Over on Friends Jour­nal, we’re reshar­ing this 2014 inter­view with Diane Ran­dall, who was then head of Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Legislation.

Diane’s suc­ces­sor Brid­get Moix, has writ­ten a State­ment on Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine. These kinds of state­ments always depress me because they’re always so pre­dictable — war is stu­pid, we’re Quak­ers, we believe in peace, every­one should back off of the war — but what else can you do? The truth is the truth, no mat­ter how many times we have to repeat it. Rinse and repeat as nations con­tin­ue to use mil­i­tary force to oppress others.

War is Not the Answer

Johan Mau­r­er is revis­it­ing Fox’s Jour­nal as he copy­ed­its a Russ­ian translation

This task of edit­ing the Russ­ian trans­la­tion has brought me face to face once again with this unapolo­get­i­cal­ly bold wit­ness and his raw tes­ti­mo­ny. What am I to do with him? How is he a mod­el or mea­sure for the Friends move­ment today? Do we have among us — do we endure among us — those who might make such bold claims … to be empow­ered with God’s mes­sage to the same degree as the orig­i­nal writ­ers of Scrip­ture?… to be per­fect­ly redeemed from temp­ta­tion? … to lead peo­ple into the same place where he was, so that they could have the same access to God’s spir­it that he claimed to have? 

From: The Wine Gave Out

When I look back at the time in that library in Eng­land where it appeared that maybe Quak­erism was already dead, I found out­side those walls a move­ment of the Spir­it that was renew­ing Friends, lead­ing Friends in faith­ful­ness to chal­lenge their year­ly meet­ing struc­tures and the exclu­sion of some of God’s chil­dren, new meet­ings aris­ing to meet con­tem­po­rary needs, and young peo­ple tak­ing lead­er­ship roles often reserved for Quak­ers twice their age. There is good wine among Friends being faith­ful to Jesus. 

It seems to me that his­to­ry became a par­tic­u­lar­ly favorite Quak­er past time for two rea­sons: our avoid­ance of any­thing resem­bling a creed, and our post-schism desire to authen­ti­cate “our brand” of Quak­erism as the “real Quakerism.”

As the Friends move­ment splin­tered into a dozen or com­pet­ing sects in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry (most notably espe­cial­ly Hick­site vs. Gur­neyite vs. Wilbu­rite), we could mine and inter­pret the his­to­ry of “ear­ly Friends” to divine which branch they would have favored. And by col­lect­ing and inter­pret­ing old Quak­er jour­nals and epis­tles we could map out an “authen­tic” Quak­er set of beliefs and practices.

The prob­lem is that most ear­ly Friends didn’t go about to cre­ate a new sect: they were Chris­tians get­ting back to the basics. Part of the thrill of hear­ing George Fox’s ser­mons is that he wasn’t just recit­ing or proof-texting scrip­ture, but speak­ing it as if it were new and fresh and true. That’s hard to do. I know I often reach for the rhetor­i­cal crutch of the “ear­ly Quak­ers,” but the irony is that those very Friends weren’t stuck on his­to­ry. I think part of this is a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ty: those of us brought up in West­ern aca­d­e­m­ic tra­di­tions think about time and change dif­fer­ent­ly than mid-seventeenth cen­tu­ry British sheep­herders. But as Wess points out, it’s just as much a result of wine that’s sat out too long and gone a bit vinegary.

I used to be a reg­u­lar at Mid­dle­town Meet­ing² and always felt fed by Chris Stern’s ministry.

I’ve often wished that meet­ings might embrace what­ev­er unique cir­cum­stances they might be in to cul­ti­vate a col­lec­tive min­istry. Sit­u­at­ed in a col­lege town? Make sure the wor­ship space is close to cam­pus and net­work with fac­ul­ty, staff, and stu­dents. In an urban set­ting get­ting lots of first-time vis­i­tors every week? Insti­tute a lowkey, ongo­ing, drop-in Quak­erism 101 class or oth­er type of activ­i­ty to give them a next-step in the Quak­er path. Do mem­bers have more of some kind of diver­si­ty (race, age, the­ol­o­gy)? Then use that to edu­cate and advo­cate. The meet­ing can con­tin­ue to do every­thing else, of course, but it could look to see if there’s a lead­ing among mem­bers to do some­thing special.

Mid­dle­town — and specif­i­cal­ly the Mid­dle­town Men’s Group as I under­stand it — does that by reg­u­lar­ly pro­vid­ing events to share the Friends Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive in Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing. This past June they held a Zoom work­shop called “Faith, Hope, and Wit­ness With­in” as part of the year­ly meet­ing’s “Run­way to Annu­al Ses­sions” series, with Chris Stern one of the speakers.

It was a nice event but as always, I kind of won­dered who it was reach­ing. Many of us on Zoom were already quite com­fort­able with a Chris­t­ian Quak­er wit­ness. What about all the kids on Red­dit and Dis­cord and YouTube who might appre­ci­ate a Quak­er voice that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly hear about PYM events or know that this was like­ly to be a not-to-be-missed one?

Read­er, it took me a week to remem­bered that I work with the Quak­er­S­peak video­g­ra­ph­er, Rebec­ca Hamilton-Levi and that Chris might make a good inter­vie­wee. You don’t need to be on a Slack chan­nel with Rebec­ca to make a sug­ges­tion. If you know some­one who should be con­sid­ered for Quak­er­S­peak, you can let her know.

I like how Chris takes the famil­iar sto­ry of a young George Fox and makes it his own. It’s a nice tes­ti­mo­ny that there’s still that one, even Christ Jesus, ready to speak to our conditions.

ps: Chris has also been fea­tured the mag­a­zine, most recent­ly in 2013 for Find­ing a Way to Peace.

Wess Daniels just wrote a use­ful piece on Quak­er excep­tion­al­ism and a form of Quak­er bullying

I have heard oth­ers refer to the “Quak­er val­ues” of as being used as a “sword and a shield,” a sword to attack oth­ers wise, and a shield to pro­tect and jus­ti­fy ones own actions. Bogus reli­gion of any kind, Quak­er or not, is often used as a cov­er for bullying. 

How do we hold our core val­ues while remain­ing invitational?