Friends United Meeting (FUM) is the largest Quaker membership organization in the world. Simplifying quite a bit, it grew out of the Gurneyites, the more churchy branch of Quakers who often adopted ministry and international missions. Those missions are the reason why there are so many Quakers in places like East Africa and Bolivia. Most of the worldwide body of Friends are part of that movement and many are formal members of FUM.

Theologically, today’s FUM is a “big tent” association that tries to hold together a wildly divergent set of beliefs and cultural norms, with gender and sexuality being the most common lightning point. There’s always corners of FUM threatening to leave or threatening to withhold membership dues. There was serious talk in the 1990s of a “realignment” that would split up FUM along evangelical and universalist lines but somehow that’s never quite happened and the tent has held. To its credit the big tent approach means that FUM has been a key facilitator of cross-branch dialogue among North American Friends.

The financial problem is pretty straightforward, a story as old as nonprofits:

Our audits have not been done in a timely fashion, internal financial controls have been missing, and we did not ensure that good accounting practices were being followed. We have not been careful enough in reviewing financial information given to us or in developing the ability of new board members to understand FUM’s complex financial structure.

I’m genuinely surprised that FUM leadership was this asleep at the wheel but I sympathize. A nonprofit I worked for in the 1990s went through a similar crisis when a few years of backlogged audits came back and showed us we were in far worse shape than we had imagined. The other major U.S. Quaker association, Friends General Conference, went though something similar in the 1980s; the story I’ve heard is that the lawyers told them they were broke to go bankrupt and they figured their way out of the financial hold.

Many nonprofits go through boom and bust cycles but this sounds more than just that. I do hope Friends United Meeting can pull through.

Letter Regarding FUM Finances

Dear Friends, we will put the bad news first: at our current income and expenditure rate, FUM will…

mailchi.mp

He’s very good at observing and understanding and explaining what he’s seen. There’s no substantive inaccuracies here. He had a deeply moving experience that he says he won’t forget.

That said, he felt disappointed that the meeting he visited wasn’t more distinctly Quaker, calling it a “bait and switch almost.” The only ministry was political and while he does a good job defending the speaker’s compassion he says that it felt “solemn but not sacred” to him, which I think is a fascinating way of putting it:

I’m really interested in the handful of people who feel like they’ve touched God. I don’t, but It’s still a profound thing to talk to somebody who’s don’t that.

He grew up Pentecostal and knew that there was a lot of crossover with early Friends. That’s what he was looking for. I think his observations on this was probably pretty fair for most Liberal Friends meetings today. I think there are other seekers like him wanting to experience something more distinctively and religiously Quaker. Overall, an awesome video, very recommended.

I’ve written before¹ that I’m not a fan of the “when to speak in meeting” flowcharts Friends sometimes post in the meetinghouse to discourage vocal ministry. One is expected to test an incoming message against half a dozen queries and only speak if they can clear them all in the space of an hour. A lot of newcomers see these and decide to just keep quiet.

Christine Hartmann was just one of these new attenders. She writes “after studying all this, I decided to hold off speaking in meeting, if at all possible, for fear of getting it wrong.” She was so careful and so scrupulous that her silence almost cost her her life. I’m not kidding. Literally. Read the article. Wild, wild.

(Yes, there are disruptive newcomers who give inappropriate ministry in Quaker worship. In my experience they’re rarely the ones sitting down and studying flowcharts. The visitors these charts deter are the careful and thoughtful ones who are already tying themselves in knots wondering whether they should speak. These are the folks you want to encourage.)

Health and the Quaker Community — A Life-Changing Lesson from Silence

A medical emergency during Quaker worship reshapes one Friend’s view of ministry, community, and the sacred responsibility of…

Friends Journal

I have come to believe that I live my life not in a straight line from birth to death but in a series of small and large circles: from birth to learning; from growth to forgetting; from remembering to prideful living; from brokenness to humility; from deep love and connection to separateness; from despair to faithfulness.

https://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2023/02/re-entry-truth-and-being-hounded.html

I too have felt circles coming back around. Liz attended last weekend’s workshop, the first multi-day retreat I’ve led since… check notes… 2014, when R. Scot Miller got me to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for Green Pastures Quarterly Meeting. Last year I finally stopped my meeting wandering and have settled down at Cropwell Meeting, where I get to be involved in all the silly, lightweight dramas that occur whenever a group of people come together.

There, I’ve felt my spoken ministry return. I was shocked a few months ago when I stood and was given words that started with reflecting of the sounds of the leaves blowing against the outside walls, referenced an attender who had just been sweeping them, circled to the history of the people who have gathered within those walls and maintained the building for worship, moved sideways into a gentle lesson on ministry in the quietist tradition, pulled it back to Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, and then tied it up in a bow with prayers of thanks to our faithful ancestors and to those today who continue to sweep away the ever-returned leaves. Readers, let me assure you I don’t think I’ve ever given such coherent, balanced ministry and I’m not sure where it came from. But faithfulness is key.

I’ve also felt the nudge to bring back some identifiable plain dress. For years I’ve tended toward what I used to call “Sears plain“² and during the work-from-home life I’m sometimes lucky if I get through the day without still wearing my pajamas. Over the last few weeks I’ve been adding suspenders to my regular clothes. Of course I’ve gone through all the old familiar self-questioning: Am I doing this to stand out? Am I trying to puff myself up? Is this what faithfulness leads me? But these questions are part of the process and a tug toward plainness often precedes outward ministry; in his study Quaker Journals, Howard Brinton noted that future ministers often recorded inward nudges in their teen years and became plainer in dress to the ridicule of their peers. I’m not a teen and I doubt anyone is going to make fun of me (at least to my face) but I do feel a certain seriousness of intent come over me when I overcome my natural desire for social anonymity and put the suspenders on.

The “awfulness” of becoming a minister lay partly in the high expectations which the Friends placed on their ministers, for they expected everything and nothing all at the same time. Ministers were to do everything which the Light, the Master, the Guide, the Heavenly Father (to use some of the various names) required of them; they were supposed to follow every intimation and speak every word given them in the light. Thus mothers or fathers might have to leave family, work, and friends for years while they traveled, not knowing when the Spirit would allow them to return. On the other hand nothing was expected of them if they felt no immediate leading, not, of course, could they ever prepare for any sermon. Thus each new meeting, each new family visit was a fresh test of faith in which one might be called to rise without knowing what was to be said, or what difficult or perplexing words might come forth; even worse, a well-known minister might be required to remain silent throughout a meeting called just for him…

Thus, as their journals make very clear, they experienced the body of Christ not as a metaphor but as a living climate or organism from which — as well as in which — they functioned. They saw themselves not as separate leaders but as extensions of the one Life and Power. They dwelt together with the other members in the same pool of the divine presence which blended all souls together in a wonderful unity. Although Quaker ministers were expected to be very good examples of the Quaker way of life, they were not required to be leaders all the time; they could sink back into the nurture and unity of the body until such times as they were clearly called to stand forth for the Lord. They knew that if they were “faithful,” he would give them both words and power, or the “matter and the “life.” Yet even so, each new meeting was a renewed test of faith; as Hannah Stratton (1825–1903) of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative) put it near the end of her life, “it don’t get easy.”

Ever since I found Friends at age 20, I’ve been drawn to this rather serious vision of ministry, with its strict demand for a complete trust in the Holy Spirit’s prompting in the moment. It’s not easy to square with modern Quaker practices. I’m due to lead 5.5 hours of a workshop next week; the topic and times are set. But maybe this dilemma is not so very new. Traveling ministers in the quietist “middle period” that Tabor describes had itineraries and meetings called for them (as for the minister of his story that was led to stay silent for a called worship).

How do you prepare when you shouldn’t prepare? Perhaps by spending part of a Saturday afternoon reading an old Bill Tabor pamphlet that’s not on a topic you’re expected to lead on the following week.

I’m reading Tabor’s essay in Quaker Religious Thought number 50, autumn 1980.

Evan posts to a passage on it from nineteenth-century Quaker chronicler Thomas Clarkson:

The Quakers, on the other hand, neither prepare their discourses, nor vary their voices purposely according to the rules of art. The tone which comes out, and which appears disagreeable to those who are not used to it, is nevertheless not unnatural. It is rather the mode of speaking which nature imposes in any violent exertion of the voice, to save the lungs. Hence persons who have their wares to cry, and this almost every other minute in the streets, are obliged to adopt a tone. Hence persons, with disordered lungs, can sing words with more ease to themselves than they can utter th6m with a similar pitch of the voice. Hence Quaker-women, when they preach, have generally more of this tone than the Quaker-men, for the lungs of the female are generally weaker than those of the other
sex.

I’ve always wondered if later opposition to sing song might have been partially motivated by the fact that it was favored by women or sounded a bit too Catholic for Anglicans like Clarkson or Quakers leaning that direction.

There’s a great 2011 post from the now-dormant Quaker Historical Lexicon blog by Illinois Friend Peter Lasersohn. The comments are also great.

I think about the people I’ve cared about who have needed to talk to themselves and make noises. Who need to pace and say things we don’t understand. Spirit is moving through them, in this incarnational way. Reminding them they still have bodies that can make noises, that they still can breath words into being.

http://www.meetinghouse.xyz/everything/2018/12/31/where-do-we-hear-gods-voice

Most folks can guess what it means to travel in the ministry. You visit different churches and meetings and share gifts of ministry with the community there. “In the old style” is a reference to how many early Friends would travel, by sensing a call to go and worship with Friends in other parts of the country and world, with no clear outcome or goal, and only trusting that by showing up and worshiping with Friends “something divinely good would happen.”

http://gatheringinlight.com/2018/11/21/on-traveling-in-the-ministry/