Confusing "Quaker Faith" for God and worshipping ourselves

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, reading through my new old Quaker book collection (Samuel Bownas just visited the meeting I'm attending most frequently these days!) and working my new advancement and outreach job--oh, and of course there's also the family! 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. Nancy A detected a "sense an overall fatigue" in them and Beppe 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?,. Here's a taste:

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, 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 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?