There are 48 workshops to choose from this year, which is about the normal number for recent years. I used Archive.org to look back and the biggest year I could dig up was 2006, when 73 workshops were offered. Gathering attendance has dropped since then but I also suspect 73 selections were a bit ambitious. The current normal is more suited to the Gathering size. There are lots of familiar workshop leaders. Are there any that stand out for you? Fell free to drop recommendations (or promote your own workshop if you’re doing one!) in the comment section.

https://www.fgcquaker.org/connect/gathering/programs-and-events/workshops

Hello! I’m studying The Friends Church for academic purposes and I’d love to hear from someone with firsthand experience. How easy is it to become a quaker? Do you ever feel people treat you differently because you’re a quaker? Do you think there should be more representation of quakers in the media? Thank you so much for your time. I’m very eager to hear back from you!

Since my experience is just one data point, I hope others will use the comment section below to add their stories.

I found becoming a Quaker to be something of a spiral process. I first walked into a Friends meetinghouse at the age of 20 and only slowly took on an identity as a Friend. At each step of the process, I learned more clearly what that might mean and have strived to grow into deeper faithfulness. I didn’t formally apply for membership until a decade or so after I became a regular attender. This time lag is not unheard of but I don’t think it’s usual. It’s more of an insight into my own carefulness and reticence about joining things than it is an indication of anything the meetings I attended required. When I did finally apply for membership I was quite qualified and wanted the clearness process to be exacting: again, this is an insight into my psyche!

Most people on the street don’t quite know what Quakers are so I can’t say I’m always treated differently. I guess seeing more Quakers in the media would be helpful, though given our overall small numbers I suspect even our fleeting appearances in TV shows and movies are more than we might proportionally expect.

I’m interested to hear how other Friends would answer Ruby’s question.

Update: reader answers by email and commentary

Jessica F: I’ve wanted to be a Quaker since I learned about the Abolitionists who helped with the Underground Railroad and prison reform. Unfortunately, the movie Gentle Persuasion presented Quakers as being against music so I became a Unitarian instead. Eventually I learned that wasn’t true for many Quakers and I found that all of the values I had developed through the years were also Quaker values and so becoming a Quaker gave me a support system and a community of like minds.

I use it all as a tool, for sure. But there are many ways in which we’re increasingly defined by corporations with no Quakers and no interest in us except for whatever engagement numbers they can generate. Look at the nonsense at many of the open Quaker Facebook groups as an obvious example. People with limited experience or knowledge and relatively fringe ideas can easily dominate discussion just by posting with a frequency that involved or careful Friends couldn’t match. Facebook doesn’t care if it’s a zoo as long as people come back to read the latest outrageous comment thread. Just because the topic is Quaker doesn’t mean the discourse really holds well to our values, historical or modern.

Add to this that Google and Facebook could make any of our Quaker-owned websites nearly invisible with a tweak of algorithms (this is not hypothetical: Facebook has dinged most publisher Pages over the years).

The open web has a lot of pluses. I’m glad to see a Friend among its prominent champions and I’d like to see Quaker readers seeking it out more (most easily by straying of Facebook and subscribing to blogs’ email lists). From Hardie:

Of course, there is an alternative to Facebook and other walled gardens: the open web. The alternative is the version of the Internet where you own your content and activity, have minimal dependence on third party business models, can discover new things outside of what for-profit algorithms show you, and where tools and services interact to enhance each other’s offerings, instead of to stamp each other out of existence.

https://chrishardie.com/2018/04/rebuilding-open-web/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

When we say we are holding someone in the Light, it is wise to remember that holding is an action verb. Sometimes I confuse intercession prayer with placing a short order to a Spirit I treat as a personal complaint department. “You didn’t get my order right, God…she’s even sicker than before!” I love the way Quaker teachings humble me and help me work with love while waiting expectantly for God’s will to be done.

— Bonnie S.  in a recent comment

The first post is “Defensiveness as a Theological Problem for Friends,” a good blogging debut.

The question of who belongs in the church, which has always been of central importance, is what’s at stake here, and unfortunately, it is often being answered in ways that are hurtful and alienating—the opposite of what the gospel promises.

A few weeks ago, reader James F. used my “Ask me anything!” page to wonder about two types of Friends:

I’ve read a little and watched various videos about the Friends. My questions are , is there a gulf between “conservative” friends and liberal? As well as what defines the two generally? I’m in Maryland near D.C. Do Quakers who define themselves as essentially Christian worship with those who don’t identify as such?

Hi James, what a great question! I think many of us don’t fully appreciate the confusion we sow when we casually use these terms in our online discussions. They can be useful rhetorical shortcuts but sometimes I think we give them more weight than they deserve. I worry that Friends sometimes come off as more divided along these lines than we really are. Over the years I’ve noticed a certain kind of rigid online seeker who dissects theological discussions with such conviction that they’ll refused to even visit their nearest meeting because it’s not the right type. That’s so tragic.

What the terms don’t mean

The first and most common problem is that people don’t realize we’re using these terms in a specifically Quaker context. “Liberal” and “Conservative” don’t refer to political ideologies. One can be a Conservative Friend and vote for liberal or socialist politicians, for example.

Adding to the complications is that these can be imprecise terms. Quaker bodies themselves typically do not identify as either Liberal or Conservative. While local congregations often have their own unique characteristics, culture, and style, nothing goes on the sign out front. Our regional bodies, called yearly meetings, are the highest authority in Quakerism but I can’t think of any that doesn’t span some diversity of theologies.

Historically (and currently) we’ve had the situation where a yearly meeting will split into two separate bodies. The causes can be complex; theology is a piece, but demographics and mainstream cultural shifts also play a huge role. In centuries past (and kind of ridiculously, today still), both of the newly reorganized yearly meetings were obsessed with keeping the name as a way to claim their legitimacy. To tell them apart we’d append awkward and incomplete labels, so in the past we had Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Orthodox).

In the United States, we have two places where yearly meetings compete names and one side’s labelled appendage is “Conservative,” giving us Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Over time, both of these yearly meetings have diversified to the point where they contain outwardly Liberal monthly meetings. The name Conservative in the yearly meeting title has become partly administrative.

A third yearly meeting is usually also included in the list of Conservative bodies. Present-day Ohio Yearly Meeting once competed with two other Ohio Yearly Meetings for the name but is the only one using it today. The name “Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative)” is still sometimes seen, but it’s unnecessary, not technically correct, and not used in the yearly meeting’s formal correspondence. (You want to know more? The yearly meeting’s clerk maintains a website that goes amazingly deep into the history of Ohio Friends).

All that said, these three yearly meetings have more than their share of traditionalist Christian Quaker members. Ohio’s gatherings have the highest percentage of plain dressing- and speaking- Friends around (though even there, they are a minority). But other yearly meetings will have individual members and sometimes whole monthly meetings that could be accurately described as Conservative Quaker.

I might have upset some folks with these observations. In all aspects of life you’ll find people who are very attached to labels. That’s what the comment section is for.

The meanings of the terms

Formal identities aside, there are good reasons we use the concept of Liberal and Conservative Quakerism. They denote a general approach to the world and a way of incorporating our history, our Christian heritage, our understanding of the role of Christ in our discernment, and the format and pace of our group decision making.

But at the same time there’s all sorts of diversity and personal and local histories involved. It’s hard to talk about any of this in concrete terms without dissolving into footnotes and qualifications and long discourses about the differences between various historical sub-movements within Friends (queue awesome 16000-word history).

Many of us comfortably span both worlds. In writing, I sometimes try to escape the weight of the most overused labels by substituting more generic terms, like traditional Friends or Christ-centered Friends. These terms also get problematic if you scratch at them too hard. Reminder: God is the Word and our language is by definition limiting.

If you like the sociology of such things, Isabel Penraeth wrote a fascinating article in Friends Journal a few years ago, Understanding Ourselves, Respecting the Differences. More recently in FJ a Philadelphia Friend, John Andrew Gallery, visited Ohio Friends and talked about the spiritual refreshment of Conservative Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting Gathering and Quaker Spring. Much of the discussion around the modern phrase Convergent Friends and the threads on QuakerQuaker has focused on those who span a Liberal and Conservative Quaker worldview.

The distinction between Conservatives and Liberals can become quite evident when you observe how Friends conduct a business meeting or how they present themselves. It’s all too easy to veer into caricature here but Liberal Friends are prone to reinventions and the use of imprecise secular language, whileConservative Friends are attached to established processes and can be unwelcoming to change that might disrupt internal unity.

But even these brief observations are imprecise and can mask surprisingly similar talents and stumbling blocks. We all of us are humans, after all. The Inward Christ is always available to instruct and comfort, just as we are all broken and prone to act impulsively against that advice.

Worshipping?

Finally, pretty much all Friends will worship with anyone. Most local congregations have their own distinct flavor. There are some in which the ministry is largely Christian, with a Quaker-infused explanation of a parable or gospel, while there are others where you’ll rarely hear Christ mentioned. You should try out different meetings and see which ones feed your soul. Be ready to find nurturance in unexpected places. God may instruct us to serve anywhere with no notice, as he did the Good Samaritan. Christ isn’t bound by any of our silly words.

Thanks to James for the question!

Do you have a question on another Quaker topic? Check out the Ask Me Anything! page.

It was a bit of a random post at the time. I had read a widely shared interview that afternoon and was mulling over the possibilities of a behind-the-scenes Quaker influence. This sort of randomness happens frequently but in the rush of work and family I don’t always take the time to blog it. That day I did and a few years later it influence spline on some small way. 

It reminds me of an old observation: the immediate boost we get when friends comment in our blog posts or like a Facebook update is an immediate hit of dopamine—exciting and ego gratifying. But the greater effect often comes months and years later when someone finds something of yours that they’re searching for. This delayed readership may be one of the greatest differences between blogging and Facebooking. 

There is much expressed in these pages which I can heartily support. Certainly, if Friends are reluctant to speak of God or Christ in the Religious Society of Friends for fear of disapproval or censure, something needs to be corrected. We cannot build deep, loving community in an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust.
I also discern a sense that the author and many visitors to this site feel that many Friends are more interested in an easy, comfortable, unchallenging social and political club, than a place for serious spiritual growth and challenge. If you wish to call that being “convicted in our sin,” so be it. The phrase does not speak to me, but I think its meaning does.
At the same time, I discern a sense here–rarely explicit, but frequently implied–that what liberal Quakers need is a good purging, a removal of those Friends who don’t believe what “we” think Friends should believe. Who “we” are, and precisely which beliefs are acceptable and unacceptable, is very much in question.
I don’t believe in God, and have spent the last 15 years among Friends trying to understand, among many other things, why I feel so irrestibly drawn to a community and religious society in which the central term is God. My relationship with that community is at the center of my life, and has transformed and improved me in ways that make me deeply grateful and reverent for whatever it is we experience or create together. It has not made me a theist.
In my large and very liberal meeting, a fair number of messages in meeting for worship invoke the name of God or Christ or Jesus. Perhaps a larger percentage do not, including many from Friends I know to be Christians of various sorts. That a message does not invoke the name of God, does not prove or even suggest that God is not present in the message. If I am mistaken and God does exist, surely he is manifest in all creation and humanity, and not merely at those moments when we invoke his name. If I am mistaken and God does exist, surely he is manifest in me, and in what I bring to my meeting, and what my meeting brings to me. Surely your conception of God is not that he is only present in the lives of those who hold certain theological propositions to be true. Or am I mistaken about this as well?
I do experience something mysterious and profound and life-changing in my religious life among Friends. I have a hard time describing it, though I occasionally try in my flawed and halting language. Perhaps the experience I have is the same as, or deeply similar to, that which you call God. For me to use that term would be misleading, even dishonest, because, mysterious as my experience sometimes is, nothing about it strikes me as unnatural. It is something beyond me, naturally, as it springs not from my own doing, but from the encounter or relationship between me and others, between me and the world. It is neither here nor there, but a living bond that comes from being alive in the world with other living beings. There is something sacred in that bond, and acting in ways that tend to violate it is not righteous. I depend on my community for many things, and one of those things is to keep me honest to that bond. I submit myself to that discipline freely and joyfully, and my willingness springs from the faith I have in the goodness of that community. I do not and cannot, however, submit my mind, my beliefs–my measure of the light–to any authority. To do so would be a violation of my integrity, and it is not in the tradition of George Fox or the founders to demand this sort of obedience, nor to deny the blessing of our community to those who will not state agreement with certain theological propositions.
I am confident that Fox and his followers would have been shocked to see the theological diversity that is the reality of modern liberal Friends. He also would have been shocked, I suspect, to learn that the creation story/stories of Genesis, taken literally, would soon be proven by science to be clearly and absolutely false. Given his unshakeable integrity, given the radical nature of his ministry, given 300 more years of light and learning, I think his beliefs would have changed in many ways that are hard to imagine. Should we have not changed during this period?
My goal is not to change Friends, though my presence among them will probably have some small effect. Like Popeye and Luther, I am what I am. At the same time, I applaud and honor the Christians and others whose faith in God is utterly central to everything of value in their lives. It would grieve me deeply if you were reluctant to speak your faith in worship to avoid offending me. Sometimes your language about God speaks to me very deeply, though on a metaphorical level. Other times, not so much. In any case, your beliefs are important to me. I want to know you. I would like for us to remain Friends.
Either way, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.

This piece originally appeared as a comment on “We’re All Ranters Now”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/ranters.php.