The 2005 article was largely pessimistic, focused on the "committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends
I knew ten years ago" who had left Friends and blaming "an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and
its own future" but my hope paragraph was optimistic:
Hard to imagine that only three years ago I was an isolated FGC staffer left to pursue outreach and youth ministry work on my own time by an institution indifferent to either pursuit. Both functions have become major staff programs, but I'm no longer involved, which is probably just as well, as neither program has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most interesting work is still largely invisible.There is hope... A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there's a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.
Wess of GatheringinLight just emailed me if we might designate a "qqtalk" tag for those of us QuakerQuaker regulars who are live-blogging tonight's presidential debate on Twitter.com. Interesting idea but I'm worried that it will be too partisan. I, for one, have not been live blogging the debates as a Friend.
I've taken a lot of care to keep QuakerQuaker culturally-neutral so that we keep the focus on the faith. I want it to be a place where people from different backgrounds and values will find common ground in their interest in the role of Quaker tradition in their lives. I'm a leftie East Coast Christian anarco-pacifist--vegan, bike rider, you get the picture, right?--and while I can argue that my values jibe with my understanding of Quaker faith, I would never want to presume that you have to adopt them to be a good Quaker.
Part of the problem
with Quakerism in all of its forms is that we've mixed up the faith
with the culture and sometimes don't know where one ends and the other
begins. That's kind of natural but it's led to a situation where we're
sometimes divided against one another over the wrong issues. We also use the words "Quaker" or "Friends" as a shortcut for a range of values and don't do the work explaining how the faith leads to the values.
So in the few hours we have till the debate, any ideas about whether to adopt a qqtalk tag? Drop them in the comments. Also, if you're a Quaker who's going to be live-twittering tonight, leave your twitter name below so people can see what we're doing on an individual level if they want.
I'll start off:
I'm at http://twitter.com/martin_kelley and have been using #debate08 for my debate coverage.
Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.
Many of the expressions, then in use, appeared to him to contain gross flattery, others to be idolatrous, others to be false representatives of the ideas they were intended to convey... Now he considered that christianity required truth, and he believed therefore that he and his followers, who prefessed to be christians in word and deed, and to follow the christian pattern in all things, as far as it could be found, were called upon to depart from all the censurable modes of seech, as much as they were from any of the customs of the world, which christianity had deemed objetionable. (p. 275-6, my edition, p. 199 in this edition in Google Books).Clarkson takes the next four pages to explain some grammatical history. In Fox's time, "thee" was still at the tail end of being replaced by the grammatically-incorrect "you" for the second person singular, a cultural change that was a "trickle down" of the courtier's desire to flatter so-called superiors in church and state. To a band of religious reformers largely drawn from rural North England, the reappropriation of "thee" was a bold cultural statement. It spoke to both a grammatical integrity and a desire to flatten social classes in a radically idealistic religious society.
There is great absurdity, it is said, in supposing, that persons pay any respect to heathen idols, who retain the use of the ancient names of the divisions of time. How many thousands are there, who know nothing of their origin? The common people of the country know none of the reasons.When I look at old customs I ask two questions:
Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken. After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive. I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:
I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.
The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.
The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.