Sustaining the purpose for which we were peculiarly raised up

December 13, 2009

Marlborough meetinghouseJust fin­ished: Ken­neth S.P. Morse’s “A His­to­ry of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends” from 1962. Like most his­to­ries of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends, it’s both heart­en­ing and depress­ing. It’s great to read the quotes, which often put the dilem­ma very clear­ly, like this one from Iowa Friends in 1877:

In con­sid­er­a­tion of many and var­i­ous depar­tures in Doc­trine, Prin­ci­ple and Prac­tice, brought into our beloved Soci­ety of late years by mod­ern inno­va­tors, who have so rev­o­lu­tion­ized our ancient order in the Church, as to run into views and prac­tices out of which our ear­ly Friends were lead, and into a broad­er, and more self-pleasing, and cross-shunning way than that marked out by our Sav­ior, and held to by our ancient Friends.… And who have so approx­i­mat­ed to the unre­gen­er­ate world that we feel it incum­bent upon us to bear testimony…and sus­tain the Church for the pur­pose for which is was pecu­liar­ly raised up.

I love this stuff. You’ve got the­ol­o­gy, poli­ty, cul­ture and an argu­ment for the eter­nal truths of the “pecu­liar­ly raised” Quak­er church. But even in 1962 this is a sto­ry of decline, of gen­er­a­tions of min­is­ters pass­ing with no one to take their place and month­ly and year­ly meet­ings wink­ing out with dis­arm­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty as the con­cept of Friends gets stretched from all sides. “It is cer­tain­ly true that most of those who call them­selves Friends at the present time are only par­tial Friends in that they seem not to have felt called to uphold var­i­ous branch­es of the Quak­er doctrine.” 

Putting the book down the most remark­able fact is that there are any Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends around still around almost fifty years later. 

The task of shar­ing and uphold­ing the Quak­er doc­trine is still almost impos­si­bly hard. The mul­ti­plic­i­ty of mean­ings in the words we use become stum­bling blocks in them­selves. Friends from oth­er tra­di­tions are often the worst, often being blind to their own inno­va­tions, often­er still just not car­ing that they don’t share much in com­mon with ear­ly Friends.

Then there’s the dis­uni­ty among present-day Con­ser­v­a­tives. Geog­ra­phy plays a part but it seems part of the cul­ture. The his­to­ry is a maze of tra­di­tion­al­ist splin­ter groups with carefully-selected lists of who they do and do not cor­re­spond with. Today the three Con­ser­v­a­tive Year­ly Meet­ings seem to know each anoth­er more through carefully-parsed read­ing of his­to­ries than actu­al vis­i­ta­tion (there is some, not enough). There’s also the human messi­ness of it all: some of the flaki­est lib­er­al Quak­ers I’ve known have been part of Con­ser­v­a­tive Year­ly Meet­ings and the inter­net is full of those who share Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends val­ues but have no year­ly meet­ing to join.

No answers today from me. Maybe we should take solace that despite the tra­vails and the his­to­ry of defeat, there still remains a spark and there are those who still seek to share Friends’ ways. For those want­i­ng to learn more the more recent “Short His­to­ry of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends” (1992) is online and a good introduction.

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Flashbacks: Aging Youth, Vanity Googling, War Fatigue

September 18, 2009

I occa­sion­al­ly go back to my blog­ging archives to pick out inter­est­ing arti­cles from one, five and ten years ago.

ONE YEAR AGO: The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool
new move­ment I had been read­ing about. It would have been Jor­dan Coop­er’s blog that turned me onto Robert E Web­ber’s The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals, a look at gen­er­a­tional shifts among Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals. In ret­ro­spect, it’s fair to say that the Quak­erQuak­er com­mu­ni­ty gath­ered around this essay (here’s Robin M’s account of first read­ing it) and it’s follow-up We’re All Ranters Now (Wess talk­ing about it).

And yet? All of this is still a small demo­graph­ic scat­tered all around. If I want­ed to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull ses­sion about the future of Friends at some local cof­feeshop this after­noon, I can’t think of any­one even vague­ly local who I could call up. I’m real­ly sad to say we’re still large­ly on our own. Accord­ing to actu­ar­i­al tables, I’ve recent­ly crossed my life’s halfway point and here I am still ref­er­enc­ing gen­er­a­tional change. How I wish I could hon­est­ly say that I could get involved with any com­mit­tee in my year­ly meet­ing and get to work on the issues raised in “Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and Younger Quak­ers”. Some­one recent­ly sent me an email thread between mem­bers of an out­reach com­mit­tee for anoth­er large East Coast year­ly meet­ing and they were debat­ing whether the inter­net was an appro­pri­ate place to do out­reach work – in 2008?!?

Pub­lished 9/14/2008.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Van­i­ty Googling of Causes

A poster to an obscure dis­cus­sion board recent­ly described typ­ing a par­tic­u­lar search phrase into Google and find­ing noth­ing but bad infor­ma­tion. Repro­duc­ing the search I deter­mined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actu­al­ly quite accu­rate. I’ve been hear­ing an increas­ing num­ber of sto­ries like this. “Cause Googling,” a vari­a­tion on “van­i­ty googling,” is sud­den­ly becom­ing quite pop­u­lar. But the inter­est­ing thing is that these new searchers don’t actu­al­ly seem curi­ous about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?

Pub­lished 10/2/2004 in The Quak­er Ranter.

TEN’ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again
This piece is about the NATO bomb­ing cam­paign in Ser­bia (Wikipedia). It’s strange to see I was feel­ing war fatigue even before 9/11 and the “real” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

There’s a great dan­ger in all this. A dan­ger to the soul of Amer­i­ca. This is the fourth coun­try the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becom­ing rou­tine. It is sand­wiched between the soap operas and the sit­coms, between the traf­fic and weath­er reports. Intense cruise mis­sile bom­bard­ments are car­ried out but have no effect on the psy­che or even imag­i­na­tion of the U.S. citizens.

It’s as if war itself has become anoth­er con­sumer good. Anoth­er event to be pack­aged for com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion. Giv­en a theme song. We’re at war with a coun­try we don’t know over a region we don’t real­ly care about. I’m not be face­tious, I’m sim­ply stat­ing a fact. The Unit­ed States can and should play an active peace­mak­ing role in the region, but only after we’ve done our home­work and have basic knowl­edge of the play­ers and sit­u­a­tion. Iso­la­tion­ism is dan­ger­ous, yes, but not near­ly as dan­ger­ous as the emerg­ing cul­ture of these dilet­tante made-for-TV wars.

Pub­lished March 25, 1999, Non​vi​o​lence​.org

FWCC Google Maps Mashup

September 12, 2009

FWCC Google Maps MashupThe Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion unites Quak­ers of all stripes togeth­er in joint projects and dia­log. It’s Amer­i­c­as office has the most com­plete list­ing of U.S. and Cana­di­an Friends Meet­ings and Church­es and now has a map to prove it!
This is a mash-up of the FWCC data­base with Google Maps.

Because of lim­i­ta­tions of how many data points Google can show the coun­tries have been divid­ed into regions. The main access page is a screen shot of a Google Map with a old fash­ioned imagemap over­lay that allows you to select the region you want to look at. Javascript good­ness shad­ows the cur­rent­ly select­ed region.

See it live: www​.fwc​camer​i​c​as​.org/​f​r​i​e​nds

Free as in Friend

July 31, 2009

In Chris Ander­son­’s new book Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price, he looks into the mean­ing of the word free. The word has two mean­ings: free as in “free­dom” and free as in “price.” Most of the romance lan­guages divide these mean­ings into two dif­fer­ent words, derived from liber and grati­is. Our double-duty Eng­lish word comes from Old Eng­lish fre­on or fre­ogan, mean­ing “to free, love.” In addi­tion to free, this word also gave us our word friend. Ander­son quotes ety­mol­o­gist Dou­glas Harper:

The pri­ma­ry sense seems to have been “beloved, friend”; which in some lan­guages (notably Ger­man­ic and Celtic) devel­oped a sense of “free,” per­haps from the terms “beloved” or “friend” being applied to the free mem­bers of one’s clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)

This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the per­fect word for the ear­ly trans­la­tors of the Eng­lish bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:

Hence­forth I call you not ser­vants; for the ser­vant knoweth not what
his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I
have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not
cho­sen me, but I have cho­sen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that
what­so­ev­er ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I com­mand you, that ye love one another.

This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spir­i­tu­al trouble-makers in Eng­land in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they start­ed call­ing one anoth­er Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, new­ly freed of the tyrants of their age by their per­son­al expe­ri­ence of Christ as friend, spread­ing the good news that we were all free and all com­mand­ed to love one another.

Conservative Friends Gathering 2009

June 22, 2009

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Pic­tures from this week­end’s gath­er­ing of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends (Quak­ers), held in Lan­cast­er Coun­ty PA and host­ed by Key­stone Fel­low­ship Friends Meet­ing of Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive.

Videos:

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Arthur Berk on “Basic Chris­t­ian Quakerism”

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The Con­vince­ment Sto­ry of John L.: a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing sto­ry of a fam­i­ly’s jour­ney from the LDS (Mor­mon) Church to Friends.

Quaker Quote of the Day

May 30, 2009

I’m exper­i­ment­ing with Quak­er Quote of the Day for the Quak­erQuak­er Twit­ter account. You should be able to read them on Twit­ter here. Extend­ed ver­sions will be on Quak­erQuak­er’s new QOTD blog.It’s hard to pack a good quote into only 140 char­ac­ters so there will be some short­en­ing, but the full piece should give it a bit more context.

I’ll be most­ly quot­ing his­tor­i­cal Friends but I might throw a liv­ing per­son in there once in awhile. I won’t use a quote book to deliv­er the same adage you’ve heard a mil­lion times before. I’ll also try not to chop it up into a mean­ing that goes against the author’s intention.

Convergent Friends: Content not designed for our market?

April 24, 2009

Hen­ry Jenk­ins (right) mix­es up the names but has good com­men­tary on the Susan Boyle phe­nom­e­non in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I’ve been quot­ing lines over on my Tum­blr blog but this is a good one for Quak­er read­ers because I think it says some­thing about the Con­ver­gent Friends culture:

When we talk about pop cos­mopoli­tanism, we are most often talking
about Amer­i­can teens doing cos­play or lis­ten­ing to K‑Pop albums, not
church ladies gath­er­ing to pray for the suc­cess of a British reality
tele­vi­sion con­tes­tant, but it is all part of the same process. We are
reach­ing across bor­ders in search of con­tent, zones which were used to
orga­nize the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent in the Broad­cast era, but which
are much more flu­id in an age of par­tic­i­pa­to­ry cul­ture and social
networks.

We live in a world where con­tent can be accessed quick­ly from any
part of the world assum­ing it some­how reach­es our radar and where the
col­lec­tive intel­li­gence of the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry cul­ture can identify
con­tent and spread the word rapid­ly when need­ed. Susan Boyle in that
sense is a sign of big­ger things to come — con­tent which wasn’t
designed for our mar­ket, con­tent which was­n’t timed for such rapid
glob­al cir­cu­la­tion, gain­ing much greater vis­i­bil­i­ty than ever before
and net­works and pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with
the rapid­ly esca­lat­ing demand.

Susan Boyle’s video was pro­duced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that bor­der. In the Con­ver­gent Friends move­ment, we’re dis­cov­er­ing “con­tent which was­n’t designed for our mar­ket” – Friends of all dif­fer­ent stripes hav­ing direct access to the work and thoughts of oth­er types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost imme­di­ate­ly. In this con­text, the “net­works and pro­duc­tions com­pa­nies” would be our year­ly meet­ings and larg­er Friends bodies.

Pushing houses across sandy soil

March 29, 2009

I feel I’m being called to be pro­found­ly non-strategic these days. What do big words add to under­stand­ing? Our mes­sage is sim­ple. All we need to do is love God and care for one anoth­er. Our task is not to know all the answers but to sim­ply fol­low what small leads we’ve been giv­en and trust in the Lord that this is the work of the King­dom. It is too easy to adopt the clothes of a pro­fes­sion­al­ism that hide a preda­to­ry motive and mask the unspo­ken fear at the root of our labors.

But love ye your ene­mies, and do good, and lend, hop­ing for noth­ing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the chil­dren of the High­est: for he is kind unto the unthank­ful and to the evil​.Be ye there­fore mer­ci­ful, as your Father also is mer­ci­ful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: con­demn not, and ye shall not be con­demned: for­give, and ye shall be forgiven:Give, and it shall be giv­en unto you; good mea­sure, pressed down, and shak­en togeth­er, and run­ning over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same mea­sure that ye mete with­al it shall be mea­sured to you again. 

I will wor­ry less about those who seem intent to push hous­es across sandy soil. I will dig down look­ing for the bedrock and I will invite oth­ers to join with their shov­els. I will stop wor­ry­ing about the specks in my broth­ers’ eyes.

And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Whoso­ev­er cometh to me, and heareth my say­ings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like: He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foun­da­tion on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehe­ment­ly upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was found­ed upon a rock. But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that with­out a foun­da­tion built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehe­ment­ly, and imme­di­ate­ly it fell; and the ruin of that house was great. Quotes from Luke 6.