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.

Warn­ing: this is a blog post about blogging.

Robin wrote a lit­tle about the New Monas­tic move­ment in a plug for the Pen­dle Hill work­shop I’m doing with Wess Daniels this Fall.

Here’s my work­ing the­ory: I think Lib­eral Friends have a good claim to invent­ing the “new monas­tic” move­ment thirty years ago in the form of Move­ment for a New Soci­ety, a net­work of peace and anti-nuclear activists based in Philadel­phia that cod­i­fied a kind of “sec­u­lar Quaker” decision-making process and trained thou­sands of peo­ple from around the world in a kind of engaged drop-out lifestyle that fea­tured low-cost com­mu­nal liv­ing arrange­ments in poor neigh­bor­hoods with part-time jobs that gave them flex­i­bil­ity to work as full-time com­mu­nity activists. There are few activist cam­paigns in the 1970s and 1980s that weren’t touched by the MNS style and a less-ideological, more lived-in MNS cul­ture sur­vives today in bor­der­line neigh­bor­hoods in Philadel­phia and other cities. The high-profile new monas­tics rarely seem to give any props to Quak­ers or MNS, but I’d be will­ing to bet if you sat in on any of their meet­ings the process would be much more inspired by MNS than Robert’s Rules of Order or any fif­teen cen­tury monas­tic rule that might be cited.

For a decade I lived in West Philly in what I called “the ruins of the Move­ment for a New Soci­ety.” The for­mal struc­ture of MNS had dis­banded but many of its insti­tu­tions car­ried on in a kind of lived-in way. I worked at the remain­ing pub­lish­ing house, New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers, lived in a land-trusted West Philly coop house, and was fed from the old neigh­bor­hood food coop and occa­sion­ally dropped in or helped out with Train­ing for Change, a revived train­ing cen­ter started by MNS-co-founder (and Cen­tral Philadel­phia Meeting-member) George Lakey It was a tight neigh­bor­hood, with strong cross-connections, and it was able to absorb related move­ments with dif­fer­ent styles (e.g., a strong anar­chist scene that grew in the late 1980s). I don’t think it’s coin­ci­dence that some of the Philly emer­gent church projects started in West Philly and is strong in the neigh­bor­hoods that have become the new ersatz West Philly as the actual neigh­bor­hood has gentrified.

So some ques­tions I’ll be wrestling with over the next six months and will bring to Pen­dle Hill:

• Why haven’t more of us in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends adopted this engaged lifestyle?
• Why haven’t we been good at artic­u­lat­ing it all this time?
• Why did the for­mal struc­ture of the Quaker-ish “new monas­ti­cism” not sur­vive the 1980s?
• Why don’t we have any younger lead­ers of the Quaker monas­ti­cism? Why do we need oth­ers to remind us of our own recent tradition?
• In what ways are some Friends (and some fel­low trav­el­ers) still liv­ing out the “Old New Monas­tic” expe­ri­ence, just with­out the hype and with­out the buzz?

It’s entirely pos­si­ble that the “new monas­ti­cism” isn’t sus­tain­able. At the very least Friends’ expe­ri­ences with it should be stud­ied to see what hap­pened. Is West Philly what the new monas­ti­cism looks like thirty years later? The biggest dif­fer­ences between now and the hey­day of the Move­ment for a New Soci­ety is 1) the Internet’s abil­ity to orga­nize and stay in touch in com­pletely dif­fer­ent ways; and 2) the power of the major Evan­gel­i­cal pub­lish­ing houses that are hyp­ing the new kids.

I’ll be look­ing at myself as well. After ten years, I felt I needed a change. I’m now in the “real world”–semi sub­ur­ban free­stand­ing house, nuclear fam­ily. The old new West Philly monas­ti­cism, like the “new monas­ti­cism” seems opti­mized for hip twenty-something sub­ur­ban kids who roman­ti­cized the gritty city. Peo­ple of other demo­graph­ics often fit in, but still it was never very scal­able and for many not very sus­tain­able. How do we bring these con­cerns out to a world where there are sub­urbs, fam­i­lies, etc?

—

RELATED READING: I first wrote about the sim­i­lar­ity between MNS and the Philadel­phia “New Monas­tic” move­ment six years ago in Peace and Twenty-Somethings, where I argued that Pen­dle Hill should take a seri­ous look at this new movement.

My F/friend Raye Hodg­son is tak­ing a train from Con­necti­cut to South Jer­sey next week for a visit, and locals and would-be vis­i­tors are invited to my house for some wor­ship! Raye’s involved with Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive and New Eng­land Friends and seems to be doing a cool sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture project these days (which I didn’t know except for Google!)

It’s next Thurs­day, the 19th at 7:30pm in Ham­mon­ton. If you want to join but don’t have my address just send me an email and I’ll pro­vide details. There’s also a Face­book event list­ing for this. If enough peo­ple are inter­ested we can have more occa­sional Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quak­erly wor­ship in this part of South Jer­sey! If you can’t make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I’ll keep you in the loop.

UPDATE: The wor­ship went well, about half a dozen peo­ple showed up. If you want to be alerted to any follow-up wor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties in the Ham­mon­ton area send me an email and I’ll add you to my list.

Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and propos­ing a peace wit­ness for next year:

My solu­tion: Quak­ers, Men­non­ites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to par­tic­i­pate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suf­fer the con­se­quences. I think we should cam­paign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meet­ings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. com­mu­ni­ties. What are they going to do–throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can’t do that for­ever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quak­ers and other paci­fists to sit in jail for not pay­ing taxes. It doesn’t make sense.

A com­menter chimes in with a warn­ing about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penal­ties a quar­ter cen­tury ago. But I know of some­one who didn’t pay taxes for twenty years and recently vol­un­teered the infor­ma­tion to the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice. The col­lec­tors were non­cha­lant, polite and sym­pa­thetic and set­tled for a very rea­son­able amount. If this friend’s expe­ri­ence is any guide, there’s not much drama to be had in war tax resis­tance. These days, Cae­sar doesn’t care much.

What if our wit­ness was directed not at the fed­eral gov­ern­ment but at our fel­low Chris­tians? We could fol­low Quaker founder George Fox’s exam­ple and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphor­i­cal) and begin preach­ing the good news that war goes against the teach­ings of Jesus. As always, we would be respect­ful and char­i­ta­ble but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have trav­eled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I under­stand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Tes­ta­ment sym­pa­thetic to our cause. And I have every rea­son to believe that the Inward Christ is still hum­ming our tune and burn­ing bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to lis­ten. Just as John Wool­man min­is­tered with his co-religionists about the sin of slav­ery, maybe our job is to min­is­ter to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neigh­bors of ours? Twenty years of peace orga­niz­ing and Friends orga­niz­ing makes me doubt we could find any large group of “his­toric peace church” mem­bers to join us. We talk big and write pretty epis­tles, but few indi­vid­u­als engage in wit­nesses that involve any dan­ger of real sac­ri­fice. The way most of our estab­lished bod­ies couldn’t fig­ure out how to respond to a mod­ern day prophetic Chris­t­ian wit­ness in Tom Fox’s kid­nap­ping is the norm. When the IRS threat­ened to put liens on Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing to force resis­tant staffers to pay, the gen­eral sec­re­tary and clerk said all sorts of sym­pa­thetic words of anguish (which they prob­a­bly even meant), then docked the employee’s pay any­way. There have been times when clear-eyed Chris­tians didn’t mind loos­ing their lib­erty or prop­erty in ser­vice to the gospel. Early Friends called our emu­la­tion of Christ’s sac­ri­fice the Lamb’s War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Baby­lo­nia itself hasn’t brought back the old fire. Our meet­ing­houses sit quaint, with own­er­ship deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands won­der­ing why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerg­ing church kids?: all those peo­ple read­ing Shane Clai­borne, mov­ing to neigh­bor­hoods in need, orga­niz­ing into small cells to talk late into the night about prim­i­tive Chris­tian­ity? Some of them are actu­ally putting down their can­dles and pre­ten­tious jar­gon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accu­mu­lated wis­dom about what it means the prim­i­tive Chris­t­ian life, even if we’re pretty rusty on its actual prac­tice. What shape would that wit­ness take and who would join us into that unknown but famil­iar desert? What would our move­ment even be called? And does it matter?

—–

Any­one inter­ested in think­ing more on this should start sav­ing up their loose change ($200 com­muters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this Novem­ber when we lead a work­shop on “The New Monas­tics and Con­ver­gent Friends” at Pen­dle Hill near Philadel­phia. Methinks I’m already start­ing to blog about it.

On a recent evening I met up with Gath­er­ing in Light Wess, who was in Philadel­phia for a Quaker-sponsored peace con­fer­ence. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great din­ner, Wess and I tested some tes­ti­monies,
and a revolv­ing group of Friends ended up around a table in the
conference’s hotel lobby talk­ing late into the night (the links are
Wess’ reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp
account).

Of all of the many peo­ple I spoke with, only one had any kind of
fea­tured role at the con­fer­ence. With­out excep­tion my con­ver­sa­tion
part­ners were fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful about the issues that had
brought them to Philadel­phia, yet I sensed a per­vad­ing sense of missed
oppor­tu­nity: hun­dreds of lives rearranged and thou­sands of air miles
flown mostly to lis­ten to oth­ers talk. I spent my long com­mute home
won­der­ing what it would have been like to have spent the week­end in the
hotel lobby record­ing ten minute Youtube inter­views with as many
con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants as I could. We would have ended up with a
snap­shot of faith-based peace orga­niz­ing circa 2009.

Next week­end I’ll be burn­ing up more of the ozone layer by fly­ing to Cal­i­for­nia to co-lead a work­shop with Wess and Robin M. (details at Con​ver​gent​Friends​.org,
I’m sure we can squeeze more peo­ple in!) The par­tic­i­pant list looks
fab­u­lous. I don’t know every­one but there’s at least half a dozen
peo­ple com­ing who I would be thrilled to take work­shops from. I really
don’t want to spend the week­end hear­ing myself talk! I also know there
are plenty of peo­ple who can’t come because of com­mit­ments and costs.

So we’re going to try some experiments–they might work, they might not. On Quak­erQuaker, there’s a new group for the event and a dis­cus­sion thread open to all QQ mem­bers (sign up is quick and pain­less). For those of you com­fort­able with the QQ tag­ging sys­tem, the Deli­cious tag for the event is “quaker.reclaiming2009”. Robin M has pro­posed using #con­ver­gent­friends as our Twit­ter hashtag.

There’s all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live
blog­ging via Twit­ter, any­one?), wacky wacky stuff that would dis­tract
us from what­ever mes­sage the Inward Christ might be try­ing to give us.
But behind all this is a real ques­tions about why and how we should
gather together as Friends. As the bank­ing sys­tem tanks, as the envi­ron­ment
strains, as com­mu­ni­ca­tions costs drop and we find our­selves in a curi­ous new econ­omy, what chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties open up?

It’s up on the side­bar and fea­tured on Quak­erQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas’ post “Why I bother with reli­gion.” I’ve writ­ten about the Emer­gent Church / Quaker exper­i­ment that Kevin-Douglass is help­ing to orga­nize down in Bal­ti­more. Check out their new’ish web­site, http://​www​.seton​hill​friends​.org/
Here’s a snip­pet of today’s post:

Orga­nized reli­gion is based in com­mu­nity. Being in a com­mu­nity chal­lenges me. Sim­ply hang­ing out with my friends and engag­ing my fam­ily isn’t enough. The risks of such an inten­tional com­mu­nity and the sup­port avail­able therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes eas­ily or go along with what exists around me. I’m chal­lenged in com­mu­nity. I’m held account­able. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an eth­i­cal soci­ety, the truth is that in a reli­gious com­mu­nity, we all seek to go much deeper than the psy­cho­log­i­cal or emo­tional lev­els. We seek to under­stand that Mys­tery — God. We seek to under­stand that trans­for­ma­tive and heal­ing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas orig­i­nally posted it to Face­book ear­lier today and I asked if he would sign up to Quak­erQuaker and post it there. There’s a lot of great stuff that goes up on Face­book and it’s a use­ful tool for keep­ing in touch with friends, but most posts are not vis­i­ble beyond your own Face­book friends list (it depends on your pri­vacy set­tings). If you post some­thing really good about Friends or belief on Face­book, seri­ously con­sider whether you might repost it some­where more pub­lic. If you don’t have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on Quak­erQuaker, where every reg­is­tered user has blog­ging capa­bil­i­ties (it cre­ates a bit of a meta­phys­i­cal con­nun­drum for the Quak­erQuaker edi­tors, as it means we’ll be link­ing QQ posts to the QQ site, but that’s fine).

This week I received an email from a young seeker in the Philadel­phia area who found my 2005 arti­cle “Wit­ness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings” pub­lished in FGCon­nec­tions. She’s a for­mer youth min­istries leader from a Pen­te­costal tra­di­tion, strongly attracted to Friends beliefs but not quite fit­ting in with the local meet­ings she’s been try­ing. Some­where she found my arti­cle and asks if I have any insights.

The 2005 arti­cle was largely pes­simistic, focused on the “com­mit­ted, inter­est­ing and bold twenty-something Friends
I knew ten years ago” who had left Friends and blam­ing “an insti­tu­tional Quak­erism that neglected them and
its own future” but my hope para­graph was optimistic:

There is hope… A great peo­ple might pos­si­bly be gath­ered from
the emer­gent church move­ment and the inter­net is full of amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tions
from new Friends and seek­ers. There are pock­ets in our branch of Quak­erism
where older Friends have con­tin­ued to men­tor and encour­age mean­ing­ful and
inte­grated youth lead­er­ship, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most
hope­fully, there’s a whole new gen­er­a­tion of twenty– some­thing Friends
on the scene with strong gifts that could be nur­tured and harnessed.

Hard to imag­ine that only three years ago I was an iso­lated FGC staffer left to pur­sue out­reach and youth min­istry work on my own time by an insti­tu­tion indif­fer­ent to either pur­suit. Both func­tions have become major staff pro­grams, but I’m no longer involved, which is prob­a­bly just as well, as nei­ther pro­gram has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most inter­est­ing work is still largely invisible.

Some of this work has been taken up by the new blog­gers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be con­geal­ing around all the blogs, Twit­ter net­works, Face­book friend­ships, inter­vis­i­ta­tions and IM chats. Many of us asso­ci­ated with Quak​erQuaker​.org have some sort of reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dence or par­tic­i­pa­tion with the Emerg­ing Church move­ment, we reg­u­larly high­light “amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tions” from new Friends and seek­ers and there’s a lot of inter-generational work going on. We’ve got a name for it in Con­ver­gent Friends, which reflects in part that “we” aren’t just the lib­eral Friends I imag­ined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quaker flavors.

But we end up with a prob­lem that’s become the cen­tral one for me and a lot of oth­ers: what can we tell a new seeker who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but doesn’t fit? I could point this week’s cor­re­spon­dent to meet­ings and churches hun­dreds of miles from her house, or encour­age her to start a blog, or com­pile a list of work­shops or gath­er­ings she might attend. But none of these are really sat­is­fac­tory answers.   

Else­where:

Gath­er­ing in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advi­sor Ryan Bol­ger that talks about tribe-style lead­er­ship and a new kind of church iden­tity that uses the instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools of the inter­net to forge a com­mu­nity that’s not nec­es­sar­ily lim­ited to local­ity. Bolger’s and his research part­ner report that they see “emerg­ing ini­tia­tives within tra­di­tional churches as the next
hori­zon for the spread of emerg­ing church prac­tices in the United States.” More links from Wess’ arti­cle on emerg­ing churches and denom­i­na­tions.