It seems as if Friends are in the middle of a big shift, fast-forwarded by Covid lockdowns but part of a larger trend.
A few weeks ago at a Quaker meeting, I was given a printout for a Quakerism class being sponsored by another meeting. Nothing remarkable, except that the meeting is thousands of miles away and the workshop leader thousands of miles from the meeting. Obviously this is all happening by Zoom. I’m glad to see Friends hungry to go deeper into their faith, but the topic is one I’ve taught multiple times and could teach in-person at any nearby meeting.
I appreciate our new Zoom opportunities. I have a busy schedule and love that I have the chance to attend interesting workshops and meet Friends without leaving my house (to be honest, I’ve occasionally run errands to the grocery store or a kid drop-off while listening to a live Quaker talk).
But what happens when our primary Quaker experience is with people who aren’t local? It’s increasingly easy to be an “at large” Friend living a busy life of daily Quaker worship and far-flung workshops all on Zoom. This is great for Friends at a distance from local Quaker communities. But what becomes of our meeting communities as this trend accelerates? How do our ties to specific neighborhoods change? And what does it mean if the people in local meetings stop being asked to teach because of the easy accessibility of nationally known teachers via Zoom? Will Friends who would have been encouraged to teach at the local level be relegated to the role of consumer? Will Quaker leadership becomes even more concentrated and national — individuals with personal brands and followers?
I suspect the interest and shifts reflects needs that have been unmet by our current structures. Maybe our local meetings aren’t that nurturing or willing to go deep. Many aren’t set up well for busy parents like myself, or for those with limited transportation. In the U.S. alone millions of people are nowhere near a Friends congregation.
Many of us find difficulty in facing change. The way a meeting house is arranged and the way Quaker faith is expressed have both changed over time. There have always been those who find it difficult if not impossible to let go of what has gone before. In my local meeting I always sit in the same place and acknowledge that I find change difficult, but in spite of this there are ways in which I have changed.
I suspect part of thr context of this is the hopes and fears of British Friends as they embark on a recision of their book of Faith and Practice. An editing group has recently been named.
From Joshua Brown, a well-known Friends pastor now down in North Carolina:
Most yearly meetings recommend that everyone who works with young people should have a background check. Most local meetings I have been a part of resist this, saying that “But we know that person – they have belonged here for years!” Requiring a background check feels to some Friends like an invasion of privacy, or that it goes against the openness and trust which they value in a Quaker meeting.
I have personally known of three respected Friends who turned out to be serial child rapists. Two were pillars of their meeting. None of the people in the monthly meeting knew learned about it because of outside legal action and investigations.
There were times when these individuals were around my children, though I was near-enough nearby that I’m not worried anything happened. Still, one of the cases involved rapes in a camper in the perpetrator’s backyard and I remember my eldest thinking it looked cool and trying the door handle. We also had a close call with a Boy Scout leader and respected local historian whose file was published when an Oregon judge ordered the national BSA to release decades of secret pedophile records.
One the affected meetings in particular is near and dear to me heart and have some warm and faithful Friends. I know it was a shock and ongoing trauma for them that this happened in their community. I understand that we were all a bit naive about these matters 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. But we’ve all been educated about just how common this is and just how charming pedophiles can be.
Even recently, I’ve had people assure me their Friends meetings are safe and that they don’t need to do background checks. I make a mental note to avoid those meetings. We are not immune. And we are not magically better about discerning this stuff than any other faith community.
From a book review by Mackenzie Morgan on the Quaker Outreach site:
Often churches that fail to reflect their changing local community die off in a generation or two. Implicit bias has been a point of discussion in some yearly meetings in recent years, and this is related.
In fact, a Friend once told me they’d been asked, “can we target these Facebook ads only to people who are just like us?”
Actually, Facebook can create what they call lookalike audiences. It’s very cool and very creepy at the same time. It’s part of the suite of fine-grain targeting tools that’s letting political propagandists and lifestyle-focused companies control our media consumption at the social feed level and reinforce liked-minded groupthink. Attention silos are dangerous for our democracy and they’re no good for our churches. If the Quaker good news has any meaning left in it, it has to be widely applicable outside of our cultural, style bubbles.
Reader Carl Abbott of Multnomah Meeting in Portand, Oregon, wrote in with a bit more context about the local public school that’s shedding it’s Quaker mascot:
The Franklin High mascot issue was very low profile here in Portland, basically raised and advocated by one person. Individuals in our meeting signed her petition, but the question did not rise to formal consideration ( I think also the case with other area meetings and churches). The question of Native American names used by schools around Oregon HAS been a substantial and difficult public issue, and I suspect that the Portland School Board was looking to avoid a quagmire. I’m supportive of the change, although it seemed to me that there have been much more important things to worry about.
Meanwhile, for your entertainment I dug out this old press release from George Fox University (whose date I can’t read). I do agree that Bruin is better than Foxy George.
It looks to me like the handwriting reads Fall 70 to me. Am I going to be the only one to think that Foxy George is pretty creative in a charmingly obvious way?
On Saturday, April 21, 2018, Abington Monthly Meeting unveiled a burial stone for Sarah & Benjamin Lay. The event which featured opening remarks by author Marcus Rediker and local resident and Quaker Avis Wanda McClinton was followed by a gathering in the meetinghouse in the manner of a Friends Memorial Meeting.
Abington was the first Friends meeting I ever visited and I’ve loved the story of Lay since the time I first stumbled on it (even as a kid I was enough of a local history nerd that I might have read of Lay’s antics before I ever met a Quaker). I’m personally so happy to see him get this wider recognition. The PYM piece is all-text but much of the grave marker ceremony has been posted to YouTube.
The Chris Christie beach memes are funny of course but I talked to more than a few local residents who wondered what the state shutdown was about. The Star Ledger has gone deep and interviewed the players to find out just what happened earlier this week:
When it ended early on the fourth day, New Jersey had been treated to a remarkable political spectacle, even by Trenton standards, complete with dueling press conferences, nasty backroom shouting matches, and even propaganda posters. Some of it played out publicly — very publicly. What didn’t is told here, the inside story of what caused — and what finally settled — the New Jersey government shutdown of 2017.
It’s especially depressing to read the kind of horse trading that was going on behind the scenes: other measures floated to end the standoff. It was a game to see which constituency the politicians might all be able to agree to screw over. I presume this is normal Trenton politics but it’s not good governing and the ramifications are felt throughout the state.
Marlborough (Pa.) Friends meetinghouse at dusk. c. 2006.
A few weeks ago, reader James F. used my “Ask me anything!” page to wonder about two types of Friends:
I’ve read a little and watched various videos about the Friends. My questions are , is there a gulf between “conservative” friends and liberal? As well as what defines the two generally? I’m in Maryland near D.C. Do Quakers who define themselves as essentially Christian worship with those who don’t identify as such?
Hi James, what a great question! I think many of us don’t fully appreciate the confusion we sow when we casually use these terms in our online discussions. They can be useful rhetorical shortcuts but sometimes I think we give them more weight than they deserve. I worry that Friends sometimes come off as more divided along these lines than we really are. Over the years I’ve noticed a certain kind of rigid online seeker who dissects theological discussions with such conviction that they’ll refused to even visit their nearest meeting because it’s not the right type. That’s so tragic.
What the terms don’t mean
The first and most common problem is that people don’t realize we’re using these terms in a specifically Quaker context. “Liberal” and “Conservative” don’t refer to political ideologies. One can be a Conservative Friend and vote for liberal or socialist politicians, for example.
Adding to the complications is that these can be imprecise terms. Quaker bodies themselves typically do not identify as either Liberal or Conservative. While local congregations often have their own unique characteristics, culture, and style, nothing goes on the sign out front. Our regional bodies, called yearly meetings, are the highest authority in Quakerism but I can’t think of any that doesn’t span some diversity of theologies.
Historically (and currently) we’ve had the situation where a yearly meeting will split into two separate bodies. The causes can be complex; theology is a piece, but demographics and mainstream cultural shifts also play a huge role. In centuries past (and kind of ridiculously, today still), both of the newly reorganized yearly meetings were obsessed with keeping the name as a way to claim their legitimacy. To tell them apart we’d append awkward and incomplete labels, so in the past we had Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox).
In the United States, we have two places where yearly meetings compete names and one side’s labelled appendage is “Conservative,” giving us Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Over time, both of these yearly meetings have diversified to the point where they contain outwardly Liberal monthly meetings. The name Conservative in the yearly meeting title has become partly administrative.
A third yearly meeting is usually also included in the list of Conservative bodies. Present-day Ohio Yearly Meeting once competed with two other Ohio Yearly Meetings for the name but is the only one using it today. The name “Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative)” is still sometimes seen, but it’s unnecessary, not technically correct, and not used in the yearly meeting’s formal correspondence. (You want to know more? The yearly meeting’s clerk maintains a website that goes amazingly deep into the history of Ohio Friends).
All that said, these three yearly meetings have more than their share of traditionalist Christian Quaker members. Ohio’s gatherings have the highest percentage of plain dressing- and speaking- Friends around (though even there, they are a minority). But other yearly meetings will have individual members and sometimes whole monthly meetings that could be accurately described as Conservative Quaker.
I might have upset some folks with these observations. In all aspects of life you’ll find people who are very attached to labels. That’s what the comment section is for.
The meanings of the terms
Formal identities aside, there are good reasons we use the concept of Liberal and Conservative Quakerism. They denote a general approach to the world and a way of incorporating our history, our Christian heritage, our understanding of the role of Christ in our discernment, and the format and pace of our group decision making.
But at the same time there’s all sorts of diversity and personal and local histories involved. It’s hard to talk about any of this in concrete terms without dissolving into footnotes and qualifications and long discourses about the differences between various historical sub-movements within Friends (queue awesome 16000-word history).
Many of us comfortably span both worlds. In writing, I sometimes try to escape the weight of the most overused labels by substituting more generic terms, like traditional Friends or Christ-centered Friends. These terms also get problematic if you scratch at them too hard. Reminder: God is the Word and our language is by definition limiting.
If you like the sociology of such things, Isabel Penraeth wrote a fascinating article in Friends Journal a few years ago, Understanding Ourselves, Respecting the Differences. More recently in FJ a Philadelphia Friend, John Andrew Gallery, visited Ohio Friends and talked about the spiritual refreshment of Conservative Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting Gathering and Quaker Spring. Much of the discussion around the modern phrase Convergent Friends and the threads on QuakerQuaker has focused on those who span a Liberal and Conservative Quaker worldview.
The distinction between Conservatives and Liberals can become quite evident when you observe how Friends conduct a business meeting or how they present themselves. It’s all too easy to veer into caricature here but Liberal Friends are prone to reinventions and the use of imprecise secular language, whileConservative Friends are attached to established processes and can be unwelcoming to change that might disrupt internal unity.
But even these brief observations are imprecise and can mask surprisingly similar talents and stumbling blocks. We all of us are humans, after all. The Inward Christ is always available to instruct and comfort, just as we are all broken and prone to act impulsively against that advice.
Worshipping?
Finally, pretty much all Friends will worship with anyone. Most local congregations have their own distinct flavor. There are some in which the ministry is largely Christian, with a Quaker-infused explanation of a parable or gospel, while there are others where you’ll rarely hear Christ mentioned. You should try out different meetings and see which ones feed your soul. Be ready to find nurturance in unexpected places. God may instruct us to serve anywhere with no notice, as he did the Good Samaritan. Christ isn’t bound by any of our silly words.
Thanks to James for the question!
Do you have a question on another Quaker topic? Check out the Ask Me Anything! page.
