Read­ers over on Quak​erQuaker​.org will know I’ve been inter­ested in the tem­pest sur­round­ing evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor Rob Bell. A pop­u­lar min­is­ter for the Youtube gen­er­a­tion, con­tro­versy over his new book has revealed some deep fis­sures among younger Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians. I’ve been fas­ci­nated by this since 2003, when I started real­iz­ing I had a lot of com­mon­al­i­ties with main­stream Chris­t­ian blog­gers who I would have nat­u­rally dis­missed out of hand. When they wrote about the authen­tic­ity of wor­ship, decision-making in the church and the need to walk the talk and also to walk the line between truth and com­pas­sion, they spoke to my con­cerns (most of my read­ing since then has been blogs, pre-twentieth cen­tury Quaker writ­ings and the Bible).

Today Jaime John­son tweeted out a link to a new piece by Rachel Held Evans called “The Future of Evan­gel­i­cal­ism.” She does a nice job pars­ing out the dif­fer­ences between the two camps squar­ing off over Rob Bell. On the one side is a cen­tral­ized move­ment of neo-Calvinists she calls Young, Rest­less, Reformed after a 2006 Chris­tian­ity Today arti­cle. I have lit­tle to no inter­est in this crowd except for mild aca­d­e­mic curios­ity. But the other side is what she’s dub­bing “the new evangelicals”:

The sec­ond group—sometimes referred to as “the new evan­gel­i­cals” or “emerg­ing evan­gel­i­cals” or “the evan­gel­i­cal left” is sig­nif­i­cantly less orga­nized than the first, but con­tin­ues to grow at a grass­roots level. As Paul Markhan wrote in an excel­lent essay about the phe­nom­e­non, young peo­ple who iden­tify with this move­ment have grown weary of evangelicalism’s alle­giance to Repub­li­can pol­i­tics, are inter­ested in pur­su­ing social reform and social jus­tice, believe that the gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and are eager to be a part of inclu­sive, diverse, and authen­tic Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. “Their broad­en­ing sense of social respon­si­bil­ity is push­ing them to rethink many of the fun­da­men­tal the­o­log­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions char­ac­ter­is­tic of their evan­gel­i­cal tra­di­tions,” Markham noted.

This is the group that intrigues me. There’s a lot of cross-over here with some of what I’m see­ing with Quak­ers. In an ideal world, the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends would open its arms to this new wave of seek­ers, espe­cially as they hit the lim­its of denom­i­na­tional tol­er­ance. But in real­ity, many of the East Coast meet­ings I’m most famil­iar with wouldn’t know what to do with this crowd. In Philly if you’re inter­ested in this con­ver­sa­tion you go to Cir­cle of Hope (pre­vi­ous posts), not any of the estab­lished Quaker meetings.

Evans makes some edu­cated guesses about the future of the “new evan­gel­i­cal” move­ment. She thinks there will be more dis­cus­sion about the role of the Bible, though I would say it’s more dis­cus­sion fo the var­i­ous Chris­t­ian inter­pre­ta­tions of it. She also fore­sees a loos­en­ing of labels and denom­i­na­tional affil­i­a­tions. I’m see­ing some of this hap­pen­ing among Friends, though it’s almost com­pletely on the indi­vid­ual level, at least here on the East Coast. It will be inter­est­ing to see how this shakes out over the next few years and whether it will bypass, engage with or siphon off the Soci­ety of Friends. In the mean­time, Evans’ post and the links she embeds in it are well worth exploring.

It seems to me that one of the cor­ner­stones of Judeo-Christian phi­los­o­phy is to remem­ber the sto­ries. I’m more than three-quarters of the way through the Bible (I’m stretch­ing my One Year Bible plan across two years) and that’s really all it is: story after story of human’s rela­tions with God. Friends have picked up this method­ol­ogy in a big way. Our pri­mary reli­gious edu­ca­tion is the jour­nals elders have been asked to write to recount the tri­als and prophetic open­ings of a life lived in an attempt at spir­i­tual obedience.

There must be a pur­pose to this con­stant story review, some way it deep­ens our own spir­i­tual lives. One gift it gives to me is per­spec­tive. I was just tak­ing an evening bath and found myself get­ting upset about a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion from my past and stopped to pick up my One Year Bible. The Old Tes­ta­ment read­ings for most of Tenth Month come from Jere­miah. Here’s a bit of God’s instruc­tions to the prophet:

“Tell them all this, but do not expect them to lis­ten. Shout out your warn­ings but do not expect them to respond. Say to them, ‘This is the nation whose peo­ple will not obey the Lord their God and who refuse to be taught. Truth has van­ished from among them; it is no longer heard on their lips.’” (Jer 7:27)

And later:

“Jere­miah, say to the peo­ple, ‘This is what the Lord says: When peo­ple fall down, don’t they get up again? When they dis­cover they’re on the wrong road, don’t they turn back? Then why do these peo­ple stay on their self-destructive path? Why do the peo­ple of Jerusalem refuse to turn back? They cling tightly to their lies and will not turn around.’” (Jer 8:4)

Here we are, Sixth Cen­tury B.C., and the spir­i­tual state of God’s peo­ple is in a ter­ri­ble state. It makes my aggriev­e­ments look petty. And maybe that’s the point. The rela­tion­ship between God and His peo­ple have been in a rol­lar coaster ride for mil­len­nia. Sure, Jesus’ new covenant brought about a lot of changes but didn’t end hypocrisy or faith­less­ness. Protes­tants can point to the ref­or­ma­tion and Friends to the new peo­ple gath­ered by George Fox but both move­ments long ago floun­dered on the shoals of human weak­ness. His­tory hasn’t stopped. The tri­als of the spir­i­tual don’t stop. We don’t get a free ride of spir­i­tual ease just because we’re on the cur­rent edge of human history.

As early Friends were aware, a spir­i­tual life still requires lift­ing of the cross. It’s easy to let dis­ap­point­ments lead to despair, and to retreat into the many temp­ta­tions of the mod­ern world has at ready sup­ply. In that state it’s easy to put off wor­ry­ing about our duties to our fel­low humans, to life on earth and to God. Every once in a while I’ll get whiny about some­thing and my dear wife will say “get over it and do what you need to do already.” We’ve remem­bered the story of Jere­miah for 2500 years for the same rea­son: “you think you’ve got it bad, you’re not being dec­i­mated and enslaved in Baby­lon!” Perspective.

* * *

I’m still think­ing about one of the con­ver­sa­tions I had the other week at Vineland Men­non­ite Church–about the dif­fer­ence between the­ol­ogy and Bib­li­cism. I like the­ol­ogy and I like learn­ing about the con­text of Bible sto­ries I read. I enjoy hear­ing new the­o­ries about old para­doxes (for exam­ple, Mar­tin Luther King’s take on the story of the Good Samar­i­tan fas­ci­nates me in part because it reminds me that the story is set on a real road and is intended as a story about real peo­ple mak­ing dif­fi­cult choices). But I’m also aware that it’s easy to spend so much time read­ing and talk­ing about the com­men­tary that I for­get to read the orig­i­nal sto­ries them­selves. If sto­ries are reli­gious ed, then we have to remem­ber to actu­ally read the sto­ries. Some­times when I stum­ble on the cool blogs of the clever­est min­is­ters I won­der if they stop to actu­ally read the sto­ries. So much energy seems to be expended on mak­ing up new words and giv­ing mes­sages of easy hope. I can’t see Jere­miah join­ing them at the local church brew pub fest to hoist a Rolling Rock. The cur­rent New Tes­ta­ment read­ing in the One Year Bible is Paul’s let­ter to the Coloss­ian, which includes this gem:

Don’t let any­one cap­ture you (Colos­sians) with empty philoso­phies and high-sounding non­sense that come from human think­ing and from the spir­i­tual pow­ers of this world, rather than from Christ.

I’m sure George Fox hooted in joy when he read that line! The sto­ries remind us that all is not well and that all will not be well. Temp­ta­tions still nips at our best inten­tions. The great­est temp­ta­tion is self-reliance. Our test as indi­vid­u­als and as a peo­ple will be demon­strated by how we patiently and faith­fully we bear the hard­ships we encounter and keep our trust in the risen Christ.

Asked what we believe many mod­ern Friends will reply “That there is that of God in every­one.” It’s an early Quaker phrase but what exactly do we mean by it? Part of its cur­rent pop­u­lar­ity is its ambi­gu­ity. We live in a fiercely indi­vid­u­al­is­tic age and it can be read as a call to per­sonal inde­pen­dence: “I don’t need to care what you think because I’ve got that of God in me!”

So it’s use­ful to read William Penn’s thoughts on spir­i­tual indi­vid­u­al­ism in The Rise and Progress of the Peo­ple Called Quak­ers. He’s talk­ing about those mem­bers of the still-new Soci­ety of Friends who had become the “great­est trou­ble,” who “fought domin­ion over conscience”:

They would have had every Man inde­pen­dent, that as he had the Prin­ci­ple in him­self, he should only stand and fall to that, and no Body else: Not con­sid­er­ing that the Prin­ci­ple is one in all and though the Mea­sure of Light or Grace might dif­fer, yet the Nature of it was the same; and being so, the struck at the Spir­i­tual Unity, which a Peo­ple, guided by the same Prin­ci­ple, are nat­u­rally led into: So that what is an Evil to one, is so to all, from the Sense and Savour of the one uni­ver­sal Prin­ci­ple which is com­mon to all, and which the Dis­af­fected also pro­fess to be the Root of all true Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship, and that Spirit into which the Peo­ple of God drink, and come to be Spiritually-minded, and of one Heart and one Soul.

For Penn, that of God is the spirit of the inward Christ–a spirit we can drink from to find spir­i­tual unity. It is an author­ity rooted not in our own human weak­ness but in  uni­ver­sal spir­i­tual truths that are acces­si­ble to all.

Yes­ter­day the fam­ily vis­ited Vineland NJ Men­non­ite Church.

We were com­ing after 8:30 Mass at Julie’s church and arrived a few min­utes before the wor­ship ser­vice while they were doing their reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­gram. But the dis­tinc­tion between reli­gious ed and wor­ship was min­i­mal, almost non-existent. Atten­dance at both was near-universal (about 110 total) and much of the wor­ship itself was reli­gious edu­ca­tion. There was a series of 15 minute’ish ser­mons (deliv­ered by var­i­ous men), bro­ken up by some four-part a capella singing (beau­ti­ful), recita­tions from a Bible verse they were mem­o­riz­ing and kneel­ing prayer (a sur­prise the first time, as they all spin around sud­denly to face the back, kneel and pray).

It’s prob­a­bly one of the most reli­giously con­sci­en­tious com­mu­ni­ties I’ve seen. A lot of the ser­vice involved review­ing belief struc­ture. Their book of dis­ci­pline is very slim, not much more than a tract, but it’s some­thing they use and they spent part of the time read­ing from it. Much of the wor­ship hour was meant to rein­force who they were, why they were and how they were–to explain over and over why they led their dis­tinc­tive life. Theirs is a vol­un­tary asso­ci­a­tion for those who agree to fol­low the author­ity of the group’s teachings. I sus­pect that every adult in the room could give a detailed pre­sen­ta­tion on con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite faith and give detailed answers about points of doctrine. At the risk of insert­ing my own opin­ion I will ven­ture that the wor­ship ser­vice felt a bit dry (as Julie said, there wasn’t a ounce of mys­ti­cism in the whole pro­ceed­ing) but I don’t think the mem­bers there would feel offended by this obser­va­tion. Excit­ing the senses is less impor­tant than review­ing the val­ues and liv­ing the moral life.

Visu­ally, the group is strik­ing. Every man in the room wore a long-sleeved white dress shirt but­toned all the way up, dark pants and black shoes; all had short hair and only one or two had facial hair. I was more dis­tinc­tively plain in my broad­falls and sus­penders but the effect of sixty-or-so men and young boys all dressed alike was visu­ally stun­ning. Like a lot of plain peo­ples, the women were more obvi­ously plain and all but one or two wore lightly-colored cape dresses and head cov­er­ings (I later learned that the excep­tions were new­com­ers who weren’t yet mem­bers). Seated was seg­re­gated, women on the left, men on the right. Gen­der roles are very clear. There were kids–lots of kids–all around, and a big focus of the ser­mons was fam­ily liv­ing. One extended ser­mon focused on dis­cern­ing between pro­vid­ing well for one’s fam­ily vs. greed and the bal­ance between work­ing hard for your fam­ily vs. giv­ing up some things so you can spend time with them. Kids were present through­out the ser­vice and were rel­a­tively well behaved.

The church itself was called a meet­ing­house and was plain–no crosses of course. Peo­ple sat in pews and there was a raised area up front for min­is­ters and elders. The build­ing dou­bled as a school­house dur­ing the week and its school­rooms had a lot of Rod and Staff books, famil­iar from our own home school­ing. A mem­ber described the school as one leg of the three-legged stool, along with church and fam­ily. If any one part of the equa­tion was lack­ing in some way, the other two could help insure the child’s moral wel­fare. School was free for church mem­bers but was open on a tuition basis to non-Mennonites. These out­siders were required to make cer­tain lifestyle choices that would insure the school stayed rel­a­tively pure; the most impor­tant require­ment was that the fam­ily not have a tele­vi­sion at home.

My reg­u­lar read­ers will have one ques­tion on their mind right about now: did any­one invite us to lunch? Why yes they did! We didn’t even have to prompt it. We knew a cou­ple there–M and J, who run a restau­rant in the local farmer’s mar­ket, a favorite Sat­ur­day morn­ing stop for us. They took us under their wing when they rec­og­nized us, sit­ting with us dur­ing wor­ship and then show­ing us the school. J said that if we came back again we could come over for lunch. Then she back­tracked and offered that we could come now, explain­ing that the church had had recent dis­cus­sions over whether it was too pushy to ask first-time atten­ders to lunch or whether they should restrain them­selves and invite them on the sec­ond visit. Wow, a church that thinks about this?!

So we fol­lowed them to their place for lunch. It was a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to ask more ques­tions and get to know one another. Meals are impor­tant. Julie and I had won­dered why there were Men­non­ites in Vineland NJ of all places–and two Men­non­ite churches at that! Short story is that there had been a civil­ian pub­lic ser­vice facil­ity in Vineland for con­sci­en­tious objec­tors and Lancaster-area Men­non­ites decided that “the boys” sta­tioned there needed the ground­ing of a local church com­mu­nity (appar­ently other C.O. camps were scenes of debauchery–Mennonite drag rac­ing in Col­orado Springs was cited). This became Norma Men­non­ite Church, which still exists and is another local church I’ve been mean­ing to visit for years (hi Mandy!). In the 1960s, there was a great round of lib­er­al­iza­tion among Men­non­ites, an unof­fi­cial aban­don­ment of the dis­tinc­tives cod­i­fied in their books of dis­ci­plines. Many churches split and the Vineland Church was formed by those mem­bers of Norma who wanted to main­tain the discipline.

This prob­a­bly explains the strong focus on the rules of the discipline. For those want­ing more of the his­to­ries, I com­mend Stephen Scott’s excel­lent “An Intro­duc­tion to Old Order and Con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite Groups” along with any­thing else Stephen Scott has writ­ten. The Vineland con­gre­ga­tion is part of the East­ern Penn­syl­va­nia Men­non­ite Church con­fer­ence, pro­filed on pages 173–176. A lot of the Men­non­ite issues and splits are echoed among Friends and we’d do well to under­stand these cousins of ours.

The result is a church that’s big on group prac­tice: the dress, the lifestyle. M. told me that they don’t believe in the­ol­ogy but in Bib­li­cism. He explained that they don’t think the Bible con­tains the word of God but instead that it is the Word of God and he paused to let the dis­tinc­tion sink in. The Bible is not to be inter­preted but read and fol­lowed, with spe­cial atten­tion given the gospels and the let­ters of Paul.

So no, I’m not going to go Con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite on you all. I have a TV. My pro­fes­sion is web design (they’re not into the inter­net, natch). I’m mar­ried to a pracitic­ing Catholic (I don’t know how they would bend on that) and at this point my brain is wired in a curi­ous, out­ward way that wouldn’t fit into the nor­ma­tive struc­tures of a group like this. Doctrinally-speaking, I’m a Friend in that I think the Word of God is the Inward Christ’s direct spirit and that the Bible needs to be read in that Light. There’s a lot of peo­ple who wouldn’t fit for var­i­ous rea­sons, peo­ple who I would want in my church (they main­tain a hard line against remar­riage after divorce and I didn’t even ask about gay issues). But I have to admit that the process and struc­ture puts together a really great com­mu­nity of peo­ple. They’re hard-working, kind, charitable and not nearly as judg­men­tal as you might imagine–in prac­tice, less judg­men­tal than a lot of pro­gres­sive reli­gious peo­ple I know. Non-resistance is one of the pil­lars of their prac­tice and they were gen­uinely inter­ested in Julie’s Catholic church and my expe­ri­ences among Friends and we talked a fair bit about Islam.

Nor­mally I’d give a big thanks to the church and M & J here, except I know they won’t read this. I am grate­ful to their kind­ness in shar­ing their church, beliefs and fam­ily meal with us.

William Penn, on the “prim­i­tive Mes­sage” of Friends:

That God is Light and in Him is no Dark­ness at all; and that he has sent His Son a Light into the World, to Enlighten all Men in order to Sal­va­tion and that they that say they have Fel­low­ship with God, and are his Chil­dren and Peo­ple, and yet walk in Dark­ness, viz. in Dis­obe­di­ence to the light in their Con­sciences, and after the Van­ity of this World, they Lie, and do not the Truth. But they all such as love the Light, and bring their Deeds to it, and walk in the Light, as God is Light, the Blood of Jesus Christ His Son, should cleanse them from all Sin.

From “Rise and Progress of the Peo­ple called Quak­ers,” p. 42 of my edition). I share this in part because Brent Bill’s been ask­ing about the mes­sage of Friends. It was inter­est­ing to read Penn’s answer at break­fast this morn­ing! It’s well worth unpack­ing the gram­mar of the long clauses!

This pas­sage from Acts 17 made me laugh in recog­ni­tion. How many of us are like the First Cen­tury Athe­ni­ans, fol­low­ers of any­thing that is new: aca­d­e­mic trends, social net­works, the 24-hour news feeds? Paul’s mes­sage was sim­ple: that the God and peace we seek is close at hand and the one we’re most tempted to overlook.

It should be explained that all the Athe­ni­ans as well as the for­eign­ers in Athens seemed to spend all their time dis­cussing the lat­est ideas. So Paul, stand­ing before the coun­cil, addressed them as fol­lows: “Men of Athens, I notice that you are very reli­gious in every way, for as I was walk­ing along I saw your many shrines. And on of your altars had this inscrip­tion on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’ This God, whom you wor­ship with­out know­ing, is the one I’m telling you about.

He is the God who made the world and every­thing in it… His pur­pose was for the nations to seek after God and per­haps feel­ing their way toward him and find him–though he is not very far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist.

This is the New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion.

Over on Tape Flags and First Thoughts, Su Penn has a great post called “Still Think­ing About My Quaker Meet­ing & Me.” She writes about a process of self-identity that her meet­ing recently went through it and the dif­fi­cul­ties she had with the process.

I won­dered whether this dif­fi­culty has become one of our modern-day stages of devel­op­ing in the min­istry. Both Samuel Bow­nas (read/buy) and Howard Brin­ton (buy) iden­ti­fied typ­i­cal stages that Friends grow­ing in the min­istry typ­i­cally go through. Not every­one expe­ri­ences Su’s rift between their meeting’s iden­tity and a desire for a God-grounded meet­ing com­mu­nity, but enough of us have that I don’t think it’s the foibles of par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­u­als or monthly meet­ings. Let me tease out one piece: that of indi­vid­ual and group iden­ti­ties. Much of the dis­cus­sion in the com­ments of Su’s post have swirled around rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent con­cep­tions of this.

Many mod­ern Friends have become pretty strict indi­vid­u­al­ists. We spend a lot of time talk­ing about “com­mu­nity” but we aren’t prac­tic­ing it in the way that Friends have under­stood it–as a “reli­gious society.” The indi­vid­u­al­ism of our age sees it as rude to state a vision of Friends that leaves out any of our members–even the most het­ero­dox. We are only as united as our most far-flung believer (and every decade the sweep gets larger). The myth of our age is that all reli­gious expe­ri­ences are equal, both within and out­side of par­tic­u­lar reli­gious soci­eties, and that it’s intol­er­ant to think of dif­fer­ences as any­thing more than language.

This is why I cast Su’s issues as being those of a min­is­ter. There has always been the need for some­one to call us back to the faith. Con­trary to modern-day pop­u­lar opin­ion, this can be done with great love. It is in fact great love (Quaker Jane) to share the good news of the directly-accessible lov­ing Christ, who loves us so much He wants to show us the way to right­eous liv­ing. This Quaker idea of right­eous­ness has noth­ing to do with who you sleep with, the gas mileage of your car or even the “cor­rect­ness” of your the­ol­ogy. Jesus boiled faith­ful­ness down into two com­mands: love God with all your might (how­ever much that might be) and love your neigh­bor as yourself.

A “reli­gious soci­ety” is not just a “com­mu­nity.” As a reli­gious soci­ety we are called to have a vision that is stronger and bolder than the lan­guage or under­stand­ing of indi­vid­ual mem­bers. We are not a per­fect com­mu­nity, but we can be made more per­fect if we return to God to the full­ness we’ve been given. That is why we’ve come together into a reli­gious society.

“What makes us Friends?” Just fol­low­ing the mod­ern tes­ti­monies doesn’t put us very squarely in the Friends tradition–SPICE is just a recipe for respect­ful liv­ing. “What makes us Friends?” Just set­ting the stop­watch to an hour and sit­ting qui­etly doesn’t do it–a wor­ship style is a con­tainer at best and false idol at worst. “How do we love God?” “How do we love our neighbor?” “What makes us Friends?” These are the ques­tions of min­istry. These are the build­ing blocks of outreach.

I’ve seen nascent min­is­ters (“infant min­is­ters” in the phras­ing of Samual Bow­nas) start ask­ing these ques­tions, flare up on inspired blog posts and then tail­dive as they meet up with the cold-water real­ity of a local meet­ing that is unsup­port­ive or inat­ten­tive. Many of them have left our reli­gious soci­ety. How do we sup­port them? How do we keep them? Our answers will deter­mine whether our meet­ing are reli­gious soci­eties or communities.

Warn­ing: this is a blog post about blogging.