Whereas the young man heretofore has been given to be something wild, he of late years was become more somber, it was proposed by friends to the young man and woman:
Whether he did believe yet was the truth which we professed and walked in according to our measure — further shewing that if wee did not walk in the truth according to our measure given us, we were but a community of men and women, and not a Church of Christ.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Sowing seeds
April 4, 2018
Mike Farley looks at Quaker stories of Easter and the difficulties of distracting the Holy Spirit:
I am at least as susceptible as anyone I know to self-deception and wishful thinking, to being untrue to myself and to God, and to looking outside myself, at the external aspects of thought and practice among people of faith, trying to distract myself from the work of the Spirit in my heart. But it is less easy to distract the Holy Spirit, and so I have been called back again and again to these uncomfortable, at times downright dangerous, places, out in the saltmarshes of the heart.
Whassup Quaker Internet?
April 4, 2018
The August issue of Friends Journal will look at “Going Viral with Quakerism.” I wrote an Editor’s Desk post with some ideas of topics I’d love to see and some queries:
- Do we have a vision of what kind of Quakerism we’re inviting people into?
- Does growing necessitate casting off or re-embracing various Quaker practices?
- Can we point to specific and reproducible tasks that meetings have done that have led to growth?
- Are there models from other churches or social change movements that we could learn from?
- What are the dangers of over-focusing on growth?
- Is there really a possibility that Quakerism could become a mass movement?
- What would our Quaker experiences look like if our numbers rose even ten-fold?
One thing that’s missing there is the internet. Yet one of the most common things people want to talk about when we talk about growing Friends is the internet. I think we’ve gotten to the point at which we can’t just pin our hopes for future vitality of the Religious Society of Friends on the internet. It’s not a build-it-and-they-will come phenomenon, especially now that so much of the internet’s attention mechanisms are dominated by billion-dollar companies.
I went into the Friends Journal archives to get a little perspective on Friends’ evolving relationship with electronic media. The word “internet” first showed up near the end of 1992, in a short announcement of a new Quaker-themed listserv. In 1993 there was a fantastic article on electronic networks, The Invisible Meetinghouse. Written by Joel GAzis-SAx, it describes the Quaker Electronic Project as
an ongoing yearly meeting that Friends around the world can join any time. It is, at once, a library, a meetinghouse, a social center, and a bulletin board. W e have created both a community and a resource center…
Amazingly, many of the people mentioned in this article from 25 years ago are still active online.
The first “http” web address was published in Friends Journal in a 1995 issue. In June 2001 the magazine announced its own website; the word “blog” debuted in 2004, “Facebook” in 2007, “Twitter” in 2011. Obviously, the internet is great for outreach. But time check: we’ve been collectively reaching out online for a quarter century. Every organization has a website. Blogs and social media have become a settled tool in outreach.
Introductions to the web and techniques and how-to’s have been done. But how do these various media work together to advance our visibility? What kind of expanded outreach could happen with a little more focus? How does any online project integrate with real-world activity. I’m not naysaying the internet; obviously, I could give my answers to these questions. But I’d like to know what others think about our Quaker electronic projects a quarter century later?
Belief, Faith, and “That of God”
April 3, 2018
Long-time Quaker blogger Mark Wutka wonders if we’ve inadvertently brought back in a doctrinal statement with our easy response to the question of Quaker belief:
Do Friends today have faith and trust in ‘that of God’ in every person? Are we striving to answer ‘that of God’ in others, and do we have the faith that doing so may eventually bring them away from evil? I ask this because much of the discourse today seems to ignore this.
“That of God in everyone” is one of those phrases that many traditional-leaning Friends have found a bit problematic over the years. Quaker co-founder George Fox used it, but sparingly. It doesn’t even appear in his Journal. If you were looking for an “elevator pitch” of his beliefs, I would go with his spiritual opening that there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to our condition. The most well-argued (perhaps over-argued) expose of “that of God” as a latter-day Quaker overlay came from Lewis Benson’s famous essay from 1970, ‘That of God in Every Man” — What Did George Fox Mean by It?
In the second half of the piece Mark asks whether our belief of that of God leads us to act differently in the political sphere. He struggles with this, as do I, and as do presumably all of us. I worry particularly about judging the way Friends act; whenever I see someone share a hard truth, I know I’ll quickly see someone else critique them for being too divisive, too “unQuakerly.”
Jesus famously overturned the money changers and Benjamin Lay spilled pig blood in yearly meeting sessions. Maybe the only guide we have is the active Guide. Maybe our orderly walking will look alternatively meek or divisive depending on the cues we’re given. And maybe we’ll be misunderstood even as we’re being the most faithful.
Mark finishes:
For now, I am striving to walk in the Light as best I can and manifest the fruit of the Spirit in my interactions with people
earofthesoul.blogspot.com Spring and healing
April 3, 2018
I was just filling out my work log for March and had forgotten just how crazy the weather here in the U.S. Northeast had been, with successive waves of nor’easters dumping massive amounts of snow on us. It made for some great kid pictures but it added quite a bit of chaos to work schedules.
So it seems kind of amazing there’s an April issue of Friends Journal. But there is and it’s a good one I think: we look at healing. The cover of new tree leaves backlit by springtime sun is seasonal but it also reflects the topic and our mood after a wintry late winter.
April 1, 2018
There is a royal seed amongst them which in time God will raise. They are more near Truth than many nations; there is a love begot in me towards them which is endless, but this is my hope concerning them, that he who hath raised me to love them more than many others will also raise his seed in them unto which my love is. Nevertheless, though they be called Turks, the seed of them is near unto God, and their kindness hath in some measure been shown towards his servants.
March 31, 2018
Love was the first motion, and then a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life, and the Spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of Truth amongst them.
March 30, 2018
And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.