Appar­ently Micah Bales wasn’t call­ing for twenty-something Friends to engage in a reign of ter­ror, of kerosene and matches. He was engag­ing in some­thing called he calls metaphor. Micah reminds us that the liv­ing church needs to be able to ask questions:

A liv­ing, breath­ing com­mu­nity can­not be per­fect in this sense. True life is found in dynamic ten­sion. Liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties change and grow; they repro­duce them­selves in a diverse array of shapes and sizes, suited to their own times and places.

I myself would have avoided the burn-baby-burn pose, even rhetor­i­cally, if only because I’ve had too much per­sonal expe­ri­ence of Quak­ers who com­pletely lack a sense of irony. But it’s cer­tainly not with­out prece­dent for Friends to chal­lenge our con­nec­tion to mate­r­ial space (Micah aint’ got noth­ing on Ben­jamin Lay!). This cri­tique is why we call them meet­ing­houses, not churches, and it’s why their most promi­nent archi­tec­tural style in the Delaware Val­ley resem­bles noth­ing so much as a barn–the most generic of open struc­tures in the eyes of the farm­ers who built them.

There have been some good reac­tions among the com­men­taries on Micah’s post. Isabel P. wrote from the per­spec­tive of a “spir­i­tual vagabond”:

For those of us with no meet­ing­houses, who wan­der from place to place try­ing to find a home for our wor­ship groups, this sort of hyper­bole (metaphor though it may be) is just painful. Is tra­di­tion and her­itage really such an awful weight? Try being a spir­i­tual vagabond …

Else­where, Macken­zie paints the pic­ture of a not-atypical wealthy East Coast meet­ing that focuses on structure:

The meet­ing room is larger than needed for how few peo­ple show up weekly (about 70 on a “good” day, while the room can hold about 250). The cam­pus is larger than the par­tic­i­pants are will­ing to put in the sweat equity to main­tain. You’d think work­ing together to main­tain it would go under the cat­e­gory of build­ing com­mu­nity, which our First Day School claims is a tes­ti­mony. Instead, the bud­get must be ever-expanded to hire some­one else to fix things up, rather than have any­one get their hands dirty. Never mind that the meet­ing is run­ning on endow­ments from long-dead Friends as it is. So much paid main­te­nance puts a strain on the bud­get, mak­ing for per­sis­tent calls for more money.

Fur­ther down in that same thread, Tri­cia shares the heart­felt thank-you notes of Philadelphia-area Occupy activists who found refuge in Quaker struc­tures:

Dear­est Quaker Friends, Thank you for har­bor­ing us in a safe place in your park­ing lot. We appre­ci­ate it, in solidarity—the 99%.

I’m so grate­ful that you opened your hearts and your space to us. (cat­a­stro­phe averted!) I want to be a Quaker. Love and Peace, Barbara.

There have also been some obnox­ious reac­tions, all too-typical dis­missals cit­ing some supposedly-inherent inabil­ity of younger Friends to be trusted in dis­cern­ment or lead­er­ship. Of course our own tra­di­tion proves this wrong. When we talk about Quaker the­ol­ogy, the start­ing point for Friends of all fla­vors is an essay writ­ten by a twenty-eight year old. When George Fox had his famous open­ing that “there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy con­di­tion,” he was a twenty-three years old talk­ing about a son-of-God that never left what Friends would call his “young adult” years. William Penn co-founded his first Quaker colony at age 33, and even old Mar­garet Fell earned her nick­name “the mother of Quak­erism” for the orga­niz­ing work she began at age thirty-eight. By counter-example, I’m sure we find some older Friends who lack some­thing in the dis­cern­ment or self-control depart­ment. The moral of the exam­ples: age is not the most impor­tant fac­tor in Quaker spir­i­tual discernment.

Now I want to turn back to the meet­ing­house ques­tion and put things in a bit of per­spec­tive. There are prob­a­bly only five or six dozen unpro­grammed meet­ings in North Amer­ica that are so large they couldn’t sim­ply squeeze into the near­est vol­un­teer fire hall. If calamity struck the meet­ing­house, the great major­ity of our con­gre­ga­tions could take a quick phone poll of mem­bers to deter­mine who has the largest liv­ing room and relo­cate there the fol­low­ing First Day. Yes, of course it’s nice to pro­vide space to the occa­sional pro­test­ers (and local yoga group, bat­tered women’s shel­ter etc.), but it’s fair to ask if this is what we’re called to do with this time and money. There would be cer­tain oppor­tu­ni­ties gained if a monthly meet­ing sold or long-term leased its prop­erty and re-established itself as a net­work of house churches. I don’t think it’s nec­es­sar­ily a good option for most meet­ings but it would be an intrigu­ing exper­i­ment. And it’s def­i­nitely worth imagining.