• 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
• 1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
• 2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

• 1937: 114,924
• 1957: 122,663
• 1967: 122,780
• 1972: 121,380
• 1977: 119,160
• 1987: 109,732
• 1992: 101,255
• 2002: 92,786
• 2012: 77,660
• 2017: 81,392

Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):

• 1937: 122,166
• 1957: 131,000
• 1967: 129,200
• 1977: 132,300
• 1987: 139,200
• 2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s¹ and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.

That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions ², we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign³ or it may be a statistical phantom.⁴ I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post and have corrected them above.

I wondered whether this difficulty has become one of our modern-day stages of developing in the ministry. Both Samuel Bownas (read/buy) and Howard Brinton (buy) identified typical stages that Friends growing in the ministry typically go through. Not everyone experiences Su’s rift between their meeting’s identity and a desire for a God-grounded meeting community, but enough of us have that I don’t think it’s the foibles of particular individuals or monthly meetings. Let me tease out one piece: that of individual and group identities. Much of the discussion in the comments of Su’s post have swirled around radically different conceptions of this.

Many modern Friends have become pretty strict individualists. We spend a lot of time talking about “community” but we aren’t practicing it in the way that Friends have understood it–as a “religious society.” The individualism of our age sees it as rude to state a vision of Friends that leaves out any of our members–even the most heterodox. We are only as united as our most far-flung believer (and every decade the sweep gets larger). The myth of our age is that all religious experiences are equal, both within and outside of particular religious societies, and that it’s intolerant to think of differences as anything more than language.

This is why I cast Su’s issues as being those of a minister. There has always been the need for someone to call us back to the faith. Contrary to modern-day popular opinion, this can be done with great love. It is in fact great love (Quaker Jane) to share the good news of the directly-accessible loving Christ, who loves us so much He wants to show us the way to righteous living. This Quaker idea of righteousness has nothing to do with who you sleep with, the gas mileage of your car or even the “correctness” of your theology. Jesus boiled faithfulness down into two commands: love God with all your might (however much that might be) and love your neighbor as yourself.

A “religious society” is not just a “community.” As a religious society we are called to have a vision that is stronger and bolder than the language or understanding of individual members. We are not a perfect community, but we can be made more perfect if we return to God to the fullness we’ve been given. That is why we’ve come together into a religious society.

“What makes us Friends?” Just following the modern testimonies doesn’t put us very squarely in the Friends tradition–SPICE is just a recipe for respectful living. “What makes us Friends?” Just setting the stopwatch to an hour and sitting quietly doesn’t do it–a worship style is a container at best and false idol at worst. “How do we love God?” “How do we love our neighbor?” “What makes us Friends?” These are the questions of ministry. These are the building blocks of outreach.

I’ve seen nascent ministers (“infant ministers” in the phrasing of Samual Bownas) start asking these questions, flare up on inspired blog posts and then taildive as they meet up with the cold-water reality of a local meeting that is unsupportive or inattentive. Many of them have left our religious society. How do we support them? How do we keep them? Our answers will determine whether our meeting are religious societies or communities.

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it’s safe to say we are all “post” something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren’t working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There’s something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it’s finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we’re more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it’s a great post, but so is Marshall Massey’s comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of “Convergence” will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that’s almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we’re starting from.

I don’t think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations–the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren’t Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can’t rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can’t help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn’t look at one’s beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I’m sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there’s little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can’t think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn’t very new. It’s just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It’s finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

For the last year I’ve been pondering the opportunities of using mid-week religious education and worship as a form of outreach. Emergent Church types love small group opportunities outside of the Sunday morning time slot and it seems that mid-week worship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker traditions that might be worth revitalizing and recasting in an Emergent-friendly format.

Last Spring I spent a few months regularly attending one of the few surviving mid-week worships in the area and I found it intriguing and full of possibilities but never felt led to do more. It seemed that attenders came and went each week without connecting deeply to one another or getting any serious grounding in Quakerism.

Reflecting on the genesis of a strong Philadelphia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look something like this:

• 6pm: regular religious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where attenders would be free to share spiritual insights but they would also learn the orthodox Quaker take on the issue or concern (Barclay essentially).
• 7pm: mid-week worship, unprogrammed
• 8pm: unofficial but regular hang-out time, people going in groups to local diners, etc.

Unprogrammed worship just isn’t enough (just when y’all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilburite…). People do need time to be able to ask questions and explore spirituality in a more structured way. Those of us led to teaching need to be willing to say “this is the Quaker take on this issue” even if our answer wouldn’t necessarily pass consensus in a Friends meeting.

People also need time to socialize. We live in an atomized society and the brunt of this isolation is borne by young adults starting careers in unfamiliar cities and towns: Quaker meeting can act as a place to plug into a social network and provide real community. It’s different from entertainment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift thinking from “those Quakers are cool” to “I’m a Quaker and I’m cool” in such a way that these new Friends understand that there are challenges and disciplines involved in taking on this new role.

Perhaps the three parts to the mid-week worship model is head, spirit and heart; whatever labels you give it we need to think about feeding and nurturing the whole seeker and to challenge them to more than just silence. This is certainly a common model. When Peggy Senger Parsons and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what’s now called The Collegium Center which is a Sunday night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that produced at least one couple (good friends of ours now!).

I don’t know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people’s heads too. The four weeks of Wednesday night religious ed at Moorestown might have something of this feel; it will be interesting to see.

For those interested in curriculum details, I’m basing it on Michael Birkel’s Silence and Witness: the Quaker Tradition (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael’s tried to pull together a good general introduction to Friends, something surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years it’s getting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can Silence and Witness anchor a Quakerism 101 course? We’ll see.

As supplementary material I’m using Thomas Hamm’s Quakers in America (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion’s Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy’s Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

When I signed off on my last post, I promised I would continue with something on “blogs, ministry and liberal Quaker outreach.” Here’s the first of the follow-ups.

As I settle in to my second week at my new (and newly-defined) jobs at FGC, I wonder if I be here without help of the Quaker Ranter? I started this blog two summers ago. It was a time when I felt like I might be headed toward membership in the lost Quaker generation that was the focus of one of my earliest posts. There were a lot of dead-ends in my life. A couple of applications for more serious, responsible employment with Friends had recently gone nowhere. Life at my monthly meeting was odd (we’ll keep it at that). I felt I was coming into a deeper experiential knowledge of my Quakerism and perhaps inching toward more overt ministry but there was no outlet, no sense of how this inward transformation might fit into any sort of outward social form or forum.

Everywhere I looked I saw Friends shortcoming themselves and our religious society with a don’t-rock-the-boat timidity that wasn’t serving God’s purpose for us. I saw precious little prophetic ministry. I knew of few Friends who were asking challenging questions about our worship life. Our language about God was becoming ever more coded and sterilized. Most of the twenty-somethings I knew generally approached Quakerism primarily as a series of cultural norms with only different standards from one yearly meeting to another (and one Quaker branch to another, I suspect) .
With all this as backdrop, I started the Quaker Ranter with a nothing-left-to-lose mentality. I was nervous about pushing boundaries and about broaching things publicly that most Friends only say in hushed tones of two or three on meetinghouse steps. I was also doubly nervous about being a Quaker employee talking about this stuff (livelihood and all that!). The few Quaker blogs that were out there were generally blogs by Quakers but about anything but Quakerism, politics being the most common topic.

Now sure, a lot of this hasn’t changed over these few years. But one thing has: we now have a vibrant community of Quaker bloggers. We’ve got folks from the corners of Quakerism getting to know one another and hash out not just our similarities and differences, but our frustrations and dreams. It’s so cool. There’s something happening in all this! Disenchanted Friends who have longed for deeper conversation and consolation when things are hard at their local meeting are finding Friends who understand.

Through the blog and the community that formed around it I’ve found a voice. I’m evolving, certainly, through reading, life, blog conversations and most importantly (I hope!) the acting of the Holy Spirit on my ever-resistant ego. But because of my blog I’m someone who now feels comfortable talking about what it means to be a Quaker in a public setting. It almost seems quaint to think back to the early blog conversations about whether we can call this a kind of ministry. When we’re all settling down to write our memoirs — our Quaker journals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chapter about becoming involved in the Quaker blogging community. In Howard Brinton’s Quaker Journals he enumerated the steps toward growth in the ministry that most of the writers seemed to go through; I suspect the journals of our generation will add self-published electronic media to it’s list of classic steps.

When I started Quaker Ranter I did have to wonder if this might be a quickest way to get fired. Not to cast aspersions on the powers-that-be at FGC but the web is full of cautionary tales of people being canned because of too-public blogs. My only consolation was the sense that no one that mattered really read the thing. But as it became more prominent a curious phenomenon happened: even Quaker staff and uber-insiders seemed to be relating to this conversation and wanted a place to complain and dream about Quakerism. My personal reputation has certainly gone up because of this site, directly and indirectly because of the blog. This brings with it the snares of popular praise (itself a well-worn theme in Quaker journals) but it also made it more likely I would be considered for my new outreach job. It’s funny how life works.
Okay, that’s enough for a post. I’ll have to keep outreach till next time. But bear with me: it’s about form too and how form contributes to ministry.

PS: Talking of two years of Quaker blogging… My “Nonviolence.org turns ten years old this Thursday!! I thought about making a big deal about it but alas there’s so little time.

In the last fifty years it’s become difficult to separate Quaker testimonies from questions of membership. Both were dramatically reinvented by a newly-minted class of liberal Friends in the early part of the twentieth century and then codified by Howard Brinton’s landmark Friends for 300 Years, published in the early 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brinton comes right out and says that the test for membership shouldn’t involve issues of faith or of practice but should be based on whether one feels comfortable with the other members of the Meeting. This conception of membership has gradually become dominant among liberal Friends in the half century since this book was published. The trouble with it is twofold. The first is that “comfort” is not necessarily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first generation of Friends had used Brinton’s model there would be no Religious Society of Friends to talk about (we’d be lost in the historical footnotes with the Muggletonians, Grindletonians and the like). One of the classic tests for discernment is whether an proposed action is contrary to self-will. Comfort is not our Society’s calling.

The second problem is that comfortability comes from fitting in with a certain kind of style, class, color and attitude. It’s fine to want comfort in our Meetings but when we make it the primary test for membership, it becomes a cloak for ethnic and cultural bigotries that keep us from reaching out. If you have advanced education, mild manners and liberal politics, you’ll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meetings. If you’re too loud or too ethnic or speak with a working class accent you’ll likely feel out of place. Samuel Caldwell gave a great talk about the difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith and I’ve proposed a tongue-in-cheek testimony against community as way of opening up discussion.

The Feel-Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also reinvented the Testimonies. They had been specific and often proscriptive: against gambling, against participation in war. But the new testimonies became vague feel-good character traits–the now-famous SPICE testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Who isn’t in favor of all those values? A president taking us to war will tell us it’s the right thing to do (integrity) to contruct lasting peace (peace) so we can bring freedom to an oppressed country (equality) and create a stronger sense of national pride (community) here at home.

We modern Friends (liberal ones at least) were really transformed by the redefintions of membership and the testimonies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our current testimonies are the ancient ones. I think an awareness of how Friends handled these issues in the 300 years before Brinton would help us navigate a way out of the “ethical society” we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the radical transformation of the testimonies. The main accomplishment of East Coast Quakerism in the mid-twentieth century was the reuniting of many of the yearly meetings that had been torn apart by schisms starting in 1827. By the end of that century Friends were divided across a half dozen major theological strains manifested in a patchwork of institutional divisions. One way out of this morass was to present the testimonies as our core unifying priciples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Christians (even as post-Christians), our core commandment is simple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37–40 and Mark 12:30–31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker testimonies also hang on these commandments: they are our collective memory. While they are in contant flux, they refer back to 350 years of experience. These are the truths we can testify to as a people, ways of living that we have learned from our direct experience of the Holy Spirit. They are intricately tied up with our faith and with how we see ourselves following through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I’m sure that Howard Brinton didn’t intend to separate the testimonies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a modern liberal audience. By popularizing them he made them so accessible that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin testimonies of plainness and simplicity. First the ancient testimony of plainness. Here’s the description from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world’s corrupt language, manners, vain and needless things and fashions, in apparel, buildings, and furniture of houses, some of which are immodest, indecent, and unbecoming. And that they avoid immoderation in the use of lawful things, which though innocent in themselves, may thereby become hurtful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are calculated more to please a vain and wanton mind, than for real usefulness; and let tradesmen and others, members of our religious society, be admonished, that they be not accessary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, minding the grace of God which brings salvation, and teaches to deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his blessing, and be instrumental in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there’s nothing in there about the length of one’s hem. The key phrase for me is the warning about doing things “calculated to please a vain and wanton mind.” Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neighbors; immoderation makes it hard to hear God’s still small voice; self-sacrifice is necessary to be an instrument of God’s love. This testimony is all about our relationships with God and with each other.

Most modern Friends have dispensed with “plainness” and recast the testimony as “simplicity.” Ask most Friends about this testimony and they’ll start telling you about their cluttered desks and their annoyance with cellphones. Ask for a religious education program on simplicity and you’ll almost certainly be assigned a book from the modern voluntary simplicity movement, one of those self-help manuals that promise inner peace if you plant a garden or buy a fuel-efficient car, with “God” absent from the index. While it’s true that most Americans (and Friends) would have more time for spiritual refreshment if they uncluttered their lives, the secular notions of simplicity do not emanate out of a concern for “gospel order” or for a “right ordering” of our lives with God. Voluntary simplicity is great: I’ve published books on it and I live car-free, use cloth diapers, etc. But plainness is something different and it’s that difference that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called “SPICE” testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) and you’ll find the modern notions are secularlized over-simplications of the Quaker understandings. In our quest for unity, we’ve over-stated their importance.

Earlier I mentioned that many of the earlier testimonies were proscriptive–they said certain actions were not in accord with our principles. Take a big one: after many years of difficult ministering and soul searching, Friends were able to say that slavery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep communion with God; this is different than saying we believe in equality. Similarly, saying we’re against all outward war is different than saying we’re in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of casting everything in postitive terms, sometimes we need to come out and say a particular practice is just plain wrong, that it interferes with and goes against our relationship with God and with our neighbors.

I’ll leave it up to you to start chewing over what specific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our ministers and meetings found that a particular practice was against our testimonies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of ministering with them and laboring with them. It would be hard. Feelings would be hurt. People would go away angry.

After a half-century of liberal individualism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is something to Quakerism, that it does have norms and boundaries. We would need all the love, charity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, especially because it’s work with members of our community, people we love and honor. We would have to follow John Woolman’s example: our first audience would not be Washington policymakers , but instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our values in secular terms. An ability to talk about pacifism with our non-Quaker neighbors in a smart, informed way is essential (thus my Nonviolence.org ministry [since laid down], currently receiving two millions visitors a year). When we affirm community and equality we are witnessing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we’ve contributed to the national and international discussions on these topics.

But for all of their contemporary centrality to Quakerism, the testimonies are only second-hand outward forms. They are not to be worshiped in and of themselves. Modern Friends come dangerously close to lifting up the peace testimony as a false idol–the principle we worship over everything else. When we get so good at arguing the practicality of pacifism, we forget that our testimony is first and foremost our proclamation that we live in the power that takes away occassion for war. When high school math teachers start arguing over arcane points of nuclear policy, playing armchair diplomat with yearly meeting press releases to the U.S. State Department, we loose credibility and become something of a joke. But when we minister with the Power that transcends wars and earthly kingdoms, the Good News we speak has an authority that can thunder over petty governments with it’s command to quake before God.

When we remember the spiritual source of our faith, our understandings of the testimonies deepen immeasurably. When we let our actions flow from uncomplicated faith we gain a power and endurance that strengthens our witness. When we speak of our experience of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the authority as others recognize the echo of that “still small voice” speaking to their hearts. Our love and our witness are simple and universal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Hallelujah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

• James Healton has a great piece on the testimonies over on Quakerinfo.com. The One Testimony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ’s role in the testimonies. Be sure to check out Quakerinfo’s list of testimony resources.

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.”