Craig Barnett on UK meetings that are attracting newcomers: “Newcomers need to be made welcome, including children. They need to find people who enjoy spending time together, who are open about their spiritual experience, and willing to share the riches of the Quaker way with them. They need to experience Quaker worship that is expectant and gathered, where people take the risk of openness to the Spirit that leads to deep and vulnerable spoken ministry.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker
quakerrenewal.substack.comStill looking for articles on the 400th anniversary of George Fox’s birth
March 11, 2025
The June/July _Friends Journal_ will look at Quaker founder George Fox at 400. We haven’t gotten a lot of articles yet so we’ve extended the deadline and are beating the bushes (well, the socials) for prospective writers. Maybe I have only myself to blame, as my call for submissions wondered whether this was an appropriate topic:
> Still, there’s a very good question to be asked (and perhaps an article to be written) about whether we should be making this kind of a fuss for George Fox.
Despite that, I think there’s a good purpose to looking back like this and hope there’s some articles in their pipeline to send to us by March 25th.
How do we use money?
March 11, 2025
The newest Friends Journal issue is out, looking at how we use money. It’s perhaps not the sexiest topic but it speaks to what we value as a body of believers. Are we focused on our internal group or on the world outside our walls? Sometimes the discussions around money are tedious and our decisions self-evident. I think it’s possible for a meeting to spend too much time focused on its own self-management. But there are times when discussions of resource use brings out surprising inspiration.
Claire Flourish examines a Quaker anti-trans campaign
March 11, 2025
Fascinating and disturbing account of an outspoken Quaker* UK anti-trans activist who has started a video podcast interviewing prominent Friends. Most of the episodes have nothing to do with gender and sexuality but some do.
The asterisk up is there because the podcaster apparently renounced their membership in the Society of Friends when Britain Yearly Meeting passed a minute on trans inclusion. I appreciate someone disagreeing with a yearly meeting resolution and even staying in the fold despite the opposition. But when an affirming minute that doesn’t actually affect you (just your ideology) is such a burden that you leave… well then the question is why you would put such effort into a podcast of your ex-religion. it doesn’t seem like a project borne in good faith.
Claire does a great job bringing the receipts and explaining the context (the details of which I haven’t been following).
Reading: George Fox – the First Quaker Socialist?
March 11, 2025
Graham Taylor with a well-cited article on the proto-socialism of early Friends. There’s a bit of anachronistic thinking going on here, which he admits to. But it’s also the case that a lot of Quaker history is viewed through the lens of later Quakers and often ignores what was happening outside of Quakerism at the time. This can lead to bad histories. I’m not sure I buy some of Taylor’s arguments but it’s a good exercise and Fox certainly did talk about economics as part of his call for justice.
quakersocialists.org.ukWhere Do We Find Our Hope?
March 11, 2025
December’s Friends Journal is online and looks at Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism.
> Has there ever been an age in human history in which we could be purely optimistic or purely pessimistic? Quaker founder George Fox wrote that his ministry arose “when all my hopes in [preachers and experienced people] were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do.” He famously found inspiration, guidance, and courage in “one, even Christ Jesus,” who could speak to his condition. What keeps us going today in a world always ready to implode or blossom?
REVIEWED: A Friend in Deed: The Life of Henry Stanley Newman
March 11, 2025
I very occasionally do a book review for the magazine. My colleague Gail thought I might be interested in this biography of the longest-serving editor of our British counterpart, “The Friend.”
The part of Henry Stanley Newman’s life that I found most fascinating was his generation’s ability to bend technicalities almost to the breaking point in order to maintain formal unity. As a young man, he rebelled against the stodgy and insular Quakerism of his upbringing and found a way to create a parallel spiritual life based on evangelical principles. In middle life, established and respected, he faced challenges from the younger liberals and managed to stay engaged and keep them within the fold. In the United States, these same tendencies toward first evangelical and then liberal theologies both resulted in schisms, many of which still divide Friends here.
Almost twenty years ago I visited a small Midwestern U.S. yearly meeting that really felt like a family, both in its bonds and its dysfunctions. I liked it. One of the most respected members was gay and at some point earlier he was nominated to be the yearly meeting clerk. This was a non-starter for a member church that also affiliated with an Evangelical yearly meeting. After some back and forth he was was approved as an assistant clerk, a solution everyone could live with. Logically it makes absolutely no sense — if gayness precludes one from one yearly meeting position it should for any. But the yearly meeting wanted him and knew he’d be good in leadership and found a way to make it work and he cheerfully accepted the situation. (The situation didn’t last and the dual-affiliated meeting eventually had to make a choice and disaffiliate from one of its yearly meetings.)
There’s an impulse toward purity that woudn’t have allowed these kinds of negotiated compromises. A young Newman, starting Evangelical organizations left and right that were nominally outside of Quaker structure but full of Quakers, would have been disowned. The Midwest yearly meeting would have splintered over an insistence of a clerk status. I certainly understand purity: sometimes we need to make a stand. But sometimes it’s more important to be a logically inconsistent family than to be alone in our correctness. Henry Stanley Newman’s compromises is an interesting model for us, still.
Miracles with Diane Allen
March 11, 2025
About thirty Friends came together at Cropwell Friends on Sunday to hear about miracles from Diane Allen. Allen is well known as a former Philadelphia TV anchor and for long service in the New Jersey State Senate. She is also a Quaker who worships at nearby Mt. Laurel Meeting.