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?

—–

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.

Look­ing back at Friends’ responses to the Chris­t­ian Peace­maker hostages

When four Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers were taken hostage in Iraq late last Novem­ber, a lot of Quaker orga­ni­za­tions stum­bled in their response. With Tom Fox we were con­fronted by a full-on lib­eral Quaker Chris­t­ian wit­ness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic wit­ness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many orga­ni­za­tions that couldn’t man­age any­thing beyond the boil­er­plate social jus­tice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in cap­tiv­ity but through­out the ordeal I was mad at the exposed frac­ture lines between reli­gious wit­ness and social activism.

When­ever a sit­u­a­tion involv­ing inter­na­tional issues of peace and wit­ness hap­pens, the Quaker insti­tu­tions I’m clos­est to auto­mat­i­cally defer to the more polit­i­cal Quaker orga­ni­za­tions: for exam­ple, the head of Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence told staff to direct out­siders inquir­ing about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a com­mit­ted vol­un­teer. The Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee and Friends Com­mit­tee on National Leg­is­la­tion have knowl­edge­able and com­mit­ted staff, but their insti­tu­tional cul­ture doesn’t allow them to talk Quak­erism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving peo­ple. I appre­ci­ate that these orga­ni­za­tions have a strong, vital iden­tity and I accept that within those con­fines they do impor­tant work and employ many faith­ful Friends. It’s just that they lack the lan­guage to explain why a gro­cery store employee with a love of youth reli­gious edu­ca­tion would go unarmed to Badg­dad in the name of Chris­t­ian witness.

The wider blo­gos­phere was totally abuzz with news of Chris­t­ian Peace­maker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hun­dreds of posts and com­ments, includ­ing long dis­cus­sions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost every­one won­dered why the CPT work­ers were there and while the opin­ions weren’t always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive ide­al­ists or disin­geneous ter­ror­ist sym­pa­thiz­ers), even the doubters were moti­vated by a pro­found curios­ity and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blo­gos­phere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and expla­na­tion? The AFSC responded by pub­li­ciz­ing the state­ments of mod­er­ate Mus­lim lead­ers (call­ing for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a sug­ges­tion about list­ing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meet­ing put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was tar­geted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of infor­ma­tion of course, and there were plenty of sto­ries on the lefty-leaning sites like Elec­tron­i­cI­raq and the UK site Ekkle­sia. But Friends explain­ing this to the world?

The Quaker blog­gers did their part. On Decem­ber 2 I quickly re-jiggered the tech­nol­ogy behind Quak​erQuaker​.org to pro­vide a Chris­t­ian Peace­maker watch on both Non​vi​o​lence​.org and Quak­erQuaker (same list­ings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audi­ences, announced on the post It’s Wit­ness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage sit­u­a­tion and included many posts from the Quaker blog­ger com­mu­nity that had recently congealed.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blog­ging com­mu­nity. We already had gath­ered together as a group of Friends who were will­ing to write about spir­i­tu­al­ity and wit­ness. Our con­ver­sa­tions had been small and inti­mate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I some­times get painted as some sort of fun­da­men­tal­ist Quaker, but the truth is that I’ve wanted to build a com­mu­nity that would wres­tle with these issues, fig­ur­ing the wrestling was more impor­tant than the lan­guage of the answers. I had already thought about how to encour­age blog­gers and knit a blog­ging com­mu­nity together and was able to use these tech­niques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.

Two other Quak­ers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his per­sonal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethe​cap​tives​now​.org site was put together impres­sively fast and con­tained a lot of good links to news, resources and com­men­tary. But like me, they were over-worked blog­gers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is direc­tor of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).

After an ini­tial few quiet days, Tom’s meet­ing Lan­g­ley Hill put together a great web­site of links and news. That makes it the only offi­cial Quaker orga­ni­za­tion that pulled together a sus­tained cam­paign to sup­port Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what’s up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work hap­pened by vol­un­teers? Johan Mau­rer has a very inter­est­ing post, Are Quak­ers Mar­ginal that points to my ear­lier com­ment on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers and doubts whether our avoid­ance of “hireling priests” has given us a more effec­tive voice. Let’s remem­ber that insti­tu­tional Quak­erism began as sup­port of mem­bers in jail for their reli­gious wit­ness; among our ear­li­est com­mit­tee gath­er­ings were meet­ings for sufferings–business meet­ings focused on pub­li­ciz­ing the plight of the jailed and sup­port the fam­ily and meet­ings left behind.

I never met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an excep­tional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a wit­ness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I won­der if it was this very whole­ness that made his work hard to cat­e­go­rize and sup­port. Did he sim­ply fall through the insti­tu­tional cracks? When you play base­ball on a dis­or­ga­nized team you miss a lot of easy catches sim­ply because all the out­field­ers think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what hap­pened? And is this what would hap­pen again?

On Sat­ur­day, Novem­ber 26, 2005 four mem­bers of “Chris­t­ian peace­mak­ers Teams”:www.cpt.org were abducted in iraq. On March 20th the body of Amer­i­can Quaker Tom Fox was found; on March 23rd, the remain­ing three hostages were freed by U.S. and British mil­i­tary forces.
Here at Non​vi​o​lence​.org, we have always been impressed and highly sup­port­ive of the deep wit­ness of the Chris­t­ian peace­mak­ers Teams. Their mem­bers have rep­re­sented the best in both the peace and Chris­t­ian move­ments, con­sis­tently putting them­selves in dan­ger to wit­ness the gospel of peace. Not con­tent to write let­ters or stand on pick­ett lines in safe west­ern cap­i­tals, they go to the front­lines of vio­lence and pro­claim a rad­i­cal alter­na­tive.
While we can be grate­ful for the release of the three remain­ing hostages, we should con­tinue to remem­ber the 43 for­eign hostages still being held in iraq and the 10–30 iraqis report­edly taken hostage each and every day. As iraq slips into full-scale civil war we must also orga­nize against the war-mongerers, both for­eign and inter­nal and finde ways of stand­ing along­side those iraqis who want noth­ing more than peace and freedom.

Here’s links to recent arti­cles on the sit­u­a­tion: https://​deli​cious​.com/​m​a​r​t​i​n​_​k​e​l​l​e​y​/​n​e​w​s​.​c​p​t​-​f​o​u​r​.​f​o​x​m​e​m​o​r​ial

And a per­sonal note from Nonviolence.org’s Mar­tin Kel­ley: I myself am a Chris­t­ian and Quaker and one of our folks, Tom Fox, of Lan­g­ley Hill (Vir­ginia) Friends Meet­ing is among the hostages. I don’t know Tom per­son­ally but over the last few days I’ve learned we have many Friends in com­mon and they have all tes­ti­fied to his deep com­mitt­ment to peace. Some of the links above are more explic­itly Quaker than most things I post to Non​vi​o​lence​.org, but they give per­spec­tive on why Tom and his com­pan­ions would see putting them­selves in dan­ger as an act of reli­gious ser­vice. I am grate­ful for Tom’s cur­rent wit­ness in iraq–yes, even as a hostage–but I cer­tainly hope he soon comes back to his fam­ily and com­mu­nity and that the atten­tion and wit­ness of these four men’s ordeal helps to bring the news of peace to streets and halls of Bagh­dad, Wash­ing­ton, Lon­don and Ottawa.

Action Step:

If you have a blog or web­site, you can add a feed of that will include the lat­est Nonviolence.org-compiled links. Sim­ply add this javascript to the side­bar of your site [Dis­abled Now]

John Paul Stephens has asked if I could help com­pile a list of online trib­utes to our Tom Fox, the fallen Chris­t­ian Peace­maker for FreetheCaptivesNow.org’sTom Fox Memo­ri­als page. I’ve started a list, now up on Quak​erQuaker​.org, that I’ll keep up for a few months. Any read­ers who know of some­thing that should be included should either email me at martink-at-nonviolence-dot-org or tag it “for:martin_kelley” in Del​.icio​.us. Thanks. Here’s my list so far:
<?php include(“http://del.icio.us/html/martin_kelley/news.cpt-four.foxmemorial?count=50&rssbutton=no&extended=body&tags=no”); ?>
h3. See also:
* “FreetheCaptivesNow.org”:http://freethecaptivesnow.org/
* “Chris­t­ian Peace­maker Watch”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/christian_peacemaker_teams/ over at Quak​erquaker​.org
* “My posts on the Chris­t­ian Peace­maker witness”:/martink/cpt
* “A really nice page on Tom over at Elec­tronic Iraq”:http://electroniciraq.net/news/2302.shtml

Hi Quak­er­Ran­ter friends: I’ve been busy today cov­er­ing the Quaker response to the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of over­lap­ping content:

• Quaker Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
• “Non​vi​o​lence​.org state­ment and list of responses

Both of these fea­ture a mix of main­stream news and Quaker views on the sit­u­a­tion. I’ll keep them updated. I’m not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Cap­tives — check it out.

It’s always inter­est­ing to see the moments that I explictly iden­tify as a Friend on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appro­pri­ate. We need to explain to the world why a Quaker and three other Chris­tians would need­lessly put them­selves in such dan­ger. This is wit­ness time, Friends. The real deal. We’re all being tested. This is one of those times for which those end­less com­mit­tee meet­ings and boil­er­plate peace state­ments have pre­pared us.

It’s time to tell the world that we live in the power that “takes away the occa­sion for war and over­comes our fear of death” (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would travel to dan­ger­ous lands to wit­ness our faith).

I’m away from my usual haunts on work-related duties but the news sites have plenty of arti­cles about the hor­ri­ble bomb­ings in Lon­don; there is no need for yet another list.
It is always tragic to see the cycles of vio­lence, ter­ror­ism and state-sponsored war feed­ing one another to new acts of vio­lence. Our prayers that the new round of heart­breaks in Lon­don don’t lead into a kind of retal­i­a­tion that will only harden hearts else­where. We need to envi­sion a new world, one based on love and mutual respect. It’s impos­si­ble to nego­ti­ate with the kind of ter­ror­ists that would bomb a packed bus but we can be a wit­ness that hate can be con­fronted with love. We must ban­dage our wounded, mourn our dead and con­tinue to build a world where the occa­sions for all war have been transcended.

h3. 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)

Con­tinue…