In Amer­ica today our sense of spir­i­tual fel­low­ship in Lib­eral meet­ings, the feel­ing of belong­ing to the same tribe, is dimin­ish­ing. We no longer live in the same com­mu­ni­ties, and we come from diverse faith tra­di­tions. Our cul­tural val­ues are no longer entwined at the roots, as were those of our founders. As a body we share less genetic and cul­tural mem­ory of what it means to be Quak­ers. Dif­fer­ent view­points often pre­vent us from look­ing in the same direc­tion to find a point of con­ver­gence. We hold beliefs rang­ing from Bud­dhism to non-theism to Chris­tian­ity, or we may sim­ply be eth­i­cal human­ists. Just imag­ine a mix­ture of wild seeds cast into a sin­gle plot of land, pro­duc­ing a pro­fu­sion of color. A wide vari­ety of plants all bloom­ing together sym­bol­ize our present con­di­tion in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends. Dis­cern­ing which is a wild­flower and which is a weed is not easy. We are liv­ing a great exper­i­ment of reli­gious diversity.

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I occa­sion­ally go back to my blog­ging archives to pick out inter­est­ing arti­cles from one, five and ten years ago.

ONE YEAR AGO: The Not-Quite-So Young Quak­ers

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. 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).

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. 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?!?

Pub­lished 9/14/2008.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Van­ity Googling of Causes

A poster to an obscure dis­cus­sion board recently described typ­ing a par­tic­u­lar search phrase into Google and find­ing noth­ing but bad infor­ma­tion. Repro­duc­ing the search I deter­mined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actu­ally quite accu­rate. I’ve been hear­ing an increas­ing num­ber of sto­ries like this. “Cause Googling,” a vari­a­tion on “van­ity googling,” is sud­denly becom­ing quite pop­u­lar. But the inter­est­ing thing is that these new searchers don’t actu­ally seem curi­ous about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?

Pub­lished 10/2/2004 in The Quaker Ranter.

TEN’ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again
This piece is about the NATO bomb­ing cam­paign in Ser­bia (Wikipedia). It’s strange to see I was feel­ing war fatigue even before 9/11 and the “real” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There’s a great dan­ger in all this. A dan­ger to the soul of Amer­ica. This is the fourth coun­try the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becom­ing rou­tine. It is sand­wiched between the soap operas and the sit­coms, between the traf­fic and weather reports. Intense cruise mis­sile bom­bard­ments are car­ried out but have no effect on the psy­che or even imag­i­na­tion of the U.S. citizens.

It’s as if war itself has become another con­sumer good. Another event to be pack­aged for com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion. Given a theme song. We’re at war with a coun­try we don’t know over a region we don’t really care about. I’m not be face­tious, I’m sim­ply stat­ing a fact. The United States can and should play an active peace­mak­ing role in the region, but only after we’ve done our home­work and have basic knowl­edge of the play­ers and sit­u­a­tion. Iso­la­tion­ism is dan­ger­ous, yes, but not nearly as dan­ger­ous as the emerg­ing cul­ture of these dilet­tante made-for-TV wars.

Pub­lished March 25, 1999, Non​vi​o​lence​.org

Not some­thing I’ll do every day, but over on Quak­erQuaker I cross-referenced today’s One Year Bible read­ings with Esther Green­leaf Murer’s Quaker Bible Index. Here’s the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus’ para­ble of wheat & tares and pearls. It’s a par­tic­u­larly rich read­ing today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an inter­est­ing para­ble about let­ting the faith­ful and the unfaith­ful grow together.

As if know­ing today is Inau­gu­ra­tion Day, Isaac Pen­ing­ton turned it into a polit­i­cal ref­er­ence: “But oh, how the laws and gov­ern­ments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their ref­or­ma­tion, whose com­mon work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!”

Mar­garet Fell sees the wheat and tares as an exam­ple of jeal­ousy and false min­istry: “Oh how hath this envi­ous man got­ten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bun­dles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seeds­men come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, … & so it was easy to stir up jeal­ousy in you, you hav­ing the ground of jeal­ousy in your­selves which is as strong as death.”

We get poetry from the sev­en­teen cen­tury Eliz­a­beth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that “the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appear­ance (even as the morn­ing –light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in bright­ness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the fir­ma­ment at noon-day height.”

The para­ble of the tares became a call for tol­er­ance in George Fox’s under­stand­ing: “For Christ com­mands chris­t­ian men to “love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their ene­mies [Mat 5:44];” and so not to per­se­cute them. And those ene­mies may be changed by repen­tance and con­ver­sion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels’ work to burn the tares, and not men’s.”

A cen­tury later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and wor­ried about reli­gious edu­ca­tion and Quaker drift: “But for want of keep­ing an eye open to this pre­serv­ing Power, a spirit of indif­fer­ence hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a ten­dency to choke the good seed; those ten­der impres­sions and reproofs of instruc­tion, which would have pre­pared our spir­its, and have bound them to the holy law and tes­ti­monies of truth.”

I hope all this helps us remem­ber that the Bible is our book too and an essen­tial resource for Friends. It’s easy to for­get this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is get­ting our Bible fix from main­stream Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian sources whose view­points might be in pretty direct oppo­si­tion from Quaker under­stand­ings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B’s post on The New Calvin­ism or Tom Smith’s very rea­son­able con­cerns about the lit­er­al­ism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and rec­om­mend). On the other hand, it’s not uncom­mon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our reli­gion as “Quaker,” down­grade Chris­tian­ity by mak­ing it optional, unmen­tion­able or non-contextual and turn­ing to the Bible only for the oblig­a­tory epis­tle ref­er­ence.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the mar­gins in the mod­ern edi­tion of Samuel Bow­nas’ “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions Nec­es­sary to a Gospel Min­istry,” which were pep­pered with the Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences Bow­nas was casu­ally cit­ing through­out. On my sec­ond read­ing (yes it’s that good!) I started look­ing up the ref­er­ences and real­ized that: 1) Bow­nas wasn’t just mak­ing this stuff up or quot­ing willy-nilly; and 2) read­ing them helped me under­stand Bow­nas and by exten­sion the whole con­cept of Quaker min­istry. You’re not read­ing my blog enough if you’re not get­ting the idea that this is one of the kind of prac­tices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talk­ing about at the Con­ver­gent work­shop next month. If you can fig­ure out the trans­port then get your­self to Cali pronto and join us.

It’s that sea­son again, the time when unpro­grammed Friends talk about Christ­mas. Click Ric has posted about the seem­ing incon­gruity of his meeting’s Christ­mas tree and LizOpp has reprinted a still-timely let­ter from about five years ago about the meeting’s chil­dren Christ­mas pageant.

Friends tra­di­tion­ally have lumped Christ­mas in with all of the other rit­u­al­is­tic boo-ha that main­stream Chris­tians prac­tice. These are out­ward ele­ments that should be aban­doned now that we know Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self and is present and avail­able to all of us at all times. Out­ward bap­tism, com­mu­nion, planned ser­mons, paid min­is­ters, Christ­mas and Easter: all dis­trac­tions from true Chris­t­ian reli­gion, from prim­i­tive Chri­tian­ity revived.

One con­fu­sion that arises in lib­eral meet­ings this time of year is that it’s assumed it’s the Chris­t­ian Friends who want the Christ­mas tree. Argu­ments some­time break out with “hyphen­ated” Friends who feel uncom­fort­able with the tree: folks who con­sider them­selves Friends but also Pagan, Non­the­is­tic, or Jew­ish and won­der why they’re hav­ing Chris­tian­ity forced on them. But those of us who fol­low what we might call the “Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion as under­stood by Friends” should be just as put out by a Christ­mas tree and party. We know that sym­bolic rit­u­als like these spark dis­unity and dis­tract us from the real pur­pose of our com­mu­nity: befriend­ing Christ and lis­ten­ing for His guid­ance.

I was shocked and star­tled when I first learned that Quaker schools used to meet on Christ­mas day. My first response was “oh come on, that’s tak­ing it all too far.” But it kept bug­ging me and I kept try­ing to under­stand it. This was one of the pieces that helped me under­stand the Quaker way bet­ter and I finally grew to under­stand the ratio­nale. If Friends were more con­sis­tent with more-or-less sym­bolic stuff like Christ­mas, it would be eas­ier to teach Quakerism.

I don’t mind Christ­mas trees, per se. I have one in my liv­ing room (right). In my extended fam­ily Christ­mas has served as one of the manda­tory times of year we all have to show up together for din­ner. It’s never been very reli­gious, so I never felt I needed to stop the prac­tice when I became involved with Friends. But as a Friend I’m care­ful not to pre­tend that the con­sumerism and social rit­u­als have much to do with Christ. Christ­mas trees are pretty. The lights make me feel good in the dol­drums of mid-winter. That’s rea­son enough to put one up.

Unpro­grammed lib­eral Friends could use the ten­sions between tra­di­tional Quak­erly sto­icism and main­stream Chris­t­ian nos­tal­gia as a teach­ing moment, and we could use dis­com­fort around the rit­ual of Christ­mas as a point of unity and dia­log with Pagan, Jew­ish and Non-theistic Friends. Chris­t­ian Friends are always hav­ing to explain how we’re not the kind of Chris­tians oth­ers assume we are (oth­ers both within and out­side the Soci­ety). Being prin­ci­pled about Christ­mas is one way of show­ing that dif­fer­ence. Peo­ple will surely say “oh come on,” but so what? A lot of spir­i­tual seek­ers are crit­i­cal of the kind of crazy com­mer­cial spend­ing sprees that marked Christmas’s past and I don’t see why a group say­ing Christ­mas isn’t about Christ would be at a par­tic­u­lar dis­ad­van­tage dur­ing this first Christ­mas sea­son of the next Great Depression.

I’ve been talk­ing about lib­eral unpro­grammed Friends. For the record, I under­stand Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions among “pas­toral” and/or “pro­grammed” Friends. They’ve made a con­scious deci­sion to adopt a more main­stream Chris­t­ian approach to reli­gious edu­ca­tion and min­istry. That’s fine. It’s not the kind of Quaker I prac­tice, but they’re open about their approach and Christ­mas makes sense in that context.

When­ever I post this kind of stuff on my blog I get com­ments how I’m being too Scroogey. Well I guess I am. Bah Hum­bug. Hon­estly though, I’ve always like Quaker Christ­mas par­ties. They’re a way of mix­ing things up, a way of com­ing together as a com­mu­nity in a warmer way that we usu­ally do. Peo­ple stop con­fab­bing about com­mit­tee ques­tions and actu­ally enjoy one another’s com­pany. One time I asked my meet­ing to call it the Day the World Calls Christ­mas Party, which I thought was kind of clever (every­one else surely thought “there goes Mar­tin again”). The joy of real com­mu­nity that is filled once a year at our Christ­mas par­ties might be symp­tom of a hunger to be a dif­fer­ent kind of com­mu­nity every week, even every day.

Over on One Quaker Take, Tim­o­thy is sur­prised to read a def­i­n­i­tion of “Con­ver­gent Friend” that sounds a lot like a cer­tain fla­vor of West Coast lib­eral Quak­erism. It doesn’t seem so sur­pris­ing for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pas­tor at an Evan­gel­i­cal Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadel­phia to attend a  “Meet-Up” of read­ers of emerg­ing church blogs and real­ized I had more com­mon ground with these younger Evan­gel­i­cals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were com­ing from dif­fer­ent the­o­log­i­cal start­ing points, but it’s safe to say we are all “post” some­thing or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been pro­vid­ing aren’t work­ing for us. We are all try­ing to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church com­mu­ni­ties. There’s some­thing about build­ing rela­tion­ships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Per­haps it’s find­ing a way to be less dog­matic at the same time that we’re more dis­ci­plined. For Friends, that means ques­tion­ing the con­tem­po­rary cul­tural ortho­doxy of liberal-think (get­ting beyond the cliched catch phrases bor­rowed from lib­eral Protes­tantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pec­u­lar­ily Quaker.

Rich the Brook­lyn Quaker was recently ask­ing about early Friends views of atone­ment and heaven and hell and it’s a great post, but so is Mar­shall Massey’s com­ment about how later Friends altered the mes­sage in dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent ways. The dif­fer­ent fla­vors of Friends have spent a lot of energy min­i­miz­ing cer­tain parts of the Quaker mes­sage and over-emphasizing oth­ers and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a work­ing the­ory that a move­ment of “Con­ver­gence” will feel sus­pi­ciously lib­eral in evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles, sus­pi­ciously evan­gel­i­cal in lib­eral cir­cles, and sus­pi­ciously worldly in Quaker con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. But that’s almost to be expected. The work to be done is dif­fer­ent depend­ing on where we’re start­ing from.

I don’t think Friends are alone in these kinds of mat­ters. I see this phe­nom­e­non in other reli­gious denominations–the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren’t Quak­ers. But Friends might have a bet­ter way out of the exis­ten­tial puz­zles that arise. For we (gen­er­ally) believe that our action should be moti­vated first and fore­most by the direct instruc­tion of the risen Christ work­ing on us now. That means we can’t rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can’t help but think of Howard Brin­ton. Back in the 1950s his gen­er­a­tion man­aged a reuni­fi­ca­tion of East Coast Quaker fac­tions that had been war­ring for over a cen­tury. One way they did it was hang­ing out together and then redefin­ing what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brin­ton argued that tests for mem­ber­ship shouldn’t look at one’s beliefs or prac­tices. It was a truce and I’m sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong con­sen­sus on what Quak­erism meant and the fights at the edges over details were dis­tract­ing. Fifty years later, there’s lit­tle con­sen­sus among Philadel­phia Friends and even those in lead­er­ship posi­tions are loathe to talk about faith or prac­tice except in a kind of code. I can’t think of a sin­gle Philadel­phia Friend who pub­licly expresses Quaker belief with the clar­ity or pas­sion of mid-century fig­ures like Brin­ton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very lib­er­at­ing for oth­ers. Con­ver­gence isn’t very new. It’s just keep­ing our­selves from ossi­fy­ing into our own human con­cepts and stay­ing open to the direct Christ. It’s find­ing a way to main­tain that crazy bal­ance between tra­di­tion and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

One of the things I liked about my old Quaker job is that I occa­sion­ally had a moment in between all of the staff meet­ings (and meet­ings about staff meet­ings, and meet­ings about meet­ings about staff meet­ings, I kid you not) to take inter­est­ing calls and emails from Friends want­ing to talk about the state of Friends in their area: how to start a wor­ship group if no Friends existed, how to revi­tal­ize a local Meet­ing, how to work through some grow­ing pains or cul­tural con­flicts. I’ve thought about repli­cat­ing that on the blog, and halfway through respond­ing to one of tonight’s emails I real­ized I was prac­ti­cally writ­ing a blog post. So here it is. Please feel free to add your own responses to this Friend in the comments.

Dear Mar­tin
I have read that Meet­ings that are
silent for long peri­ods of time often wither away. But I can’t remem­ber where I
read that, or if the obser­va­tion has facts to back it up. Do you know of any
source where I can look this up?
Thanks,
CC

Dear CC,
I
can’t think of any spe­cific source for that obser­va­tion. It is
some­times used as an argu­ment against wait­ing wor­ship, a pre­lude to the
intro­duc­tion of some sort of pro­gram­ming. While it’s true that too much
silence can be a warn­ing sign, I sus­pect that Meet­ings that talk too
much are prob­a­bly also just as likely to wither away (at least to
Inward Christ that often seems to speak in whis­pers). I think the
deter­min­ing fac­tor is less deci­bel level but atten­tion to the work­ings
of the Holy Spirit.

One of the main roles of min­istry is to teach. Another is to remind
us to keep turn­ing to God. Another is to remind us that we live by
higher stan­dards than the default required by the sec­u­lar world in
which we live. If the Friends com­mu­nity is ful­fill­ing these func­tions
through some other chan­nel than min­istry in meet­ing for wor­ship then
the Meeting’s prob­a­bly healthy even if it is quiet.

Unfor­tu­nately there are plenty of Meet­ings are too silent on all
fronts. This means that the young and the new­com­ers will have a hard
time get­ting brought into the spir­i­tual life of Friends. Once upon a
time the Meet­ing annu­ally reviewed the state of its min­istry as part of
its queries to Quar­terly and Yearly Meet­ings, which gave neigh­bor­ing
Friends oppor­tu­ni­ties to pro­vide assis­tance, advise or even min­is­ters.
The prac­tice of writ­ten answers to queries have been dropped by most
Friends but the pos­si­bil­ity of appeal­ing to other Quaker bod­ies is
still a def­i­nite pos­si­bil­ity.
Your Friend, Martin

There’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion in the com­ments from my last post about “Con­ver­gent Friends and Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives” and one of the more inter­est­ing comes from a com­menter named Diane. My reply to her got longer and longer and filled with more and more links till it makes more sense to make it its own post. First, Diane’s question:

I don’t know if I’m “con­ver­gent,” (prob­a­bly not) but I have been involved with the emerg­ing church for sev­eral years and with Quak­erism for a decade. I also am aware of the house church move­ment, but my expe­ri­ence of it is that is is very tan­gen­tially related to Quak­erism. I really, really hope and pray that Chris­t­ian revival is com­ing to lib­eral Friends, but per­son­ally I have not seen that phe­nom­e­nom. Where do you see it most? Do you see it more as com­mit­ment to Christ or as more peo­ple being Christ curi­ous, to use Robin’s phrase?

As I wrote recently I think con­ver­gence is more of a trend than an iden­tity and I’m not sure whether it makes sense to fuss about who’s con­ver­gent or not. As with any ques­tion involv­ing lib­eral Friends, whether there’s “Chris­t­ian revival” going on depends on what what you mean by the term. I think more lib­eral Friends have become com­fort­able label­ing them­selves as Christ curi­ous; it has become more accept­able to iden­tify as Chris­t­ian than it was a decade or two ago; a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of younger Friends are very recep­tive to Chris­t­ian mes­sages, the Bible and tra­di­tional Quaker tes­ti­monies than they were.

These are indi­vid­ual responses, how­ever. Turn­ing to col­lec­tive Quaker bod­ies there are few if any beliefs or prac­tices left that lib­eral Friends wouldn’t allow under the Quaker ban­ner if they came wrapped in Quak­erese from a well-connected Friend; the social tes­ti­monies stand in as the uni­fy­ing agent; it’s still con­sid­ered an argu­ment stop­per to say that any prof­fered def­i­n­i­tion would exclude someone.

I’d argue that lib­eral Quak­erism is becom­ing ever more lib­eral (and less dis­tinc­tively Quaker) at the same time that many of those in influ­ence are becom­ing more Chris­t­ian. It’s a very pro­scribed Chris­tian­ity: coded, ten­ta­tive and most of all indi­vid­u­al­is­tic. It’s okay for a lib­eral Friend to believe what­ever they want to believe as long as they don’t believe too much. Whether the quiet influ­ence of the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of conservative-friendly lead­er­ship is enough to hold a Quaker cen­ter in the cen­trifuge that is lib­eral Quak­erism is the $60,000 ques­tion. I think the lead­er­ship has an inflated sense of its own influ­ence but I’m watch­ing the exper­i­ment. I wish it well but I’m skep­ti­cal and worry that it’s built on sand.

Some of the Christ-curious lib­eral Friends are form­ing small wor­ship groups and some of these are seek­ing out recog­ni­tion from Con­ser­v­a­tive bod­ies. It’s an achingly small move­ment but it shows a desire to be cor­po­rately Quaker and not just indi­vid­u­al­is­ti­cally Quaker. With the inter­net tra­di­tional Quaker view­points are only a Google search away; sites like Bill Samuel’s “Quakerinfo.com”:www.quakerinfo.com and blogs like Mar­shall Massey’s are break­ing down stereo­types and doing a lot of invalu­able edu­cat­ing (and I could name a lot more). It’s pos­si­ble to imag­ine all this cook­ing down to a third wave of tra­di­tion­al­ist renewal. Ohio Yearly Meeting-led ini­tia­tives like the Chris­t­ian Friends Con­fer­ence and All Con­ser­v­a­tive Gath­er­ings are steps in the right direc­tion but any real change is going to have to pull together mul­ti­ple trends, one of which might or might not be Convergence.

Our role in this future is not to be strate­gists play­ing Quaker pol­i­tics but ser­vants ready to lay down our iden­ti­ties and pre­con­cep­tions to fol­low the prompt­ings of the Inward Christ into what­ever ter­ri­tory we’re called to:

From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his dis­ci­ples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suf­fer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, say­ing, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his dis­ci­ples, If any man will come after me, let him deny him­self, and take up his cross, and fol­low me. Matthew 16:21–28.

Robin M’s recent post on a “Con­ver­gent Friends definition”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2007/07/two-convergent-events-in-california.html has gar­nered a num­ber of fas­ci­nat­ing com­menters. The lat­est comes from Scott Sav­age, a well-known Con­ser­v­a­tive Friend (author of “A Plain Live,” pub­lisher of the defunct “Plain Mag­a­zine” and light­en­ing rod for a recent cul­ture war skir­mish over homo­sex­u­al­ity at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity). Savage’s com­ment on Robin’s blog fol­lows what we could call the “Cranky Con­ser­v­a­tive” tem­plate: gra­tu­itous swipes at Con­ser­v­a­tives in Iowa and North Car­olina, whole­sale dis­missal of other Friends, mul­ti­ple affir­ma­tions of Christ, digs at the issue of homo­sex­u­al­ity, a recita­tion of past fail­ures of cross-branch com­mu­ni­ca­tion, then a shrug that seems to ask why he should stoop to our level for dia­logue.
Snore.
What makes my sleepy response espe­cially strange is that except for the homo­sex­u­al­ity issue (yay for “FLGBTQC”:http://www.quaker.org/flgbtqc/!) I’m pretty close to Scott’s posi­tions. I worry about the lib­er­al­iza­tion of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends, I get cranky about Chris­t­ian Friends who deny Christ in pub­lic, and I think a lot of Friends are miss­ing the boat on some core essen­tials. When I open my copy of Ohio’s 1968 dis­ci­pline and read its state­ment of faith (oops, sorry, “Intro­duc­tion”) I nod my head. As far as I’m aware I’m in unity with all of Ohio Conservative’s prin­ci­ples of faith and prac­tice and if I signed up for their dis­tance mem­ber­ship I cer­tainly wouldn’t be the most lib­eral mem­ber of the yearly meet­ing.
I’m actu­ally not sure about Scott’s yearly meet­ing mem­ber­ship, I’m sim­ply answer­ing his ques­tion of why he and the other Con­ser­v­a­tives who hold a strong con­cern for “the hedge” (a sep­a­ra­tion of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends from other branches) might want to think about Con­ver­gence. Of all the remain­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive bod­ies, the hedge is arguably strongest in Ohio Yearly Meet­ing and while parts of this apply to Con­ser­v­a­tives elsewhere–Iowa, North Car­olina and indi­vid­u­als embed­ded in non-Conservative yearly meetings–the snares and oppor­tu­nies are dif­fer­ent for them than they are for Ohioans.
Why Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive should engage with Con­ver­gence:
bq.. If you have all the answers and don’t mind keep­ing them hid­den under the near­est bushel then Con­ver­gence means noth­ing.
But if you’re inter­ested in fol­low­ing Jesus and being a fisher of men and women by shar­ing the good news… Well, then it’s use­ful to learn that there’s a grow­ing move­ment of Friends from out­side Con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles (how­ever defined) who are sens­ing there’s some­thing miss­ing and look­ing to tra­di­tional Quak­erism for answers.
Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives have answers and this Con­ver­gence move­ment is pro­vid­ing a fresh oppor­tu­nity to share them with the apos­tate Friends and with Chris­tians in other denom­i­na­tions seek­ing out a more authen­tic rela­tion­ship with Christ. Engag­ing with Con­ver­gence doesn’t mean Ohio Friends have to change any­thing of their faith or prac­tice and it needn’t be about “dia­logue”: sim­ply shar­ing the truth as you under­stand it is min­istry.
Yes, there are snares involved in any true gospel min­istry; strik­ing the right bal­ance is always dif­fi­cult. As the car­pen­ter said, “nar­row is the way which lead­eth unto life”:http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=47&chapter=7&version=9. We are beset on all sides by road­blocks that threaten to lead us away from Christ’s lead­er­ship. Ohio Friends will need to be on guard that min­is­ters don’t suc­cumb to the temp­ta­tion to water down their the­ol­ogy for any fleet­ing pop­u­lar­ity. This is a real dan­ger and “it fre­quently occurs”:http://www.quakerranter.org/for_other_uses_see_light_disambiguation.php but while I could tell eight years of great insider sto­ries from the halls of Philadel­phia, is that what we’re here to do?
Let me put my cards on the table: I don’t see much of Ohio effec­tively min­is­ter­ing now. There’s too much of a kind of pride that bor­ders on obnox­ious­ness, that loves end­lessly recit­ing why Iowa and North Car­olina aren’t Con­ser­v­a­tive and why no other Friends are Friends, blah blah blah. It can get tire­some and legal­is­tic. I could point to plenty of online forums where it crosses the line into detrac­tion. Char­ity and love are Chris­t­ian qual­i­ties too. Humil­ity and a sense of humor are com­pat­i­ble with tra­di­tional Quak­erism. How do we find a way to con­tinue safe­guard­ing Ohio’s pearls while shar­ing them widely with the world. There are Ohio Friends doing this and while I dif­fer with Scott Sav­age on some social issues I con­sider tan­gen­tial (and he prob­a­bly doesn’t), I very much appre­ci­ate his hard work advanc­ing the under­stand­ing of Quak­erism and agree on more than I dis­agree.
But how do we find a way to be both Con­ser­v­a­tive and Evan­gel­i­cal? To marry Truth with Love? To not only under­stand the truth but to know how, when and where to share it? I think Con­ver­gence can help Ohio think about deliv­ery of Truth and it can help bring seek­ers into the doors. When I rhetor­i­cally asked last month what Con­ver­gent Friends “might be con­verg­ing toward”:http://www.quakerranter.org/convergent_friends_a_long_definition.php, the first answer that popped in my head was Ohio Friends with a sense of humor. I’m not sure it’s the most accu­rate def­i­n­i­tion but it reveals my own sym­pa­thies and I find it tempt­ing to think about what that would look like (hint: “kraken might be involved”:http://www.conservativefriend.org/newsandevents.htm).
p. A reminder to every­one that I’ll be at “Ohio Yearly Meet­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive sessions”:http://www.conservativefriend.org/2007yearlymeeting.htm in a few weeks to talk more about the oppor­tu­ni­ties for Ohio engage­ment with Con­ver­gence. Come round if you’re in the area.
Also check out Robin’s own response to Scott, up there on her own blog. It’s a mov­ing per­sonal tes­ti­mony to the power and joy of cross-Quaker fel­low­ship and the spir­i­tual growth that can result.