a little picture I am a South Jersey Friend and dad with a love out of outreach and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. I am the publisher of Quaker Quaker, a community site for Friends, and write about online publicity, organizing and design on my business site at MartinKelley.com.

faithfulness Posts

Return of the bloggers (and the links blog) (Links)

The automatically pulled in links haven't been working for a few days. Some readers will like that--less Martin clutter--but I like having them here and using the blog as a catch-all for my online public life.

April 6, 2008 12:39 AM. View Comments | Edit
Categories: delicious
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Dancing Quakers and Dead Pacifists (Links)

Apologies to Ralph DiGia, RIP, for the morbid link title. I met him a number of times in my associations with the War Resisters League (first through co-publishing books with New Society Publishers, then through a two year stint on the WRL National Committee). Ralph was an oasis in meetings packed to overflowing with outsized egos and self-important agendas. He was a warm guy, curious, always willing to lend a hand, a hard-working gem in the pacifist world.

February 1, 2008 11:26 PM. View Comments | Edit
Categories: delicious
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All sorts of Quaker links today

Lots of links today as I finally checked through my blogrolls!

January 12, 2008 11:22 PM. View Comments | Edit
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The spiritual discipline of sailing in circles

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.

December 10, 2007 6:33 AM. View Comments | Edit
Categories: quaker | Tags: committees, disbelief, dissent, failure, faithfulness, leading, ministry
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We the Church, the People and the Fellowship

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.

November 13, 2007 4:45 PM. View Comments | Edit
Categories: christian , ministry , outreach , quaker
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Convergent Friends, a long definition

Robin M posts this week about two Convergent Events happening in California in the next month or two. And she also tries out a simplified definition of Convergent Friends:

people who are engaged in the renewal movement within the Religious Society of Friends, across all the branches of Friends.

It sounds good but what does it mean? Specifically: who isn't for renewal, at least on a theoretical level? There are lots of faithful, smart and loving Friends out there advocating renewal who don't fit my definition of Convergent (which is fine, I don't think the whole RSoF should be Convergent, it's a movement in the river, not a dam).

When Robin coined the term at the start of 2006 it seemed to refer to general trends in the Religious Society of Friends and the larger Christian world, but it was also referring to a specific (online) community that had had a year or two of conversation to shape itself and model trust and accountability. Most importantly we each were going out of our way to engage with Friends from other Quaker traditions and were each called on our own cultural assumptions.

The coined term implied an experience of sort. "Convergent" explicitly references Conservative Friends ("Con-") and the Emergent Church movement ("-vergent"). It seems to me like one needs to look at those two phenomenon and their relation to one's own understanding and experience of Quaker life and community before really understanding what all the fuss has been about. That's happening lots of places and it is not simply a blog phenomenon.

Nowadays I'm noticing a lot of Friends declaring themselves Convergent after reading a blog post or two or attending a workshop. It's becoming the term du jour for Friends who want to differentiate themselves from business-as-usual, Quakerism-as-usual. This fits Robin's simplified definition. But if that's all it is and it becomes all-inclusive for inclusivity's sake, then "Convergent" will drift away away from the roots of the conversation that spawned it and turn into another buzzword for "liberal Quaker." This is starting to happen.

The term "Convergent Friends" is being picked up by Friends outside the dozen or two blogs that spawned it and moving into the wild--that's great, but also means it's definition is becoming a moving target. People are grabbing onto it to sum up their dreams, visions and frustrations but we're almost certainly not meaning the same thing by it. "Convergent Friends" implies that we've all arrived somewhere together. I've often wondered whether we shouldn't be talking about "Converging Friends," a term that implies a parallel set of movements and puts the rather important elephant square on the table: converging toward what? What we mean by convergence depends on our starting point. My attempt at a label was the rather clunky conservative-leaning liberal Friend, which is probably what most of us in the liberal Quaker tradition are meaning by "Convergent."

I started mapping out a liberal plan for Convergent Friends a couple of years before the term was coined and it still summarizes many of my hopes and concerns. The only thing I might add now is a paragraph about how we'll have to work both inside and outside of normal Quaker channels to effect this change (Johan Maurer recently wrote an interesting post that included the wonderful description of "the lovely subversives who ignore structures and communicate on a purely personal basis between the camps via blogs, visitation, and other means" and compared us to SCUBA divers ("ScubaQuake.org" anyone?).

Robin's inclusive definition of "renewal" definitely speaks to something. Informal renewal networks are springing up all over North America. Many branches of Friends are involved. There are themes I'm seeing in lots of these places: a strong youth or next-generation focus; a reliance on the internet; a curiosity about "other" Friends traditions; a desire to get back to roots in the simple ministry of Jesus. Whatever label or labels this new revival might take on is less important than the Spirit behind it.

But is every hope for renewal "Convergent"? I don't think so. At the end of the day the path for us is narrow and is given, not chosen. At the end of day--and beginning and middle--the work is to follow the Holy Spirit's guidance in "real time." Definitions and carefully selected words slough away as mere notions. The newest message is just the oldest message repackaged. Let's not get too caught up in our own hip verbage, lecture invitations and glorious attention that we forget that there there is one, even Christ Jesus who can speak to our condition, that He Himself has come to teach, and that our message is to share the good news he's given us. The Tempter is ready to distract us, to puff us up so we think we are the message, that we own the message, or that the message depends on our flowery words delivered from podiums. We must stay on guard, humbled, low and praying to be kept from the temptations that surround even the most well-meaning renewal attempts. It is our faithfulness to the free gospel ministry that will ultimately determine the fate of our work.

July 25, 2007 6:15 PM. View Comments | Edit
Categories: conservative , emergent , evangelical , generational , liberal , ministry , quaker , vision , youth | Tags: christian world, convergent, faithful, happening, loving friends, religious society of friends, renewal movement, smart, society of friends, sounds good, specifically, theoretical level
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Reading Woolman part three: The Isolated Saint

It's said that John Woolman re-wrote his Journal three times in an effort to excise it of as many "I" references as possible. As David Sox writes in Johh Woolman Quintessential Quaker, "only on limited occasion do we glimpse Woolman as a son, a father and a husband." Woolman wouldn't have been a very good blogger. Quoting myself from my introduction to "Quaker blogs": http://www.quakerquaker.org/quaker_blogs/::

blogs give us a unique way of sharing our lives—how our Quakerism intersects with the day-to-day decisions that make up faithful living. Quaker blogs give us a chance to get to know like-minded Friends that are separated by geography or artificial theological boundaries and they give us a way of talking to and with the institutions that make up our faith community.

I've read many great Woolman stories over the years and as I read the Journal I eagerly anticipated reading the original account. It's that same excitement I get when walking the streets of an iconic landscape for the first time: walking through London, say, knowing that Big Ben is right around the next corner. But Woolman kept letting me down.

One of the AWOL stories is his arrival in London. The Journal's account:

On the 8th of Sixth Month, 1772, we landed at London, and I went straightway to the Yearly Meeting of ministers and elders, which had been gathered, I suppose, about half an hour. In this meeting my mind was humbly contrite.

But set the scene. He had just spent five weeks crossing the Atlantic in steerage among the pigs (he doesn't actually specify his non-human bunkmates). He famously went out of his way to wear clothes that show dirt because they show dirt. He went straightaway: no record of a bath or change of clothes. Stories abound about his reception, and while are some of dubious origin, there are first hand accounts of his being shunned by the British ministers and elders. "The best and most dubious story is the theme of another post":.

I trust that Woolman was honestly aiming for meekness when he omitted the most interesting stories of his life. But without the context of a lived life he becomes an ahistorical figure, an icon of goodness divorced from the minutiae of the daily grind. Two hundred and thirty years of Quaker hagiography and latter-day appeals to Woolman's authority have turned the tailor of Mount Holly into the otherworldly Quaker saint but the process started at John's hands himself.

Were his struggles merely interior? When I look to my own ministry, I find the call to discernment to be the clearest part of the work. I need to work to be ever more receptive to even the most unexpected prompting from the Inward Christ and I need to constantly practice humility, love and forgiveness. But the practical limitations are harder. For years respectibility was an issue; relative poverty continues to be one. It is asking a lot of my wife to leave responsibility for our two small boys for even a long weekend.

How did Woolman balance family life and ministry? What did wife Sarah think? And just what was his role in the sea-change that was the the "Reformation of American Quakerism" (to use Jack Marietta's phrase) that forever altered American Friends' relationship with the world and set the stage for the schisms of the next century.

We also lose the context of Woolman's compatriots. Some are named as traveling companions but the colorful characters go unmentioned. What did he think of the street-theater antics of Benjamin Lay, the Abbie Hoffman of Philadelphia Quakers. The most widely-told tale is of Lay walking into Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions, opening up a cloak to reveal military uniform underneath, and declaring that slave-made products were products of war, plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible full of pig's blood, splattering Friends sitting nearby.

What role did Woolman play in the larger anti-slavery awakening happening at the time? It's hard to tell just reading his Journal. How can we find ways to replicate his kind of faithfulness and witness today? Again, his Journal doesn't give much clue.

Next time: I Really Do Like Woolman!

Reading John Woolman:

Picked up today in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Library:

PYM Librarian Rita Varley reminded me today they mail books anywhere in the US for a modest fee and a $50/year subscription. It's a great deal and a great service, especially for isolated Friends. The PYM catalog is online too!

August 17, 2006 12:30 AM. View Comments | Edit
Categories: ministry , quaker | Tags: anticipated, blogger, blogs, boundaries, david sox, day to day decisions, excitement, faith community, geography, glimpse, iconic, john woolman, journal, minded friends, quaker, quakerism, quintessential, quoting, separated
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