quarterly meeting Posts

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!

Sometimes it seems as if moderns are looking back at history through the wrong end of the telescope: everything seems soooo far away. The effect is magnified when we're talking about spirituality. The ancients come off as cartoonish figures with a complicated set of worked out philosophies and prohibitions that we have to adopt or reject wholesale. The ideal is to be a living branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intelligently converse with the past and negotiate changes?

Let's talk Friends and music. The cartoon Quaker in our historical imagination glares down at us with heavy disapproval when it comes to music. They're squares who just didn't get it.

Getting past the cartoons

Thomas Clarkson, our Anglican guide to Quaker thought circa 1700, brings more nuance to the scruples. "The Quakers do not deny that instrumental music is capable of exciting delight. They are not insensible either of its power or of its charms. They throw no imputation on its innocence, when viewed abstractly by itself." (p. 64)

"Abstractly by itself": when evaluating a social practice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tempations? Quakers are engaged in a grand experiment in "christian" living, keeping to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral living. The warnings against certain activities are based on observation borne of experience. The Quaker guidelines are wikis, notes compiled together into a collective memory of which activities promote--and which ones threaten--the leading of a moral life.

Clarkson goes on to detail Quaker's concerns about music. They're all actually quite valid. Here's a sampling:

• People sometimes learn music just so they can show off and make others look talentless.
• Religious music can become a end to itself as people become focused on composition and playing (we've really decontextualized: much of the music played at orchestra halls is Masses; much of the music played at folk festival is church spirituals).
• Music can be a big time waster, both in its learning and its listening.
• Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won't say any of these are absolute reason to ban music, but as a list of negative temptations they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very consciously has music as a centerpiece. It's very beautiful, but I always appreciate the pastor's reminder that the music is in service to the Mass and that no one had better clap at some performance! Like with Friends, we're seeing a deliberate balancing of benefits vs temptations and a warning against the snares that the choice has left open.

Context context context

In section iv, Clarkson adds time to the equation. Remember, the Quaker movement is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of early Quakers] was principally in the hands of those, who made a livelihood of the art. Those who followed it as an accomplishment, or a recreation, were few and those followed it with moderation. But since those days, its progress has been immense... Many of the middle classes, in imitation of the higher, have received it... It is learned now, not as a source of occasional recreation, but as a complicated science, where perfection is insisted upon to make it worth of pursuit. p.76.

Again we see Clarkson's Quakers making distinctions between types and motivations of musicianship. The laborer who plays a guitar after a hard day on the field is less worrisome than the obsessed adolescent who spends their teen years locked in the den practicing Stairway to Heaven. And when music is played at large festivals that lead youth "into company" and fashions, it threatens the religious society: "it has been found, that in proportion as young Quakers mix with the world, they generally imbibe its spirit, and weaken themselves as members of their own body."

Music has changed even more radically in the suceeding two centuries. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it's ubiquitious and often involuntary (you can't go shopping without it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of isolated listenership. Then, what about DIY music and singalongs. Is there a distinction to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between arenas and coffeehouse shows? And move past music into the other media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, computers, glossy magazines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsessing over American Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion?

Does a social practice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral center? What if we turned off the mediated consumer universe and engaged in more spiritually rewarding activities--contemplative reading, service work, visiting with others? But what if music, computers, radio, is part of the way we're engaging with the world?

How to decide?

Finally, in Clarkson's days Friends had an elaborate series of courts that would decide about social practices both in the abstract (whether they should be published as warnings) and the particular (whether a particular person had strayed too far and fallen in moral danger). Clarkson was writing for a non-Quaker audience and often translated Quakerese: "courts" was his name for monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures. I suspect that those sessions more closely resembled courts than they do the modern institutions that share their name. The court system led to its own abuses and started to break down shortly after Clarkson's book was published and doesn't exist anymore.

We find outselves today pretty much without any structure for sharing our experiences ("Faith and Practice" sort of does this but most copies just gather dust on shelves). Monthly meetings don't feel that oversight of their members is their responsibility; many of us have seen them look the other way even at flagrantly egregious behavior and many Friends would be outraged at the concept that their meeting might tell them what to do--I can hear the howls of protest now!

And yet, and yet: I hear many people longing for this kind of collective inquiry and instruction. A lot of the emergent church talk is about building accountable communities. So we have two broad set of questions: what sort of practices hurt and hinder our spiritual lives in these modern times; and how do we share and perhaps codify guidelines for twenty-first century righteous living?

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

A workshop led by Zachary Moon and Martin Kelley at the 2005 FGC Gathering of Friends

This is for Young Friends who want to break into the power of Quakerism: it’s the stuff you didn’t get in First Day School. Connecting with historical Quakers whose powerful ministry came in their teens and twenties, we’ll look at how Friends wove God, covenants and gospel order together to build a movement that rocked the world. We’ll mine Quaker history to reclaim the power of our tradition, to explore the living testimonies and our witness in the world. (P/T)

I was given permission to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Ministry Consultation that took place Third Month. A number of goals and projects had been brainstormed beforehand. The thirty-or-so participants at the Consultation were each given ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pursued. Every star acted as a vote that there was one person interested in that topic. The stars were coded to indicate the age range of the voter: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18-37 years old) and older Friends.

In early 2005, I was nominated to apply for the Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership. I decided to dream up the best project I could under the restraints of the limited Pickett grant sizes. While the endowement was approved their budget was limited that year (lots of Quaker youth travel to a World Gathering) and I got a small fraction of what I had hoped for. I made an online appeal and contributions from dozens of Friends doubled the Pickett Fund grant size!

Here then is an edited version of the proposal I presented to the Pickett Fund in Third Month 2005; it has subsequently been approved by the Overseers of my meeting, Atlantic City Area Monthly Meeting.

What involvement have you had in Quaker-related activities/service projects for the betterment of your community/world?

Ten years ago I founded Nonviolence.org, a cutting edge "New Media" website that now reaches over a million visitors a year. I have been involved with a number of Philadelphia peace groups (e.g.,Food Not Bombs, the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, Act for Peace in the Middle East). I have served my monthly meeting as co-clerk and as a representative to yearly meeting bodies. I recently led a well-received "Quakerism 101" course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting and will co-lead a workshop called "Strangers to the Covenant" at this year's FGC Gathering. I have organized Young Adult Friends at the yearly and national levels, serving formally and informally in various capacities. I am quite involved with Quakers Uniting in Publications, an international association of Quaker publishers, authors and booksellers. Eighteen months ago I started a small Quaker ministry website that has inspired a number of younger Friends interested in exploring ministry and witness. For the past six years I have worked for Friends General Conference; for two of those years I was concurrently also working for Friends Journal.

What is the nature of the internship, creative activity or service project for which you seek funding?

I've served with various Young Adult Friends groupings and committees for ten years. In that time I've been blessed to meet many of my peers with a clear call to inspired ministry. Most of these Friends have since left the Society, frustrated both by monthly meetings and Quaker bodies that didn't know what to do with a bold ministry and by a lack of mentoring eldership that could help season and steady these young ministers and deepen their understanding of gospel order.

I would like to put together an independent online publication. This would address the isolation that most serious young Friends feel and would give a focus to our work together. The publication would also have a quarterly print edition.

It's important to build face-to-face relationships too, to build an advisory board but also a base of contributors and to give extra encouragement to fledgling ministries. I would like to travel to different young adult communities to share stories and inspiration. This would explicit reach out across the different braches of Friends and even to various seeker movements like the so-called "Emergent Church Movement."

What amount are you requesting and how will it be used in the project? What other financial resources for your project are you considering?

$7800. Web hosting: $900 for 18 months. Software: $300. Print publication: $3000 for 6 quarterly issues at $500 per issue. Travel: $1600 for four trips averaging $400 each. $2000 for mini-sabbatical time setting up site.

The Pickett Fund would be a validation of sorts for this vision. I would also turn to other youth fellowship and yearly meeting travel funds that support the work.

What is the time frame for your project? 18 months, to be reviewed/revisioned then.

When did/will it begin? This summer. When will it end? December 2006.

In what specific ways will the project further your leadership potential in Quaker service?

It's time that I formalize some of the work I've been doing and make it more of a collective effort. It will be good to see formal monthly meeting recognition of this ministry and to have institutional Quaker support. I hope to learn much by being involved with so many wonderful Friends and hope to help pull together more of a sense of mission among a number of younger Friends.

It's time to explain why I call this site "The Quaker Ranter" and to talk about my home, the liberal branch of Quakers. Non-Quakers can be forgiven for thinking that I mean this to be a place where I, Martin Kelley, "rant," i.e., where I "utter or express with extravagance." That may be the result (smile), but it's not what I mean and it's not the real purpose behind this site.

Friends and Ranters

The Ranters were fellow-travelers to the Friends in the religious turmoil of seventeenth-century England. The countryside was covered with preachers and lay people running around England seeking to revive primitive Christianity. George Fox was one, declaring that "Christ has come to teach his people himself" and that hireling clergy were distorting God's message. The movement that coalesced around him as "The Friends of Truth" or "The Quakers" would take its orders directly from the Spirit of Christ.

This worked fine for a few years. But before long a leading Quaker rode into the town of Bristol in imitation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Not a good idea. The authorities convicted him of heresy and George Fox distanced himself from his old friend. Soon afterwards, a quasi-Quaker collection of religious radicals plotted an overthrow of the government. That also didn't go down very well with the authorities, and Fox quickly disavowed violence in a statement that became the basis of our peace testimony. Clearly the Friends of the Truth needed to figure out mechanisms for deciding what messages were truly of God and who could speak for the Friends movement.

The central question was one of authority. Those Friends recognized as having the gift for spiritual discernment were put in charge of a system of discipline over wayward Friends. Friends devised a method for determining the validity of individual leadings and concerns. This system rested on an assumption that Truth is immutable, and that any errors come from our own willfulness in disobeying the message. New leadings were first weighed against the tradition of Friends and their predecessors the Israelites (as brought down to us through the Bible).

Ranters often looked and sounded like Quakers but were opposed to any imposition of group authority. They were a movement of individual spiritual seekers. Ranters thought that God spoke directly to individuals and they put no limits on what the Spirit might instruct us. Tradition had no role, institutions were for disbelievers.

Meanwhile Quakers set up Quarterly and Yearly Meetings to institutionalize the system of elders and discipline. This worked for awhile, but it shouldn't be too surprising that this human institution eventually broke down. Worldliness and wealth separated the elders from their less well-to-do brethren and new spiritual movements swept through Quaker ranks. Divisions arose over the eternal question of how to pass along a spirituality of convincement in a Society grown comfortable. By the early 1800s, Philadelphia elders had became a kind of aristocracy based on birthright and in 1827 they disowned two-thirds of their own yearly meeting. The disowned majority naturally developed a distrust of authority, while the aristocratic minority eventually realized there was no one left to elder.

Over the next century and a half, successive waves of popular religious movements washed over Friends. Revivalism, Deism, Spiritualism and Progressive Unitarianism all left their mark on Friends in the Nineteenth Century. Modern liberal Protestantism, Evangelicalism, New Ageism, and sixties-style radicalism transformed the Twentieth. Each fad lifted up a piece of Quakers' original message but invariably added its own incongruous elements into worship. The Society grew ever more fractured.

Faced with ever-greater theological disunity, Friends simply gave up. In the 1950s, the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings reunited. It was celebrated as reconciliation. But they could do so only because the role of Quaker institutions had fundamentally changed. Our corporate bodies no longer even try to take on the role of discerning what it means to be a Friend.

We are all Ranters now

Liberal Quakers today tend to see their local Meetinghouse as a place where everyone can believe what they want to believe. The highest value is given to tolerance and cordiality. Many people now join Friends because it's the religion without a religion, i.e., it's a community with the form of a religion but without any theology or expectations. We are a proud to be a community of seekers. Our commonality is in our form and we're big on silence and meeting process.

Is it any wonder that almost everyone today seems to be a hyphenated Quaker? We've got Catholic-Quakers, Pagan-Quakers, Jewish-Quakers: if you can hyphenate it, there's a Quaker interest group for you. I'm not talking about Friends nourished by another tradition: we've have historically been graced and continue to be graced by converts to Quakerism whose fresh eyes let us see something new about ourselves. No, I'm talking about people who practice the outward form of Quakerism but look elsewhere for theology and inspiration. If being a Friend means little more than showing up at Meeting once a week, we shouldn't be surprised that people bring a theology along to fill up the hour. It's like bringing a newspaper along for your train commute every morning.

But the appearance of tolerance and unity comes at a price: it depends on everyone forever remaining a Seeker. Anyone who wants to follow early Friends' experience as "Friends of the Truth" risks becomes a Finder who threatens the negotiated truce of the modern Quaker meeting. If we really are a people of God, we might have to start acting that way. We might all have to pray together in our silence. We might all have to submit ourselves to God's will. We might all have to wrestle with each other to articulate a shared belief system. If we were Finders, we might need to define what is unacceptable behavior for a Friend, i.e., on what grounds we would consider disowning a member.

If we became a religious society of Finders, then we'd need to figure out what it means to be a Quaker-Quaker: someone who's theology and practice is Quaker. We would need to put down those individual newspapers to become a People once more. I'm not saying we'd be united all the time. We'd still have disagreements. Even more, we would once again need to be vigilant against the re-establishment of repressive elderships. But it seems obvious to me that Truth lies in the balance between authority and individualism and that it's each generation's task to restore and maintain that balance.

* * *

Over the years a number of older and wiser Friends have advised me to live by Friends' principles and to challenge my Meeting to live up to those ideals. But in my year serving as co-clerk of a small South Jersey Meeting, I learned that almost no one else there believed that our business meetings should be led by the real presence of the living God. I was stuck trying to clerk using a model of corporate decision-making that I alone held. I would like to think those wiser Friends have more grounded Meetings. Perhaps they do. But I fear they just are more successful at kidding themselves that there's more going on than there is. I agree that the Spirit is everywhere and that Christ is working even we don't recognize it. But isn't it the role of a religious community to recognize and celebrate God's presence in our lives?

Until Friends can find a way to articulate a shared faith, I will remain a Ranter. I don't want to be. I long for the oversight of a community united in a shared search for Truth. But can any of us be Friends if so many of us are Ranters?

In friendship,
Martin Kelley

ps: for those interested, "We all Ranters Now" paraphrases (birthright Friend) Richard Nixon's famous quote about the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes.

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More Reading

Bill Samuel has an interesting piece called "Keeping the Faith" that addresses the concept of Unity and its waxing and waning among Friends over the centuries.

Samuel D. Caldwell gave an interesting lecture back in 1997, Quaker Culture vs. Quaker Faith. An excerpt: "Quaker culture and Quaker faith are... often directly at odds with one another in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting today. Although it originally derived from and was consistent with Quaker faith, contemporary Quaker culture in this Yearly Meeting has evolved into a boring, peevish, repressive, petty, humorless, inept, marginal, and largely irrelevant cult that is generally repugnant to ordinary people with healthy psyches. If we try to preserve our Quaker culture, instead of following the leadings of our Quaker faith, we will most certainly be cast out of the Kingdom and die."

I talk a bit more about these issues in Sodium Free Friends, which talks about the way we sometimes intentionally mis-understand our past and why it matters to engage with it. Some pragmantic Friends defend our vagueness as a way to increase our numbers. In The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers I look at a class of contemporary seekers who would be receptive to a more robust Quakerism and map out the issues we'd need to look at before we could really welcome them in.