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.