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.
In the NYTimes, a fascinating piece on filter bubbles and the ability of Facebook “superposters” to dominate feeds, distort reality, and promote paranoia and violence.
Superposters tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist. When more casual users open Facebook, often what they see is a world shaped by superposters like Mr. Wasserman. Their exaggerated worldviews play well on the algorithm, allowing them to collectively — and often unknowingly — dominate newsfeeds. “That’s something special about Facebook,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up getting a lot of time on the feed, you are influential. It’s a difference with real life.”
A great many general-interest Facebook groups that I see are dominated by trollish people whose visibility relies on how provocative they can get without being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Facebook prioritizes engagement and nothing seems to get our fingers madly tapping more than provocation by someone half-informed.
Formal membership in a Quaker meeting is a considered process; for many Quaker groups, public ministry is also a deliberated process, with clearness committees, anchor committees, etc. On Facebook, membership consists of clicking a like button; public ministry, aka visibility, is a matter of having a lot of time to post comments. Public groups with minimal moderation which run on Facebook’s engagement-inducing algorithms are the public face of Friends these days, far more visible than any publication or recognized Quaker body’s Facebook presence. I written before of my long-term worry that with the rise of social media gatekeeping sites, we’re not the ones writing our story anymore.
I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some useful ways of thinking about these phenomena.
A nice piece on Philadelphia Friend O:
For O., a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, carrying this query for pastoral ministry awakens joy in her heart. It raises important questions: Are we transformed by the power of love, during our biological conception as human beings? Might our lives be a measureless love story about creation?
It’s hard to capture O’s personality in ASCII characters. She’s been in a few QuakerSpeak videos.
Mackenzie Morgan reminds us that some kinds of hospitality begin in our church bathrooms:
Now imagine a parent with a screaming baby suddenly realizing they forgot the diaper bag at home. Imagine it’s their first time at your meeting. Many people are self-conscious about their baby crying, especially with unprogrammed worship.
This week’s featured article over at Friends Journal is Peterson Toscano’s “A Reluctant Minister.”
Satire and irony, especially when it is subtle, done in character, or relies on tone can be misunderstood when taken literally. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is never fun explaining a joke to a Friend, but even that interaction is part of the work of presenting performance art for Quakers. We are committed to fairness and love. Comedy can be used to hurt others or to make light of serious issues. Unpacking a joke can lead to rich discussion. I seek to use comedy to shed light on important issues. Still, some Friends prefer the straightforward message over the comic performance.
I really appreciate the care and honesty that Peterson has put into defining his work. It would be so easy for him to label his performance art as ministry and wear it as a cloak of respectability. Much of his work does indeed act as ministry and he uses a clearness committee as a Quaker discernment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artistic confusion and so describes himself as a “theatrical performance activist.”
When the pendulum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of ministry within Liberal Quakerism some years back, many forms of public work started being labeled ministry. It might be a sign of the incompleteness of our follow-through that few of the people coming forward with ministries felt comfortable calling themselves ministers. I like the idea of keeping middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to artificially kludge into classic Quaker models.
Chalk this one up as another whisper-down-the-lane. As readers will probably remember, a few weeks ago, non-Friend Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the possibility of British Friends dropping God from their Faith and Practice. There were a lot of exaggerations in it; the yearly meeting session was mostly deciding whether it it felt led to start the long process of revising the document of Friends’ belief and practice. Many yearly meetings do this every generation or so. AFAIK, there was no substantive discussion on what the revisions might bring. At the time, I speculated that “Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends.”
Now we have another headline chaser. The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary more or less reads Jenkins’s piece aloud on his radio show (hat-tip havedanson on the Quakers subreddit). He lightly skips over the fact that Jenkins isn’t Quaker and admits to limited experience of Quaker worship. The SBTS president, Albert Mohler, repeatedly calls the Guardian article a “news report” even though it is clearly labeled as an opinion piece. If any publicity is good publicity then it’s good that non-Friends like Jenkins and now Mohler are talking about the decision-making process of a Quaker yearly meeting, but this is stupid piled on stupid.
From a media perspective, I get it: Mohler has a daily 24-minute podcast to fill. He has interns who scan buzzy news items. They rearrange the text with interstitials like “he continues, and I quote” and “he goes on to say” so that Mohler can spend five minutes reading an article without sounding like he’s just reading an article. But seriously, how does the president of a major seminary have such disregard for anything approaching academic rigor? Also: how much regurgitated junk is on the internet simply because people need to fill time? The Quaker caution about giving ministry just because you’re paid to give ministry and it’s time to give ministry seems apt in this case.
I’ve enjoyed John Jeremiah Edminster’s comments over the years, which is one reason I was happen to get the submission that became The Cost of a Healing Gift. It starts with the story of having a gift of ministry recognized but what I like even more is that he talks about his journey exploring and developing it. What’s surprising is that is he’s far from a purist:
we went to weekend training workshops; we read the writings of Christian healers; shamanic healers; and practitioners of Reiki, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and homeopathy. I longed to be able to inspect people’s etheric and astral bodies, their chakras and marmas, with a diagnostician’s eye. So long as it involved no straying from Christ, I aspired to know how to mobilize healing virtues in plant spirits, minerals, colors, and sounds, and how to recognize “holy” places.
Some of this reminds me of the wonderful work of the eighteen-century Friend Samuel Bownas, whose book A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister is full of very useful advice on ministry and warnings about pitfalls — romantic attachments, undue politicization.
Let it be considered that the ministry is a birth.
— BOWNAS
Friends Journal