My speculations, therefore, center around around what a Quaker Village might look like, understanding “village” to mean “small community” (hundreds or thousands, but not millions). How do these people live? How do they put their Christian values into practice?

Let’s say it’s a hundred years from now, when all of us are safely dead. Or maybe we’d like to accelerate the timeline?

For me, a hallmark of Quakerism is its egalitarianism and commitment to rotating roles. That’s not a feature of every branch I realize, and those who decry “outward forms” may consider Oversight, Property Management, Children’s Program etc., to be the opposite of “primitive” by definition. Perhaps such infrastructure seems too complicated, too much like everyday life. I realize we use our words differently.

I like the qualification to imagine this 100 years from now. It gives us a bit of time to sort out all of the inconvenient roadblocks of current apathy and resistance to change. One of the techniques Amazon is said to use is to start any new project ideas with a press release as a way to make sure the final product is focused on actual customer needs. Kirby’s piece reminds me of this. What would it look like to have a strong vision of the Quaker communities we’d like to live in someday?
http://www.quakerquaker.org/forum/topics/what-is-primitive-christianity

I pay a lot of attention to pronoun use. People often say “our nuclear weapons” and/or “what we did in Vietnam”. I don’t have any nuclear weapons, nor do my friends.

Kirby’s lost reminds of the classic “What do you mean we, white man” Lone Ranger / Tonto joke.

Part of the deal of the modern nation state and its trappings of democracy is that we all own it together. The peasantry could be lacksidaisical when they were jiat doing the bidding of whichever duke/warlord/king controlled the plot of land in which their ancestral village now sat. But now we fight national wars because the state is us. It’s mostly a load of huey but it disarms what should be the natural Christian (and plain human) distaste for jingoistic tribalism.

http://www.quakerquaker.org/m/discussion?id=2360685%3ATopic%3A159446