Tag Archives ⇒ Samuel Bownas

Communities vs Religious Societies

June 15, 2010
· Martin Kelley

Over on Tape Flags and First Thoughts, Su Penn has a great post called “Still Think­ing About My Quak­er Meet­ing & Me.” She writes about a process of self-identity that her meet­ing recent­ly went through it and the dif­fi­cul­ties she had with the process.

communitysocietyI won­dered whether this dif­fi­cul­ty has become one of our modern-day stages of devel­op­ing in the min­istry. Both Samuel Bow­nas (read/buy) and Howard Brin­ton (buy) iden­ti­fied typ­i­cal stages that Friends grow­ing in the min­istry typ­i­cal­ly go through. Not every­one expe­ri­ences Su’s rift between their meet­ing’s iden­ti­ty and a desire for a God-grounded meet­ing com­mu­ni­ty, but enough of us have that I don’t think it’s the foibles of par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­u­als or month­ly meet­ings. Let me tease out one piece: that of indi­vid­ual and group iden­ti­ties. Much of the dis­cus­sion in the com­ments of Su’s post have swirled around rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent con­cep­tions of this. 

Many mod­ern Friends have become pret­ty strict indi­vid­u­al­ists. We spend a lot of time talk­ing about “com­mu­ni­ty” but we aren’t prac­tic­ing it in the way that Friends have under­stood it – as a “reli­gious soci­ety.” The indi­vid­u­al­ism of our age sees it as rude to state a vision of Friends that leaves out any of our mem­bers – even the most het­ero­dox. We are only as unit­ed as our most far-flung believ­er (and every decade the sweep gets larg­er). The myth of our age is that all reli­gious expe­ri­ences are equal, both with­in and out­side of par­tic­u­lar reli­gious soci­eties, and that it’s intol­er­ant to think of dif­fer­ences as any­thing more than language.

This is why I cast Su’s issues as being those of a min­is­ter. There has always been the need for some­one to call us back to the faith. Con­trary to modern-day pop­u­lar opin­ion, this can be done with great love. It is in fact great love (Quak­er Jane) to share the good news of the directly-accessible lov­ing Christ, who loves us so much He wants to show us the way to right­eous liv­ing. This Quak­er idea of right­eous­ness has noth­ing to do with who you sleep with, the gas mileage of your car or even the “cor­rect­ness” of your the­ol­o­gy. Jesus boiled faith­ful­ness down into two com­mands: love God with all your might (how­ev­er much that might be) and love your neigh­bor as yourself.

A “reli­gious soci­ety” is not just a “com­mu­ni­ty.” As a reli­gious soci­ety we are called to have a vision that is stronger and bold­er than the lan­guage or under­stand­ing of indi­vid­ual mem­bers. We are not a per­fect com­mu­ni­ty, but we can be made more per­fect if we return to God to the full­ness we’ve been giv­en. That is why we’ve come togeth­er into a reli­gious society.

“What makes us Friends?” Just fol­low­ing the mod­ern tes­ti­monies does­n’t put us very square­ly in the Friends tra­di­tion – SPICE is just a recipe for respect­ful liv­ing. “What makes us Friends?” Just set­ting the stop­watch to an hour and sit­ting qui­et­ly does­n’t do it – a wor­ship style is a con­tain­er at best and false idol at worst. “How do we love God?” “How do we love our neigh­bor?” “What makes us Friends?” These are the ques­tions of min­istry. These are the build­ing blocks of outreach.

I’ve seen nascent min­is­ters (“infant min­is­ters” in the phras­ing of Samual Bow­nas) start ask­ing these ques­tions, flare up on inspired blog posts and then tail­dive as they meet up with the cold-water real­i­ty of a local meet­ing that is unsup­port­ive or inat­ten­tive. Many of them have left our reli­gious soci­ety. How do we sup­port them? How do we keep them? Our answers will deter­mine whether our meet­ing are reli­gious soci­eties or communities.

When Isaac Penington, Margaret Fell and Elizabeth Bathurst join the reading group

January 20, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Not some­thing I’ll do every day, but over on Quak­erQuak­er I cross-referenced today’s One Year Bible read­ings with Esther Green­leaf Mur­er’s Quak­er Bible Index. Here’s the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph ris­es to pow­er in Egypt; Jesus’ para­ble of wheat & tares and pearls. It’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly rich read­ing today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an inter­est­ing para­ble about let­ting the faith­ful and the unfaith­ful grow together. 

As if know­ing today is Inau­gu­ra­tion Day, Isaac Pen­ing­ton turned it into a polit­i­cal ref­er­ence: “But oh, how the laws and gov­ern­ments of this world are to be lament­ed over! And oh, what need there is of their ref­or­ma­tion, whose com­mon work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!”

Mar­garet Fell sees the wheat and tares as an exam­ple of jeal­ousy and false min­istry: “Oh how hath this envi­ous man got­ten in among you. Sure­ly he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bun­dles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seeds­men come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, … & so it was easy to stir up jeal­ousy in you, you hav­ing the ground of jeal­ousy in your­selves which is as strong as death.”

We get poet­ry from the sev­en­teen cen­tu­ry Eliz­a­beth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that “the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appear­ance (even as the morn­ing ‑light), but as it is giv­en heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in bright­ness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the fir­ma­ment at noon-day height.”

The para­ble of the tares became a call for tol­er­ance in George Fox’s under­stand­ing: “For Christ com­mands chris­t­ian men to “love one anoth­er [John 13:34, etc], and love their ene­mies [Mat 5:44];” and so not to per­se­cute them. And those ene­mies may be changed by repen­tance and con­ver­sion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels’ work to burn the tares, and not men’s.”

A cen­tu­ry lat­er, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and wor­ried about reli­gious edu­ca­tion and Quak­er drift: “But for want of keep­ing an eye open to this pre­serv­ing Pow­er, a spir­it of indif­fer­ence hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a ten­den­cy to choke the good seed; those ten­der impres­sions and reproofs of instruc­tion, which would have pre­pared our spir­its, and have bound them to the holy law and tes­ti­monies of truth.”

I hope all this helps us remem­ber that the Bible is our book too and an essen­tial resource for Friends. It’s easy to for­get this and kind of slip one way or anoth­er. One extreme is get­ting our Bible fix from main­stream Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian sources whose view­points might be in pret­ty direct oppo­si­tion from Quak­er under­stand­ings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B’s post on The New Calvin­ism or Tom Smith’s very rea­son­able con­cerns about the lit­er­al­ism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and rec­om­mend). On the oth­er hand, it’s not uncom­mon in my neck of the Quak­er woods to describe our reli­gion as “Quak­er,” down­grade Chris­tian­i­ty by mak­ing it option­al, unmen­tion­able or non-contextual and turn­ing to the Bible only for the oblig­a­tory epis­tle ref­er­ence.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the mar­gins in the mod­ern edi­tion of Samuel Bow­nas’ “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions Nec­es­sary to a Gospel Min­istry,” which were pep­pered with the Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences Bow­nas was casu­al­ly cit­ing through­out. On my sec­ond read­ing (yes it’s that good!) I start­ed look­ing up the ref­er­ences and real­ized that: 1) Bow­nas was­n’t just mak­ing this stuff up or quot­ing willy-nilly; and 2) read­ing them helped me under­stand Bow­nas and by exten­sion the whole con­cept of Quak­er min­istry. You’re not read­ing my blog enough if you’re not get­ting the idea that this is one of the kind of prac­tices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talk­ing about at the Con­ver­gent work­shop next month. If you can fig­ure out the trans­port then get your­self to Cali pron­to and join us.

More ways to QuakeQuake in the socialscape

April 7, 2008
· Martin Kelley

For any bleed­ing edge Web 2.0 Quak­ers out there, there’s now a Quak­erQuak­er Friend­Feed account to go along with its Twit­ter account. Both accounts sim­ply spit out the Quak­erQuak­er RSS feed but there might be some prac­ti­cal uses. I actu­al­ly fol­low QQ pri­ma­ry by Twit­ter these days and those who don’t mind annoy­ing IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 every­where man Robert Scoble recent­ly post­ed that many of his con­ver­sa­tions and com­ments have moved away from his blog and over to Friend­Feed. I don’t see that occur­ring any­time soon with QQ but I’ll set the accounts up and see what hap­pens. I’ve hooked my own Twit­ter and Friend­Feed accounts up with Quak­erQuak­er, so that’s one way I’m cross-linking with this pos­si­ble over­lay of QQ.

For what it’s worth I’ve always assumed that QQ is rel­a­tive­ly tem­po­rary, an ini­tial meet­ing ground for a net­work of online Friends that will con­tin­ue to expand into dif­fer­ent forms. I’m hop­ing we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the lat­est trends. As far as the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends is con­cerned, I’d say the two most impor­tant tests of a new media is it’s abil­i­ty to out­reach to new peo­ple and its util­i­ty in help­ing to con­struct a shared vision of spir­i­tu­al renewal.

On these test, Face­book has been a com­plete fail­ure. So many promis­ing blog­gers have dis­ap­peared and seem to spend their online time swap­ping sug­ges­tive mes­sages on Face­book (find a hotel room folks) or share ani­mat­ed gifs with 257 of their closed “friends.” Quak­er Friends tend to be a clan­nish bunch and Face­book has real­ly fed into that (unfor­tu­nate) part of our per­sona. Blog­ging seemed to be resus­ci­tat­ing the idea of the “Pub­lic Friend,” some­one who was will­ing to share their Quak­er iden­ti­ty with the gen­er­al pub­lic. That’s still hap­pen­ing but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I’m not ready to close my own Face­book account but I would like to see Friends real­ly think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapt­ing – rail­roads, news­pa­pers, fre­quent­ly fli­er miles have all affect­ed how we com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and the out­side world. Com­put­er net­work­ing is just the lat­est wrinkle.

As a per­son­al aside, the worst thing to hap­pen to my Quak­er blog­ging has been the lack of a com­mute (except for a short hop to do some Had­don­field web design a few times a week). I’m no longer strand­ed on a train for hours a week with noth­ing to do but read the jour­nal of Samuel Bow­nas or throw open my lap­top to write about the lat­est idea that flits through my head. Ah the tra­vails of telecommuting!

Confusing “Quaker Faith” for God and worshipping ourselves

November 9, 2005
· Martin Kelley

Some­times my Quak­er Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I con­sole myself that I’m doing enough giv­ing out the “dai­ly read­ing list of Quak­er posts”:/quaker, read­ing through my new old Quak­er book col­lec­tion (Samuel Bow­nas just vis­it­ed the “meet­ing I’m attend­ing most fre­quent­ly these days”:http://www.pym.org/pym_mms/middletownpa_cdq.php!) and work­ing my new “advance­ment and out­reach “:www​.FGC​quak​er​.org/ao job – oh, and of course there’s also “the family”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley/40269563/! But you could also just fol­low my train of thought by look­ing over my shoul­der at com­ments made at oth­er sites. Over the last few days the Quak­er blo­gos­phere has had a num­ber of inter­est­ing posts. Here’s a cobble-together of posts and com­ments that have spo­ken to me about the inher­ent Quak­er snare of con­fus­ing our “Quak­er faith” for God.
Over on Kwak­er­saur, David M “shares some renew­al queries for his year­ly meeting”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/11/consultation-and-renewal.html. “Nan­cy A”:http://nancysapology.blogspot.com detect­ed a “sense an over­all fatigue” in them and “Beppe”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/ agreed, ask­ing if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by “under­stand­ing [of] who we are.”
One of the queries goes “What does our Quak­er faith ask us to DO?” _Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn_. My favorite Quak­er committee-meeting trick of late con­sists of replace all the “we”-like phras­es with _God_. How about “What does God ask us to DO?” (Just a quick tes­ti­mo­ny: I love David’s work and I val­ue his won­der­ful online min­istry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quak­er renew­al, he’s wel­come!! I’m sure every­one on the Con­sul­ta­tion and Renew­al Work­ing Group is deep­er than the queries would indi­cate and sus­pect that this is an exam­ple of the Quak­er cor­po­rate dumbing-down ten­den­cy that’s prac­ti­cal­ly our modus operandi.)
All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, “Can I Say I’m Emerg­ing If I Haven’t Emerged or Quak­er If I Haven’t Quaked?”:http://ajschwanz.com/index.php/2005/11/07/can-i-say-im-emerging-if-i-havent-emerged-or-quaker-if-i-havent-quaked/,. Here’s a taste:
bq. Part of me has thought of shed­ding my Quak­er pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the pow­er of God? Shed­ding my dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion label cer­tain­ly would sup­port the idea that “there’s real­ly only one church, but lots of meet­ing places.” Par­tic­u­lar­ly in this town where the Quak­er col­lege is per­ceived as pret­ty insu­lar, would I have dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions with folks if I sim­ply said “I’m a fol­low­er of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?
Paul L implic­it­ly address­es the ques­tion of shed­ding the Quak­er pin in his “review of Pun­shon­’s Rea­sons for Hope”:http://showerofblessings.blogspot.com/2005/11/reasons-for-hope.html, where he asks if “Quak­ers have a unique niche to fill in the Chris­t­ian and broad­er social landscape.”
Are we Quak­er because it’s com­fort­able, because our friends are, because the build­ings are cool and the social hour cof­fee hot? Or the oppo­site: are we Friends because we real­ly liked “Bar­clay’s Apology”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/333004 but could­n’t care less for the messy­ness of flesh-and-blood reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty? Anoth­er Quak­er blog­ger recent­ly sent me a pri­vate email in which he con­fid­ed: “My main ques­tion of late to Quak­ers is: what is so remark­able about Quak­ers? I some­times have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these ques­tions.” That seems like both a good ques­tion and a impor­tant meet­ing role.
There’s some­thing about liv­ing both with­in a com­mu­ni­ty and out­side it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human insti­tu­tions, the­o­ries or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as tran­scen­dent every­thing­ness and Christ as a par­tic­u­lar guy in a par­tic­u­lar place speak­ing a par­tic­u­lar lan­guage and liv­ing a par­tic­u­lar life. The pull between the eter­nal and pecu­liar is the very essence of the human con­di­tion. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apos­tles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the vol­ume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?

The Loss of a Faithful Servant

April 18, 2005
· Martin Kelley

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.