As the blog name implies, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, known colloquially as Quakers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our society and its interactions with the larger world. I generally only include my own posts in this list. I share many many Quaker links in my Links Blog category and on QuakerQuaker.
On the Woodbrooke website, a new piece on vocal ministry from British Friend Mark Russ. I like the warning that what might look obvious to a newcomer might not be what they think:
From a non-Quaker perspective, a group of people sitting in a circle in silence, with anyone able to stand and speak, might look very much like a therapy group. We might then interpret the words spoken in this group as being mainly personal and to a large extend private. We might see the person speaking as unburdening themselves, sharing something they’ve perhaps never shared before, and finding healing through this sharing. These words are treated as something precious, belonging to the individual who speaks, and are treated with confidentiality by others in the group.
“Speaking into the Silence” from the August 1991 Friends Journal.
People have been commenting a lot on this chart Friends Journal shared on social media last week. Originally published in the August 1991 issue, what I love most about it is its 1990s-era flowchart design. What would it be today — some punchy infographic perhaps? We dove into the archives because this month’s issue is all about Quaker vocal ministry and at least two of the feature articles mention these kinds of charts.
There is a frequently reproduced diagram that graphically guides potential speakers through a series of questions they are to consider when they feel an urge to rise and speak. These examine whether a potential message is divinely inspired; whether it is intended for the speaker alone or for others present; and whether this is the right time and place to deliver it. These resources are all useful, but they only address one half of the act of vocal ministry: one that is, by far, the smaller and perhaps less important portion. The other part is the ministry of listening, and we are all called to be listening ministers.
Since the beginning of the Religious Society of Friends, written advices have guided Friends. Yearly meetings’ faith and practice books, Pendle Hill pamphlets on vocal ministry, and individual monthly meetings’ “Welcome to Quaker Worship” handouts have guidelines for speaking or not speaking in meeting for worship. In 2019, Friends General Conference even published a poster of a circle flow chart with guidelines for delivering a message during worship.
This version is below. Yes, it is very 2020’s infographical in design! (PDF; a similar version was produced for a Pendle Hill pamphlet by FGC staff Barry Crossno and Brent Bill, PDF).
But I link to the articles because these kinds of when-to-speak kind of charts can always become problematic. As Betsy Cazden replied on Twitter: “The people who need it least will spend the full hour obsessing about the flow-chart and will never speak. The people who need it most never will.” Just a few weeks ago I was sitting on a bench in Cropwell (N.J.) Meeting testing and retesting my motivations and leadings to rise and give ministry. I gave a final breath to stand up when I heard the “good morning Friends” followed by the sounds of hands slapping on hands in rise-of-meeting handshakes. Over the years I have learned not spend my whole hour obsessing but had not realized this meeting’s worship was only 45 minutes!
Further reading: An Expected Miracle, a 2023 post about the (often unnecessary) pressures of Quaker ministry.
But let’s say you and I have put all our eggs into the Jesus basket. Abandoning nonviolence is simply not an option. What can we say that is different from the calculations of our peace-loving friends and neighbors who are casting about for political solutions and compromises when evidence suggests that the aggressor is completely uninterested in what we think of him?
My friend Peter Blood asked me to get out information on this year’s Quaker Spring gathering, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and online, at the end of June:
Are you familiar with Quaker Spring? It’s an unusual gathering — open-hearted, minimal advance programming. A journey each time we gather. It would be wonderful if some of you are able & led to join us in person but we know it is a long way. But, of course, it would also be wonderful to see some of you via Zoom! In God’s loving care, Peter for the Quaker Spring Planning Group
Pendle Hill had a practice of asking week-long students to take on a job on Wednesday afternoon. One week my task was to clean/dust and arrange the books in the Upmeads library and in the process I found, high on an upper shelf, a whole series of dusty pamphlets called the William Penn Lectures. Inaccessible? You bet. A few months later I sojourned at Pendle Hill while my late wife was taking a week-long course. During that week I sat with my computer and scanned the text of those pamphlets. My intent was to make that body of literature more accessible to Quakers and others throughout the world on the internet. And recently that goal has been achieved.
I know Jim well from his time on Friends Journal’s board of trustees and making Quaker archives accessible is a great passion of his. He helped us tremendously in getting older articles indexed. That combined with the Haverford College Library’s digitalization of everything going back to 1955 means we’re relatively accessible.
Speaking of archives, it looks like I’ve been remiss sharing another amazing resource: the Salem (NJ) Quarter Tape Archive. Starting in the late 1970s, people started taping long interviews with Friends. They’ve sat gathering dust until they were pulled out an digitized. Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of Rachel Davis DuBois and her interview by Charles Crabbe Thomas (number 13) is absolute gold.
Speaking of Bayard Rustin, the printed version of the 1948 speech that is the subject of Carlos Figueroa’s recent Friends Journalarticle is now available as a free e‑book or PDF.
A warning that the selections reflect the prejudices of the day. As far as I can tell it took until the 1950s until lecture organizers thought to invite a woman. And of course naming your lecture after William Penn is seen as problematictoday given his personal involvement in human trafficking. Back then they could overlook that to claim he endeavored “to live out the laws of Christ in every thought, and word, and deed.” In 2016 the revived lecture series was renamed.
In the magazine, Ithaca College’s Carlos Figueroa looks back at an important talk Bayard Rustin gave to the young Friends association in Philadelphia in 1948. It was a pivotal moment in a life that contained so many: Rustin had spent the early 1940s organizing with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and was recently released from a prison term for violating the Selective Service Act. This was his opportunity to lay out a pacifist politics for the Cold War era:
Rustin explicitly sought to persuade others into considering civil disobedience as a social democratic strategy for pursuing structural and policy change. Rustin advocated for a humanitarian, communal, and moralistic approach to change, thus disregarding an individual’s political affiliation, geographic location, or government system.
Bayard believed in the oneness of the human family, in the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people,” Walter says. “He believed in the power of nonviolence which comes out of that belief in the oneness of all people.… He saw everybody as equal in the eyes of the divine.
Rustin’s walk with Friends was rather complicated and he’s often not been given the recognition he deserves.
I’ve written many times about the dumbing down of Quaker language into ever-more-ambiguous terms and like this latest blog post from Johan Maurer.
Whatever the causes, phrases such as “inner light” and “that of God” became even vaguer than they might have been individually. Increasingly, as some Friends meetings became gatherings of people who loved the atmosphere and found a refuge in the freedom of Quaker community, and as the surrounding culture became more hostile to claims of faith, the folkways of Quakerism became more important than the core teachings — at least in the London-Philadelphia axis and its offspring.
Let’s face it: that refuge became more important as certain quarters of Christianity became more obnoxious and authoritarian. It’s unfair to charge that hostility to Christianity simply became more fashionable. Too often, we Christians did it to ourselves, projecting a false certainty and a fearsome God instead of the actual Gospel.
He goes on to make the point that the Quaker avoidance of a kind of rigid certainty makes our faith inherently risky and it’s true, it’s always on the edge of either flying apart from centrifugal forces or collapsing in on itself in self-regard.
