Over on Beppe­blog, “Lib­er­al Quak­erism is no longer Quak­erism”, the first of a multi-post series. In part one, Beppe looks at our dif­fi­cul­ty artic­u­lat­ing a col­lec­tive voice that might pro­claim “Truth.” Indi­vid­u­al­ism has real­ly tak­en a hit on Quak­ers, that’s for sure. In this day and age, how can a group set itself apart as a “reli­gious soci­ety” – a coher­ent com­mu­ni­ty of believ­ers? I don’t find ful­fill­ment in my own self and I’m an awful­ly slow learn­er when I try to fig­ure out things myself. I need oth­er’s wis­dom but books and blogs only take me so far.

As Dave Carl reminds us in the com­ments, the inward Christ is avail­able to all, every­where. But just because you can have a vis­i­ta­tion while stand­ing in the super­mar­ket check­out line does­n’t make the super­mar­ket a reli­gious soci­ety or the cashier a min­is­ter. Many of our meet­ings are good for the casu­al seek­er who wants a stress-free med­i­ta­tion cen­ter. The RSOF seems to serve many seek­ers as an in-between point: a place of entry back into the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion (for those who have been alien­at­ed by false prophets) but not a final des­ti­na­tion in itself. If you want to get seri­ous you often have to leave. That’s a shame, not only for the lost seek­er, but for our own reli­gious soci­ety which sees a con­stant “brain drain” leaking-out of gift­ed ministers.

I turn on the TV and radio and hear all sorts of per­ver­sions of the gospel being spout­ed out (yes­ter­day’s Memo­r­i­al Day pap was par­tic­u­lar­ly annoy­ing – has­n’t any of these Chris­tians read the Ser­mon on the Mount?!?). The world still needs the kind of rad­i­cal, back-to-the-roots Chris­tian­i­ty that Quak­ers have long held up as an alter­na­tive. But how can we unite to speak with that prophet­ic voice if we have no col­lec­tive voice.

I’m not as pes­simistic as all this sounds. I think most Friends want some­thing more. We’re con­stant­ly lif­ing up the exam­ple of dead Friends with prophet­ic voic­es and there’s a strong pride in our his­to­ry of social jus­tice. Our mod­ern cul­ture of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty blinds us to how these voic­es got nutured and how those old-timey Friends were able to come togeth­er to speak out these truths. But Friends have often been lured away from our call­ing and every age has had faith­ful Friends who have been will­ing to hit their heads against the brick walls of frus­tra­tion time and time again in order to remind us of who we are. The back-and-forth of reach­ing out into the world and pulling back into our tra­di­tion is actu­al­ly itself part of our tra­di­tion and Quak­er bod­ies have often seen health­i­est when we’ve been able to hold both together.

PS: Check here for Beppe’s sec­ond post, which argues that “Lib­er­al Quak­erism con­tin­ues to be Quakerism.”