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.

Even though my last post was a five minute quickie, it gen­er­ated a num­ber of com­ments. One ques­tion that came up was how aware indi­vid­ual Friends are about the spe­cific Quaker mean­ings of some of the com­mon Eng­lish words we use–“Light,” “Spirit,” etc.(“disambiguation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation in Wiki-speak). “Mar­shall Massey”:http://journal.earthwitness.org/the-quaker-magpie-journal/ expressed sad­ness that the terms were used uncom­pre­hend­ingly and I sug­gested that some Friends know­ingly con­fuse the generic and spe­cific mean­ings. Mar­shall replied that if this were so it might be a cul­tural dif­fer­ence based on geography.

Con­tinue…

Every­one can now add posts to the Quak­erQuaker cat­e­gory list­ings. Sim­ply book­mark the post in Del​.icio​.us, list the QQ cat­e­gories and it will be added to the page.
For exam­ple, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Con­ver­gent Friends. Go to the “Con­ver­gent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag”–in this case “quaker.convergent”. Book­mark the post you like, write a title and descrip­tion and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Con­ver­gent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruc­tion on how to use Del​.icio​.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.

Con­tinue…