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Friends never set out to start to their own religion; what became seen as the more "peculiar" Quaker practices were simply their interpretation of the proper mode of christian living. At some point some of these practices became forms, things done because that's what Quakers are supposed to do. The emptiness of this rationale led some of those in later generations to abandon them altogether. Neither path is very satisfactory. Those of us inspired by the Quaker tradition and have to sift through the half-remembered ancient forms to understand their rationale and continued relevancy.

When reading through Thomas Clarkson's account of Friends circa 1800, I was struck by the differing lengths of explanation needed for two customs. read earlier installments of my series you'll know that Thomas Clarkson was a British Anglican who  spent a lot of time with Friends around the turn of the 19th Century and published an invaluable multi-volumn apology in 1806. "A Portraiture of Quakerism" explains contemporary Friends practices and defends them as legitimate ways to lead a "christian" life.

The two practices that struck me were 1: the Quaker custom of using "thee" in speech and, 2: of using numbers for the names of days of the week and months of the year. Clarkson makes a good defense of the reasons behind the practices:

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.

Following the history lesson, Clarkson turns to names of the days of the week and months of the years. Most are pagan names. Good christians seeking to honor the one true God and deny any false gods shouldn't spend their days invoking the Norse gods Tyr and Woden or the Roman gods Janus, Mars. Replacing them by Third Day, Fourth Day, First Month and Third Month strips them of their roots in non-christian cultures.

As Clarkson well knew, the question 150 years later (and now 350 years later) is whether these old peculiar customs carry any weight beyond a kind of 17th Century Quaker nostalgia. As he writes:

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:

1. The Elevator rule: could I explain to my peculiarity to a non-Quaker "average Joe" in under two minutes?
2. The Christian rule: could I make the argument that this practice is not just a Quaker oddity but something that every faithful and earnest Christian should consider adopting?

In these cases, thee fails and numbered days passes.

Let me explain: I can't really explain why I would use thee without going into a explanation of pre-17th Century grammar, talking about different forms of second person singular in the history of the English language and the retention of the second person singular in most romance languages. By the time I'd be done I'd come off as an over-educated bore.

In contrast I can say "Wednesday is named after the Norse god Woden, Thursday after Thor, January after the Roman Janus, etc., and as a one-God Christian I don't want to spend my days invoking their names constantly." A one-sentence explanation works even in modern America. I'll still be seen as an odd duck (nothing wrong with that) but at least people will leave the conversation knowing there's someone who thinks we really should be serious about only worshipping one God: mission accomplished, really.

I know faithful Friends who do use thee. I'm glad they do and don't want to double-guess their leadings. But for me the test of keeping it real (which I think is a ancient Quaker principle) means holding onto oddities that still point to their origins.

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

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.

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.

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.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young'ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled  "The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,"  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn't much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on "quakers" and "emerging church" nothing much came up. It's not surprising that there wasn't much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We're getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we're asked to lead worships and we've got a catchy name in "Convergent Friends."

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I've drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn't have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don't see one convinced young Friend profiled and it's post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occassional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren't anyone's target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting "Covergent" minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won't blow your cover guys!). I've seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it's not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here's my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the "convergent" theme next month. I'll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
  
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC's isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we'll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you're interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I've let my blog deteriorate into too much of a "life stream," all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You'll notice it's been redesigned. The right bar has the "life stream" stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I'll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don't want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I'm just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God's call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn't talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don't exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn't do much work in the temple and didn't spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the "bad" elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let's see where we can all get in the next five years!

Just got Carole Dale Spencer's Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism in the mail. There's been some blogger buzz around it and I'm glad to check it out for myself. I can tell right off the bat that I'm probably not going to be convinced by her arguments. Flipping through the index (the place to start any book like this) I see she makes three scant references to tradition-minded "Conservative" Friends. That's not a good sign, but she's far from the first modern historian to quarantine this branch to the footnotes.

I'll cut her some slack because she's traveling an interesting route. She's spending a lot of time talking about the Methodist and Holiness influences in Friends--John Wesley himself directly is indexed eighteen times. If you look at the people who defined modern 20th Century liberal Quakerism, folks like Rufus Jones (28 index references), you find that these influences were very strong. They still are, even if they go unacknowledged. And many of the issues Spencer is tracing are still with us and continue to be relevant even as some of us are talking up the possibilities of a new renewal/revival movement.

I'm still trying to figure out this idea I have of video interviews on practical faith. I'll just do some and see how they go. Wess at Gatheringinlight.com was willing to be guinea pig #1--thanks!

Warning: insider Quaker conversation to follow.

Over on her blog Robin M has a great post looking at the Convergent Friend conversation now. It's kind of State of the Convergent Friends report. It's very good and well worth a read and makes me wonder again where exactly I stand.

Even though I was around at the gestation and birth of the term, and even though it originally referred to a small group of bloggers who I all love, I go back and forth between using and refusing to use the label. I don't feel the need to always be explicitly "convergent." Sometimes I can just embody the spirit of it, which as a renewal movement is really just the same old spirit of Quakerism, which as its own renewal movement is the same old spirit of Christianity, with is just that spirit which animates the world.

See: it's too easy to throw up terms as a defense shield or as a way of boosting ourselves. I know I'm prone to this trap. I'll say "I'm doing this as a [Convergent Friend/Quaker/Christian]" as if that explains anything, as if careful listening to the Holy Spirit isn't all the authority that any of us needs.

I think a central part of the convergent experience is stepping outside of the institutional boxes and walking into the discomfort zone of our brand of Friends--asking the thorny questions and pointing out the inconvenient elephants. If "Convergent Friend" ever settles down into a set definition and annual rituals (like a Gathering interest group?), we'll see our own brier patches take root along those inconvenient pathways.

I've noticed Friends with bright ideas brand and sell themselves, and have wondered to myself how freely the gospel spirit is moving after ten years of Gathering workshops and Pendle Hill workshops. I'm not so much purist that I don't understand that sometimes those of us led to the ministry have to push through doubts and present things we've promised to present even if we're not in the best mood (praying that we find that groove). But I've also sat through committee meetings that felt like the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where I look around and realize the same people have been sitting in the same room having the same conversation for twenty years, and everyone is just so tired and the feeling is they're all reading a script and would want to be anywhere but where they are.

A friendly amendment to Convergent

Just the last thing is that for me if our work isn't ultimately rooted in sharing the good news then it's self-indulgent. I don't want to create a little oasis or hippy compound of happy people. Friends aren't going to go to heaven in our politically-correct smugness while the rest of the world is dying off. It's all of us or none of us. If we're not actively evangelizing <liberal translation: sharing the spiritual insights and gifts we've been given />, then we are part of the problem. "Convergence" is Quaker lingo. When we say it we're turning our back to the world to talk amongst ourselves: a useful exercise occassionally but not our main work.

I've been reading a lot of seeker blogs where Quakers are mentioned and I'm struck by how so many of the words we routinely use in our blogs and self-statements are totally alien to others.

It may be too late to throw a switch on the quickly-gathering-steam train that is the "Convergent Friends" express. But here's my friendly amendment: Convergent Friends need to be ready to get out of the Quaker conference centers and need to be ready to put aside the Quaker arcana we've accumulated over the years. If all we're doing is sitting around talking to roomfulls of Quakers in our hopeless-inaccessible lingo then we're fooling ourselves that any real renewal is happening.

Frankly, I have no idea what this would look like. I'm as clueless and scared by the possibilities as most of y'all. I just know we need to do it. Even if I had all the travel money and time in the world (I have neither), I don't know if I'd have enough motivation to get to the next Barnesville / Greensboro / Richmond / Newberg / wherever conference (I just realized I'm reinforcing my last Quaker post!). I love meeting other Friends and I soooo miss seeing other Friends in my current relative isolation. But. But. I wish I had a better ending to this post. I guess I'll just throw it out to the comments: what are we being called to do to send this work into the world?

Churches Retool Mission Trips - washingtonpost.com

A growing body of research questions the value of the trips abroad, which are supposed to bring hope and Christianity to the needy of the world, while offering American participants an opportunity to work in disadvantaged communities, develop relationships and charge up their faith. Critics scornfully call such trips "religious tourism" undertaken by "vacationaries."

My brand of religious don't do this kind of mission work but we are more and more enchanted with long-distance conferences. We now address every issue with a conference but do we ask any "research questions" about their effectiveness? The web is a great tool to extend the conference outward and yet, despite all the content that could be easily ported to the web, most conferences, consultations and gatherings barely exist online.

I know that real life has it's own value--I was happy to have a visit from individual traveler Micah Bales this weekend, a Friend with a great talent for the good question that stays with you long after his bus departs. I just wish I saw more media coming out of these big events, more ways to bootstrap the volumes of content produced at these events into something we can use for outreach.

If anecdotal evidence is an indication, most of the people who have come to Friends in the last half-decade first encountered us on Beliefnet, a for-profit dot-com with no connection to any Friends body. It's definitions of "Liberal Quakers" and "Orthodox Quakers" have become more important (de facto) than all of our books of Faith and Practice. Beliefnet, Wikipedia and a site called Religious Tolerance have become the definers of our faith to millions of seekers. Nothing we're doing comes close to Beliefnet.

And this is part fo the reason I've been fascinated by a Youtube video that was made this weekend. It's an introduction to "liberal Quakers" by someone who's never been to Quaker worship. While this might sound presumptuous, the real crime is that hers is the only American liberal Quaker introduction on Youtube. What the hell are we doing, Friends? I've been corresponding with the Youtuber. She's 22, a spiritual seeker who cobbled together a spirituality after following a couple of dead-end spiritual paths. She came across the Beliefnet quiz, came out a "liberal Quaker" and started looking for real world Friends. She tried the meeting in her home town but it looked deserted (!) and so started an email correspondence with a Friend she found on another meeting's website. She did the Youtube video because she couldn't find any American introductions and wanted to give back, especially to younger seekers that might not respond to a British Youtube series. Yes her video is awkward and a little sketchy on some points of liberal Quaker theology, but it's honest and doesn't contain any viewpoints you won't hear around most meetinghouses.

PS: Since writing this I've come across the first video from the just-concluded FGC Gathering. I don't know if it'll help with outreach but it is really funny. Thanks Skip, I feel like I was there! 

Survey: More have dropped dogma for spirituality in U.S. - USATODAY.com

"Every religious group has a major challenge on its hands from all directions," says [Pew Forum director Luis] Lugo. When he factors in Pew's February findings that 44% of adults say they've switched to another religion or none at all, Lugo says, "You have to wonder: How do you guarantee the integrity of a religious tradition when so many people are coming or going or following ideas that don't match up?"

Lugo's questions is particularly relevant for Friends, as many of us are converts. But the general turn toward a more experiential religiosity points to possibilities for further outreach. Don't have the time to check the survey itself but USAToday looks to have some good graphs about it.

Sometimes it seems as if moderns are looking back at history through the wrong end of the telescope: everything seems soooo far away. The effect is magnified when we're talking about spirituality. The ancients come off as cartoonish figures with a complicated set of worked out philosophies and prohibitions that we have to adopt or reject wholesale. The ideal is to be a living branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intelligently converse with the past and negotiate changes?

Let's talk Friends and music. The cartoon Quaker in our historical imagination glares down at us with heavy disapproval when it comes to music. They're squares who just didn't get it.

Getting past the cartoons

Thomas Clarkson, our Anglican guide to Quaker thought circa 1700, brings more nuance to the scruples. "The Quakers do not deny that instrumental music is capable of exciting delight. They are not insensible either of its power or of its charms. They throw no imputation on its innocence, when viewed abstractly by itself." (p. 64)

"Abstractly by itself": when evaluating a social practice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tempations? Quakers are engaged in a grand experiment in "christian" living, keeping to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral living. The warnings against certain activities are based on observation borne of experience. The Quaker guidelines are wikis, notes compiled together into a collective memory of which activities promote--and which ones threaten--the leading of a moral life.

Clarkson goes on to detail Quaker's concerns about music. They're all actually quite valid. Here's a sampling:

• People sometimes learn music just so they can show off and make others look talentless.
• Religious music can become a end to itself as people become focused on composition and playing (we've really decontextualized: much of the music played at orchestra halls is Masses; much of the music played at folk festival is church spirituals).
• Music can be a big time waster, both in its learning and its listening.
• Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won't say any of these are absolute reason to ban music, but as a list of negative temptations they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very consciously has music as a centerpiece. It's very beautiful, but I always appreciate the pastor's reminder that the music is in service to the Mass and that no one had better clap at some performance! Like with Friends, we're seeing a deliberate balancing of benefits vs temptations and a warning against the snares that the choice has left open.

Context context context

In section iv, Clarkson adds time to the equation. Remember, the Quaker movement is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of early Quakers] was principally in the hands of those, who made a livelihood of the art. Those who followed it as an accomplishment, or a recreation, were few and those followed it with moderation. But since those days, its progress has been immense... Many of the middle classes, in imitation of the higher, have received it... It is learned now, not as a source of occasional recreation, but as a complicated science, where perfection is insisted upon to make it worth of pursuit. p.76.

Again we see Clarkson's Quakers making distinctions between types and motivations of musicianship. The laborer who plays a guitar after a hard day on the field is less worrisome than the obsessed adolescent who spends their teen years locked in the den practicing Stairway to Heaven. And when music is played at large festivals that lead youth "into company" and fashions, it threatens the religious society: "it has been found, that in proportion as young Quakers mix with the world, they generally imbibe its spirit, and weaken themselves as members of their own body."

Music has changed even more radically in the suceeding two centuries. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it's ubiquitious and often involuntary (you can't go shopping without it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of isolated listenership. Then, what about DIY music and singalongs. Is there a distinction to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between arenas and coffeehouse shows? And move past music into the other media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, computers, glossy magazines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsessing over American Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion?

Does a social practice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral center? What if we turned off the mediated consumer universe and engaged in more spiritually rewarding activities--contemplative reading, service work, visiting with others? But what if music, computers, radio, is part of the way we're engaging with the world?

How do decide?

Finally, in Clarkson's days Friends had an elaborate series of courts that would decide about social practices both in the abstract (whether they should be published as warnings) and the particular (whether a particular person had strayed too far and fallen in moral danger). Clarkson was writing for a non-Quaker audience and often translated Quakerese: "courts" was his name for monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures. I suspect that those sessions more closely resembled courts than they do the modern institutions that share their name. The court system led to its own abuses and started to break down shortly after Clarkson's book was published and doesn't exist anymore.

We find outselves today pretty much without any structure for sharing our experiences ("Faith and Practice" sort of does this but most copies just gather dust on shelves). Monthly meetings don't feel that oversight of their members is their responsibility; many of us have seen them look the other way even at flagrantly egregious behavior and many Friends would be outraged at the concept that their meeting might tell them what to do--I can hear the howls of protest now!

And yet, and yet: I hear many people longing for this kind of collective inquiry and instruction. A lot of the emergent church talk is about building accountable communities. So we have two broad set of questions: what sort of practices hurt and hinder our spiritual lives in these modern times; and how do we share and perhaps codify guidelines for twenty-first century righteous living?

Visting 1806's "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends"

Thomas Clarkson wasn't a Friend. He didn't write for a Quaker audience. He had no direct experience of (and little apparent interest in) any period that we've retroactively claimed as a "golden age of Quakerism." Yet all this is why he's so interesting.

The basic facts of his life are summed up in his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Clarkson), which begins: "Thomas Clarkson (28 March 1760 – 26 September 1846), abolitionist, was born at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, and became a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire." The only other necessary piece of information to our story is that he was a Anglican.

British Friends at the end of of the Eighteenth Century were still somewhat aloof, mysterious and considered odd by their fellow countrymen and women. Clarkson admits that one reason for his writing "A Portraiture of Quakerism" was the entertainment value it would provide his fellow Anglicans. Friends were starting to work with non-Quakers like Clarkson on issues of conscience and while this ecumenical activism was his entre--"I came to a knowledge of their living manners, which no other person, who was not a Quaker, could have easily obtained" (Vol 1, p. i)-- it was also a symptom of a great sea change about to hit Friends. The Nineteenth Century ushered in a new type of Quaker, or more precisely whole new types of Quakers. By the time Clarkson died American Friends were going through their second round of schism and Joseph John Gurney was arguably the best-known Quaker across two continents: Oxford educated, at ease in genteel English society, active in cross-denominational work, and fluent and well studied in Biblical studies. Clarkson wrote about a Society of Friends that was disappearing even as the ink was drying at the printers.

Most of the old accounts of Friends we still read were written by Friends themselves. I like old Quaker journals as much as the next geek, but it's always useful to get an outsider's perspective (here's a more modern-day example). Also: I don't think Clarkson was really just writing an account simply for entertainment's sake. I think he saw in Friends a model of christian behavior that he thought his fellow Anglicans would be well advised to study.

His account is refreshingly free of what we might call Quaker baggage. He doesn't use Fox or Barclay quotes as a bludgeon against disagreement and he doesn't drone on about history and personalities and schisms. Reading between the lines I think he recognizes the growing rifts among Friends but glosses over them (fair enough: these are not his battles). Refreshingly, he doesn't hold up Quaker language as some sort of quaint and untranslatable tongue, and when he describes our processes he often uses very surprising words that point to some fundamental differences between Quaker practice then and now that are obscured by common words.

Thomas Clarkson is interested in what it's like to be a good christian. In the book it's typeset with lowercase "c" and while I don't have any reason to think it's intentional, I find that typesetting illuminating nonetheless. This meaning of "christian" is not about subscribing to particular creeds and is not the same concept as uppercase-C "Christian." My Lutheran grandmother actually used to use the lowercase-c meaning when she described some behavior as "not the christian way to act." She used it to describe an ethical and moral standard. Friends share that understanding when we talk about Gospel Order: that there is a right way to live and act that we will find if we follow the Spirit's lead. It may be a little quaint to use christian to describe this kind of generic goodness but I think it shifts some of the debates going on right now to think of it this way for awhile.

Clarkson's "Portraiture" looks at peculiar Quaker practices and reverse-engineers them to show how they help Quaker stay in that christian zone. His book is most often referenced today because of its descriptions of Quaker plain dress but he's less interested in the style than he is with the practice's effect on the society of Friends. He gets positively sociological at times. And because he's speaking about a denomination that's 150 years old, he was able to describe how the testimonies had shifted over time to address changing worldly conditions.

And that's the key. So many of us are trying to understand what it would be like to be "authentically" Quaker in a world that's very different from the one the first band of Friends knew. In the comment to the last post, Alice M talked about recovered the Quaker charism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charism). I didn't join Friends because of theology or history. I was a young peace activist who knew in my heart that there was something more motivating me than just the typical pacifist anti-war rhetoric. In Friends I saw a deeper understanding and a way of connecting that with a nascent spiritual awakening.

What does it mean to live a christian life (again, lowercase) in the 21st Century? What does it mean to live the Quaker charism in the modern world? How do we relate to other religious traditions both without and now within our religious society and what's might our role be in the Emergent Church movement? I think Clarkson gives clues. And that's what this series will talk about.

Technorati Tags: quaker, quakerism, thomas clarkson, anglican, abolition, anti-slavery, joseph john gurney, christian, gospel order, practice, denomination, testimonies, catholic, emergent chruch, charism

It's been a fascinating education learning about institutional Catholicism these past few weeks. I won't reveal how and what I know, but I think I have a good picture of the culture inside the bishop's inner circle and I'm pretty sure I understand his long-term agenda. The current lightening-fast closure of sixty-some churches is the first step of an ambitious plan; manufactured priest shortages and soon-to-be overcrowded churches will be used to justify even more radical changes. In about twenty years time, the 125 churches that exist today will have been sold off. What's left of a half million faithful will be herded into a dozen or so mega-churches, with theology borrowed from generic liberalism, style from feel-good evangelicalism, and organization from consultant culture.

When diocesan officials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sentence and nod their heads approvingly. The conspiracy is real.

But I don't want to talk about Catholicism again. Let's talk Quakers instead, why not? I should be in some meeting for worship right anyway. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbringing after eleven years with us because she wanted a religious community that shared a basic faith and that wasn't afraid to talk about that faith as a corporate "we." It seems that Catholicism won't be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the Eastern Orthodox church? For that matter should I be running off to the Mennonites? See though, the problem is that the same issues will face us wherever we try to go. It's modernism, baby. No focused and authentic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the questions of course. Why would someone who dislikes Catholic culture and wants to dismantle it's infrastructure become a priest and a career bureaucrat? For that matter why do so many people want to call themselves Quakers when they can't stand basic Quaker theology? If I wanted lots of comments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ultimately the question is futile and beyond my figuring.

Another piece to this issue came in some questions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few others this past week in preparation for his upcoming presentation at Woodbrooke. He asked about how a particular Quaker institution did or did not represent or might or might not be able to contain the so-called "Convergent" Friends movement. I don't want to bust on anyone so I won't name the organization. Let's just say that like pretty much all Quaker bureaucracies it's inward-focused, shallow in its public statements, slow to take initiative and more or less irrelevant to any campaign to gather a great people. A more successful Quaker bureaucracy I could name seems to be doing well in fundraising but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more interested in donor-focused hype than long-term program implementation. 

One enemy of the faith is bureaucracy. Real leadership has been replaced by consultants and fundraisers. Financial and staffing crises--real and created--are used to justify a watering down of the message. Programs are driven by donor money rather than clear need and when real work might require controversy, it's tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quaker readers who think I'm talking about Quakers: no I'm talking about Catholics. Catholic readers who think I'm talking about Catholics: no, I'm talking about Quakers. My point is that these forces are tearing down religiosity all over. Some cheer this development on. I think it's evil at work, the Tempter using our leader's desires for position and respect and our the desires of our laity's (for lack of a better word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I'm tired of thinking that maybe if I try one more Quaker meeting I'll find the community where I can practice and deepen my faith as a Christian Friend. I'm stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feeling: Fox and the Peningtons and all the rest talked about isolation and about religious professionals who were in it for the career. I know from the blogosphere and from countless one-on-one conversations that there are a lot of us--a lot--who either drift away or stay in meetings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spiritual community for these outsider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our structures look like? If we let the generic churches go off to out-compete one other to see who can be the blandest, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

I guess this last paragraph is the new revised mission statement for the Quaker part of this blog. Okay kids, get a stepstool, go to your meeting library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out volume one of "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends" by Thomas Clarkson. Yes the 1806 version, stop the grumbling. Get out the ribbed packing tape and put it's cover back together--this isn't the frigging Library of Congress and we're actually going to read this thing. Don't even waste your time checking it out in the meeting's logbook, no one's pulled in down in fifty years and no one's going to miss it now. Really stuck, okay Google's got it too. Class will start shortly.

One of the things I liked about my old Quaker job is that I occasionally had a moment in between all of the staff meetings (and meetings about staff meetings, and meetings about meetings about staff meetings, I kid you not) to take interesting calls and emails from Friends wanting to talk about the state of Friends in their area: how to start a worship group if no Friends existed, how to revitalize a local Meeting, how to work through some growing pains or cultural conflicts. I've thought about replicating that on the blog, and halfway through responding to one of tonight's emails I realized I was practically writing a blog post. So here it is. Please feel free to add your own responses to this Friend in the comments.

Dear Martin
I have read that Meetings that are silent for long periods of time often wither away. But I can't remember where I read that, or if the observation has facts to back it up. Do you know of any source where I can look this up?
Thanks,
CC

Dear CC,
I can't think of any specific source for that observation. It is sometimes used as an argument against waiting worship, a prelude to the introduction of some sort of programming. While it's true that too much silence can be a warning sign, I suspect that Meetings that talk too much are probably also just as likely to wither away (at least to Inward Christ that often seems to speak in whispers). I think the determining factor is less decibel level but attention to the workings of the Holy Spirit.

One of the main roles of ministry is to teach. Another is to remind us to keep turning to God. Another is to remind us that we live by higher standards than the default required by the secular world in which we live. If the Friends community is fulfilling these functions through some other channel than ministry in meeting for worship then the Meeting's probably healthy even if it is quiet.

Unfortunately there are plenty of Meetings are too silent on all fronts. This means that the young and the newcomers will have a hard time getting brought into the spiritual life of Friends. Once upon a time the Meeting annually reviewed the state of its ministry as part of its queries to Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, which gave neighboring Friends opportunities to provide assistance, advise or even ministers. The practice of written answers to queries have been dropped by most Friends but the possibility of appealing to other Quaker bodies is still a definite possibility.
Your Friend, Martin

Interesting reading today about how our Quaker structures can choke the Spirit and hem in our communities. Johan M is no stranger to Quaker institutions, but in "Clerk Please" he writes:

But who will see and proclaim these things to new audiences if we are so busy trying to sort out our structures, nomination processes, and interpersonal animosities that we don't take the time to discern and honor leadings?

Susanne K echos some of these themes in her latest post, "Quakerism and Structure":

One of the key parts of George Fox's revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit... My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 50 years. He believes that the spark of the initial vision and passion of religious groups only survives for about 50 years before developing structures start to choke the movement of the Spirit.

It's been about eighteen months since I was sidelined from the professional Quaker world (I work for some Quakers now, but on a contract basis and the relationship is much different). A year or two before this, my monthly meeting melted down and more or less devolved into a worship group and while I've found a more active meeting to attend, it's not particularly close and I haven't joined.

The result of these two changes is that I haven't sat in a staff meeting for over a year; I don't attend business meetings; I don't belong to any committees; I don't represent any group at conferences. After years of being what Evan Welkin called an uberQuaker, I'm an uninvolved slacker. Bad Martin, right?

Except I'm not uninvolved of course. I feel I'm doing as much now to help people find and grow into Quakerism than I did when I was paid to do this. I don't spend much time with that 2% skim of Quaker elite who attend all the same conferences and appoint each other to all the same committees, but then catering to their needs was pretty high maintenance and was never something I thought of as the real mission.

Suzanne talks about the "Sabbatical Year" meme, and of course lots of electrons fly about the blogosphere about the possibilities of the Emerging Church movement. There's a hunger for a different way of being a Friend. I know one Quaker who threatens to burn down the famous meetinghouse he worships in because he feels that the building has become an empty icon, a weight of bricks upon the Spirit (I'll leave him anonymous in case something mysterious happens to the meetinghouse tonight!). How tragic would it be, really, if some of institutional baggage was laid down and we had to find other ways to confirm and support one another's ministries?

I love teaching Quakerism, I love helping Quakers use the internet for outreach and I love reaching out to potential Friends with my writing. I'm doing all that without committees or staff meetings. No budgets to fight over, no mission statements to write.

Half a decade ago now I wrote about the "lost Quaker generation," active and visionary Gen X Friends who seemed to be dropping out in droves. We're all keeping in better touch now via Facebook but I haven't noticed much jumping back into the fray. What I have noticed is a phenomenon where Friends half a generation older are taking on Quaker responsibilities only to drop away from active meeting involvement when their terms ended. 

If we could pull together all of the dropouts together and start meetings that focused on worship, religious education and deep-community activities, I think we'd see something interesting. I envy those with less-musty, Gen-X heavy meetings nearby (Robin M showcased her meeting recently). And don't get me wrong: I also love the old Quaker ideal of the strong local Quaker community and the bonds of the community on the individual, etc., etc. But I don't see meetings like that anywhere nearby and the only clear leading I really have is to continue this "freelance" teaching, writing and organizing. It's not the situation I want but it's the situation I have and at this point I have to just trust the leadings as they come step by step and have faith they're going somewhere. Boy though, I wish I knew where all this was heading sometimes!

For any bleeding edge Web 2.0 Quakers out there, there's now a QuakerQuaker FriendFeed account to go along with its Twitter account. Both accounts simply spit out the QuakerQuaker RSS feed but there might be some practical uses. I actually follow QQ primary by Twitter these days and those who don't mind annoying IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 everywhere man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his conversations and comments have moved away from his blog and over to FriendFeed. I don't see that occurring anytime soon with QQ but I'll set the accounts up and see what happens. I've hooked my own Twitter and FriendFeed accounts up with QuakerQuaker, so that's one way I'm cross-linking with this possible overlay of QQ.

For what it's worth I've always assumed that QQ is relatively temporary, an initial meeting ground for a network of online Friends that will continue to expand into different forms. I'm hoping we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the latest trends. As far as the Religious Society of Friends is concerned, I'd say the two most important tests of a new media is it's ability to outreach to new people and its utility in helping to construct a shared vision of spiritual renewal.

On these test, Facebook has been a complete failure. So many promising bloggers have disappeared and seem to spend their online time swapping suggestive messages on Facebook (find a hotel room folks) or share animated gifs with 257 of their closed "friends." Quaker Friends tend to be a clannish bunch and Facebook has really fed into that (unfortunate) part of our persona. Blogging seemed to be resuscitating the idea of the "Public Friend," someone who was willing to share their Quaker identity with the general public. That's still happening but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I'm not ready to close my own Facebook account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting--railroads, newspapers, frequently flier miles have all affected how we communicate with each other and the outside world. Computer networking is just the latest wrinkle.

As a personal aside, the worst thing to happen to my Quaker blogging has been the lack of a commute (except for a short hop to do some Haddonfield web design a few times a week). I'm no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with nothing to do but read the journal of Samuel Bownas or throw open my laptop to write about the latest idea that flits through my head. Ah the travails of telecommuting!

A recent article on the art and science of taste and smell in the New Yorker had a paragraph that stood out for me. The author John Lanchester had just shared a moment where he suddenly understood the meaning behind "grainy," a term that had previously been an esoteric wine descriptor. He then writes:

The idea that your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously might sound felicitous, but there is a catch. The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who haven't had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like horse manure, and not in a good way.

How might this apply to Quakerism? A post-modernist philosopher might argue that our words are our experience and their argument would be even stronger for communal experiences. I once spent a long afternoon worrying whether the colors I saw were really the same colors others saw: what if what I interpreted as yellow was the color others saw as blue? After turning around the riddle I ended up realizing it didn't matter as long as we all could point to the same color and give it the same name.

But what happens when we're not just talking about yellow. Turning to the Crayola box, what if we're trying to describe the yellowish colors apricot, dandelion, peach and the touch-feely 2008 "super happy". Being a Crayola connoisseur requires an investment not only in a box of colored wax but also in time: the time needed to experience, understand and take ownership in the various colors.

Religion can be a like wine snobbery. If you take the time to read the old Quaker journals and reflect on your spiritual experiences you can start to understand what the language means. The terms stop being fussy and obscure, outdated and parochial. They become your own religious vocabulary. When I pick up an engaging nineteenth journal (not all are!) and read stories about the author's spiritual up and downs and struggles with ego and community, I smile with shared recognition. When I read an engaging historian's account of some long-forgotten debate I nod knowing that many of the same issues are at the root of some blogospheric bruhaha.

Of course I love outreach and want to share the Friends "sensory experience." One way to do that is to strip the language and make it all generic. The danger of course is that we're actually changing the religion when we're change the language. It's not the experience that makes us Friends--all people of all spiritual persuasions have access to legitimate religious experiences no matter how fleeting, misunderstood or mislabeled. We are unique in how we frame that experience, how we make sense of it and how we use the shared understanding to direct our lives.

We can go the other direction and stay as close to our traditional language as possible, demanding that anyone coming into our religious society's influence take the time to understand us on our terms. That of course opens us to charges of spreading horse manure, in Lanchester's words (which we do sometimes) and it also means we threaten to stay a small insider community. We also forget to speak "normal," start thinking the language really is the experience and start caring more about showing off our vocabulary than about loving God or tending to our neighbors.

I don't see any good way out of this conundrum, no easy advice to wrap a post up. A lot of Friends in my neck of the woods are doing what I'd call wink-wink nudge-nudge Quakerism, speaking differently in public than in private (see this post) but I worry this institutionalizes the snobbery and excuses the manure, and it sure doesn't give me much hope. What if we saw our role as taste educators? For want of a better analogy I wonder if there might be a Quaker version of Starbucks (yes yes, Starbucks is Quaker, I'm talking coffee), a kind of movement that would educate seekers at the same time as it sold them the Quaker experience. Could we get people excited enough that they'd commit to the higher costs involved in understanding us?

My friend Kevin-Douglas emailed recently about a new worship group he's helped to start in downtown Baltimore. It sounds like some of the other Christ-center worship groups that have been popping up the shadow of established Quaker meetings. It's consciously small and home-based, taking place at a non-traditional time with an implicit Emergent Church flavor. Experienced Friends are involved (I know KD from FGC's Central Committee for example) and while it's formed next to and out of large, active meetings, it's not schismatic.

I asked KD if I could put his description up as a "guest post.' I'm hoping a post here can let more seekers and Friends in Baltimore know about it. But beyond that, there's a definite small movement afoot and I thought Ranter readers might be interested in the example (here are a few others: Laughing Waters and Chattahoochee (thanks to Bill Samuel for the last link, some of these are indexed in his helpful Friends Christian Renewal listing).

From KD:

Before R. got sick and eventually died, we had been thinking of hosting an informal meeting for worship in the manner of Friends at our house that would be explicitly Christ-centered. We aren't talking Christian Orthodoxy here, but rather with the understanding of all involved that we come together to explore our faith through the teachings of Jesus and those who came before and after him.  It would be Quaker in that we'd follow in the tradition of Quaker Christians, gaining from their wisdom and experience.

Now, the Spirit is leading me back to this.  

So, what is going on? 

I very much appreciate universalism as a world view. I in no way believe that Christianity is the only way. I do believe, however, that Jesus is the Way, Truth and the Life.  The Way being one of love and compassion, of justice and sincere seeking of that mystery that I call God.  I don't think Jesus was the only one who brought that way, but I do see his way as leading to God, and that by his Way, we can get to God. It doesn't matter to me whether he was or is God; I do see him as a sacrament, a way to God.  For me he is the way to God.  He is living. I know this experientially.

So I want to share in this with others. I want to sit in silence, or sing in praise, or consider a query, scripture or word of advice from Friends past with others who also want to know God through Christ.  I'm not concerned about theology.  IT's about experience for me.  I don't mind if those who don't "know Jesus" come, as I know God can speak through all.   If those who come and don't consider themselves Christian are willing to wrestle with the teachings of Jesus and his ancestors and his followers, then I say WELCOME!  I'm not set on form either.  I do prefer unprogrammed worship, but I mean that literally:  that we don't necessarily set a program, but that there indeed may be silence or a query, scripture or advice read at the beginning of worship. Perhaps candles are lit, maybe even *gasp* incense!  I don't feel the need to be bound to our puritan roots and yet I feel the wisdom of allowing the Spirit to direct the worship is a wisdom we should continue to follow.  I believe in experiential and experimental worship. Perhaps we have the Friends hymnal available and one may feel led to sing from it and others can join if they too feel led.  As for now, it's been completely unprogrammed worship as one would find in most Conservative Friends meetings.   As for community, I hope God will gather together a community where we do recognize ministries and gifts perhaps in the way that Friends have done so traditionally but maybe in radically new ways!   I'm so tired of Evangelical/Liberal/Conservative labels.  Can we just be Friends?

I do so love being Quaker.  I do so love Jesus.  I hope to find a community where these are wed without qualifications.

We meet third Sundays of every month at a home (Mine right now) from 5-6pm and are listed in Quaker Finder:

Downtown Baltimore Worship Group
Christ-centered, unprogrammed worship is generally held on the 3rd Sunday of the month at 5:00 PM in a home. Follow link for current details.

Over on Friends Journal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Written by Margaret Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the different bodies of Friends, it's a bit of cold water for most of us. Official numbers are down in most places despite whatever official optimism might exist. Favorite line: "Perhaps those who leave are noticed less." I'm sure P.R. hacks in various Quaker organizations are burning the midnight oil writing response letters to the editor spinning the numbers to say things are looking up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: "Hispanic Friends Churches" in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There's surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I'll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations. I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an opportunity to share growth and challenges together.

An interesting image in meeting yesterday. "CS" rose after the break of worship to share a story from a old Quaker journal he's been reading. The minister in question was in England at the time and felt a strong leading to visit Friends in Ireland. Being dutiful he arranged passage in a ship heading west and boarded it thinking he would soon reach his destination. But the winds didn't cooperate. The currents didn't cooperate. In an era before diesel engines and jet fuel the fulfillment of traveling intentions were dependent upon outside forces: wind, current, trails, weather. The poor Quaker's ship went around in circles for a week and finally ended up in the port it had departed.

We expect today that when we set out to accomplish something it will get done. But there are always unexpected currents to contend with, uncooperative winds, sandbars and shoals and God may well be involved in these blocks. Our duty as people of faith is to get on the boat. We might not get to our Ireland and that may not be the real purpose of our leading. Maybe our job is to learn to catch fish from the boat. Perhaps our faithfulness in apparent failure is a lesson for the disbelieving sailors on board. And maybe the lesson is for us, to remain faithful in the mystery and confusion of God's roadblocks.

The modern impulse is to win, to accomplish, to neutralize dissent, problem-solve and succeed. As Friends, we've inherited some of this attitudes and often want to take our spiritual leadings and run with them as if God's part is over. We set up committees, write mission statements, hire staff: we lock our ship's course in a particular direction, crank up the engines and plow ahead. These can be useful tools, certainly, but somehow there's a lesson for us in that little boat going around in circles.

Not really news, but Friends United Meeting recently dedicated their new Welcome Center in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On September 15, 2007, FUM dedicated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Bookstore as the new FUM Welcome Center. The Welcome Center contains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of during business hours. Tables and chairs to comfortably accommodate 50 people make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meetings, anniversary/birthday parties, etc. Reduced prices are available for churches.

Most Quaker publishers and booksellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pendle Hill bookstore and publishing operation, the AFSC Bookstore in Southern California, Barclay Press in Oregon. The veritable Friends Bookshop in London farmed out its mail order business a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a coffeebar: popular and cool I'm sure, but does London really needs another place to buy coffee? Rumor has it that Britain's publications committee has been laid down. The official spin is usually that the work continues in a different form but only Barclay Press has been reborn as something really cool. One of the few remaining booksellers is my old pals at FGC's QuakerBooks: still selling good books but I'm worried that so much of Quaker publishing is now in one basket and I'd be more confident if their website showed more signs of activity.

The boards making these decisions to scale back or close are probably unaware that they're part of a larger trend. They probably think they're responding to unique situations (the peer group Quakers Uniting in Publications sends internal emails around but hasn't done much to publicize this story outside of its membership). It's sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bodies have independently decided that publishing is not an essential part of their mission.

Liberal Friends today frequently question the meaning of membership. Its necessity and obligations are debated. Does it foster separation? Is it an exclusive club? What cultural norms get in the way of wider fellowship? Why do so many of our meetings have the same limited demographic and why do they look so unlike the larger community. The way we answer these questions affect the way we think of outreach and ministry and what we mean when we think of who "we" are. (Interesting recent discussions from a seeker here and amongst Conservative Friends here.)

Membership is a powerful means of facilitation fellowship, something that most of us need to grow very deep into the Spirit. But the fellowship of our monthly meetings (and of "Quakerism" in general) can easily become a distraction, a means to its own end, a false idol. We need to keep our eyes on the prize and realize that membership in meeting is secondary to membership in the body of Christ and into that Spirit which seeks to build the Kingdom of God in the world.

Here I'll look at three overlapping ways of defining "we": the Church, the Fellowship and the People. They're not mutually exclusive but they're also not identical and its possible to have one without the others. "We" are out of balance and unable to grow into our full measure as individuals and as a faith community when we don't keep our eyes on all three together.


The Church

This is the collective body of all those who have experienced the power of the Inward Christ and turned toward Him. Liberal Friend that I am I'm not going to insist on what name people give to the other side of this encounter (especially at first). The experience of visitation comes in various manifestations and we will be alternately judged, comforted, etc. God loves us and doesn't hide Himself from us and reaches us wherever we are. This is not to say that all religious traditions are equally useful guides to that path, just that God is merciful.

The visitation is not a one-time affair but ongoing. As we respond we will change and we will find ourselves voluntarily re-aligning our lives in ways that let us hear the Spirit more clearly. It is quite possible to be a respectable member of a religious body and stop listening (the root of Friends nervousness about professional ministry). As we mature spiritually and fine-tune the instrument of our discernment, we will be presented with ever more subtle and ingenious temptations and snares to further progress. It becomes almost impossible to progress without the active fellowship of others committed to this journey, who will confirm and challenge us as needed and amplify our praise.

The Fellowship

We organize ourselves into frail human institutions to provide that fellowship. This is fine and necessary at times but comes with its own snares. It is all too easy to raise up ourselves and begin to exalt ourselves. It is easy to think that our purpose is to serve ourselves. We must never forget that the Body of Christ is our first membership and that its boundaries will never match up with our printed directories or membership roles. The primary role of the monthly meeting and lower-case "c" churches is to spread the good news of the spiritual resurrection of Christ and the life and power that exists when we serve God. "The Membership" is always a temporarily illusion, a pale imitation of The Church and a temporary stop-gap as the Kingdom of God aligns itself on the world.  

The People

"Christ has come to teach The People Himself," one of George Fox's most important insights. We're all in this together, spiritual salvation is for us all. Those of us who have felt the workings of the Inward Spirit in our hearts must sing that out to everyone we meet. We must hum the song of God and so let others hear it in their hearts.

In the Bible "the people" are the Jews, a specific social group whose spiritual devotion fades in and out through the centuries. The Old Testament is story after story of the Jewish people falling down and getting back up, usually with the help of a prophet whose role was to remind them of God and show them how far they had fallen out of alignment with His will.

Jesus was prophet extraordinaire. When lawyers asked him to define neighbor--who is it that our religious institutions exist to serve--he gave the story of a despised Samaritan who did the right thing by helping a fellow human in need. A point of this story was to show that the Jewish God works among non-Jews and that faithfulness doesn't depend on one's social station in life.

The People are everywhere. We all have access to the Spirit. And if we are to be the building blocks to God's Kingdom here on Earth we must serve one another across the superficialities that seek to divide us: lines of class, race, ethnicity and yes even sexual orientation. These are snares. We must seek to rise up together, focusing less on perceived failings of those around us than on our own inward call to a greater perfection (communion) with God.

What does this all mean to Friends?

Most Quaker meetings I've visited are good at one or two of these models of we-ness. But without balance they become self-serving.

The Church without Fellowship becomes a "ranterism" where everyone is tempted by the snares of self-delusion. Church without the People becomes a elite spiritualism that detaches itself from the pain of the world and the need to witness and serve our neighbors.

Fellowship without the People becomes a social club uninterested in sharing this good thing we've got going. Fellowship without the Church becomes the shell of an empty form worshiping itself.

The People without the Church give us a consumer culture which exists for the next fashion, for the next sale at the Mall. The People without Fellowship becomes a flock of sheep dispersed, easy targets for the wolves of temptation whispering in our ears.

Human fellowships like a Quaker monthly meeting exist solely to bridge the Church and the People. Some of that work involves learning our ministry and service, facilitated by monthly meetings and helped along by the tools of our Friends tradition. But most of the work of the Church is its daily witness to the world of the transformative power of the Spirit in our lives. If we're doing our job right our meetings should constantly buckle and break under the weight of new members and our worship will spill out into our lives. We will care more about our neighbors than our fellowship. "Outreach," "Inreach," "Ministry" and "Witness" will all be the same work.

If you cycle through my last few months of comments, you'll see that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about who "we" Friends are and who we serve and the consequent question of why we organize into local meetings, national affiliations, blogs, etc.

Essential to this thinking has been Jeanne B's Social Class and Quakers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way culture and faith work to reinforce and sabotage one another, but class is a good one. If you travel from one theological brand of Friends to another, from one cultural zone to another (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rural) you'll see marked culture differences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban liberal Quaker stigma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty culture can unwittingly separate itself from potential allies in social change over tofu.

Since falling out of the rarefied world of professional Quakerism a year ago, I've become more local. I live in a small, largely agricultural town in rural South Jersey roughly equidistant from the region's skyscraper metropoli (I don't give its name for privacy reasons) and residents range from multi-generational families to Mexican farmworkers to people who got in trouble up north in NYC and are looking for a quieter place to come clean. I don't see Quakers in my day-to-day life anymore but I do interact with a more representative sampling of America, people who are all trying to get somewhere other than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do modern liberal Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jeanne's blog issues of safety-net public assistance that seem like do-gooder causes for most well-off liberal Friends are matters of personal practicality for more economically diverse religious bodies (the child care program that President Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doctor last Friday).

Last First Day I heard a good orthodox piece of Quaker ministry couched in a learned language, all talk of justification versus sanctification, with a bit of insider Quaker acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn't start off assuming middle class norms. What do our tofu covered dishes and vanilla soy chai's (I'm so addicted) have to do with living under Christ's instruction? And just which FGC outreach pamphlet should I be handing my new friend?

Enough for now. More soon. 

I usually skip out on meme games but I thought I'd try out Jeanne's class one. Bold are the privileges I can claim from my youth, italics are ones that I'm unsure of or that are more "yes but" kind of privileges. My mom's Lutheran pride kept her from wanting us to look or feel poor. Yes, I didn't have second-hand clothes but the rich kids often did. While they might wear scrubs from their parent's doctor practice or vintage clothes scored from a thrift-store outing, I was in striped button-down shirts from the respectable department store whose teen department was always empty of teen customers. Yes, respectable people on TV sound like me but that's because my mom dropped her childhood Pennsylvania Dutch accent and was hyper-aware of non-standard accents (a trait I've unfortunately picked up, I correct/mock Julie's "wooder" pronunciation for water before I can even think about it, it's like I have a very specificTourettes Syndrome that only applies to non-standard accents). Julie tallied up and commented on the quiz here in Jeanne's comments. It's fascinating to realize that although I grew up significantly poorer and have less than half Julie's "steps" she's much more culturally working class than I'll ever be.

Father went to college (he was secretive about past, he might have done a semester at St Joe's)
Father finished college
Mother went to college (two year secretarial program)
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (because we're good assimilationists)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Had to take out less than $5000 in student loans in order to go to college
Didn't need student loans to go to college out of high school
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp (day camp at the Y for a few summers)
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (pride kept us out of second-hand stores until we later crossed that class boundary where thrifting is cool precisely because its not a necessity)
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child (I was the only child at home after age 7)
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (my mom thought they were cheating)
Had your own TV in your room in High School (mostly as monitor for Radio Shack Color Computer she bought me junior year of high school)
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (we were more zoo/county fair/Independence Hall tour types (hey, they're all free/low-cost!))
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (n/a: included in apt rent, besides my mom would never let on that things were tight)

A list like this can never be all inclusive but it seems there are some big omissions. Where's anything about family structure and finances, like "You had two parental figures living in your house" and "Both parents contributed to family income" or "One parent stayed home or worked part-time"? In my own instance, my father had a secret other family and never paid for anything other than the occasional trip to Roy Rogers (secret family to "Little Marty" at least, the women and older children presumably noitced he was only around half the time and constructed some mental run-around to explain it away).

The other omission is social networks. I have no memory of family friends. I cannot name one friend of my father and my mother's friends were limited to a handful of "girls" at the office. By the time I got to high school I started to see how certain classmates were able to work the system to get the best teachers and classes and this was mostly accomplished by parents swapping notes after Hewbrew class or at church or at hockey practice. Friends are rightly noted for the strength of their social networks and I suspect these provide a social privilege that is far more valuable than parental salary.

Jeanne promises to write a part two to her post explaining what this all means to Friends. I'm looking forward to it though I'm unsure just what easy generalization can be made if we're looking at origins. One of the few surveys trying to be comprehensive found Philadelphia-area Friends don't reflect American averages yet for many convinced Friends our participation has mirrored (and perhaps been unconsciously motivated by) an upward class mobility. Keep an eye on Social Class & Quakers for more!

Over on my design blog I've just posted an article, Banking on reputations, which looks at how the websites for high-profile cultural institutions are often built without regard to natural web publicity--there's no focus on net culture or search engine visibility. The sites do get visited, but only because of the reputation of the institution itself. My guess is that people go to them for very specific functions (looking up a phone number, ordering tickets, etc.). I finish by asking the question, "Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?"

I won't belabor the point, but I wonder if something similar is happening within Friends. It's kind of weird that only two people have commented on Johan Maurer's blog post about Baltimore Yearly Meeting's report on Friends United Meeting. Johan's post may well be the only place where online discussion about this particular report is available. I gave a plug for it and it was the most popular link from QuakerQuaker, so I know people are seeing it. The larger issue is dealt with elsewhere (Bill Samuel has a particularly useful resource page) but Johan's piece seems to be getting a big yawn.

It's been superseded as the most popular QuakerQuaker link by a lighthearted call for an International Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Livejournal blogger. It's fun but it's about as serious as you might expect. It's getting picked up on a number of blogs, has more links than Johan's piece and at current count has thirteen commenters. I think it's a great way to poke a little fun of ourselves and think about outreach and I'm happy to link to it but I have to think there's a lesson in its popularity vis-a-vis Johan's post.

Here's the inevitable question: do most Quakers just not care about Friends United Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting, about a modern day culture clash that is but a few degrees from boiling over into full-scale institutional schism? For all my bravado I'm as much an institutional Quaker as anyone else. I care about our denominational politics but do others, and do they really?

Yearly meeting ses