ethnic Posts

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

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!

To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of... well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia's interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia's de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?

But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We've been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven't we learned how to stop them?

Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.

Why hasn't the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The "international community" needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week's real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.

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.

I'm reading Bill Taber's fascinating history of Ohio Conservative Friends called The Eye of Faith. Like any good history there's a lot of the present in there. There's a strong feeling of deja-vu to the scenes of Friends in conflict and various characters come to life as much for their foibles as their strength of character (there's more than a few bloggers echoed there). I'm now a few years into the second great separation, the Wilburite/Gurneyite split that brewed for years before erupting in 1854.

I'm not one of those Friends who bemoan the various schisms. The diversity of those calling themselves Friends today is so great that it's hard to imagine them ever having stayed part of the same body. Only a strong authoritarian control could have prevented the separations and even then, large masses of the "losing" party would have simply left and regrouped elsewhere: the only real difference is that one party stops using the Quaker name. Here in South Jersey, where the only Gurneyite meeting wasn't recognized by either Philadelphia yearly meeting for almost a hundred years, we've got dozens of Methodist "meeting houses" with graveyards full of old Quaker family names. Fascinating histories could be written of Friends who didn't bother to squabble over meetinghouse deeds and simply decided to congregate under another banner.

One concept I'm chewing on is that of the "remnant." As I understand it, the doctrine comes largely from Revelation 12 and is used by small theologically-conservative Christian sects to explain why their small size isn't a problem; it's kind of like Mom saying it's better to do the right thing than to be popular. When the remnant community is a relatively isolated locale like Barnesville, there's also the image of the Land That Time Forgot, the place where the old time ways has come down to us most fully intact. There's truth to the preserving power of isolation: linguists claim the Ozark hillbilly accent most clearly mirrors Shakespeare's. But Ohio Friends aren't simply Jed Clampett's Quaker cousins.

Like most rural Quaker yearly meetings, Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative has lost much of its membership over the last hundred years. I don't have statistics but it seems as if a good percentage of the active members of the yearly meeting hail from outside southeastern Ohio and a great many are convinced Friends. This echoes the most significant change in U.S. Quakerism in the past fifty years: the shift from a self-perpetuating community with strong local customs and an almost ethnic sense of self, to a society of convinced believers.

The keen sense of self-sufficiency and isolation that held together tight-knit Quaker communities over the centuries are largely non-sustainable now. In our media-saturated lives even Barnesville teens can get the latest Hollywood gossip and New York fashions in real time. Yes it's possible to ban the TV and live as a media hermit in a commune somewhere, but even that only gets you so far. Once upon a time, not so long ago, a Friend could situate themselves in the wider Quaker universe simply by comparing family trees and school ties but that's becoming less important all the time. For those of us who enter into the Society of Friends as adults--majorities in many yearly meetings now--there's a sense of choice, of donning the clothes. We play at being Quaker until voila!, some mystical alchemical process happens and we identify as Quaker--even if we're not always quite so made-over into Quakerness as we imagine ourselves.

At the Ohio sessions a few Friends really loved Wess Daniel's statement that "A tradition that loses the ability to explain itself becomes an empty form" (see his wrap-up post here). One Ohio Friend said he had heard it postulated that isolated and inward-focused communities like Ohio Conservative were God's method of preserving the old ways against the onslaught of the modernist age (with its mocking disbelief) until they could be reintroduced to the wider world in a more forgiving post-modernist era. Looked at that way, Quakerism isn't a quaint relic in need of the same botox/bleach blond "NOW!" makeover every other spiritual tradition is getting. Think of it instead as a time capsule ready to be opened. An interesting theory. Are we ready to look at this peculiar thing we've dug up and reverse-engineer it back into meaningfulness?

Update:

Kirk W. over at Street Corner Society emailed me that he had recently put the Journal of Ann Branson online. She features heavily in the middle part of Taber's book, which is the story of Conservative Ohio finding its own identity. Kirk suggests, and I agree, that her journal might be considered one of the artifacts of the Ohio time capsule. I hope to find some time to read this in the not-too-distant future.

The Palestinian president Yasser Arafat died a few days ago, after weeks of deteriorating health. As the most recognizable face of the Palestinian struggle for the last fifty years, Yassir Arafat was undoubtedly one of the most important world leaders of the Twentieth Century. While he didn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, he was far from the first architect of murder to walk off with it (our own Henry Kissinger comes to mind), and he is one of a few men who could legitimately claim to have defined war and peace in our age.

There's a saying in my religious tradition that some problems can only be resolved after a certain amount of funerals have passed. It's been hard to imagine how a lasting peace could be built in the Middle East while he and his counterparts in the Israeli gerontocracy remained in power. The twentieth century saw plenty of autocratic leaders who came to personify their nation and whose decades-long tenure came to represent the stalemate to real change or lasting peace. When the death of Zaire's iconic strongman Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 opened up possibilities for peaceful realignments in the region, even though war was the first result. For the death of strong-willed leaders doesn't always bring about peace. When Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito died, the power vacuum imploded the country and set the stage for decades of civil wars. The atrocities and chaos brought the word "ethnic cleansing" into our vocabulary.

Perhaps the saddest commentary on all this was one I heard on the street. Two men were talking loudly about having a TV show interrupted the day before, only five minutes before a scheduled program break. "It's not like it's that important that you can't wait five minutes" repeated the one, over and over. Yes, my friend, Arafat's death is that important.

One of the more revolutionary transformations of American Quakerism in the twentieth century has been our understanding of the testimonies. In online discussions I find that many Friends think the "SPICE" testimonies date back from time immemorial. Not only are they relatively new, they're a different sort of creature from their predecessors.

In the last fifty years it's become difficult to separate Quaker testimonies from questions of membership. Both were dramatically reinvented by liberal Gurneyite Friends in the early part of the Twentieth Century and the codified by Howard Brinton's landmark Friends for 300 Years, published in the early 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brinton comes right out and says that the test for membership shouldn't involve issues of faith or of practice but should be based on whether one feels comfortable with the other members of the Meeting. This conception of membership has gradually become dominant among liberal Friends in the half century since this book was published. The trouble with it is twofold. The first is that "comfort" is not necessarily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first generation of Friends had used Brinton's model there would be no Religious Society of Friends to talk about (we'd be lost in the historical footnotes with the Muggletonians, Grindletonians and the like). One of the classic tests for discernment is whether an proposed action is contrary to self-will. Comfort is not our Society's calling.

The second problem is that comfortability comes from fitting in with a certain kind of style, class, color and attitude. It's fine to want comfort in our Meetings but when we make it the primary test for membership, it becomes a cloak for ethnic and cultural bigotries that keep us from reaching out. If you have advanced education, mild manners and liberal politics, you'll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meetings. If you're too loud or too ethnic or speak with a working class accent you'll likely feel out of place. Samuel Caldwell gave a great talk about the difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith and I've proposed a tongue-in-cheek testimony against community as way of opening up discussion.

The Feel Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also reinvented the Testimonies. They had been specific and often proscriptive: against gambling, against participation in war. But the new testimonies became vague feel-good character traits--the now-famous SPICE testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Who isn't in favor of all those values? A president taking us to war will tell us it's the right thing to do (integrity) to contruct lasting peace (peace) so we can bring freedom to an oppressed country (equality) and create a stronger sense of national pride (community) here at home.

We modern Friends (liberal ones at least) were really transformed by the redefintions of membership and the testimonies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our current testimonies are the ancient ones. I think an awareness of how Friends handled these issues in the 300 years before Brinton would help us navigate a way out of the "ethical society" we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the radical transformation of the testimonies. The main accomplishment of East Coast Quakerism in the mid-twentieth century was the reuniting of many of the yearly meetings that had been torn apart by schisms starting in 1827. By end of that century Friends were divided across a half dozen major theological strains manifested in a patchwork of institutional divisions. One way out of this morass was to present the testimonies as our core unifying priciples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Christians (even as post-Christians), our core commandment is simple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40 and Mark 12:30-31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker testimonies also hang on these commandments: they are our collective memory. While they are in contant flux, they refer back to 350 years of experience. These are the truths we can testify to as a people, ways of living that we have learned from our direct experience of the Holy Spirit. They are intricately tied up with our faith and with how we see ourselves following through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I'm sure that Howard Brinton didn't intend to separate the testimonies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a modern liberal audience. By popularizing them he made them so accessible that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin testimonies of plainness and simplicity. First the ancient testimony of plainness. Here's the description from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world's corrupt language, manners, vain and needless things and fashions, in apparel, buildings, and furniture of houses, some of which are immodest, indecent, and unbecoming. And that they avoid immoderation in the use of lawful things, which though innocent in themselves, may thereby become hurtful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are calculated more to please a vain and wanton mind, than for real usefulness; and let tradesmen and others, members of our religious society, be admonished, that they be not accessary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, minding the grace of God which brings salvation, and teaches to deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his blessing, and be instrumental in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there's nothing in there about the length of one's hem. The key phrase for me is the warning about doing things "calculated to please a vain and wanton mind." Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neighbors; immoderation makes it hard to hear God's still small voice; self-sacrifice is necessary to be an instrument of God's love. This testimony is all about our relationships with God and with each other.

Most modern Friends have dispensed with "plainness" and recast the testimony as "simplicity." Ask most Friends about this testimony and they'll start telling you about their cluttered desks and their annoyance with cellphones. Ask for a religious education program on simplicity and you'll almost certainly be assigned a book from the modern voluntary simplicity movement, one of those self-help manuals that promise inner peace if you plant a garden or buy a fuel-efficient car, with "God" absent from the index. While it's true that most Americans (and Friends) would have more time for spiritual refreshment if they uncluttered their lives, the secular notions of simplicity do not emanate out of a concern for "gospel order" or for a "right ordering" of our lives with God. Voluntary simplicity is great: I've published books on it and I live car-free, use cloth diapers, etc. But plainness is something different and it's that difference that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called "SPICE" testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) and you'll find the modern notions are secularlized over-simplications of the Quaker understandings. In our quest for unity, we've over-stated their importance.

Earlier I mentioned that many of the earlier testimonies were proscriptive--they said certain actions were not in accord with our principles. Take a big one: after many years of difficult ministering and soul searching Friends were able to say that slavery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep communion with God; this is different than saying we believe in equality. Similarly, saying we're against all outward war is different than saying we're in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of casting everything in postitive terms, sometimes we need to come out and say a particular practice is just plain wrong, that it interferes with and goes against our relationship with God and with our neighbors.

I'll leave it up to you to start chewing over what specific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our ministers and meetings found that a particular practice was against our testimonies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of ministering with them and laboring with them. It would be hard. Feelings would be hurt. People would go away angry.

After a half-century of liberal individualism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is something to Quakerism, that it does have norms and boundaries. We would need all the love, charity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, especially because it's work with members of our community, people we love and honor. We would have to follow John Woolman's example: our first audience would not be Washington policy makers instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our values in secular terms. An ability to talk about pacifism with our non-Quaker neighbors in a smart, informed way is essential (thus my Nonviolence.org ministry, currently receiving two millions visitors a year). When we affirm community and equality we are witnessing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we've contributed to the national and international discussions on these topics.

But for all of their contemporary centrality to Quakerism, the testimonies are only second-hand outward forms. They are not to be worshipped in and of themselves. Modern Friends come dangerously close to lifting up the peace testimony as a false idol--the principle we worship over everything else. When we get so good at arguing the practicality of pacifism, we forget that our testimony is first and foremost our proclamation that we live in the power that takes away occassion for war. When high school math teachers start arguing over arcane points of nuclear policy, playing armchair diplomat with yearly meeting press releases to the State Department, we loose credibility and become something of a joke. But when we minister to the Power is the Good News we speak with an authority that can thunder over petty governments with it's command to Quake before God.

When we remember the spiritual source of our faith, our understandings of the testimonies deepen immeasurably. When we let our actions flow from uncomplicated faith we gain a power and endurance that strengthens our witness. When we speak of our experience of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the authority as others recognize the echo of that "still small voice" speaking to their hearts. Our love and our witness are simple and universal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Halleluiah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

• James Healton has a great piece on the testimonies over on Quakerinfo.com. The One Testimony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ's role in the testimonies. (Be sure to check out Quakerinfo's list of testimony resources.