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Pictures from this weekend's gathering of Conservative Friends (Quakers), held in Lancaster County PA and hosted by Keystone Fellowship Friends Meeting of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative.

Videos:

Arthur Berk on "Basic Christian Quakerism"



The Convincement Story of John L.: a particularly interesting story of a family's journey from the LDS (Mormon) Church to Friends.

Earlier today I posted an excerpt of an interesting article on Anabaptism on my Tumblr blog and it's engendered quite a conversation on Facebook about testimonies and empty forms, etc. It's true that any form of spiritual discipline can get twisted into look-at-me heroism or lets-talk-anything-but-God group conformity.

The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:

I've been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.

I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn't how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.

I'm experimenting with Quaker Quote of the Day for the QuakerQuaker Twitter account. You should be able to read them on Twitter here. Extended versions will be on QuakerQuaker's new QOTD blog.It's hard to pack a good quote into only 140 characters so there will be some shortening, but the full piece should give it a bit more context.

I'll be mostly quoting historical Friends but I might throw a living person in there once in awhile. I won't use a quote book to deliver the same adage you've heard a million times before. I'll also try not to chop it up into a meaning that goes against the author's intention.

Henry Jenkins (right) mixes up the names but has good commentary on the Susan Boyle phenomenon in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I've been quoting lines over on my Tumblr blog but this is a good one for Quaker readers because I think it says something about the Convergent Friends culture:

When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand.

Susan Boyle's video was produced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that border. In the Convergent Friends movement, we're discovering "content which wasn't designed for our market"--Friends of all different stripes having direct access to the work and thoughts of other types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost immediately. In this context, the "networks and productions companies" would be our yearly meetings and larger Friends bodies.

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. 

Robin wrote a little about the New Monastic movement in a plug for the Pendle Hill workshop I'm doing with Wess Daniels this Fall.

Here's my working theory: I think Liberal Friends have a good claim to inventing the "new monastic" movement thirty years ago in the form of Movement for a New Society, a network of peace and anti-nuclear activists based in Philadelphia that codified a kind of "secular Quaker" decision-making process and trained thousands of people from around the world in a kind of engaged drop-out lifestyle that featured low-cost communal living arrangements in poor neighborhoods with part-time jobs that gave them flexibility to work as full-time community activists. There are few activist campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s that weren't touched by the MNS style and a less-ideological, more lived-in MNS culture survives today in borderline neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities. The high-profile new monastics rarely seem to give any props to Quakers or MNS, but I'd be willing to bet if you sat in on any of their meetings the process would be much more inspired by MNS than Robert's Rules of Order or any fifteen century monastic rule that might be cited.

For a decade I lived in West Philly in what I called "the ruins of the Movement for a New Society." The formal structure of MNS had disbanded but many of its institutions carried on in a kind of lived-in way. I worked at the remaining publishing house, New Society Publishers, lived in a land-trusted West Philly coop house, and was fed from the old neighborhood food coop and occasionally dropped in or helped out with Training for Change, a revived training center started by MNS-co-founder (and Central Philadelphia Meeting-member) George Lakey It was a tight neighborhood, with strong cross-connections, and it was able to absorb related movements with different styles (e.g., a strong anarchist scene that grew in the late 1980s). I don't think it's coincidence that some of the Philly emergent church projects started in West Philly and is strong in the neighborhoods that have become the new ersatz West Philly as the actual neighborhood has gentrified.

So some questions I'll be wrestling with over the next six months and will bring to Pendle Hill:

• Why haven't more of us in the Religious Society of Friends adopted this engaged lifestyle?
• Why haven't we been good at articulating it all this time?
• Why did the formal structure of the Quaker-ish "new monasticism" not survive the 1980s?
• Why don't we have any younger leaders of the Quaker monasticism? Why do we need others to remind us of our own recent tradition?
• In what ways are some Friends (and some fellow travelers) still living out the "Old New Monastic" experience, just without the hype and without the buzz?

It's entirely possible that the "new monasticism" isn't sustainable. At the very least Friends' experiences with it should be studied to see what happened. Is West Philly what the new monasticism looks like thirty years later? The biggest differences between now and the heyday of the Movement for a New Society is 1) the Internet's ability to organize and stay in touch in completely different ways; and 2) the power of the major Evangelical publishing houses that are hyping the new kids.

I'll be looking at myself as well. After ten years, I felt I needed a change. I'm now in the "real world"--semi suburban freestanding house, nuclear family. The old new West Philly monasticism, like the "new monasticism" seems optimized for hip twenty-something suburban kids who romanticized the gritty city. People of other demographics often fit in, but still it was never very scalable and for many not very sustainable. How do we bring these concerns out to a world where there are suburbs, families, etc?

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I feel I'm being called to be profoundly non-strategic these days. What do big words add to understanding? Our message is simple. All we need to do is love God and care for one another. Our task is not to know all the answers but to simply follow what small leads we've been given and trust in the Lord that this is the work of the Kingdom. It is too easy to adopt the clothes of a professionalism that hide a predatory motive and mask the unspoken fear at the root of our labors.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

I will worry less about those who seem intent to push houses across sandy soil. I will dig down looking for the bedrock and I will invite others to join with their shovels. I will stop worrying about the specks in my brothers' eyes.

And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like: He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock. But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great. Quotes from Luke 6.

An interview with Raye, a member of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative who serves on their Electronic Outreach Committee. You can also watch it on QuakerQuaker: Quaker Video and Electronic Outreach.

Raye: Ohio Yearly Meeting holds our yearly meeting in Barnesville Ohio--some people know us as those Barnesville folks. We have an electronic Outreach Committee and that includes the oversight and ministry associated with our website. We spend time thinking about how to open up to people who might be interested in Friends' ways and might want to know more about us whether or not they've ever read the Journal of George Fox. We're trying to expand our witness, if you will.

One of the questions that has come up in this electronic outreach group is: what types of communication or video are useful for someone to get to know us but also respectful of the fact that we do worship and that worship is a spiritually intimate time. We're trying to bridge and deal with respecting the worshippers, the Friends themselves, to not put on a performance and yet to try to communicate what it is that is edifying in practice and worship.

Martin: How do you give newcomers a taste of Quakers without directing it too much? If you just have that silent empty box it's hard for newcomers to know what should be filling that box.

Raye: One of the things Friends have done for hundreds of years is to publish, to keep journals and to share that. But that's not all there is to the Friends experience. There are those quiet times and those moments of ministry that we believe are Spirit-inspired. Many of us wish we could give people a little taste of that because that doesn't show up in a lot of published writings. That spontaneous and timely, and at times prophetic, witness that we see in our Meetings. We have considered digital video as a way to do that.

Martin: I love the video possibilities here. Video can be a way of reaching out to more people.

Raye: It's not just anything that can be written. Certainly the writings that have been published are very helpful in getting some sort of a glimmer of where we have been, or in some cases where we are headed or where we are. But there is nothing like that experience of being with Friends in meeting. It doesn't always happen but there are these moments called a covered meeting or a gathered meeting where everybody seems to be in the same place spiritually and when seems to be messages and gifts coming through people. That's difficult to get across.

We're hoping that with video we can discuss these kinds of things after the fact. We don't want to turn it into a spectator sport or performance.

Martin: Authenticity is a key part of the Quaker message. You're not practicing what you're going to say for First Day or Sunday. You're sitting there and waiting for that immediate spirit to come upon you.

Raye: We don't know when that will happen. There are meetings where everybody is very quiet, where there's a sense of that spirit and unity but it may be an outwardly quiet meeting. I have been in meetings where someone stood up and began to sing their message or a psalm or someone had a wonderful sermon that was perfect for the moment. These things happen but we don't know when they will.

Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do--throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can't do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn't make sense.

A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn't pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend's experience is any guide, there's not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn't care much.

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox's example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of "historic peace church" members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn't figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox's kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee's pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn't mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ's sacrifice the Lamb's War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn't brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we're pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?

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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends" at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I'm already starting to blog about it.

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.

• Peggy's blog post about the workshop
• QuakerQuaker Events listing
• Pendle Hill's listing

Both of my workshop co-leaders Wess and Robin have now checked in with preliminary reports. More material is being collected on the QuakerQuaker event page.

Wess and I have both been uploading lots of photos to Flickr using the "quakerreclaiming2009" tag. I've been uploading my video interviews both on Youtube and QuakerQuaker. You can see them at the reclaiming2009 tag (I have the feeling we've just doubled the Quaker content on Youtube but it's not that extreme). Anyone present with more photos can either upload them to Flickr with the "quakerreclaiming2009" tag or send them directly up to QuakerQuaker. Same with videos.

Hey all, the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop at California's Ben Lomond Center wrapped up a few hours ago (I'm posting from the San Jose airport). I think it went well. There were about thirty participants. The makeup was very intergenerational and God and Christ were being named all over the place!



I myself felt stripped throughout the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease--not at how the workshop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work pointing out the layers of pride that I've used to protect myself over the last few years. This morning's agenda was mostly extended worship, begun with "Bible Reading in the Manner of Conservative Friends" (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me--I think God even joked around with me a bit.

As always, many of the high points came unexpectedly in small conversations, both planned and random. One piece that I'll be returning to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of movement piece by piece and not worry about the Big Conference or the Big Website that will change everything that we know. That's not how the Spirit works and our pushing it to work this way almost invariably leads to failure and wasted effort.

Another piece is that we need to start focusing on really building up the kind of habits that will work out our spiritual muscles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great analogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musicians and I hoped to get an interview with him on that but time ran out. I'll try to get a remote interview (an earlier interview with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first interview of the weekend!)

I conducted a bunch of video interviews that I'll start uploading to my Youtube account and on the "reclaiming2009" tag on QuakerQuaker. When you watch them, be charitable. I'm still learning through my style. But it was exciting starting to do them and it confirmed my sense that we really need to be burning up Youtube with Quaker stuff.

I need to find my boarding gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together collections of practices that Friends can try in their location Friends community. Gathering in Light Wess led a really well-received session that took the Lord's Prayer and turned it into an interactive small group even. We took photos and a bit of video and we'll be putting it together as a how-to somewhere or other.

Pictures going up on Flickr, I'll organize them soon. Also check out ConvergentFriends.org and the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop page on QuakerQuaker.

I wrote this in Eighth Month 2004 for the Plainandmodestdress discussion group back when the red dress MacGuffin made it's appearance on that board.

I wonder if it's not a good time for the Margaret Fell story. She was one of the most important founders of the Quaker movement, a feisty, outspoken, hardworking and politically powerful early Friend who later married George Fox.

The story goes that one day Margaret wore a red dress to Meeting. Another Friend complained that it was gaudy. She shot back in a letter that it was a "silly poor gospel" to question her dress. In my branch of Friends, this story is endlessly repeated out of context to prove that "plain dress" isn't really Quaker. (I haven't looked up to see if I have the actual details correct--I'm telling the apocryphal version of this tale.)

Before declaring her Friend's complaint "silly poor gospel" Margaret explains that Friends have set up monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures in order to discipline those walking out of line of the truth. She follows it by saying that we should be "covered with God's eternal Spirit, and clothed with his eternal Light."

It seems really clear here that Margaret is using this exchange as a teaching opportunity to demonstrate the process of gospel order. Individuals are charged with trying to follow Christ's commands, and we should expect that these might lead to all sorts of seemingly-odd appearances (even red dresses!). What matters is NOT the outward form of plain dress, but the inward spiritual obedience that it (hopefully!) mirrors. Gospel order says it's the Meeting's role to double-guess individuals and labor with them and discipline them if need be. Individuals enforcing a dress code of conformity with snarky comments after meeting is legalism--it's not gospel order and not proper Quaker process (I would argue it's a variant of "detraction").

This concern over legalism is something that is distinctly Quaker. Other faiths are fine with written down, clearly-articulated outward forms. Look at creeds for example: it's considered fine for everyone to repeat a set phrasing of belief, even though we might know or suspect that not everyone in church is signing off on all the parts in it as they mutter along. Quakers are really sticklers on this and so avoid creeds altogether. In worship, you should only give ministry if you are actively moved of the Lord to deliver it and great care should be given that you don't "outrun your Guide" or add unnecessary rhetorical flourishes.

This Plain and Modest Dress discussion group is  meant for people of all sorts of religious backgrounds of course. It might be interesting some time to talk about the different assumptions and rationales each of our religious traditions bring to the plain dress question. I think this anti-legalism that would distinguish Friends.

For Friends, I don't think the point is that we should have a formal list of acceptable colors--we shouldn't get too obsessed over the "red or not red" question. I don't suspect Margaret would want us spending too much time working out details of a standard pan-Quaker uniform. "Legalism" is a silly poor gospel for Friends. There's a great people to be gathered and a lot of work to do. The plainness within is the fruit of our devotion and it can certainly shine through any outward color or fashion!

If I lived to see the day when all the Quakers were dressing alike and gossiping about how others were led to clothe themselves, I'd break out a red dress too! But then, come to think about it, I DO live in a Quaker world where there's WAY TOO MUCH conformity in thought and dress and where there's WAY TOO MUCH idle gossip when someone adopts plain dress. Where I live, suspenders and broadfalls might as well be a red dress!

On a recent evening I met up with Gathering in Light Wess, who was in Philadelphia for a Quaker-sponsored peace conference. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great dinner, Wess and I tested some testimonies, and a revolving group of Friends ended up around a table in the conference's hotel lobby talking late into the night (the links are Wess' reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp account).

Of all of the many people I spoke with, only one had any kind of featured role at the conference. Without exception my conversation partners were fascinating and insightful about the issues that had brought them to Philadelphia, yet I sensed a pervading sense of missed opportunity: hundreds of lives rearranged and thousands of air miles flown mostly to listen to others talk. I spent my long commute home wondering what it would have been like to have spent the weekend in the hotel lobby recording ten minute Youtube interviews with as many conference participants as I could. We would have ended up with a snapshot of faith-based peace organizing circa 2009.

Next weekend I'll be burning up more of the ozone layer by flying to California to co-lead a workshop with Wess and Robin M. (details at ConvergentFriends.org, I'm sure we can squeeze more people in!) The participant list looks fabulous. I don't know everyone but there's at least half a dozen people coming who I would be thrilled to take workshops from. I really don't want to spend the weekend hearing myself talk! I also know there are plenty of people who can't come because of commitments and costs.

So we're going to try some experiments--they might work, they might not. On QuakerQuaker, there's a new group for the event and a discussion thread open to all QQ members (sign up is quick and painless). For those of you comfortable with the QQ tagging system, the Delicious tag for the event is "quaker.reclaiming2009". Robin M has proposed using #convergentfriends as our Twitter hashtag.

There's all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live blogging via Twitter, anyone?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract us from whatever message the Inward Christ might be trying to give us. But behind all this is a real questions about why and how we should gather together as Friends. As the banking system tanks, as the environment strains, as communications costs drop and we find ourselves in a curious new economy, what challenges and opportunities open up?

It's up on the sidebar and featured on QuakerQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas' post "Why I bother with religion." I've written about the Emergent Church / Quaker experiment that Kevin-Douglass is helping to organize down in Baltimore. Check out their new'ish website, http://www.setonhillfriends.org/ Here's a snippet of today's post:

Organized religion is based in community. Being in a community challenges me. Simply hanging out with my friends and engaging my family isn't enough. The risks of such an intentional community and the support available therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes easily or go along with what exists around me. I'm challenged in community. I'm held accountable. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an ethical society, the truth is that in a religious community, we all seek to go much deeper than the psychological or emotional levels. We seek to understand that Mystery -- God. We seek to understand that transformative and healing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas originally posted it to Facebook earlier today and I asked if he would sign up to QuakerQuaker and post it there. There's a lot of great stuff that goes up on Facebook and it's a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, but most posts are not visible beyond your own Facebook friends list (it depends on your privacy settings). If you post something really good about Friends or belief on Facebook, seriously consider whether you might repost it somewhere more public. If you don't have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on QuakerQuaker, where every registered user has blogging capabilities (it creates a bit of a metaphysical connundrum for the QuakerQuaker editors, as it means we'll be linking QQ posts to the QQ site, but that's fine).

Today is the extended deadline for forced flu shots for young children in New Jersey, the day schools across the state threaten to kick students out if they haven't taken the mercury-laden vaccine. Every year sees more forced and/or pressured vaccinations, many dozens now in New Jersey. The flu shot is particularly unnecessary. An average of two kids a year die from flu in the state and this flu season has only seen two pediatric deaths in the entire country. Yes, every death is a shame but why are we kicking kids out of school and spending billions of dollars in flu shots for a largely non-lethal disease.

New Jersey is also known as the state with the highest concentration of autism. I've met sane-seeming parents of special-needs kids who say the symptoms started right after a vaccination. I'm no expert but I've read enough to know the doctors and pharmaceutical companies have no clue about the cumulative effect of all these vaccinations. They took our little one Francis in to school this morning despite not having the shot. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

Other New Jersians wanting to know more can check out the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice for more about the movement to have parents these choices for their kids.

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.

A few of you might have noticed that yesterday's quote was from the gospel reading of the One Year Bible plan. It's January 15th and I'm still following the readings. It's only twenty or so minutes a day, which seems quite manageable. Each day has readings from four parts of the Bible, which I hope helps keep me motivated through Leviticus!

Oregon Quakers Gregg K Gregg Koskela and AJ Schwanz posted about the One Year Bible plan at the start of the year and I know of at least one other online Friend following it. It's never too late to start. A great resource has been the One Year Bible Blog from a guy named Mike, who links the the day's reading and gives his own daily commentary. He has a good sense of humor and it's obvious he has a real ministry and leading to sharing the Bible like this.

I started a One Year Bible Quaker Group over at QuakerQuaker where people can learn more and discuss the day's reading with other Friends. Check it out. I'm reading OYBB's Mike every day and I've also followed his suggestion and bought the One Year Bible for New Believers, which presents each day's reading altogether. It's a great way to keep up without being glued to the computer.

Over the QuakerQuaker forum, a new blogger asked "I am new at blogging. Do you have any suggestions for my site?" I'll cross-post my answer here.

I think the success to any kind of writing is to first and foremost write about what interests you. Don't worry about whether there's an audience or not: with millions of people on the internet every day there's bound to be plenty of others who share your interests. Don't be afraid to be personal, quirky and idiosyncratic, as people come to blogs looking for personality.

The most interesting blogs have an intimacy and honesty to them. My blog posts are the kind of discussions I would have around my dining room table. Friends have a tendency to downplay our opinions in public settings. The Quaker blogs have given us a place to be respectfully honest, open and inquisitive. That openness has led many of us into surprising friendships.

I'd also recommend that you keep your blog open to development. I was four months into my QuakerRanter blog before I had the first post that I would now consider a "typical" QuakerRanter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you're comfortable in and many people find themselves interested in different topics than they initially imagined. Blogs often end up being very different than the one they thought they were starting! Most blogs last about two months and are abandoned: if you're blogging because you think you should be, then the motivation won't be enough to sustain you over the long term.

Finally, blogs are social. They're conversation. Encourage conversation on your blog. Respond to comments, on the blog and also in direct emails if people have provided them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and read them and comment on thoughtful posts. Get to know people and try to attend the events we're now listing here on QuakerQuaker. About half of my QuakerQuaker time is actually private emails and IM conversations with Friends and the comments I leave on blogs (some Quaker, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It's a social medium and the public blog is just one piece of that.

I'd love to hear what advice others have, either here on Quaker Ranter or over on the Forum post.