In late January 2004, I went to a gathering on “Quaker Faith and Practice: The Witness of Our Lives and Words,” co-sponsored by the Christian Friends Conference and the New Foundation Fellowship. Here are some thoughts about the meeting.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ friends
FGC on Quaker Religious Ed
February 12, 2004
One of the pieces I helped put online in my role of FGC webmaster is FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century, by Beckey Phipps. It’s definitely worth a read. It’s comprised of interviews of three Friends:
Ernie Buscemi: “It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs – they’ve disappeared. I see the same thing [happening] as a woman and person of color, we are doing something wrong.”
Marty Grundy: “Our branch [of Friends] has discarded the tools by which earlier Friends’ practices were formed. We’ve lost our understanding of what it is that we are about.”
Arthur Larrabee: “We need to tap into God’s energy and God’s joy. Early Friends had that energy, they had a vision, they had the connection with the inward Christ, a source of infinite energy power and joy.”
While I wish this could be extended a bit (e.g., why not ask the ‘kids’ themselves where they’ve gone), at least these are the right questions.
Testimonies for twentieth-first century: a Testimony Against “Community”
February 1, 2004
I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it’s time for a moratorium of the word “community” and the phrases “faith community” and “community of faith.” Through overuse, we Friends have stretched this phrase past its elasticity point and it’s snapped. It’s become a meaningless, abstract term used to disguise the fact that we’ve become afraid to articulate a shared faith. A recent yearly meeting newsletter used the word “community” 27 times but the word “God” only seven: what does it mean when a religious body stops talking about God?
The “testimony of community” recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was the centerpiece of the new-and-improved testimonies Howard Brinton unveiled back in the 1950s in his Friends for 300 Years (as far as I know no one elevated it to a testimony before him). Born into a well-known Quaker family, he married into an even more well-known family. From the cradle Howard and his wife Anna were Quaker aristocracy. As they traveled the geographic and theological spectrum of Friends, their pedigree earned them welcome and recognition everywhere they went. Perhaps not surprisingly, Howard grew up to think that the only important criteria for membership in a Quaker meeting is one’s comfort level with the other members. “The test of membership is not a particular kind of religious experience, nor acceptance of any particular religious, social or economic creed,” but instead one’s “compatibility with the meeting community.” ( Friends for 300 Years page 127).
So what is “compatibility”? It often boils down to being the right “kind” of Quaker, with the right sort of behavior and values. At most Quaker meetings, it means being exceedingly polite, white, upper-middle class, politically liberal, well-educated, quiet in conversation, and devoid of strong opinions about anything involving the meeting. Quakers are a homogenous bunch and it’s not coincidence: for many of us, it’s become a place to find people who think like us.
But the desire to fit in creates its own insecurity issues. I was in a small “breakout” group at a meeting retreat a few years ago where six of us shared our feelings about the meeting. Most of these Friends had been members for years, yet every single one of them confided that they didn’t think they really belonged. They were too loud, too colorful, too ethnic, maybe simply too too for Friends. They all judged themselves against some image of the ideal Quaker – perhaps the ghost of Howard Brinton. We rein ourselves in, stop ourselves from saying too much.
This phenomenon has almost completely ended the sort of prophetic ministry once common to Friends, whereby a minister would challenge Friends to renew their faith and clean up their act. Today, as one person recently wrote, modern Quakers often act as if avoidance of controversy is at the center of our religion. That makes sense if “compatibility” is our test for membership and “community” our only stated goal. While Friends love to claim the great eighteenth century minister John Woolman, he would most likely get a cold shoulder in most Quaker meetinghouses today. His religious motivation and language, coupled with his sometimes eccentric public witness and his overt call to religious reform would make him very incompatible indeed. Sometimes we need to name the ways we aren’t following the Light: for Friends, Christ is not just comforter, but judger and condemner as well. Heavy stuff, perhaps, but necessary. And near-impossible when a comfy and non-challenging community is our primary mission.
Don’t get me wrong. I like community. I like much of the non-religious culture of Friends: the potlucks, the do-it-yourself approach to music and learning, our curiousity about other religious traditions. And I like the openness and tolerance that is the hallmark of modern liberalism in general and liberal Quakerism in particular. I’m glad we’re Queer friendly and glad we don’t get off on tangents like who marries who (the far bigger issue is the sorry state of our meetings’ oversight of marriages, but that’s for another time). And for all my ribbing of Howard Brinton, I agree with him that we should be careful of theological litmus tests for membership. I understand where he was coming from. All that said, community for its own sake can’t be the glue that holds a religious body together.
So my Testimony Against “Community” is not a rejection of the idea of community, but rather a call to put it into context. “Community” is not the goal of the Religious Society of Friends. Obedience to God is. We build our institutions to help us gather as a great people who together can discern the will of God and follow it through whatever hardships the world throws our way.
Plenty of people know this. Last week I asked the author of one of the articles in the yearly meeting newsletter why he had used “community” twice but “God” not at all. He said he personally substitutes “body of Christ” everytime he writes or reads “community.” That’s fine, but how are we going to pass on Quaker faith if we’re always using lowest-common-denominator language?
We’re such a literate people but we go surprisingly mute when we’re asked to share our religious understandings. We need to stop being afraid to talk with one another, honestly and with the language we use. I’ve seen Friends go out of their way to use language from other traditions, especially Catholic or Buddhist, to state a basic Quaker value. I fear that we’ve dumbed down our own tradition so much that we’ve forgotten that it has the robustness to speak to our twenty-first century conditions.
Related Essays
I talk about what a bold Quaker community of faith might look like and why we need one in my essay on the “Emergent Church Movement” I talk about our fear of meeting unity in “We’re all Ranters Now.”
We’re All Ranters Now: On Liberal Friends and Becoming a Society of Finders
November 18, 2003
It’s time to explain why I call this site “The Quaker Ranter” and to talk about my home, the liberal branch of Quakers. Non-Quakers can be forgiven for thinking that I mean this to be a place where I, Martin Kelley, “rant,” i.e., where I “utter or express with extravagance.” That may be the result (smile), but it’s not what I mean and it’s not the real purpose behind this site.
Friends and Ranters
The Ranters were fellow-travelers to the Friends in the religious turmoil of seventeenth-century England. The countryside was covered with preachers and lay people running around England seeking to revive primitive Christianity. George Fox was one, declaring that “Christ has come to teach his people himself” and that hireling clergy were distorting God’s message. The movement that coalesced around him as “The Friends of Truth” or “The Quakers” would take its orders directly from the Spirit of Christ.
This worked fine for a few years. But before long a leading Quaker rode into the town of Bristol in imitation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Not a good idea. The authorities convicted him of heresy and George Fox distanced himself from his old friend. Soon afterwards, a quasi-Quaker collection of religious radicals plotted an overthrow of the government. That also didn’t go down very well with the authorities, and Fox quickly disavowed violence in a statement that became the basis of our peace testimony. Clearly the Friends of the Truth needed to figure out mechanisms for deciding what messages were truly of God and who could speak for the Friends movement.
The central question was one of authority. Those Friends recognized as having the gift for spiritual discernment were put in charge of a system of discipline over wayward Friends. Friends devised a method for determining the validity of individual leadings and concerns. This system rested on an assumption that Truth is immutable, and that any errors come from our own willfulness in disobeying the message. New leadings were first weighed against the tradition of Friends and their predecessors the Israelites (as brought down to us through the Bible).
Ranters often looked and sounded like Quakers but were opposed to any imposition of group authority. They were a movement of individual spiritual seekers. Ranters thought that God spoke directly to individuals and they put no limits on what the Spirit might instruct us. Tradition had no role, institutions were for disbelievers.
Meanwhile Quakers set up Quarterly and Yearly Meetings to institutionalize the system of elders and discipline. This worked for awhile, but it shouldn’t be too surprising that this human institution eventually broke down. Worldliness and wealth separated the elders from their less well-to-do brethren and new spiritual movements swept through Quaker ranks. Divisions arose over the eternal question of how to pass along a spirituality of convincement in a Society grown comfortable. By the early 1800s, Philadelphia elders had became a kind of aristocracy based on birthright and in 1827 they disowned two-thirds of their own yearly meeting. The disowned majority naturally developed a distrust of authority, while the aristocratic minority eventually realized there was no one left to elder.
Over the next century and a half, successive waves of popular religious movements washed over Friends. Revivalism, Deism, Spiritualism and Progressive Unitarianism all left their mark on Friends in the Nineteenth Century. Modern liberal Protestantism, Evangelicalism, New Ageism, and sixties-style radicalism transformed the Twentieth. Each fad lifted up a piece of Quakers’ original message but invariably added its own incongruous elements into worship. The Society grew ever more fractured.
Faced with ever-greater theological disunity, Friends simply gave up. In the 1950s, the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings reunited. It was celebrated as reconciliation. But they could do so only because the role of Quaker institutions had fundamentally changed. Our corporate bodies no longer even try to take on the role of discerning what it means to be a Friend.
We are all Ranters now
Liberal Quakers today tend to see their local Meetinghouse as a place where everyone can believe what they want to believe. The highest value is given to tolerance and cordiality. Many people now join Friends because it’s the religion without a religion, i.e., it’s a community with the form of a religion but without any theology or expectations. We are a proud to be a community of seekers. Our commonality is in our form and we’re big on silence and meeting process.
Is it any wonder that almost everyone today seems to be a hyphenated Quaker? We’ve got Catholic-Quakers, Pagan-Quakers, Jewish-Quakers: if you can hyphenate it, there’s a Quaker interest group for you. I’m not talking about Friends nourished by another tradition: we’ve have historically been graced and continue to be graced by converts to Quakerism whose fresh eyes let us see something new about ourselves. No, I’m talking about people who practice the outward form of Quakerism but look elsewhere for theology and inspiration. If being a Friend means little more than showing up at Meeting once a week, we shouldn’t be surprised that people bring a theology along to fill up the hour. It’s like bringing a newspaper along for your train commute every morning.
But the appearance of tolerance and unity comes at a price: it depends on everyone forever remaining a Seeker. Anyone who wants to follow early Friends’ experience as “Friends of the Truth” risks becomes a Finder who threatens the negotiated truce of the modern Quaker meeting. If we really are a people of God, we might have to start acting that way. We might all have to pray together in our silence. We might all have to submit ourselves to God’s will. We might all have to wrestle with each other to articulate a shared belief system. If we were Finders, we might need to define what is unacceptable behavior for a Friend, i.e., on what grounds we would consider disowning a member.
If we became a religious society of Finders, then we’d need to figure out what it means to be a Quaker-Quaker: someone who’s theology and practice is Quaker. We would need to put down those individual newspapers to become a People once more. I’m not saying we’d be united all the time. We’d still have disagreements. Even more, we would once again need to be vigilant against the re-establishment of repressive elderships. But it seems obvious to me that Truth lies in the balance between authority and individualism and that it’s each generation’s task to restore and maintain that balance.
Until Friends can find a way to articulate a shared faith, I will remain a Ranter. I don’t want to be. I long for the oversight of a community united in a shared search for Truth. But can any of us be Friends if so many of us are Ranters?
More Reading
For those interested, “We all Ranters Now” paraphrases (birthright Friend) Richard Nixon’s famous quote (semi-misattributed) about the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes.
Bill Samuel has an interesting piece called “Keeping the Faith” that addresses the concept of Unity and its waxing and waning among Friends over the centuries.
Samuel D. Caldwell gave an interesting lecture back in 1997, Quaker Culture vs. Quaker Faith. An excerpt: “Quaker culture and Quaker faith are… often directly at odds with one another in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting today. Although it originally derived from and was consistent with Quaker faith, contemporary Quaker culture in this Yearly Meeting has evolved into a boring, peevish, repressive, petty, humorless, inept, marginal, and largely irrelevant cult that is generally repugnant to ordinary people with healthy psyches. If we try to preserve our Quaker culture, instead of following the leadings of our Quaker faith, we will most certainly be cast out of the Kingdom and die.”
I talk a bit more about these issues in Sodium Free Friends, which talks about the way we sometimes intentionally mis-understand our past and why it matters to engage with it. Some pragmantic Friends defend our vagueness as a way to increase our numbers. In The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers I look at a class of contemporary seekers who would be receptive to a more robust Quakerism and map out the issues we’d need to look at before we could really welcome them in.
Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal
September 6, 2003
A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.
I’m currently reading Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World, which examines the cultural and generational shifts happening within the Christian Evangelical movement. At the bottom of this page is a handy chart that outlines the generational differences in theology, ecclesiastical paradigm, church polity that he sees. When I first saw it I said “yes!” to almost each category, as it clearly hits at the generational forces hitting Quakerism.
Unfortunately many Friends in leadership positions don’t really understand the problems facing Quakerism. Or: they do, but they don’t understand the larger shifts behind them and think that they just need to redouble their efforts using the old methods and models. The Baby Boom generation in charge knows the challenge is to reach out to seekers in their twenties or thirties, but they do this by developing programs that would have appealed to them when they were that age. The current crop of outreach projects and peace initiatives are all very 1980 in style. There’s no recognition that the secular peace community that drew seekers in twenty years ago no longer exists and that today’s seekers are looking for something deeper, something more personal and more real.
When younger Friends are included in the surveys and committees, they tend to be either the uninvolved children of important Baby Boom generation Quakers, or those thirty-something Friends that culturally and philosophically fit into the older paradigms. It’s fine that these two types of Friends are around, but neither group challenges Baby Boomer group-think. Outspoken younger Friends often end up leaving the Society in frustration after a few years.
It’s a shame. In my ten years attending a downtown Philadelphia Friends meeting, I easily met a hundred young seekers. They mostly cycled through, attending for periods ranging from a few months to a few years. I would often ask them why they stopped coming. Sometimes they were just nice and said life was too busy, but of course that’s not a real answer: you make time for the things that are important and that feed you in some way. But others told me they found the meeting unwelcoming, or Friends too self-congratulatory or superficial, the community more social than spiritual. I went back to this meeting one First Day after a two year absence and it was depressing how it was all the same faces. This is not a knock on this particular meeting, since the same dynamics are at work in most of the liberal-leaning meetings I’ve attended, both in the FGC and FUM worlds – it’s a generational cultural phenomenon. I have never found the young Quaker seeker community I know is out there, though I’ve glimpsed its individual faces a hundred times: always just out of reach, never gelling into a movement.
I’m not sure what the answers are. Luckily it’s not my job to have answers: I leave that up to Christ and only concern myself with being as faithful a servant to the Spirit as I can be (this spirit-led leadership style is exactly one of the generational shifts Webber talks about). I’ve been given a clear message that my job is to stay with the Society of Friends, that I might be of use someday. But there are a few pieces that I think will come out:
A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
What babies were thrown out with the bathwater by turn-of-the-century Friends who embraced modernism and rationalism and turned their back on traditional testimonies? This will require challenging some of the sacred myths of contemporary Quakerism. There are a lot that aren’t particularly Quaker and we need to start admitting to that. I’ve personally taken up plain dress and find the old statements on the peace testimony much deeper and more meaningful than contemporary ones. I’m a professional webmaster and run a prominent pacifist site, so it’s not like I’m stuck in the nineteenth century; instead, I just think these old testimonies actually speak to our condition in the twenty-first Century.
A Desire to Grow
Too many Friends are happy with their nice cozy meetings. The meetings serve as family and as a support group, and a real growth would disrupt our established patterns. If Quakerism grew tenfold over the next twenty years we’d have to build meetinghouses, have extra worship, reorganize our committees. Involved Friends wouldn’t know all the other involved Friends in their yearly meeting. With more members we’d have to become more rigorous and disciplined in our committee meetings. Quakerism would feel different if it were ten times larger: how many of us would just feel uncomfortable with that. Many of our Meetings are ripe for growth, being in booming suburbs or thriving urban centers, but year after year they stay small. Many simply neglect and screw up outreach or religious education efforts as a way of keeping the meeting at its current size and with its current character.
A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
Religion in America has become yet another consumer choice, an entertainment option for Sunday morning, and this paradigm is true with Friends. We complain how much time our Quaker work takes up. We complain about clearness committees or visioning groups that might take up a Saturday afternoon. A more involved Quakerism would realize that the hour on First Day morning is in many ways the least important time to our Society. Younger seekers are looking for connections that are deeper and that will require time. We can’t build a Society on the cheap. It’s not money we need to invest, but our hearts and time.
I recently visited a Meeting that was setting up its first adult religious education program. When it came time to figure out the format, a weighty Friend declared that it couldn’t take place on the first Sunday of the month because that was when the finance committee met; the second Sunday was out because of the membership care committee; the third was out because of business meeting and so forth. It turned out that religious education could be squeezed into one 45-minute slot on the fourth Sunday of every month. Here was a small struggling meeting in the middle of an sympathetic urban neighborhood and they couldn’t spare even an hour a month on religious education or substantive outreach to new members. Modern Friends should not exist to meet in committees.
A renewal of discipline and oversight
These are taboo words for many modern Friends. But we’ve taken open-hearted tolerance so far that we’ve forgotten who we are. What does it mean to be a Quaker? Seekers are looking for answers. Friends have been able to provide them with answers in the past: both ways to conduct oneself in the world and ways to reach the divine. Many of us actually yearn for more care, attention and oversight in our religious lives and more connection with others.
A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries
Too much of Quaker culture is still rooted in elitist wealthy Philadelphia Main Line “Wasp” culture. For generations of Friends, the Society became an ethnic group you were born into. Too many Friends still care if your name is “Roberts,” “Jones,” “Lippencott,” “Thomas,” “Brinton.” A number of nineteenth-century Quaker leaders tried to make this a religion of family fiefdoms. There was a love of the world and an urge for to be respected by the outside world (the Episcopalians wouldn’t let you into the country clubs if you wore plain dress or got too excited about religion).
Today we too often confuse the culture of those families with Quakerism. The most obvious example to me is the oft-repeated phrase: “Friends don’t believe in proselytizing.” Wrong: we started off as great speakers of the Truth, gaining numbers in great quantities. It was the old Quaker families who started fretting about new blood in the Society, for they saw birthright membership as more important than baptism by the Holy Spirit. We’ve got a lot of baggage left over from this era, things we need to re-examine, including: our willingness to sacrifice Truth-telling in the name of politeness; an over-developed intellectualism that has become snobbery against those without advanced schooling; our taboo about being too loud or too “ethnic” in Meeting.
Note that I haven’t specifically mentioned racial diversity. This is a piece of the work we need to do and I’m happy that many Friends are working on it. But I think we’ll all agree that it will take more than a few African Americans with graduate degrees to bring true diversity. The Liberal branch of Friends spends a lot of time congratulating itself on being open, tolerant and self-examining and yet as far as I can tell we’re the least ethnically-diverse branch of American Quakers (I’m pretty sure, anyone with corroboration?). We need to re-examine and challenge the unwritten norms of Quaker culture that don’t arise from faith. When we have something to offer besides upper-class liberalism, we’ll find we can talk to a much wider selection of seekers.
Can we do it?
Can we do these re-examinations without ripping our Society apart? I don’t know. I don’t think the age of Quaker schisms is over, I just think we have a different discipline and church polity that let us pretend the splits aren’t there. We just self-select ourselves into different sub-groups. I’m not sure if this can continue indefinitely. Every week our Meetings for Worship bring together people of radically different beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of worship, we have individual meditation in a group setting, where everyone is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn’t Friends’ style and it’s not satisfying to many of us. I know this statement may seem like sacrilege to many Friends who value tolerance above all. But I don’t think I’m the only one who would rather worship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper religious fellowship than that found in most contemporary Meetings. Quakerism will change and Modernism isn’t the end of history.
How open will we all be to this process? How honest will we get? Where will our Society end up? We’re not the only religion in America that is facing these questions.
Traditional | Pragmatic | Younger | |
Theological | Christianity as a rational worldview | Christianity as therapy Answers needs | Christianity as a community of faith. Ancient/Reformation |
| Apologetics Style | Evidential Foundational | Christianity as meaning-giver Experiential Personal Faith | Embrace the metanarrative Embodied apologetic Communal faith |
| Ecclesial Paradigm | Constantinian Church Civil Religion | Culturally sensitive church Market Driven | Missional Church Counter cultural |
| Church Style | Neighbourhood churches Rural | Megachuruch Suburban Market targeted | Small Church Back to cities Intercultural |
| Leadership Style | Pastor centred | Managerial Model CEO | Team ministry Priesthood of all |
| Youth Ministry | Church-centred programs | Outreach Programs Weekend fun retreats | Prayer, Bible Study, Worship, Social Action |
| Education | Sunday School Information centred | Target generational groups and needs | Intergenerational formation in community |
| Spirituality | Keep the rules | Prosperity and success | Authentic embodiment |
| Worship | Traditional | Contemporary | Convergence |
| Art | Restrained | Art as illustration | Incarnational embodiment |
| Evangelism | Mass evangelism | Seeker Service | Process evangelism |
| Activists | Beginnings of evangelical social action | Need-driving social action (divorce groups, drug rehab | Rebuild cities and neighborhoods |
See also:
On Quaker Ranter:
- It Will Be There in Decline Our Entire Lives. There’s a generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism who are writing and blogging under the “post-modern” “emergent church” labels. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism?
- Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?, my observations from the November 2003 “Indie Allies” meet-up.
- Sodium-Free Friends, a post of mine urging Friends to actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. “We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world and Quakerism has something to say about that.”
- Peace and Twenty-Somethings: are the Emergent Church seekers creating the kinds of youth-led intentional communities that the peace movement inspired in the 1970s?
Elsewhere:
- From Evangelical Friends Church Southwest comes an emergent church” church planting project called Simple Churches (since laid down, link is to archive). I love their intro: “As your peruse the links from this site please recognize that the Truth reflected in essays are often written with a ‘prophetic edge’, that is sharp, non compromising and sometimes radical perspective. We believe Truth can be received without ‘cursing the darkness’ and encourage you to reflect upon finding the ‘candle’ to light, personally, as you apply what you hear the Lord speaking to you.”
- The emergent church movement hit the New York Times in February 2004. Here’s a link to the article and my thoughts about it.
- “Orthodox Twenty-Somethings,” a great article from TheOoze (now lost to a site redesign of theirs), and my intro to the article Want to understand us?
- The blogger Punkmonkey talks about what a missional community of faith would look like and it sounds a lot like what I dream of: “a missional community of faith is a living breathing transparent community of faith willing to get messy while reach out to, and bringing in, those outside the current community.”