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.
freedom Posts
Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.
It's always fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of my blogging. Quakerranter, my "main" blog has been remarkably quiet. I'm still up to my eyeballs with blogging in general: posting things to QuakerQuaker, giving helpful comments and tips, helping others set up blogs as part of my consulting business. My Tumblr blog and Facebook and Twitter feeds all continue to be relatively active. But most of these is me giving voice to others. For two decades now, I've zigzagged between writer and publisher; lately I've been focused on the latter.
When I started blogging about Quaker issues seven years ago, I was a low-level clerical employee at an Quaker organization. It was clear I was going nowhere career-wise, which gave me a certain freedom. More importantly, blogs were a nearly invisible medium, read by a self-selected group that also wanted to talk openly and honestly about issues. I started writing about issues in among liberal Friends and about missed outreach opportunities. A lot of what I said was spot on and in hindsight, the archives give me plenty of "told you so" credibility. But where's the joy in being right about what hasn't worked?
Things have changed over the years. One is that I've resigned myself to those missed opportunities. Lots of Quaker money and humanly activity is going into projects that don't have God as a center. No amount of ranting is going to dissuade good people from putting their faith into one more staff reorganization, mission rewrite or clever program.It's a distraction to spend much time worrying about them.
But the biggest change is that my heart is squarely with God. I'm most interested in sharing Jesus's good news. I'm not a cheerleader for any particular human institution, no matter how noble its intentions. When I talk about the good news, it's in the context of 350 years of Friends' understanding of it. But I'm well aware that there's lots of people in our meetinghouses that don't understand it this way anymore. And also aware that the seeker wanting to pursue the Quaker way might find it more closely modeled in alternative Christian communities. There are people all over listening for God and I see many attempts at reinventing Quakerism happening among non-Friends.
I know this observation excites some people to indignation, but so be it: I'm trusting God on this one. I'm not sure why He'sgiven us a world why the communities we bring together to worship Him keep getting distracted, but that's what we've got (and it's what we've had for a long time). Every person of faith of every generation has to remember, re-experience and revive the message. That happens in church buildings, on street corners, in living rooms, lunch lines and nowadays on blogs and internet forums.We can't get too hung up on all the ways the message is getting blocked. And we can't get hung up by insisting on only one channel of sharing that message. We must share the good news and trust that God will show us how to manifest this in our world: his kingdom come and will be done on earth.
But what would this look like?
When I first started blogging there weren't a lot of Quaker blogs and I spent a lot more time reading other religious blogs. This was back before the emergent church movement became a wholly-ownedsubsidiaryof Zondervan and wasn't dominated by hype artists (sorry, a lot of big names set off my slime-o-meter these days). There are still great bloggers out there talking about faith and readers wanting to engage in this discussion. I've been intrigued by the historical example of Thomas Clarkson, the Anglican who wrote about Friends from a non-Quaker perspective using non-Quaker language. And sometimes I geek out and explain some Quaker point on a Quaker blog and get thanked by the author, who often is an experienced Friend who had never been presented with a classic Quaker explanation on the point in question. My tracking log shows seekers continue to be fascinated and drawn to us for our traditional testimonies, especially plainness.
I've put together topic lists and plans before but it's a bit of work, maybe too much to put on top of what I do with QuakerQuaker (plus work, plus family). There's also questions about where to blog and whether to simplify my blogging life a bit by combining some of my blogs but that's more logistics rather than vision.
Interesting stuff I'm reading that's making me think about this:
- Mission Credibility by Anglican Plain
- The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere on the Immanent Frame, "principally written" by Nathan Schneider, who's one of the contributors at Killing the Buddha.
- LizOpp's I Blog Because I Dive.
March 3, 2010 11:33 AM.
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blogging, facebook, god, humanly activity, liberal friends, mission, publisher, quaker, reorganization, tumblr, twitter
Categories: blogs , christian , emergent , quaker , quakerquaker , vision | Tags: blogging, facebook, god, humanly activity, liberal friends, mission, publisher, quaker, reorganization, tumblr, twitter
In Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he looks into the meaning of the word free. The word has two meanings: free as in "freedom" and free as in "price." Most of the romance languages divide these meanings into two different words, derived from liber and gratiis. Our double-duty English word comes from Old English freon or freogan, meaning "to free, love." In addition to free, this word also gave us our word friend. Anderson quotes etymologist Douglas Harper:
The primary sense seems to have been "beloved, friend"; which in some languages (notably Germanic and Celtic) developed a sense of "free," perhaps from the terms "beloved" or "friend" being applied to the free members of one's clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the perfect word for the early translators of the English bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:
Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that ye love one another.This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spiritual trouble-makers in England in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they started calling one another Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, newly freed of the tyrants of their age by their personal experience of Christ as friend, spreading the good news that we were all free and all commanded to love one another.
July 31, 2009 9:03 AM.
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Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":
"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.
All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.
The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies.
April 22, 2009 7:13 PM.
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Categories: iraq , peace | Tags: abuse, ahmed chalabi, al Qaida, cheney, freedom, intelligence, interrogation, Iraq, nonviolence, osama bin laden, rumsfeld, saddam hussein, torture
The most excellent Peggy Senger Parsons of Oregon's Freedom Friends Church emailed me today saying she and the equally excellent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a workshop at the Philadelphia area Pendle Hill Retreat Center from 3/27-29. These two were crossing theological boundaries and pioneering the Convergent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twitter & Facebook. The workshop is called "Are we still a dangerous people?" and as rocking as that sounds, I'd be willing to listen to these two read the Salem, Oregon phone book for a weekend. If you have a pillow stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for commuters) then you should definitely try to make it (unfortunately I don't have a lumpy pillowcase and can't afford to take another three days off). Peggy wrote that she wants to make herself "available for the Saturday afternoon free time for a conversation with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the party." That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some childcare schedules, I'll try to make that. That would be Saturday the 28th from 1:00-3:30pm.
March 8, 2009 9:37 PM.
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Then a very elderly woman, a lifelong Quaker (a very weighty Friend, we would say), stood up in the silence and said, "I wish our Friend would run up and down shouting Hallelujah if God is asking him to."
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The panel had a chance to share with the wider meeting community the tenderness, vulnerability, intimacy, and challenge of working with an ongoing care-and-accountability committee.
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Form of worship, reliance on unmediated revelation, potential for living into the Light and decision-making assumptions top the list. She also lists issues she didn't discuss, including freedom of belief.
February 25, 2008 11:26 PM.
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delicious
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"FRIENDS" from Oklahoma and the Osage Nation.
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The theology of seating
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That tide of harmony, disharmony, and resolution is constantly shifting, and it's normal. What's problematic is when the conflicts get swept under the rug. It starts to get really lumpy under there, and we all start tripping all over the place!
November 7, 2007 11:29 PM.
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One morning I woke up with several queries for her to reflect on, and quickly realized I needed to examine them for myself as well.
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I don’t think that Quakers have the financial or human resources to save the planet... Instead I think Quakers have a unique tradition of seeing what more secularly minded liberals see as social problems as being really spiritual problems.
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[W]e don't try to pre-empt the Holy Spirit with our own traditions or cleverness, but do all we can to frame and demonstrate freedom, authenticity, and equality in worship. We depend on the Holy Spirit to guide our worship...
October 19, 2007 1:34 AM.
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