer unfairly we need to be able to muster up a certain humility and obedience to the meeting, even if we’re sure it’s wrong. Again, it will be messy and all too-human but we need to work with each other on this one.
Sharing the Treasure
The real problem as I see it is not respectful non-theists among us: it’s those of us who have tasted of the bounty but hoard the treasure for ourselves. We hide the openings we’ve been given. A few weeks ago I was at yearly meeting sessions attended by some of the most recognized ministers in Philadelphia when a woman said she was offended by the (fairly tame) psalms we were asked to read. She explained “I’m used to Quakerese, Light and all that, and I don’t like all this language about God as an entity.” No one in that room stood to explain that these psalms _are one of the sources_ of our Quakerese and that the “Light” Friends have have been talking about for most of the past three and a half centuries is explicitly the Light _of Christ_. I don’t want to make too big a deal of this incident, but this kind of thing happens all the time: we censor our language to the point where it’s full of inoffensive double-meanings. Let’s not be afraid to talk in the language we have. We need to share the treasure we’ve been given.
Related Reading:
This post was inspired by James R’s comment, which I titled I Am What I Am. He was responding originally to my essay We’re All Ranters Now. I remain deeply grateful that James posted his comment and then allowed me to feature it. These are not easy issues, certainly not, and its easy to misread what we all are saying. I hope that what I’m contributing is seen through the lens of love and charity, in whose spirit I’ve been trying to respond. I’m not trying to write a position paper, but to share honestly what I’ve seen and the openings I feel I have been given – I reserve the right to change my opinions! From what I’ve read, I’d be honored to be in fellowship with James.
Liz Oppenheimer has opened up with a thoughtful, tender piece called My Friendly journey with Christ.
You know the disclaimer at the bottom that says I’m not speaking for any Quaker organization? I mean it. I’m just take phone orders and crank out web pages for a particular organization. This isn’t them speaking.
The Loss of a Faithful Servant
April 18, 2005
A humble giant among modern Friends passed away this weekend: Bill Taber. All of us doing the work of mapping out a “conservative liberal Quakerism” owe a huge debt to Bill. Although others are more qualified to share his biography, I know he taught for many years at Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative)‘s Olney Friends School and then for many more years at the Pendle Hill Center outside Philadelphia. He and his wife Fran were instumental in the 1998 founding of the Friends Center retreat and conference center on the campus of Olney.
I had the honor of meeting Bill and Fran once, when they came to lead a meeting retreat. But like so many Friends, Bill’s strongest influence has been his writings. “Four Doors to Meeting for Worship”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0 – 87574-306 – 4 was his introduction to worship. I’ll quote from the “About the Author,” since it explains the root of much of his work:
bq. This pamphlet’s metaphor of the four doors grew out of his awarness of a need for a more contemporary explanation of “what happens” in a Quaker meeting. He feels this lack of insturction in method has become an increasing problem as modern Friends move farther and farther away from the more pervasive Quaker culture which in earlier generations played such a powerful teaching role, allowing both birthright and convinced Friends to learn the nuances and spiritual methodology of Quakerism largely through osmosis. In sharing this essay Bill hopes to help nurture a traveling, teaching, and prophetic ministry which could reach out and touch people into spiritual growth just when they are ready to receive the teaching.
One of the spiritual methodolgy’s Bill shared with his students at Pendle Hill was a collection by a old Quaker minister named Samuel Bownas – regular readers of this site know how important Bownas’s “Descriptions of the Qualifications”:http://dqc.esr.earlham.edu/toc/E19787374 has been to me. But other books of his have been invalable too: his history of Ohio Yearly Meeting shared the old culture of the yearly meeting with great stories and gentle insight.
Bill Taber might have passed from his earthly body Friday morning but the work he did in the world will continue. May we all have the grace to be as faithful to the Teacher as he was.
Vision for an online magazine
April 1, 2005
In early 2005, I was nominated to apply for the Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership. I decided to dream up the best project I could under the restraints of the limited Pickett grant sizes. While the endowement was approved their budget was limited that year (lots of Quaker youth travel to a World Gathering) and I got a small fraction of what I had hoped for. I made an online appeal and contributions from dozens of Friends doubled the Pickett Fund grant size!
Here then is an edited version of the proposal I presented to the Pickett Fund in Third Month 2005; it has subsequently been approved by the Overseers of my meeting, Atlantic City Area Monthly Meeting.
What involvement have you had in Quaker-related activities/service projects for the betterment of your community/world?
Ten years ago I founded Nonviolence.org, a cutting edge “New Media” website that now reaches over a million visitors a year. I have been involved with a number of Philadelphia peace groups (e.g.,Food Not Bombs, the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, Act for Peace in the Middle East). I have served my monthly meeting as co-clerk and as a representative to yearly meeting bodies. I recently led a well-received “Quakerism 101” course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting and will co-lead a workshop called “Strangers to the Covenant” at this year’s FGC Gathering. I have organized Young Adult Friends at the yearly and national levels, serving formally and informally in various capacities. I am quite involved with Quakers Uniting in Publications, an international association of Quaker publishers, authors and booksellers. Eighteen months ago I started a small Quaker ministry website that has inspired a number of younger Friends interested in exploring ministry and witness. For the past six years I have worked for Friends General Conference; for two of those years I was concurrently also working for Friends Journal.
What is the nature of the internship, creative activity or service project for which you seek funding?
I’ve served with various Young Adult Friends groupings and committees for ten years. In that time I’ve been blessed to meet many of my peers with a clear call to inspired ministry. Most of these Friends have since left the Society, frustrated both by monthly meetings and Quaker bodies that didn’t know what to do with a bold ministry and by a lack of mentoring eldership that could help season and steady these young ministers and deepen their understanding of gospel order.
I would like to put together an independent online publication. This would address the isolation that most serious young Friends feel and would give a focus to our work together. The publication would also have a quarterly print edition.
It’s important to build face-to-face relationships too, to build an advisory board but also a base of contributors and to give extra encouragement to fledgling ministries. I would like to travel to different young adult communities to share stories and inspiration. This would explicit reach out across the different braches of Friends and even to various seeker movements like the so-called “Emergent Church Movement.”
What amount are you requesting and how will it be used in the project? What other financial resources for your project are you considering?
$7800. Web hosting: $900 for 18 months. Software: $300. Print publication: $3000 for 6 quarterly issues at $500 per issue. Travel: $1600 for four trips averaging $400 each. $2000 for mini-sabbatical time setting up site.
The Pickett Fund would be a validation of sorts for this vision. I would also turn to other youth fellowship and yearly meeting travel funds that support the work.
What is the time frame for your project? 18 months, to be reviewed/revisioned then.
When did/will it begin? This summer. When will it end? December 2006.
In what specific ways will the project further your leadership potential in Quaker service?
It’s time that I formalize some of the work I’ve been doing and make it more of a collective effort. It will be good to see formal monthly meeting recognition of this ministry and to have institutional Quaker support. I hope to learn much by being involved with so many wonderful Friends and hope to help pull together more of a sense of mission among a number of younger Friends.
Youth Ministry, Yearly Meeting Style
March 18, 2005
One has to applaud the sheer honesty of the group of leading Quakers who have recently proposed turning the grounds of Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meetinghouse into a retirement home. It makes perfect sense. Arch Street is the host for our annual sessions, where the average age is surely over 70. Why not institutionalize the yearly meeting reality?
The Arch Street Meetinghouse grounds are also a cemetery. In about ten years time we can raze the meetinghouse for more headstones and in about twenty years time we can have a big party where we cash out the yearly meeting funds and just burn them in a big bonfire (there’s a fire station across the street), formally laying down Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The fifteen of us who are left can go attach ourselves to some other yearly meeting.
This year’s annual sessions continue their tradition of self-parody: the featured speakers are the umpteenth gray-hair professional Quaker talking about the peace testimony and a psychologist who appears on NPR. It’s safe to assume neither will stray beyond the mildest communities of faith talk to mention God, gospel order or naming of gifts, and that neither will ask why there’s almost no one under forty involved in the yearly meeting. The last time I went to a nominating committee workshop at annual sessions, members openly explained to me why Friends under forty couldn’t serve on committees. Later during that session we learned the average new attender was in their thirties yet the yearly meeting clerk didn’t think it was appropriate than any Friend under fifty comment on that (about 40 older Friends were recognized to share their thoughts, natch).
The generational freefall is coming to the yearly meeting. Arch Street Meeting is smack in the middle of one of the premier hip young neighborhoods of Philadelphia yet they’ve been resistant to doing any serious outreach or adult religious ed (I could tell stories: don’t get me started). This weekend I learned that the other downtown meeting, Central Philadelphia, continues its practice – almost policy – of not supporting emerging ministry in long-time young attenders (I could really tell stories). I wouldn’t be surprised if Philadelphia has the lowest per-capita yearly meeting attendance.
So why not just admit that the yearly meeting is irrelevant to younger Friends? Why not turn our meetinghouses into retirement homes?
PS: How I wish I weren’t so cynical about the yearly meeting. I don’t want to feel like it’s a state of all-out generational warfare. I’ve tried, really I have. I’m even willing to try again. But no where have I found a space to have these discussions, at yearly meeting or anywhere else. Other Phila. YM Friends concerned with these issues are welcome to email me – maybe we can figure out some forum for this either inside or outside of the official structures.
PPS: There are a lot of wonderful Friends involved with the yearly meeting. They have good ideas and sincerely try to make it a more welcoming place. The best part of the yearly meeting sessions I’ve attended have been the unexpected conversations. It’s the institution I am frustrated with: the sense that it’s bigger and dumber than all of us.
PPPS: What if I took my own words to heart and considered a PhYM renewal as part of the fifty-year plan? If I just stopped complaining and just attended patiently and faithfully year after year for those “teachable moments” that might inch it forward?
Seattle Five Years Later
December 6, 2004
It’s been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.
In the _Seattle Weekly_, Geov Parrish asks “Is This What Failure Looks Like?”:http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0447/041124_news_wtogeov.php:
bq. But it’s one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it’s quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle’s groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.
I’ve always respect Geov, who’s been one of the rare pacifist organizers who’s acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it’s kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson’s critique, “Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement”:http://www.counterpunch.org/munson11302004.html.
The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7 – 11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being “bad.” It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.
I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.
But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical “Seattle.” It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.
It’s good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn’t. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let’s stop idolizing what happened there and let’s see what we can learn. For we’ve barely begun the work.
Selling Quakerism to The Kids
November 23, 2004
A few weeks ago I got a bulk email from a prominent sixty-something Friend, who wrote that a programmed New Age practice popular in our branch of Quakerism over the last few years has been a “crucial spiritual experience for a great many of the best of our young adult Friends to whom [Liberal Friends] must look for its future” and that they represented the “rising generation of dedicated young adult Friends.” Really? I thought I’d share a sampling of emails and posts I’ve gotten over just the last couple of days.
Quakerism 101
August 10, 2004
In Fall 2005 I led a six-week Quakerism 101 course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting. It went very well. Medford has a lot of involved, weighty Friends (some of them past yearly meeting clerks!) and I think they appreciated a fresh take on an introductory course. The core question: how might we teach Quakerism today?
This is the proposal for the course. I started off with a long introduction on the history and philosophy of Quaker religious education and pedagogic acculturation and go on to outline a different sort curriculum for Quakerism 101.
I took extensive notes of each session and will try to work that feedback into a revised curriculum that other Meetings and Q101 leaders could use and adapt. In the meantime, if you want to know how specific sessions and rolesplays went, just email me and I’ll send you the unedited notes. If you’re on the Adult Religious Ed. committee of a South Jersey or Philadelphia area Meeting and want to bring me to teach it again, just let me know.
Thoughts on a Quakerism 101 Course
Over the last few years, there seems to be a real groundswell of interest in Quakers trying to understand who we are and where we came from. There’s a revival of interst in looking back at our roots, not for history or orthodoxy’s sake, but instead to trying to tease out the “Quaker Treasures” that we might want to reclaim. I’ve seen this conversation taking place in all of the branches of Friends and it’s very hopeful.
I assume at least some of the participants of the Quakerism 101 course will have gone through other introductory courses or will have read the standard texts. It would be fun to give them all something new – luckily there’s plenty to choose from! I also want to expose participants to the range of contemporary Quakerism. I’d like participants to understand why the other branches call themselves Friends and to recognize some of the pecularities our branch has unconsciously adopted.
Early Friends didn’t get involved in six-week courses. They were too busy climbing trees to shout the gospel further, inviting people to join the great movement. Later Quietist Friends had strong structures of recorded ministers and elders which served a pedagogic purpose for teaching Friends. When revivalism broke out and brought overwhelmingly large numbers of new attenders to meetings, this system broke down and many meetings hired ministers to teach Quakerism to the new people. Around the turn of the century, prominent Quaker educators introduced academic models, with courses and lecture series. Each of these approaches to religious education fiddles with Quakerism and each has major drawbacks. But these new models were instituted because of very real and ongoing problems Friends have with transmitting our faith to our youth and acculturating new seekers to our Quaker way.
The core contradiction of a course series is that the leader is expected to both impart knowledge and to invite participation. In practice, this easily leads to situations where the teacher is either too domineering _or_ too open to participation. The latter seems more common: Quakerism is presented as a least-common-denominator social grouping, formless, with membership defined simply by one’s comfortability in the group (see Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years.) One of the main goals of a introductory course should be to bring new attenders into Quaker culture, practice and ethics. There’s an implicit assumption that there is something called Quakerism to teach. Part of that job is teasing out the religious and cultural models that new attenders are bringing with them and to open up the question as to how they fit or don’t fit in with the “gestalt” of Quakerism (Grundy, Quaker Treasures and Wilson’s Essays on the Quaker Vision).
The greatest irony behind the Quakerism 101 class is that its seemingly-neutral educational model lulls proudly “unprogrammed” Friends into an obliviousness that they’ve just instituted a program led by a hireling minister. Arguments why Q101 teachers should be paid sounds identical to arguments why part-time FUM ministers should be paid. A Q101 leader in an unprogrammed meeting might well want to acknowledge this contradiction and pray for guidance and seek clearness about this. (For my Medford class, I decided to teach it as paid leader of a class as a way of disciplining myself to practice of my fellow Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Friends.)
The standard Quakerism 101 curriculum compartmentalizes everything into neat little boxes. History gets a box, testimonies get a box, faith and institutions get boxes. I want to break out of that. I can recommend good books on Quaker history and point participants to good websites advocating Quaker testimonies. But I want to present history as current events and the testimonies as ministry. The standard curriculum starts with some of the more controversial material about the different braches of Friends and only then goes into worship, the meeting life, etc. I want discussion of the latter to be informed by the earlier discussion of who we are and who we might be. The course will start off more structured, with me as leader and become more participatory in the later sections.
Curriculum:
What I want to do is have one solid overview book and supplement it with some of those fascinating (and coversation-sparking!) pamphlets. The overview book is Thomas Hamm’s Quakers in America. Published last year, it’s the best introduction to Quakerism in at least a generation. Hamm wrote this as part of a religions of America series and it’s meant as a general introduction to contemporary Quakerism. His later chapters on debates within Quakerism should be easy to adapt for a Q‑101 series.
Session I: Introductions
- Worship
- In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of Ohio Yearly Meeting sessions, p. 1), reflections. (maybe start this class 2?)
- Introductions to one another.
Session II: What Are Our Models
- Worship
- In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of First Friends Church of Canton, p. 3), reflections.
- What are our models? Roleplay of “What Would X Do?” with a given problem: JC, George Fox, Methodists, Non-denominational bible church, college. Also: the “natural breaking point” model of Quaker divisions.
- Reading for this class: “Convinced Quakerism” by Ben Pink Dandelion
Session III: The Schisms
- Worship
- In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of Wilmington Yearly Meeting sessions, p. 5), reflections.
- Reading for this class: Quakers in America chapter 3, “Their Separate Ways: American Friends Since 1800,” about the branches
Session IV: Role of our Institutions
- Worship
- In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of Lake Erie Yearly Meeting, p. 7), reflections.
- Reading for this class: “The Authority of Our Meetings…” by Paul Lacey
Session V: Controversies within Friends
- Could pick any 2 – 3 controversies of Hamm’s: “Is Quakerism Christian?,” “Leadership,” “Authority,” “Sexuality,” “Identity,” “Unity and Diversity,” “Growth and Decline.” Early in the course I could poll the group to get a sense which ones they might want to grapple with. The idea is not to be thorough covering all the topics or even all the intricacies within each topic. I hope to just see if we can model ways of talking about these within Medford.
- Reading for this class: Quakers in America chapter 5, “Contemporary Quaker Debates,” p. 120
Session VI: Role of worship, role of ministry, role of witnesses.
- Focusing on Worship/Ministry (Witness)/MM Authority (Elders). If the calendar allows for eight sessions, this could easily be split apart or given two weeks.
- Reading for this class: “Quaker Treasures” by Marty Paxton Grundy, which ties together Gospel Order, Ministries and the Testimonies.
Session VII: What kind of religious community do we want Medford MM to be?
- This should be participatory, interactive. There should be some go-around sort of exercise to open up our visions of an ideal religious community and what we think Medford Meeting might be like in 5, 10, 25 years.
- Reading for this class: “Building the Life of the Meeting” by Bill & Fran Taber (1994, $4). I’ve heard there’s something recent from John Punshon which might work better.
- Also: something from the emergent church movement to point to a great people that might be gathered. Perhaps essays from Jordan Cooper & someone at Circle of Hope/Phila.
Books Used:
- “Quakers in America” is Thomas Hamm’s excellent new introduction to Friends is a bit pricey ($40) but is adapting well to a Q101 course.
- “Convinced Quakerism” by Ben Pink Dandelion mixes traditional Quaker understadings of convincement with Ben’s personal story and it sparked a good, wideranging discussion. $4.
- “Quaker Treasures” by Marty Grundy. $4
- “The Authority of Our Meetings…” by Paul Lacey. $4
- “Building the Life of the Meeting” by Bill and Fran Taber. $4
Considered Using:
- “Why Friends are Friends” by Jack Willcuts. $9.95. I like this book and think that much of it could be used for a Q101 in a liberal-branch Friends Meeting. Chapters: “The Wonder of Worship,” “Sacred Spiritual Sacraments,” “Called to Ministry,” “Letting Peace Prevail,” “Getting the Sense of the Meeting,” “On Being Powerful” – I find the middle chapters are the more interesting/Quaker ones).
- Silence and Witness by Michael Birkel. I haven’t read through this yet, but in skimming the chapters it looks like Birkel shys away from challenging the Quaker status quo. Within that constraint, however, it looks like a good introduction to Quakerism. $16.
- “Quaker Culture vs. Quaker Faith” by Samuel Caldwell.
- The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Quakerism 101 curriculum. It’s not as bad as it could be but it’s too heavy on history and testimonies and too focused on the Jones/Brinton view of Quakerism which I think has played itself out. I’ve seen Q101 facilitators read directly out of the curriculum to the glazed eyes of the participants. I wanted something fresher and less course-like.