god bless Posts

• Wess on two (Possible) Roles of Religion In A Global World
  The abstractions within modern globalized religious movements.
  (tags: comment)
• Help wanted. « The Quaker Agitator
  The Quaker Agitator is looking for help writing a small grant. Any Ranter readers able to lend a hand?
  (tags: comment)
• Paul L thinks Orwell's got us pegged
  "Socialism" draws with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal comment)
• LizOpp on the different kinds of pride
  That said, there is a quiet pride that lends itself to being low, and then there is another sort of pride that lends itself to being high, to pushing God out of our lives because we mistakenly take up the belief that there is no more room.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry)

• Robin M buys paper and thinks about the craft of writing
  Have any of you taken or taught a writing class recently? Do you recommend a particular school or type of class? Or a book on the subject?
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• Cherice on pro-war theory at seminary
  I just got done with my small group discussion session for my "War & Christian Conscience" class. In my discussion group, I'm the only pacifist, or at least the only pacifist who talks.
  (tags: comment)
• Paul on confusing God by making an idol of Quakerism
  Almost immediately, I regreted putting it the way I did, and the reason why came up a few minutes later when another Friend, a noted Quaker historian and writer, admitted to sometimes making an idol out his Quakerism instead of worshiping the Living God.
  (tags: quaker comment quaker.ministry)
• Showmen Ben on trusting individual discernment and one another
  If I don't trust my Friend, then I won't trust her initiative and I will resist her ideas. Trust is the trust we give the Holy Spirit, the trust we give to Jesus, the trust of handing our will and our lives over to a power greater than ourselves.
  (tags: quaker quaker.community)

• Revolutionary Zach on two movements
  At the lefty rally, many of the young people looked miserable and lost. Afterwards, they walked off just as isolated as they were before... At Church, the preacher and other leaders repeatedly called attendees to get involved with others...
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• New blog: Minding The Light
  "Random thoughts of a Christian Quaker" in Missouri USA. First post is about grace and price: "Pride in our hard work at achieving that grade point would be meaningless because it was God who blessed us with it in the first place."
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• LizOpp on FGC's recent invitation-only consultation
  We must be clear, though, that it is when we give attention to our ego needs... that we fail to listen further for Instruction; we fail to be Obedient.
  (tags: comment quaker.fgc)

Getting right back on the horse, I'm teaching Quakerism 101 at Moorestown NJ Meeting Wednesday evenings starting in a few weeks. The original plan was for the most excellent Thomas Swain to lead it but he's become rather busy after being tapped to be yearly meeting clerk (God bless 'im). He'll be there for the first session, I'll be on my own for the rest. A rather small group has signed up so it should be nice and intimate.

For the last year I've been pondering the opportunities of using mid-week religious education and worship as a form of outreach. Emergent Church types love small group opportunities outside of the Sunday morning time slot and it seems that mid-week worship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker traditions that might be worth revitalizing and recasting in an Emergent-friendly format.

Last Spring I spent a few months regularly attending one of the few surviving mid-week worships in the area and I found it intriguing and full of possibilities but never felt led to do more. It seemed that attenders came and went each week without connecting deeply to one another or getting any serious grounding in Quakerism.

Reflecting on the genesis of a strong Philadelphia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look something like this:

• 6pm: regular religious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where attenders would be free to share spiritual insights but they would also learn the orthodox Quaker take on the issue or concern (Barclay essentially).
• 7pm: mid-week worship, unprogrammed
• 8pm: unofficial but regular hang-out time, people going in groups to local diners, etc.

Unprogrammed worship just isn't enough (just when y'all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilburite....) . People do need time to be able to ask questions and explore spirituality in a more structured way. Those of us led to teaching need to be willing to say "this is the Quaker take on this issue" even if our answer wouldn't necessarily pass consensus in a Friends meeting.

People also need time to socialize. We live in an atomized society and the brunt of this isolation is borne by young adults starting careers in unfamiliar cities and towns: Quaker meeting can act as a place to plug into a social network and provide real community. It's different from entertainment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift thinking from "those Quakers are cool" to "I'm a Quaker and I'm cool" in such a way that these new Friends understand that there are challenges and disciplines involved in taking on this new role.

Perhaps the three parts to the mid-week worship model is head, spirit and heart; whatever labels you give it we need to think about feeding and nurturing the whole seeker and to challenge them to more than just silence. This is certainly a common model. When Peggy Senger Parsons and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what's now called The Collegium Center which is a Sunday night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that produced at least one couple (good friends of ours now!).

I don't know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people's heads too. The four weeks of Wednesday night religious ed at Moorestown might have something of this feel; it will be interesting to see.

For those interested in curriculum details, I'm basing it on Michael Birkel's Silence and Witness: the Quaker Tradition (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael's tried to pull together a good general introduction to Friends, something surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton's Friends for 300 Years it's getting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can Silence and Witness anchor a Quakerism 101 course? We'll see.

As supplementary material I'm using Thomas Hamm's Quakers in America (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion's Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy's Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

Last night LizOpp, Robin M and myself hosted our FGC Gathering interest group. The title was "On Fire!: Renewing Quakerism through a Convergence of Friends." All morning long we've had Friends grabbing our arms to tell us how powerful and important it was for them. One well-traveled Friend went so far as to say the spontaneous worship that occurred halfway through was the deepest he's experienced in twenty years of Quakerism. The obvious challenge for us hosts is keeping our egos securely tamed from all this praise.

The work wasn't ours. We simply set the stage. My first impulse is to say we helped create an environment where the Spirit could break into the event, but that's not really it. We tried to create a space where participants would recognize when the Spirit knocked on the door.

Food for Fire participants. Bloggers at the workshop pose for a goofy attacking-one-another photo.

What happened last night felt similar to what happened in last February's Powell House Food for the Fire workshop. While I took notes and journaled a lot about it I never gave a followup blog post. It was powerful and I needed to digest it. Luckily participants Rob, Amanda and Zach and Claire all shared about it or its themes in the weeks afterwards.

I'd like to share something about the assumptions and preparation that went into these two events. There's no way to create a cookie-cutter agenda to force a deep spiritual high. In fact part of what's needed is to move beyond predictability. Both times I've had a clear sense that a point came when I was no longer facilitating, where Spirit was actively guiding us and participants were actively responding to that process, even eldering us past the control of facilitation.

When I came to Powell House I had a workshop description and a keen interest in the topic. What I didn't bring was an agenda. I'm trying to experiment with not being too prepared.* Early Friends held open meetings and while they often bore concerns and had themes that frequently reoccurred in their ministry. Friends today rely very much on models borrowed from higher education: we have workshops that expect agendas, we give talks that expect pre-printed speeches. These are often the opportunities we get for teaching ministries, yet they are very programmed. The challenge is to figure out how to subvert them to allow for unprogrammed surprise.

At Powell House I spent time before each session walking around the grounds in prayer for guidance on what to do next. I had brainstormed ideas beforehand but my main preparation had been a lot of Quaker reading and prayer in the weeks preceeding the event. I wanted the sessions to connect to the spiritual condition of the participants, as individuals and as a group. There were a few moments I thought I was nuts. For example, walking around before the Powell House Saturday afternoon session it seemed like reading a chapter of Samuel Bownas's Description of the Qualifications would be a good idea, but by mid-afternoon I could see the sleepy faces. We did it anyway and faces and spirit lit up. People wanted to engage with Bownas. As it turns out we read all of chapter three, "Advice to Ministers in a State of Infancy." It was so cool.

The real inbreaking happened a little later. The group was tired, dinner was nearing. I started to recommend we go into a circle to break up. One Friend interrupted, looked at another across the room and said "you have something to say, don't you." The second Friend said yes, then challenged us that we hadn't actually answered our queries at all. The main question was still on the table. "What are we called to do?" There was a release. I knew I was not in control of the workshop anymore. We came into a prayer circle and started to talk about some of this. One Friend said something about naming who it is that call us. A theme came out that it wasn't enough for us to find some sort of personal salvation and comfort in our Quaker meetings: we needed to bring all the world into this if it was to be meaningful. It truly felt like the Holy Spirit was in the room. It wasn't necessarily so comfortable and it somehow seemed like not enough, but it pointed to the work we needed to do afterwards.

Blogging participants of On Fire! workshop pose together. About fifty people total came out for the Monday night interest group. Click photo for names and links. Lots of discussions happened at the rise of the worship. The semi-impromptu post-discussion group. (Thanks for FGC's Emily for taking & posting this!) FGC Gathering photos on Flickr and Technorati

Last night, at the FGC interest group, something similar happened. Robin, Liz and I had planned out the first half of the meeting. The most important piece: coming early to sit in prayer and holding it well past the time the interest group was supposed to start. The work of Friends needs to be rooted in worship. We need to be still enough to hear the Holy Spirit. If the medium is the message, our message was about the need to not pack ourselves in with agendas. We started predicatbly enough by asking the fifty-or-so participants to give their names and to name a spiritual practice that gives them joy. We asked for space in between speakers to keep worship at the fore and we were blessed by a self-faciliating group; Friends did hold the spaces in between.

Then the three of us told our stories of starting spiritually-focused blogs and coming to find a fellowship that extended beyond our traditional Quaker branches (hence the term "Convergence of Friends"). I went first and explained that I trying to be careful not to do this to lift myself up. My story is simple and like those of many Friends. I was giving testimony. The idea of testimony rang throughout the evening. Robin's story in particular was very grounded and coming last it took us into the unprogrammed agenda-less time we had left free. Friends rose to give testimony of other "convergent" experiences, for example particpation in the Northwest Women's Theological Conferences, events of the Western branch of the Christian Friends Fellowship.

At some point a woman I didn't know stood up without being recognized and she had a pose of supplication. My first though, "oh no!" Then I noticed another Friend, worshipful in spirit, who pointed her to us. She said she was going to sing a song. "Oh no again!" I thought. But this was the facilitation coming off our shoulders. This was a Friend rising to name what we needed and another Friend pointing that we needed to go this direction. It was like the two Powell House Friends: one recognizing in the other a need to share ministry and being willing to break through "proper" group process. At the interest group the song was powerful, it brought us to a place where we could be low and thankful. We were now spontaneously in worship. Liz, Robin and I had planned some closing worship but this wasn't the time yet. But it was the time and the suceeding ministry was heartfelt and largely from the Source.

The only funny aside was that we felt we couldn't let the group go on past our 8:45 end time, for the simple reason that childcare ended then and we needed to let parents go. We mentioned this around 8:30 but twenty minutes later the worship was continuing. Just then the cellphone of the Friend giving ministry went off: it was his daughter calling to ask where he was! He turned off the phone but it gave us the excuse to close the meeting and invite an extended meeting to continue outside. This was wonderful as there were a number of other similarly-themed interest groups (one on youth ministries, the other on the World Gathering of Young Friends) and participants from all three groups met outside and continued the sharing for another two hours.

Lessons? Simply to ground workshop events in worship, let the agenda be empty enough for the Spirit to intervene (having backup exercises just in case it doesn't is fine!). I don't think this is a foolproof method. A lot depends on the participants and how willing they are to share in the faciliation and worship. A lot also depends on Friends breaking into the agenda, for both times that was what turned the event from a workshop to a gathered meeting.

• For me the danger is a personal style that has long relied on a last-minute miracles (I was the kind of college student who read all the material through the semester but didn't actually start writing anything until the night before an assignment was due). I don't want my theology to be an excuse for my procrastination and I try to test this regularly.

Related posts:

Lots of folks have been talking about the Gathering and the Monday night interest group.

• Co-faciliator LizOpp also details some of the process of the Interest Group and of the semi-impromptu multi-generational interest group afterwards. She's also written about the visits from Freedom Friends Church.
• Co-facilitator RobinM has the first of a handful of promised posts where she emphasizes the importance of grounding and starting the session in worship.
• ChrisM describes how he couldn't sleep after the Interest Group.
• Dave T has a quick check-in and description.
• Paul L felt a real covering of the meeting halfway through the Interest Group.
• Both AJ Schwanz and Gregg Koskela have posts about a post-Gathering meet-up of some Friends around a picnic table in Oregon.

I'm sure more reaction posts are up there and I'll link to them as I find them. I suspect that in addition to being the biggest group Quaker blogger photo to date (sorry Gregg!), this will end up being the most blogged about Quaker event yet, at least till Wess gathers West Coasters together next month. I counted at least 20 Quaker bloggers at the Gathering.

Sometimes my Quaker Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I console myself that I'm doing enough giving out the daily reading list of Quaker posts, reading through my new old Quaker book collection (Samuel Bownas just visited the meeting I'm attending most frequently these days!) and working my new advancement and outreach job--oh, and of course there's also the family! But you could also just follow my train of thought by looking over my shoulder at comments made at other sites. Over the last few days the Quaker blogosphere has had a number of interesting posts. Here's a cobble-together of posts and comments that have spoken to me about the inherent Quaker snare of confusing our "Quaker faith" for God.

Over on Kwakersaur, David M shares some renewal queries for his yearly meeting. Nancy A detected a "sense an overall fatigue" in them and Beppe agreed, asking if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by "understanding [of] who we are."

One of the queries goes "What does our Quaker faith ask us to DO?" Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn. My favorite Quaker committee-meeting trick of late consists of replace all the "we"-like phrases with God. How about "What does God ask us to DO?" (Just a quick testimony: I love David's work and I value his wonderful online ministry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quaker renewal, he's welcome!! I'm sure everyone on the Consultation and Renewal Working Group is deeper than the queries would indicate and suspect that this is an example of the Quaker corporate dumbing-down tendency that's practically our modus operandi.)

All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, Can I Say I’m Emerging If I Haven’t Emerged or Quaker If I Haven’t Quaked?,. Here's a taste:

Part of me has thought of shedding my Quaker pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the power of God? Shedding my differentiation label certainly would support the idea that “there’s really only one church, but lots of meeting places.” Particularly in this town where the Quaker college is perceived as pretty insular, would I have different interactions with folks if I simply said “I’m a follower of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?

Paul L implicitly addresses the question of shedding the Quaker pin in his review of Punshon's Reasons for Hope, where he asks if "Quakers have a unique niche to fill in the Christian and broader social landscape."

Are we Quaker because it's comfortable, because our friends are, because the buildings are cool and the social hour coffee hot? Or the opposite: are we Friends because we really liked Barclay's Apology but couldn't care less for the messyness of flesh-and-blood religious community? Another Quaker blogger recently sent me a private email in which he confided: "My main question of late to Quakers is: what is so remarkable about Quakers? I sometimes have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these questions." That seems like both a good question and a important meeting role.

There’s something about living both within a community and outside it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human institutions, theories or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as transcendent everythingness and Christ as a particular guy in a particular place speaking a particular language and living a particular life. The pull between the eternal and peculiar is the very essence of the human condition. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apostles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the volume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?

A Guest Piece by Jeffrey Hipp

"I take this commitment of membership very seriously – to labor, nurture, support and challenge my fellow Friends; to walk in the Light together, and to give, receive, and pray with my fellow sojourners when the next step is unclear. My feet are on solid ground."