Tag Archives ⇒ sense

Welcoming families in meetings

April 18, 2019
· Martin Kelley

An account of one British meet­ing find­ing space for families:

It has been the task of the whole meet­ing not just of one or two; there has been an aware­ness that what they are doing now will need to change and evolve. And there has been a care and nour­ish­ing of us as par­ents too, with our own spir­i­tu­al jour­neys and need for nurture.

I know, from talk­ing to oth­er Quak­er par­ents – and, very sad­ly, from par­ents who would love to explore Quak­erism but who have felt dis­cour­aged or unwel­comed – that we have been par­tic­u­lar­ly lucky. Lucky not because we found a Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty with a ready-made chil­dren’s meet­ing, but because we found a meet­ing will­ing and ready to wel­come, to make space, where there was a sense of glad­ness that we were there. 


Welcoming families in meetings

Wel­com­ing fam­i­lies in meetings 

How do we rejoice in the pres­ence of chil­dren in our meet­ings and nur­ture their spir­i­tu­al growth? Alistair…

Quakers Quakers 

Trustworthy, part one: the cost of betrayal

March 4, 2019
· Martin Kelley

Johan Mau­r­er on abus­es in our meetings:

As far as I know, the final set­tle­ment in that case was nev­er made pub­lic. In a larg­er sense, the “final set­tle­ment” demand­ed by God’s grace and jus­tice will nev­er be mea­sured in dol­lars, but there is some­thing sat­is­fy­ing about know­ing that mon­ey was involved: almost noth­ing slices through pious mis­di­rec­tion or sophistry like cold cash. But it’s also true that cash does­n’t cut deeply enough. 

I’m still uncon­vinced we’re all doing enough to bring day­light to skele­tons in our clos­ets or heal­ing to vic­tims. Law­suits make every­one clam up, yet they too often seem to be the only mech­a­nism for shed­ding light on the sit­u­a­tion in the first place.

https://​blog​.canyoube​lieve​.me/​2​0​1​9​/​0​2​/​t​r​u​s​t​w​o​r​t​h​y​-​p​a​r​t​-​o​n​e​-​c​o​s​t​-​o​f​-​b​e​t​r​a​y​a​l​.​h​tml

Is Quaker Culture an Obstacle to Faith?

February 2, 2019
· Martin Kelley

From Isaac Smith:

I have tend­ed to describe this shift in under­stand­ing as the moment when Quak­erism “clicked” for me — when it ceased to be just the weird sub­cul­ture I grew up in, and more a mat­ter of con­vic­tion. Prac­tices that I ignored or nev­er quite under­stood, like mak­ing group deci­sions with­out tak­ing a vote, now made sense, because they were borne out of an attempt to make Christ the present teacher in all affairs. 

Isaac’s piece stems in part from the Decem­ber Friends Jour­nal, on Quak­ers and Chris­tian­i­ty. A large per­cent­age of the sub­mis­sions we received for the issue had remark­ably sim­i­lar per­son­al sto­ries: peo­ple had grown up in a restric­tive reli­gious tra­di­tion and come to Lib­er­al Friends because of its open­ness to spir­i­tu­al seek­ing. If any­thing they were hos­tile to Chris­tian­i­ty and dis­tinc­tive Quak­er pecu­liar­i­ties when they joined but over time they slow­ly shift­ed, often after get­ting to know ground­ed elder Friends. Now they qui­et­ly iden­ti­fied as Chris­t­ian Friends.

We could have print­ed a whole issue of (most­ly) con­vinced Lib­er­al Friends who had redis­cov­ered Chris­tian­i­ty. Instead we picked a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple for the print edi­tion and pub­lished the rest as part of our our extend­ed online edi­tion; you can read it all at the online con­tents. Although Isaac’s sto­ry is dif­fer­ent (he grew up as a Friend) it shares a sim­i­lar trajectory.

(Issac also has some ques­tions about Quak­er pub­lish­ing, with a link to a great 2009 blog post from Johan Mau­r­er. I feel I should talk about this issue too but that’ll take a bit more pon­der­ing on my part).

Is Quak­er Cul­ture an Obsta­cle to Faith?

Anointing

November 2, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Mike Far­ley, of Silent Assem­blies, writes of an ear­ly Quak­er inter­pre­ta­tion of anoiting:

I have been struck by the word “anoint­ing”. Eliz­a­beth Bathurst (as quot­ed by David John­son) wrote: “But I brought them the scrip­tures, and told them there was an anoint­ing with­in man to teach him, and the Lord would teach them him­self.” We are not very used, I think, to the term among Friends today. Among charis­mat­ic Chris­tians it is much more com­mon, and seems to be used in both the sense of being giv­en spir­i­tu­al gifts… But I think Eliz­a­beth Bathurst, fol­low­ing the apos­tle John, as she says, is using the word in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent sense to either of these, and it is a sense we as Quak­ers should recognise. 

Anoint­ing

What is “Clerking Consciousness”?

September 18, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From the new clerk of New York Year­ly Meeting:

If all the world inter­act­ed on the basis of con­sen­sus, the world would be a far bet­ter place. But if all the world func­tioned on the basis of sense of the meet­ing, as Friends do, the world would be a very dif­fer­ent place alto­geth­er. Every­one would have full respon­si­bil­i­ty to find the best way for­ward for everyone. 

http://​www​.nyym​.org/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​w​h​a​t​-​i​s​-​c​l​e​r​k​i​n​g​-​c​o​n​s​c​i​o​u​s​n​ess

Creeds and stories

August 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Isaac Smith was going to write some­thing about creeds:

I had been kick­ing around writ­ing some­thing on the uses and abus­es of creeds in the Quak­er tra­di­tion, but then I dis­cov­ered that Ben Wood had writ­ten a fair­ly defin­i­tive ver­sion of that essay already. So read that instead.

Ben’s 2016 piece on Quak­ers and creeds is def­i­nite­ly worth a read. I checked my records and I must have missed it at the time, so I’ll share it now. He goes deep into the kinds of creeds that Penn and Bar­clay gave in their writ­ings but also what the ear­li­er Chris­t­ian creed-makers were com­ing from. He also comes to today. Here’s a taste:

we can­not be creed-makers before we are story-preservers and story-tellers. We can­not hope to resolve dif­fer­ences unless and until we dig down into our own Quak­er sto­ry; unless we come to terms with its pow­er and impli­ca­tions. At least part of our sense of spir­i­tu­al malaise is a ret­i­cence to engage with the depth of the Quak­er tale. Part­ly that ret­i­cence is about a lack of teach­ing min­istry among Friends. We haven’t giv­en each oth­er the tools to become skill­ful read­ers of our own nar­ra­tive. We have assumed that peo­ple can just ‘pick this stuff up’ through a mys­te­ri­ous process of osmo­sis. This has led to a frag­men­ta­tion of under­stand­ing about the mean­ing and impli­ca­tions of Quak­er grammar.

In my world, talk of creeds has sprung up recent­ly fol­low­ing the Quak­er­S­peak video of Arthur Larrabee’s nine core prin­ci­ples of unpro­grammed Friends. His prin­ci­ples seem fair­ly descrip­tive of main­stream Lib­er­al Friends to me, but pre­dictably enough the video’s com­ments have peo­ple wor­ried about any for­mu­la­tion: “Espous­ing core beliefs — no mat­ter how well inten­tioned — risks intro­duc­ing a creed.” One of my pet the­o­ries is that the mid-century truce over the­ol­o­gy talk that helped Quak­er branch­es reunite (at least on the U.S. East Coast) has stopped working.

Quak­ers and Creeds

Membership — in a Yearly Meeting?

July 31, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Steven Davi­son looks at a pro­pos­al to record mem­bers at the year­ly meet­ing level:

with­out mean­ing­ful pas­toral care, reg­u­lar wor­ship, spir­i­tu­al nur­ture, and a fel­low­ship that goes deep­er than just three annu­al meet­ings could pro­vide, what does “mem­ber­ship” mean? All that’s left is Quak­er iden­ti­ty and a sense of belong­ing to the unique spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty that is New York Year­ly Meet­ing. To me, that’s a half-baked Quak­er life.

Mem­ber­ship — in a Year­ly Meeting?

Lifting up the vocabulary

May 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

This week’s fea­tured Friends Jour­nal arti­cle is Sell­ing Hope by Tom Hoopes. Hoopes is a teacher at George School, one of the two promi­nent Quak­er board­ing schools in the Philadel­phia area, and he talks about the brand­ing chal­lenges of “Quak­er val­ues” which his­toric Quak­er schools so often fall back on when describ­ing their mis­sion. We often describe these with the sim­plis­tic “SPICES” foru­mu­la­tion (Eric Moon wrote about the prob­lems over-emphasizing these). Hoopes encour­ages us to expand our language:

We can use any num­ber of descrip­tors that do not sound so haughty and near­sight­ed. I think we should con­tin­u­al­ly lift up some key pieces of vocab­u­lary that real­ly do make the Quak­er way dis­tinc­tive. Here is a brief list, to which I am sure Friends can add oth­ers: “that of God in every per­son”; “the Inner Light”; “con­tin­u­ing rev­e­la­tion”; “dis­cern­ment”; “sense of the meet­ing”; “right­ly led and right­ly ordered”; “Friend speaks my mind”; “the still, small voice with­in”; “way open­ing”; “clerk­ing”; “query”; “wor­ship shar­ing”; “expec­tant wait­ing”; “cen­ter­ing down”; “Quak­er deci­sion mak­ing”; “Quak­er tra­di­tion”; “faith and prac­tice”; “seek­ing clear­ness”; “Quak­er tes­ti­monies”; and of course, “meet­ing for worship.”

Long­time FJ read­ers will remem­ber a much-discussed 2008 arti­cle by Hoopes, “Young Fam­i­lies and Quak­erism: Will the Cen­ter Hold?” It cer­tain spoke to my con­di­tion as a par­ent strug­gling with fam­i­ly life among Friends:

Let’s look at some hard real­i­ties fac­ing many Quak­er par­ents of young chil­dren today. They are fre­quent­ly exhaust­ed and fraz­zled from attend­ing to their children’s needs in addi­tion to their own all week long. They des­per­ate­ly need a break from their own chil­dren, and they may feel guilty about that fact. They are often asked — or expect­ed — to serve as First-day school teach­ers or child­care providers. Hence, their expe­ri­ence of meet­ing is not one of replen­ish­ment, but of fur­ther depletion.

I wish I could report that Philadel­phia Friends took the 2008 arti­cle to heart.


Selling Quakerism - Friends Journal

Sell­ing Quak­erism — Friends Journal 

The Mis­sion – Mar­ket Ten­sion Inher­ent in Quak­er Values

Friends Journal Friends Journal