What if, instead of characterizing folks seeking home as “threats” or “invaders,” we understood them to be our neighbors, that our futures are interlocked and that how they are treated is connected to the well-being of us all? What if we understood love as not constrained by borders or walls, but abundant, and that caring for one another and those most violated by systemic oppression is the pathway toward liberation for us all? What if we, as people of conscience and faith, greeted the migrants at the border as our brothers, sisters, and kin, opened our homes and communities to them, and greeted them as resourceful contributors to figuring out the planetary threats we currently face together?

https://www.afsc.org/blogs/acting-in-faith/freedom-to-seek-sanctuary-quaker-perspective-migrant-caravan

When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real differences in philosophy about how to build community. Some see how much needs to radically change so that those who have been marginalized can truly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slowly to build it correctly. Some see the damage having no community can bring, and want to do what they can to build something as safely as possible. I hate that these differences are still causing damage to our relationships and our communities. I don’t have a solution.

I appreciate the way he tries to understand the flip sides of community and institutionalism; perhaps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be negotiated. As pastor of one of the “most institutional of institutional churches for 15 years,” he was in the center of the centrifugal forces that tore apart both Northwest Yearly Meeting as a whole and indivisible Friends churches within it. From a distance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverging Quaker history, I’m not in a position to say whether things could have gone differently or whether individuals always acted in their best ways but I can appreciate that it there must have been a lot of impossible choices and no-good answers as polarization gave way to disintegration.

Risking Community

I’m not quite sure how we got here, in this “Christian” nation of ours. Christ says to welcome the stranger. These folks are not even strangers to many of us – they are woven into the fabric of our shared communities, their families, their work and service in the world, and their blessings.

I really see mental diversity as a gift to a community, and that the folks that I serve and that I’ve worked with are very resilient. If they tell you their stories about how they’ve gotten through their traumatic situations and what’s helped them to keep going, faith is a huge part of that. And we have a lot to learn from their strength and resilience.

My family has had very avoidable and out-of-nowhere conflicts at two religious spaces—one a Friends meeting and the other a Presbyterian church—over easy accomodations for my son Francis. It seems like many of the dynamics that we’ve seen are not dissimilar to those that keep others out of meeting communities. Who are we willing to adapt for? Is comfort and familiarity our main goal?

Melody also wrote for Friends Journal a few years ago, Imagining a Trauma-informed Quaker Community.

I’m in this funny position where I have a quarter century of random Quaker factoids in my head, have access to great databases (like instant searches of Friends Journal’s 60+ years of articles), and have good Googling chops. When I’m in a discussion with Friends face-to-face, I find I often have useful context. Some of it is historical (I geek out on the Quaker past) but some of it is just my lived memory. I’ve been in and out of Quaker offices for 27 years now. I’m entering this weird phase of life in which I’ve been a professional Quaker staffer longer than most of my contemporaries.

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this weird talent to remember things I read years earlier. When the topic of clearness committees recently came up, I remembered that Deborah Haines had written a piece about Rachel Davis DuBois in the long-defunct FGConnections newsletter (yes, groaner of a name but it was a great publication in its heyday). Thanks to Archive.org I could resurface the article and bring it to the discussions.

And so, I’ve been quietly been changing the idea of Quaker Ranter from a classic old-school blog to a daily email newsletter. I’ll still collect interesting Quaker links, as I’ve been doing for years with QuakerQuaker. But now I’ll annotate them and give them context. If there’s a side story I think is interesting I’ll tell it. I have a long train commute and writing fun and geeky things about Friends makes it interesting.

I think that something like this could help bring Quaker newcomers up to speed. Our insider language and unexplained (and sometimes dated) worldviews create an impediment for seekers. We kind of expect they’ll figure out things that aren’t so obvious. Learning factoids and histories a day at a time can give them some context to understand what’s happening Sunday morning. If that’s not enough, I also have an Ask A Quaker feature where people new to Friends can ask questions. I’ll be liberally pitching Friends Journal articles and QuakerSpeak videos because I think we’re doing some of our best Quaker media work, but I’m also all about spreading the love and will share many other great resources and blogs.

As with all my projects I also hope to get people contributing so it becomes a community watering hole. If you want to get involved, the first step is to sign up for the free daily email list. At some point, this will probably outgrow the free tier of the email service I’m using, and I will start to have to pay to send thesee emails out. For those of you with a little extra to give, Quaker Ranter Membership is a way to help offset these costs.

And let your friends know about it! Just send them to quakerranter.org/email to sign up.

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The Old Believers have a fascinating history. They were Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to comply with liturgical changes mandated by the Patriarch and Czar in the 1650s. As usual, there was a lot of politics involved, with the Czar wanting to cozy up with the Greek Orthodox to ally Russia against the Muslim Ottomans, etc., etc. The theological charge was that the Greek traditions were the standard and Russian differences latter-day innovations to be stamped out (more modern research has found the Russians actually were closer to the older forms, but no matter: what the Czar and Patriarch want, the Czar and Patriarch get). The old practices were banned, beginning hundreds of years of state-sponsored persecution for the “Old Believers.” The survivors scattered to the four corners of the Russian empire and beyond, keeping a low profile wherever they went.

The Old Believers have a fascinating fractured history. Because their priests were killed off in the seventeenth century, they lost their claims of apostolic succession–the idea that there’s an unbroken line of ordination from Jesus Christ himself. Some Old Believers found work-arounds or claimed a few priests were spared but the hardcore among them declared succession over, signaling the end times and the fall of the Church. They became priestless Old Believers–so defensive of the old liturgy that they were willing to lose most of the liturgy. They’ve scattered around the world, often wearing plain dress and living in isolated communities.

The Old Believers church in Millville has no signs, no website, no indication of what it is (a lifelong member of “our” St Nick’s called it mysterious and said he little about it of it). From a few internet references, they appear to be the priestless kind of Old Believers. But it has its own distinctions: apparently one of the greatest iconographers of the twentieth century lived and worshipped there, and when famed Russian political prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn visited the U.S. he made a point of speaking at this signless church on a dead end road.

Links:
* Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
* Account of US Lithuanian Bespopovtsy communities: http://www.synaxis.info/old-rite/0_oldbelief/history_eng/nicoll.html
* OSU Library on iconographer Sofronv (PDF): http://cmrs.osu.edu/rcmss/CMH21color.pdf
* Solzhenitsyn’s 1976 visit: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f‑news/2057793/posts

In album St Nicholas Old Believers, Millville NJ (9 photos)

The future of the traditional evangelical church as I see it is: a.) mega churches continuing to grow, consolidating what is left of the Christendom populations…; b.) smaller churches of under 200 slowly dying and eventually closing, and c.) the birthing of new missional communities through  either seeding new missionary communities or transitioning (the aforementioned) dying small churches into vibrant places of mission.

On the face of it, it’s bizarre to compare liberal Friends to mainstream Christian evangelicals, but there are similarities if you scale back the numbers. I think some larger Friends meetings have mega-church-like dynamics. They have strong family programs and connections to nearby Friends schools and/or retirement communities. They serve as the local progressive liberal hub of their communities. They’re not deeply rooted in Quaker spirituality and are proud of the spiritual heterodoxy. They’re very organized–name tags, “Friendly 8” dinners, experienced clerks. They stand in contrast to the bulk of smaller meetings that are dying fast and won’t be around another generation.

Fitch clearly thinks the interesting work falls under the last category, “missional communities” and argues that a “significant part” of church resources should be devoted to “efforts in training missionary pastors.” His big question is whether the small “b” churches can evolve into the “c” missional communities.

I’m not sure that we really need training programs but for argument’s sake let’s say Fitch is right. Liberal Friends don’t have anyone to devote church resources to training (the closest analogue be the Earlham School of Religion). We do have small missional communities springing up but so far there’s been little support or recognition from local meetings or larger Friends bodies. What would it look like to equip these efforts in an unprogrammed Quaker setting? Is it all but inevitable that they’ll have to rely on self-organized associations? Will they remain as worship groups? Is that fine?