Testimonies

Over on Tape Flags and First Thoughts, Su Penn has a great post called "Still Thinking About My Quaker Meeting & Me." She writes about a process of self-identity that her meeting recently went through it and the difficulties she had with the process.

I wondered whether this difficulty has become one of our modern-day stages of developing in the ministry. Both Samuel Bownas (read/buy) and Howard Brinton (buy) identified typical stages that Friends growing in the ministry typically go through. Not everyone experiences Su's rift between their meeting's identity and a desire for a God-grounded meeting community, but enough of us have that I don't think it's the foibles of particular individuals or monthly meetings. Let me tease out one piece: that of individual and group identities. Much of the discussion in the comments of Su's post have swirled around radically different conceptions of this.

Many modern Friends have become pretty strict individualists. We spend a lot of time talking about "community" but we aren't practicing it in the way that Friends have understood it--as a "religious society." The individualism of our age sees it as rude to state a vision of Friends that leaves out any of our members--even the most heterodox. We are only as united as our most far-flung believer (and every decade the sweep gets larger). The myth of our age is that all religious experiences are equal, both within and outside of particular religious societies, and that it's intolerant to think of differences as anything more than language.

This is why I cast Su's issues as being those of a minister. There has always been the need for someone to call us back to the faith. Contrary to modern-day popular opinion, this can be done with great love. It is in fact great love (Quaker Jane) to share the good news of the directly-accessible loving Christ, who loves us so much He wants to show us the way to righteous living. This Quaker idea of righteousness has nothing to do with who you sleep with, the gas mileage of your car or even the "correctness" of your theology. Jesus boiled faithfulness down into two commands: love God with all your might (however much that might be) and love your neighbor as yourself.

A "religious society" is not just a "community." As a religious society we are called to have a vision that is stronger and bolder than the language or understanding of individual members. We are not a perfect community, but we can be made more perfect if we return to God to the fullness we've been given. That is why we've come together into a religious society.

"What makes us Friends?" Just following the modern testimonies doesn't put us very squarely in the Friends tradition--SPICE is just a recipe for respectful living. "What makes us Friends?" Just setting the stopwatch to an hour and sitting quietly doesn't do it--a worship style is a container at best and false idol at worst. "How do we love God?" "How do we love our neighbor?" "What makes us Friends?" These are the questions of ministry. These are the building blocks of outreach.

I've seen nascent ministers ("infant ministers" in the phrasing of Samual Bownas) start asking these questions, flare up on inspired blog posts and then taildive as they meet up with the cold-water reality of a local meeting that is unsupportive or inattentive. Many of them have left our religious society. How do we support them? How do we keep them? Our answers will determine whether our meeting are religious societies or communities.

My response to the excellent Greg Woods' If I wanted to live by 1600s standards, I would be Amish. Greg talks about the over-obsession with Early Friends and the tendency to use them as ways to accuse others of un-Quakerism. 

My workshop partner Wess Daniels just posted an update about the upcoming workshop at Pendle Hill. Here's the start. Click through to the full post to get a taste of what we're preparing.

Martin Kelley and I will be leading a weekend retreat at Pendle Hill in just a couple weeks (May 14-16) and I'm starting to get really excited about it! Martin and I have been collaborating a lot together over the past few months in preparation for this weekend and I wanted to share a little more of what we have planned for those of you who are interested in coming (or still on the fence). During the weekend we will be encouraging conversations around building communities, convergent Friends and how this looks in our local meetings. I wanted to give the description of the weekend, some of the queries we'll be touching on, and the outline for the weekend. And of course, I want to invite all of you interested parties to join us!

Read the full post on Wess's blog

One of the blueprints for Quaker community is the "Epistle from the Elders at Balby" written in 1656 at the very infancy of the Friends movement by a gathering of leaders from Yorkshire and North Midlands, England.

It's the precursor to Faith and Practice, as it outlines the relationship between individuals and the meeting. If remembered at all today, it's for its postscript, a paraphrase of 2 Corinthians that warns readers not to treat this as a form to worship and to remain living in the light which is pure and holy. That postscript now starts off most liberal Quaker books of Faith and Practice.

But the Epistle itself is well worth dusting off. It addresses worship, ministry, marriage, and how to deal in meekness and love with those walking "disorderly." It talks of how to support families and take care of members who were imprisoned or in need. Some of it's language is a little stilted and there's some talk of the role of servants that most modern Friend would object to. But overall, it's a remarkably lucid, practical and relevant document. It's also short: just over two pages.

One of the things I hear again and again from Friends is the desire for a deeper community of faith. Younger Friends are especially drawn toward the so-called "New Monastic" movement of tight communal living. The Balby Epistle is a glimpse into how an earlier generation of Friends addressed some of these same concerns.

ONLINE EDITIONS OF THE EPISTLE AT BALBY:
Quaker Heritage Press: qhpress.org/texts/balby.html
Street Corner Society: strecorsoc.org/docs/balby.html
Wikisource: en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Epistle_from_the_Elders_at_Balby,_1656

DISCUSSIONS:
Brooklyn Quaker post & discussion (2005): brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/03/elders-at-balby.html

There's a nice remembrance of George Willoughby by the Brandywine Peace Community's Bob Smith over on the War Resisters International site. George died a few days ago at the age of 95 [updated]. It's hard not to remember his favorite quip as he and his wife Lillian celebrated their 80th birthdays: "twenty years to go!" Neither of them made it to 100 but they certainly lived lives more full than the average people.

I don't know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gump's of peace activism--at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos at there's George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b-rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughby's championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing which became Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you've ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone's using consensus, then you've been influenced by the Willoughby's!

Had a good time with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting high school Friends yesterday, two mini-session on the testimonies in the middle of their end-of-summer gathering. The second session was an attempt at a write-your-own testimonies exercise, fueled by my testimonies-as-wiki idea and grounded by passages from an 1843 Book of Discipline and Thomas Clarkson's "Portraiture". My hope was that by reverse-engineering the old testimonies we might get an appreciation for their spiritual focus. The exercise needs a bit of tweaking but I'll try to fix it up and write it out in case others want to try it with local Friends.

The invite came when the program coordinator googled "quaker testimonies" and found the video below (loose transcript is here):

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.

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.

My sort-of response to Callid's great Youtube piece on the Quaker testimonies, I compare the classic testimonies to a wiki: the collective knowledge of Friends distilled into specific cautions and guides. "We as Friends have found that...." I do talk about how the recent "SPICE" simplification (simplicity, integrity, integrity, community and equality) has robbed our notion of testimonies of some of their power.

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken.  After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive.  I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"

I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:

I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.

The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.

The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.

But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.