Tag Archives ⇒ george fox

Tim Gee tracks down Ann Lee’s Quaker connection

March 17, 2026
· Martin Kelley

I always love a lit­tle sleuthing and all the bet­ter if it argues against some poor­ly researched report that made its way to Wikipedia.

The claim is that Shak­er leader Ann Lee was born a Quak­er. The Wikipedia entry says: “Her par­ents were mem­bers of a dis­tinct branch of the Soci­ety of Friends (a sect of Quak­ers) and too poor to afford their chil­dren even the rudi­ments of edu­ca­tion.” The source of this is giv­en in the cita­tion: a 1879 ency­clo­pe­dia arti­cle, a copy of which is host­ed on Wik­isource: “Her par­ents were mem­bers of a dis­tinct branch of the soci­ety of Friends, and too poor to afford their chil­dren even the rudi­ments of edu­ca­tion.” A source for this claim was nev­er giv­en in the ency­clo­pe­dia, though lat­er on it does ref­er­ence Fred­er­ick William Evans, a much lat­er Shak­er figure.

That is the Tim Gee com­piles five pieces of evi­dence that togeth­er feel very con­vinc­ing.

There are of course influ­ences but that’s to be expect­ed. Every reli­gious move­ment of the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing had some rela­tion­ship to Quak­ers. The Methodists, Mor­mons, Holi­ness, Adven­tists all have some con­nec­tions. When you tour the “1652 Coun­try” area of Eng­land, where George Fox first brought Quak­ers togeth­er, you’ll keep run­ning into signs about John Wes­ley doing the same for Methodists a cen­tu­ry lat­er, and here in South Jer­sey where I live a whole slew of Quak­ers became Methodists in the ear­ly 1800s. At least one ear­ly Mor­mon evan­ge­list in Ohio essen­tial­ly went from Quak­er town to Quak­er town try­ing to recruit peo­ple. The Quak­er defense of female lead­er­ship and the prin­ci­ple that women can preach obvi­ous­ly rubbed off on the Shak­ers and oth­er movements.

The idea that the British colonies in Amer­i­ca were some pure land where we could rein­vent a prim­i­tive Chris­tian­i­ty was a pow­er­ful meme (if you will) at the time and cer­tain­ly drew Ann Lee to cross over and plant a reli­gious move­ment here. But Ann Lee picked one of the least Quak­er areas to plant her com­mu­ni­ty and drew ear­ly mem­bers from New Eng­land mil­len­ni­al­ist revival­ists. She def­i­nite­ly want­ed to build some­thing dis­tinct from Friends.

Ann Lee Was Never a Quaker: Here's the Evidence
Ann Lee Was Nev­er a Quak­er: Here’s the Evidence 

Five rea­sons why Wikipedia is wrong.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Talking about Who We Believe In

December 11, 2025
· Martin Kelley

I talked with Tom Gates this week about the nature of belief. He has an arti­cle in the cur­rent Friends Jour­nal titled “Beyond What Words Can Utter.”

We agreed that a lot of Quak­er belief can only be expe­ri­enced, not described, which makes for dif­fi­cul­ties when doing out­reach. It’s easy to go into nuance once some­one has com­ing into the meet­ing­house and is par­tic­i­pat­ing in an edu­ca­tion pro­gram but how do we get them off the street in the first place. Tom said:

I’m com­fort­able with Christ lan­guage and the inward light of Christ. And I know there are friends who are not, and there are good rea­sons why they’re not. I’m not deny­ing that. in these new­com­er ses­sions a per­sis­tent ques­tion is: Are Quak­ers Chris­t­ian? And how do you under­stand that? And they’re most­ly com­ing from back­grounds and oth­er kind of more con­ser­v­a­tive churches.

And so that’s a live ques­tion for them because in some sense they all left those church­es because the fun­da­men­tal­ism was grat­ing on them. I always pull off this thing from my shelf, it’s the Reader’s Guide to George Fox’s Jour­nal by Joseph Pick­vance. And he makes a fas­ci­nat­ing state­ment: the com­mon­est cause of mis­un­der­stand­ing of Fox’s teach­ing today is a fail­ure to real­ize how wide and deep and func­tion­al is the mean­ing that quote Christ had for him. 

Our dis­cus­sion ranged quite a bit, from Art Larrabee’s “Nine Core Quak­er Beliefs” to Mar­cus Borg’s Heart of Chris­tian­i­ty and 1653’s Saul’s Errand to Dam­as­cus, by James Nayler and George Fox. I def­i­nite­ly need to do some more reading!

Full show notes and a tran­script are avail­able.

Tom has also writ­ten a follow-up post on Quak­er belief on his blog. 

Steven Davison looks at “That of God” (Again)

October 17, 2025
· Martin Kelley

Often prof­fered as the pri­ma­ry belief among mod­ern Friends, the phrase has been stretched and pulled to the point of obtuse­ness in recent years. In the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Rufus Jones resus­ci­tat­ed it from pas­toral let­ters of Quak­er co-founder George Fox. But in 1970, Lewis Ben­son penned a scathing take­down of both Jones and “that of God” as a formulation.

Davi­son is return­ing to the debate:

“That of God” yearns for God, Fox implies in the quote we always use for this phrase. In that epis­tle, once we have done the inner work of our own trans­for­ma­tion in the light of Christ our­selves, then we can answer that of God in oth­ers. That of God with­in us is call­ing out in the dark­ness, and the Light answers with the Word.

“That of God”—Again
“That of God” — Again 

For decades, I have com­plained about Friends claim­ing that “that of God in every­one” is our cen­tral tenet…

Through the Flaming Sword Through the Flam­ing Sword 

September Friends Journal

September 4, 2025
· Martin Kelley

The Sep­tem­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal is out. There are a lot of sto­ries about how we get through trou­bled times. From my open­ing col­umn:

One of the roles of faith is to remem­ber that we’ve been here before. We’ve been the wan­der­ing Jews lost in the desert but fed man­na to sur­vive. We remem­ber the dis­ci­ples tak­en by sur­prise by the rush of Roman guards come to arrest our Mes­si­ah, who urged us to put away our swords. We tell sto­ries of a young George Fox wan­der­ing Eng­land look­ing for spir­i­tu­al teach­ers until all his “hopes in them and in all men were gone.” We sur­vive by telling sto­ries. We keep our­selves cen­tered and calm by remem­ber­ing oth­ers who found a path through uncer­tain­ty and assured us they were held up by a Comforter.

September 2025
Sep­tem­ber 2025 
Friends Journal Friends Journal 

George Fox Speaking

April 2, 2019
· Martin Kelley

At some point 18 months ago, we at Friends Jour­nal decid­ed that a future issue would revolve around humor. I remem­ber feel­ing a lump in my stom­ach at the time. I’ve learned to stop and poll my moti­va­tions before mak­ing a Quaker-related joke — not to see if it’s fun­ny, but to make sure that at least most Quak­ers might think it’s fun­ny. Well, that humor issue is out and avail­able online. Many of the fea­tures talk about humor but the first fea­ture actu­al­ly aims for humor itself. Don McCormick imag­ines Quak­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ures brought into modern-day cable news pro­gram­ming as they describe some of our rather odd customs.

George gives the cam­era a steely-TV-anchorman-type look and says, “Hel­lo, this is the evening edi­tion of Fox News. George Fox speak­ing. For our first sto­ry, let’s turn to Will ‘the Quill’ Penn at the sports desk.”

“Good evening,” says Will. “Well, it’s half-time over at Sier­ra Friends Center’s out­door bas­ket­ball court, and the Wool­man Wom­bats are bat­tling it out with the Quak­er Oafs. Both teams just com­plet­ed the league’s required work­shops on non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the Alter­na­tives to Vio­lence Project. The score at half-time is zero to zero. We have some footage from the sec­ond quarter.” 


Fox News: George Fox Speaking

Fox News: George Fox Speaking 

Our favorite news anchor goes on loca­tion with Will “The Quill” Penn and an assort­ment of dubi­ous­ly fact-checked…

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Looking outside the meetinghouse (FJ call for submissions)

November 6, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Let me give a plug that Friends Jour­nal is look­ing for arti­cles on the top­ic of “Out­side the Meet­ing­house” for the March issue. The dead­line is a lit­tle over a month away. Here’s a lit­tle bit of my write-up for it, as a teaser:

There is a long his­to­ry of Friends preach­ing and wit­ness­ing out­side of the con­fines of the meet­ing­house. George Fox’s Jour­nal is full of uncon­ven­tion­al wor­ship­ing; he had a par­tic­u­lar pen­chant for preach­ing from any bit of high ground he could find, like a tree or rock out­crop­ping. His con­tem­po­rary James Nay­lor is most remem­bered for re-enacting Jesus’s Palm Sun­day entry into Jerusalem by dra­mat­i­cal­ly rid­ing a horse down a main road into Bris­tol. Modern-day Friends con­tin­ue to find uncon­ven­tion­al places to worship… 

Also, I’ve just set up a form to get on the email noti­fi­ca­tion list to get pinged when top­ic write-ups get post­ed. It’s very low-volume, as we only write these once a month. There’s only two sub­scribers. For the time being, I’m just keep­ing the emails in a list and send­ing per­son­al­ized emails.


Page not found - Friends Journal

Page not found — Friends Journal 

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Friendly Fire: The Making of a Charismatic Quaker

September 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

A look at the Vine­yard Move­men­t’s Quak­er roots:

When it comes to Spirit-attentive wor­ship and min­istry, the Vine­yard man­i­fests Quak­er spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in a way that is faith­ful to the Evan­gel­i­cal tra­di­tion, but tru­ly mys­ti­cal, and of course deeply Quak­er. They live out a Quak­erism many of today’s Amer­i­can Quak­ers, both Lib­er­al and Ortho­dox, would find laugh­able, back­wards. George Fox, on the oth­er hand, may get it.

The Mak­ing of a Charis­mat­ic Quaker

Isaac Smith: Good soil

August 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

An obser­va­tion on the soil of God’s work — us:

For many of us, our predica­ment today seems most like the soil with the thorns: We want to draw clos­er to God and walk in God’s ways, but there is so much bad news, so many oblig­a­tions, so many dis­trac­tions. We can be led astray, some­times with­out even know­ing it. The founder of our move­ment, George Fox, once said that “what­ev­er ye are addict­ed to, the Tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trou­ble you, then he gets advan­tage over you, and then ye are gone.” We can be addict­ed to many things: not just, say, alco­hol or gam­bling, but ideas, both about the world and about ourselves. 

Alone, none of us can do much to change the world. But we can allow our­selves to be instru­ments of peace, rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, love. It’s easy to get stuck and tempt­ing in those times to get defen­sive or look toward oth­ers. I’ve found the old Quak­er take on “The Tempter” to be per­son­al­ly very use­ful. I’ve learned to ques­tion and go inward when­ev­er I feel too much pride in some­thing or find myself part of a group that seems self-satisfied with its work. 

Good soil