What makes a Quaker meeting house?

December 5, 2003

12/05/200305/31/2016 · Martin Kelley

An Atlantic County Methodist Episcopal Meetinghouse. Picture from NJChurschape

One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com—that’s New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It’s a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there’s a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month’s feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.

We modern-day Friends tend to think of the term meetinghouse as uniquely ours, but go back in history and you’ll find just about everyone using the term to describe the non-showy buildings they erected for religious services and town life. Drive around South Jersey and you’ll see old Methodist churches that started out life as meetinghouses and look surprisingly Quaker. Greenagel looks at the style and then asks:

At what point does a structure cease being a meetinghouse and become a church?.. With the rising affluence and increased mobility of the population came a demand for more specialized places to meet, as well as more of the basic comforts and style which heretofore were dismissed as too worldly, so many churches added smaller lecture rooms, classrooms for Sunday school, and other assembly rooms distinct from the main auditorium.

By this measure, how many of our beloved East Coast Quaker meetinghouses should really just be called “churches?” In the nineteenth century the Protestant “Sunday School Movement” was picked up by Gurneyite and Progressive Hicksite Friends, with the classes simply renamed “First Day School” in deference to Quaker sensibilities (I’ve always wondered if the name switch actually fooled anyone, but that’s another story). By the twentieth century, the new modern liberal Friends had picked up the lecture format, which like the First Day School movement had been adopted from educational models via other religious groups. Many of our larger monthly meetings have fellowship halls, classrooms, kitchens, etc. These buildings have become specialized religious worship buildings and many of them sit empty for most of the week. But not all.

Nowadays many Quaker meetings with buildings open them mid-week for use by community groups. Quaker meetinghouses host peace groups, battered women hotlines, yoga classes, religious congregations in need of a temporary home and similar causes. There’s often an element of good works in the group’s charter.

Perhaps this willingness to open our buildings up earns us the right to continue using the meetinghouse name. If so, we should be careful to resist the pressure of the insurance industry to close ourselves up in the name of liability. One uniqueness to our worship spaces is that they are not consecrated and there should be no special rules for their use. They are oversized barns and we should cherish that. We should remember not to get fetishistic about their history and we shouldn’t tie up our business meetings in endless discussions over the color of the new seat cushions. When we turn our buildings over for others’ use, we shouldn’t worry overly much if a chair or clock gets damanged or stolen. Friends know that our religion is not our buildings and that the measure of our spirit is simply how far we’ll follow God, together as a people.

Are Catholics More Quaker?

November 16, 2003

11/16/200303/16/2015 · Martin Kelley

I guess folks might wonder why the son of the Quaker Ranter is getting baptized in a Roman Catholic church…

[box]An updated note before I start: I don’t want this to be seen as a critique or put-down of any particular individuals but to point out what seems to me to be a pretty obvious larger dynamic within Quakerism: our religious education programs have not been doing a very good job at transmitting our faith to our young people. One measure of such programs is how many children we retain as actively-participating adults; by such measures I think we can say Quakers are failing.

And, a few perhaps obvious disclaimers: 1) there are deeply faithful people who grew up in Young Friends programs; 2) there are religious ed instructors who are worried about the message we’re giving our young people and fret as I do; 3) there are a lot of members of the RSoF who just don’t think teaching distinctly Quaker faithfulness is important and wouldn’t agree that there’s a problem.

I don’t think it’s useful to read this without also looking to my early article, The Lost Quaker Generation, which mourns the friends I’ve seen drop out of Quakerism (many of them “birthright,” i.e., born into Quaker families), and We’re all Ranters Now, which argues that our society of seekers needs to become a society of finders if we are to be able to articulate a faith to transmit.
[/box]

On June 30, 2000, Julie and I met at a national gathering of Quakers. Fourteen months later we were married at the Woodstown Friends Meetinghouse under the care of the Atlantic City Area Friends Meeting. Roughly fourteen months later, when the sparkles in our eyes were meeting with an approving nod from God and our baby was conceived, I was co-clerk of Atlantic City Area Meeting and Julie was clerk of its Outreach Committee. Ten months later, our infant son Theo was baptized at Mater Ecclesiae Roman Catholic Church in Berlin, N.J. It’s Julie’s new church; I myself remain Quaker, but without a Meeting I can quite call home. What happened?

I don’t want to try to speak for Julie and why she left Friends to return to the faith she was brought up in. But I do have to testify that the reverence, spirit and authenticity of the worship at Mater Ecclesiae is deeper than that in most Friends Meetinghouses. It’s a church with a lot of members who seem to believe in the real presence of Christ. A disclaimer that Mater Ecclesiae is unusual, one of the few churches in the country that uses the traditional Tridentine Mass or Roman Rite, and that it attracts ardent followers who have self-selected themselves, in that they’re not going to their local parish church. I don’t think it’s the Catholicism alone that draws Julie – I think the purposefulness of the worshipers is a large piece. Despite all the distractions (chants, Latin, rote confessions of faith: I’m speaking as a Friend), the worship there is unusually gathered. But more: there’s a groundedness to the faith. In a one-on-one conversation the priest explained to me the ways he thought Quakerism was wrong. I wasn’t offended – quite the contrary, I loved it! It was so refreshing to meet someone who believed what he believed, (Hey, if I didn’t believe in the degeneration of the Roman Catholic Church or the empty professions of hireling priests, I might join him. I also feel comfortable predicting that he would welcome my jousting here.)

What I can talk about is my misgivings about the prospect of raising up Theo as a Quaker in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The weakest element of the Religious Society of Friends is its children’s religious education. This is something I’ve seen manifested in two different kinds of ways: content and results.

Quakers have remarkably few expectations of their children. It’s considered remarkable if older children spend a whole ten minutes in Meeting for Worship (I’ve heard adult birthright Friends boast that they’ve never sat through a whole hour of Quaker worship). Quakers are obsessed about listening to what children have to say, and so never share with them what they believe. I’ve known adults birthright Friends who have never had conversations with their parents about the basis of their faith.

Quaker religious education programs often forgo teaching traditional Quaker faith and practice for more faddish beliefs. The basement walls of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting youth center is painted over with dancing gods, while of the big events of the Young Friends’ annual calendar is a “Quaker sweat lodge”. A culture of touch and physicality (“cuddle puddles”, backrubs) is thought charming and immodest dress is considered a sign of rebellious individuality. Quaker schools publish brochures saying Meeting for Worship is all about “thinking, with God given little notice.” When Quakers want to have “intergenerational” worship, they feel they have to program it with some sort of attention-keeping playtime activity (Mater Ecclesiae echoes Quaker tradition here: “intergenerational” means children sitting through and participating in Mass with the adults).

Too many of the people my age and Julie’s who were brought up at Friends are ignorant of basic Quaker beliefs and are unaware of Quaker traditions (FUM, EFI, Conservatives) outside the easy-going East Coast liberalism they were raised in. For them being a Friend is acting a certain way, believing a certain brand of political philosophy and being part of a certain social group. Too many Young Adult Friends I’ve known over the years are cliquish, irreligious, and have more than their share of issues around intimacy and sexuality.

Don’t get me wrong: these kids are often really good people, children to be proud of, doing great things in the world. Many of them are open-hearted, spiritually-sensitive, and in deeply grounded relationships. But only a very few are practicing Quakers. And when I look at the religious education they get, I can’t say I’m surprised. If I were to raise Theo as a Quaker, I would have to “home school” him away from most of the religious education programs offered locally. When all the kids scramble out of worship after ten minutes I’d have to say “no” and tell him to keep sitting – how weird would that be?

Theo has a better chance of sharing the traditional Quaker values of the presence of Christ, of Holy Obedience, and of bearing the cross by being raised as a Catholic in a traditionalist church. It’s more likely he’ll turn out Quaker if he’s baptised at Mater Ecclesiae. Julie and I will be teaching him reverence by example. I’ll share my Quaker faith with him. I’m sure he’ll participate in Quaker events, but consciously, selectively, guardedly (in the old Quaker sense).

If Friends believe they have a faith worth holdling, they should also believe they have a faith worth passing on. Do we?

The Lost Quaker Generation

September 30, 2003

09/30/200310/17/2017 · Martin Kelley

The other day I had lunch with an old friend of mine, a thirty-something Quaker very involved in nation-wide pacifist organizing. I had lost touch with him after he entered a federal jail for participating in a Plowshares action but he’s been out for a few years and is now living in Philly.

We talked about a lot of stuff over lunch, some of it just movement gossip. But we also talked about spirituality. He has left the Society of Friends and has become re-involved in his parents’ religious traditions. It didn’t sound like this decision had to do with any new religious revelation that involved a shift of theology. He simply became frustrated at the lack of Quaker seriousness.

It’s a different kind of frustration than the one I feel but I wonder if it’s not all connected. He was drawn to Friends because of their mysticism and their passion for nonviolent social change. It was this combination that has helped power his social action witness over the years. It would seem like his serious, faithful work would be just what Friends would like to see in their thirty-something members but alas, it’s not so. He didn’t feel supported in his Plowshares action by his Meeting.

He concluded that the Friends in his Meeting didn’t think the Peace Testimony could actually inspire us to be so bold. He said two of his Quaker heroes were John Woolman and Mary Dyer but realized that the passion of witness that drove them wasn’t appreciated by today’s peace and social concerns committees. The radical mysticism that is supposed to drive Friends’ practice and actions have been replaced by a blandness that felt threatened by someone who could choose to spend years in jail for his witness.

I can relate to his disappointment. I worry about what kinds of actions are being done in the name of the Peace Testimony, which has lost most of its historic meaning and power among contemporary Friends. It’s invoked most often now by secularized, safe committees that use a rationalist approach to their decision-making, meant to appeal to others (including non-Friends) based solely on the merits of the arguments. NPR activism, you might say. Religion isn’t brought up, except in the rather weak formulations that Friends are “a community of faith” or believe there is “that of God in everyone” (whatever these phrases mean). That we are led to act based on instructions from the Holy Spirit directly is too off the deep end for many Friends, yet the peace testimony is fundamentally a testimony to our faith in God’s power over humanity, our surrender to the will of Christ entering our hearts with instructions which demand our obedience.

But back to my friend, the ex-Friend. I feel like he’s just another eroded-away grain of sand in the delta of Quaker decline. He’s yet another Friend that Quakerism can’t afford to loose, but which Quakerism has lost. No one’s mourning the fact that he’s lost, no one has barely noticed. Knowing Friends, the few that have noticed have probably not spent any time reaching out to him to ask why or see if things could change and they probably defend their inaction with self-congratulatory pap about how Friends don’t proselytize and look how liberal we are that we say nothing when Friends leave.

God!, this is terrible. I know of DOZENS of friends in my generation who have drifted away from or decisively left the Society of Friends because it wasn’t fulfilling its promise or its hype. No one in leadership positions in Quakerism is talking about this lost generation. I know of very few thirty-something Friends who are involved nowadays and very very few of them are the kind of passionate, mystical, obedient-to-the-Spirit servants that Quakerism needs to bring some life back into it. A whole generation is lost – my fellow thirty-somethings – and now I see the passionate twenty-somethings I know starting to leave. Yet this exodus is one-by-one and goes largely unremarked and unnoticed (but then I’ve already posted about this: It will be in decline our entire lives).

Update 10/2005

I feel like I should add an addendum to all this. As I’ve spoken with more Friends of all generations, I’ve noticed that the attention to younger Friends is cyclical. There’s a thirty-year cycle of snubbing younger Friends (by which I mean Friends under 40). Back in the 1970s, all twenty-year-old with a pulse could get recognition and support from Quaker meetings; I know a lot of Friends of that generation who were given tremendous opportunities despite little experience. A decade later the doors had started to close but a hard-working faithful Friend in their early twenties could still be recognized. By the time my generation came along, you could be a whirlwind of great ideas and energy and still be shut out of all opportunities to serve the Religious Society of Friends.

The good news is that I think things are starting to change. There’s still a long way to go but a thaw is upon us. In some ways this is inevitable: much of the current leadership of Quaker institutions is retiring. Even more, I think they’re starting to realize it. There are problems, most notably tokenism — almost all of the younger Friends being lifted up now are the children of prominent “committee Friends.” The biggest problem is that a few dozen years of lax religious education and “roll your own Quakerism” means that many of the members of the younger generation can’t even be considered spiritual Quakers. Our meetinghouses are seen as a place to meet other cool, progressive young hipsters, while spirituality is sought from other sources. We’re going to be spending decades untangling all this and we’re not going to have the seasoned Friends of my generation to help bridge the gaps.

Related Reading

After my friend Chris posted below I wrote a follow-up essay, Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quakers Style.
Many older Friends hope that a resurgence of the peace movement might come along and bring younger Friends in. In Peace and Twenty-Somethings I look at the generational strains in the peace movement.
Beckey Phipps conducted a series of interviews that touched on many of these issues and published it in FGConnections. FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century asks many of the right questions. My favorite line: “It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs – they’ve disappeared.”

Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal

September 6, 2003

09/06/200309/05/2023 · Martin Kelley

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 Evangelicals 1950 – 1975	Pragmatic Evangelicals 1975 – 2000	Younger Evangelicals 2000-
Theological Commitment	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

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.”

It will be there in decline our entire lives

August 1, 2003

08/01/200310/17/2017 · Martin Kelley

A lot of the generational problems I see affecting Quakerism are not unique to us. The values of the Sixties generation have become the the new oppressive orthodoxy. In Quakerism, our “freedom from” (the past, Christianity, the testimonies understood as the reflections of faith) has become nearly complete, which means it’s become boring, and stifling. There’s a refusal to take responsibility for matters of faith and so all truth is judged by how it affects one’s own individual spirituality (we’re all Ranters now, hence my website’s name). Where Friends once talked about the death of the rebellious self-will and the bearing the cross, we now endlessly share self-absorbed stories of our “spiritual journeys” (does it really matter, hasn’t Christ gotten us all here now and isn’t that the point?), while we toss out pseudo-religious feel-good buzzwords like “nurture” and “community” like they’re party favors.

I often feel like I’m talking to a brick wall when I talk about these issues (can’t we just all be nurturing without being told to, simply because it’s the right way to be?). Fortunately, there are some fascinating sites from thirty-somethings also seeing through the generational crisis affect Christians. Right now I’m reading Pastoral Softness, a post from Jordan Cooper, a pastor in a community church in Saskatchewan, and this paragraph just hits me so hard:

The modern church is not going to listen to us, it won’t affirm us, or give us any of its resources there is no point anymore in letting it get to us. It will be there in decline our entire lives and will probably go down fighting and wasting a lot of lives and money but to let that define us spiritually will be an even bigger loss. We can’t blame it for being what it is and if we are going to have a long term future in serving God, we need to stop looking at our environment and instead in our hearts.

Serious stuff, indeed, and I suspect some Friends would elder me for even repeating it. But its really the same message that Christ gave a young man 350 years ago:

When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory. (Journal of George Fox)

Everyone knows the first part but it’s the last sentence that’s been speaking to me for at least the last year. Does Christ make the insitutions fail us just so He can direct our gaze to the true Source? And isn’t this what Quaker simplicity is all about: keeping our minds as undistracted as possible so we can see the real deal?

Cooper did an interview with Robert Webber, an author I know nothing about but who’s apparently written a few books dealing with the new generation of Evangelicals. I sometimes stumble across people and wonder if there’s not some kindred culture out there that’s just out of reach because it’s supposedly on some other side of an theological rift. Anyway, Webber says:

The pragmatic churches have become institutionalized — with some exceptions. They responded to the sixties and seventies, created a culture-driven church and don’t get that the world has changed again. Pragmatics, being fixed, have little room for those who are shaped by the postmodern revolution.

A lot of these evangelicals are reaching for something that looks very much like early Quakerism (which self-consciously reached toward early Christianity). I’d like to think that Friends have something to offer these seekers and that there could be a dynamic re-emergence of Quakerism. But to be honest, most Quakers I know don’t have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism, with different flavored toppings (differences of social stands, e.g., pacifism, attitudes towards gays). I know John Punshon’s been talking a lot about Quakers’ possible intersection with a larger renewed evangelism but I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read Reasons for Hopeyet. I’ll do that soon.

Update:
Comparison chart of traditional, pragmatic, and younger evangelicals from Robert Webber by way of Jordan Cooper. Very interesting.

More Online Reading:
Leading Dying Churches
Jordan Cooper
The Ooze
“Indieallies” Meetup to connect with local readers of these sites

Friends Media Project

July 28, 2003

07/28/200302/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

Continue reading →

Shameless fundraising plug

July 2, 2003

07/02/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

I’ve run up a lot of Nonviolence.Org expenses over Iraq War II – the flood of visitors have eaten up the bandwidth. Help keep the site going by buying a fundraising t‑shirt, only $22 while supplies last!

Quaker Ranter

A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley

Tag Archives ⇒ lot

What makes a Quaker meeting house?

December 5, 2003

Related Reading:

Are Catholics More Quaker?

November 16, 2003

Related Reading

Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal

September 6, 2003

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends

A Desire to Grow

A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment

A renewal of discipline and oversight

A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

Can we do it?

Theological
Commitment

See also:

Elsewhere:

It will be there in decline our entire lives

August 1, 2003

Friends Media Project

July 28, 2003

Shameless fundraising plug

July 2, 2003

Related Reading:

Related Reading

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends

A Desire to Grow

A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment

A renewal of discipline and oversight

A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

Can we do it?

Theological Commitment

See also:

Elsewhere:

Theological
Commitment