But to someone without context, he’s just some schmoe on YouTube.

Quakerism is well-known for being creedless. It’s easy to argue that it’s anything you want it to be. Plenty of people are drawn more to our community than to the historic beliefs of Friends. At one point, not that long ago even, one could point to Robert Barclay’s Apology as a theological statement accepted by most Friends. No longer. Unprogrammed Friends have largely given up even on the elders who once tried to maintain orthodoxy (sometimes overly so and often to ill effect). Nowadays “What do Quakers Believe?” easily morphs into “What Do I Believe?”

In the Liberal U.S. Quaker world it used to be that you could legitimize some hitherto outsider belief by starting a website, presenting it as a workshop at a few successive FGC Gatherings, and getting an article published in Friends Journal. Nowadays a popular YouTuber like Jessica Kellgren-Fozard will get much more reach than any institutional outlet: her 2018 video Oh God… Let’s Talk About My Religion has gotten 530k views and 3,885 comments. Is she the most learned representative of Quakerism? A recorded minister in her yearly meeting? Did she vet her views with her meeting before posting the video, as Friends used to have to vet books pre-publication? No, no, and no, but she’s done a lot to get us out there in front of seekers and is, de facto, a recognized authority on Friends to hundreds of thousands of people.

Art Larrabee, of the QuakerSpeak video (currently at 241k views for those keeping score), is an interesting counterpoint. He’s held a variety of leadership positions among Philadelphia Friends and has been a sought-after workshop leader. Art started his list of core beliefs while he was the chief executive of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. In this role, he was often called on to be a spokesperson for Liberal Friends. He has written about the background of this list:

Several years ago, way opened for me to share with PYM’s Advisory Committee a life-long frustration that I could not articulate the core beliefs of our faith community with any confidence that what I might say would be shared by others. At the time, I was feeling let down by my faith community and that our failure to name collectively held, core beliefs contributed to a loss of energy among us. I also felt that the absence of a statement of core beliefs inhibited our ability to easily and effectively communicate to others about our Quaker faith. In my professional life before becoming General Secretary, I sometimes found myself wanting to invite friends in law and business to come to meeting for worship but I could never quite figure out what I could say with any confidence when asked, “What do Quakers believe?” What was I inviting them to? Yes, I could try to say what I believed, but I could not tell them what we believed as a community. I wanted something I could hand to those I thought might be interested and say, “This is what’s at the core of our faith. There is more to Quakerism than this, but this is a place to begin.”

Advisory Committee invited me to try my hand at drafting such a statement and on several occasions they have seen prior versions of what I am presenting today. I have shared earlier versions of this work with two quarterly meetings, three or four monthly meetings, the residents of a retirement community and Interim Meeting. With each presentation, suggestions have been made which have found their way into the document.

The results in a very thoughtful, threshed-out list. It might be the most careful distillation since Howard Brinton dashed out Friends for 300 Years in 1952. And yet: as far as I know, the nine beliefs list was never formally adopted by any Quaker body. Years later, it’s still only a list of what Art Larrabee believes other Friends believe. His authority is the respect he has, which is really not all that different than the source of authority for a popular YouTuber. In some future revision of Faith and Practice both Larrabee and Kellgren-Fozard is sure to be quoted in the extracts section. But even there, their words will be presented as interesting viewpoints, not canonical statements.

It’s a hell of a way to run a religion, perhaps, but it’s a fascinating culture we’ve developed to compensate for our rejection of creeds.

I had a few minutes before worship at Cropwell Meeting this morning and so turned to the bookcase—a place you’ll often find me in in-between times at churches of all sorts. There was a slim, dark volume with no discernible title on the spine, a mystery book. I pulled it out and it was a 1935 copy of Philadelphia Faith and Practice.

On the inside-front cover was the name of its original owner, who had a surname familiar to anyone who has wandered the graveyard out front. Near the beginning was a history of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting which abruptly ended in the early 1800s, just before the Great Schism. It’s as if history ended there. Only the publication address let on to those in the know that this was the Orthodox Yearly Meeting.

As I started reading passages I was struck by how well written it is. I don’t know why that should be surprising as Philadelphia Orthodox had Friends like Rufus Jones, Thomas Kelly, and Howard Brinton. I guess I wasn’t expecting the official publication to be free of stilted nineteenth century prose.

Here’s a passage from the beginning of its “Worship and Ministry” section that spoke to me:

Our conception of worship is based on a deep-seated faith that God is Spirit, as Christ taught at Jacob’s well, and that man, as spirit, can respond to Him and enter into direct communion and fellowship with Him. This faith in the nearness of God as Spirit sprang out of a fresh and wonderful experience of God in the lives of George Fox and the early Friends. They felt that they found Him as they walked in the fields or as they sat in the quiet of their meetings and they arrived at an unwavering certainty of the real presence of God in the lives of men, which gave them unusual inner strength and spiritual power.

I appreciate that it clearly maps out how God and Humana interact, tying it without much artifice to a particular passage in the gospels. And then it gets real with the image of seekers walking the fields looking to commune with God: such a human depiction. I’ll be checking out whether I have a copy of this F&P in my home library. It seems we’ll worth a read.

A random Google search while waiting for my family to pick me up from Cropwell turned up this 1922 editorial in The Friend. This apparently is the discussion leading up to the new F&P that surprised me!

Bellers’ statement about the poor stands out because there is so little in Quaker Faith and Practice about the experience of being employed. By comparison, a great deal is included about Quaker businesses and business ethics — from the point of view of those who own, run and invest in them. But many people and many Quakers today engage and struggle with the world of work as employees. Even more live valuable lives outside paid employment — and if we really believe in “that of God” in everyone, this might also help us to see the value in the work people do, whether it is paid or not.

Kathz found little practical advice for wage workers. I’m reminded of the year I worked the night shift in the local supermarket after getting the boot from a Quaker outreach position. What did any of our Quaker discussions have to say to my fellow workers here at a throwaway job with crappy bosses and miserable pay?

What do Quakers believe? How do we practice our faith? The best place to look for the answers might be in a book of faith and practice. Here’s what they are and how they evolved over time.

http://quakerspeak.com/what-is-a-quaker-book-of-faith-and-practice/

Many of us find difficulty in facing change. The way a meeting house is arranged and the way Quaker faith is expressed have both changed over time. There have always been those who find it difficult if not impossible to let go of what has gone before. In my local meeting I always sit in the same place and acknowledge that I find change difficult, but in spite of this there are ways in which I have changed.

I suspect part of thr context of this is the hopes and fears of British Friends as they embark on a recision of their book of Faith and Practice. An editing group has recently been named.

https://stumblingstepping.blogspot.com/2019/02/belonging-and-difference.html

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.

Monday, May 14, 2018

Regular revision and being open to new truths is part of who Quakers are as a religious society. Quakers compiled the first of these books of discipline in 1738. Since then, each new generation of Quakers has revised the book. A new revision may help it speak to younger Quakers and the wider world.

This possibility of this revision was the basis for the inaccurate and overblown clickbaity rhetoric last week that Quakers were giving up God. Rewriting these books of Faith and Practice is not uncommon. But it can be a big fraught. Who decides what is archaic? Who decides which parts of our Quaker experience are core and which are expendable? Add to this the longstanding Quaker distrust of creedal statements and there’s a strong incentive to include everybody’s experience. Inclusion can be an admirable goal in life and spirituality of course, but for a religious body defining itself it leads to lowest-common-denominationalism.

I’ve found it extremely rewarding to read older copies of Faith and Practice precisely because the sometimes-unfamiliar language opens up a spiritual connection that I’ve missed in the routine of contemporary life. The 1806 Philadelphia Book of Discipline has challenged me to reconcile its very different take on Quaker faith (where are the SPICES?) with my own. My understanding is that the first copies of Faith and Practice were essentially binders of the important minutes that had been passed by Friends over the first century of our existence; these minutes represented boundaries–on our participation on war, on our language of days and times, on our advices against gambling and taverns. This was a very different kind of document than our Faith and Practice’s today.

It would be a personal hell for me to sit on one of the rewriting committees. I like the margins and fringes of Quaker spirituality too much. I like people who have taken the time to think through their experiences and give words to it–phrases and ideas which might not fit the standard nomenclature. I like publishing and sharing the ideas of people who don’t necessarily agree.

These days more newcomers first find Friends through Wikipedia and YouTube and (often phenomenally inaccurate) online discussions. A few years ago I sat in a session of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in which we were discussion revising the section of Faith and Practice that had to do with monthly meeting reporting. I was a bit surprised that the Friends who rose to speak on the proposed new procedure all admitted being unaware of the process in the current edition. It seems as if Faith and Practice is often a imprecise snapshot of Quaker institutional life even to those of us who are deeply embedded.

Quakers take long hard look at faith

Quakers in Britain are to rewrite their book of discipline that has guided their work and witness across…

Quakers

The Quakers’ lack of ceremony and liturgical clutter gives them a point from which to view the no man’s land between faith and non-faith that is the “new religiosity”. A dwindling 40% of Britons claim to believe in some form of God, while a third say they are atheists

The piece is sure to get everyone’s dander up. It feels to me as if Jenkins is chasing the headline to advance his own argument without regard to how his statement might polarize Friends. But this is one of the rarer instances in which it’s worth digging through the comments on this one; some are better than the article itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/04/quakers-dropping-god?CMP=share_btn_fb