I thought I had wandered into a group of people who actually believed that God was able to speak directly to them. I remember saying, “Oh my God, this is Pentecost!” I couldn’t believe that these people think God is actually glllllloing to speak to them! I’m down for this. This is where I belong.

Most of the Quakers reading this can probably guess where this is going–she pretty quickly got a lesson in the unwritten norms against exuberance at many Quaker meetings, the rules that prevent many expressions of worship. Ayesha’s Black and many of the strictures on behavior are pretty middle-class white. But a lot of this isn’t really about race. I’ve been led to do some very non-ordinary things at uptight Quaker meetings and feeling incredibly self-conscious over it. When I came to Friends, I loved the idea of the radical spontenaeity of our worship (anyone can minister anytime!) and the life it called us to but in practice we often are creatures of habit, to our detriment. I love Ayesha’s talk of “experimenting with freedom” and the “liberty of the spirit.” I realize my stories of non-ordinariness are all over a decade old. I wish I felt more of that liberty again.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-does-culture-influence-quaker-worship/

Helen Drewery, Head of Witness and Worship for Quakers in Britain, welcoming all to Friends House, said, “We are pleased to be hosting an event which honours all those – including Quakers who put the Kindertransport into effect. Their endeavours are being echoed today by nearly 100 Quaker meetings across Britain which have identified themselves as Sanctuary Meetings and are supporting people who have fled from danger in their home countries. We are glad that these Meetings and the people they are supporting are represented at today’s event. We join them in pressing for more safe passages.”

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/27200

Traditionally, Quaker meetings recognized and nurtured individuals who had spiritual gifts as ministers, elders, or overseers. These roles could be filled by men or women, and their service extended over the entire congregation.

Many Friends have dropped the term “overseers” in recent years, out of concern for how the word is so associated with slavery. As I understand it, early Friends’ use of the word came from its use as an English translation for Episkopos in the New Testament. They considered themselves to be re-establishing early Christian models. For example, Acts 20:28:

Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

Bible translations that were geared toward a Catholic audience tended to stick to Latinized words and went with “bishop” over “overseer.” Quakers worried about the connotation of the word could propose that we just start naming bishops. It’s not as nutty as it might seem, as there are anabaptist churches who use the term to talk about roles within individual churches. Of course, sometimes name changes also mask changes in theology and I noticed that some of the more liberal Quaker meetings dropped “overseer” with a speed which they are not otherwise known for. Friends today are a lot more individualistic than Friends were when our institutions were set up — there are many good reasons for this in our histories. But I do hope we’re continuing to find adequate ways to notice and care for our members.
 

We need all three – and more

At almost 3,000 downloads and counting, the podcast could be considered one of the biggest Quaker meetings ever held. In the aftermath of the media excitement, I began to try and unpick what had made this meeting so successful that Quakers and non-Quakers all over the world had ventured to participate in it. The conclusion I came to was its accessibility.

The Future Is Accessible

A silent podcast goes viral and points to ways to share Quakerism.

Friends Journal

But a big gateway is genealogy. Over the years I’ve gotten countless emails and phone calls from excited newcomers who start off the conversation with details of their family tree (when I used to answer the Quakerbooks phone, I would let these folks go for about two minutes before gently interjecting “wow that’s fascinating!, do you wanna buy a book?!?”)

One fascinating factoid in this week’s QuakerSpeak video comes from Thomas Hamm:

If your family arrived in the United States before 1860, there’s probably a 50–50 chance that you have a Quaker ancestor somewhere.

Quaker Meetings shouldn’t try to be the gathering spots for prodigal family reunions. The early Quakers were strangers to one another, joining together because of the fire of their convictions. Ours is a living, breathing, ever evolving spiritual practice. Still: we are also a grouping of people. We look for belonging.

The longer I’m with Friends, the more I think ours is a religious community that draws strength from the tension of paradoxes. I have a soft spot for the old Quaker families. If Jesus brings some of the new people in through Beliefnet quizzes or Ancestry.com search results, well, maybe that’s okay.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-to-research-your-quaker-ancestry/

Friends don’t have a particularly good track record with regards to controversy. There’s no reason we need to pretend to be talking historically. We’ve had two major yearly meetings break up in this summer (meet Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting and North Carolina Fellowship of Friends), with at least one more “at bat” for some future long hot summer.

Controversies flare up in many places. Friend Sa’ed Atshan just broke his media silence to talk about the cancelation of his talk at Friends’ Central School in February and the subsequent walk-outs, firings, and litigations. The controversy around Avis Wanda McClinton’s disownment by Upper Dublin Meeting continues to incense large numbers of Philadelphia Friends, with fuel to the fire coming from the role that the Undoing Racism Group does or doesn’t have in the yearly meeting structure. Last year a majority of Friends of color boycotted public events at the FGC Gathering over frustration at the site selection process and the underlying issues extend to other Quaker venues.

The most-commented recent article in Friends Journal is “It Breaks My Heart” by Kate Pruitt from the online June/July issue. Many readers related to her sense of alienation and loss. Two comments that hit me the hardest were:

Not all Friends are found in Quaker Meetings. You’re better off without your meeting.

Gone now is the hope… of finding community among Quakers. To be frank, why bother? There’s plenty of brokenness right where I am.

And I get enough “Why I’m leaving Friends” manifestos in my email inbox every month that I could turn it into a regular Friends Journal column.

It seems to me that are a number of underlying issues that tie these controversies together. What do we do when a group of Friends starts acting in a manner that seems contrary to our understanding of Quaker testimonies and practices? How do we balance love and judgement when conflict arises among us? When do we break out of Quaker niceness? Maybe even more challenging, how do we maintain our integrity and accountability when controversy breaks us into camps willing to engage in exaggeration? And just what do we say when the outside public only gets half the story or thinks that one side is speaking for all Friends?

So this is a plug for submissions for December’s Friends Journal.  The theme is “Conflict and Controversy” and the submission deadline is September 9. We’re not looking for blow-by-blow accounts of being mistreated, and we’re not terribly interested (this time) in manifestos about Quaker cultural norms. I’m less interested in specific issues than I am the meta of discernment: How do individuals or small groups of Friends move forward in the heat of controversy. What do we do when the easy solutions have failed? How do we decide when it’s time to break out of Quaker niceness to lay down some truth—or time to kick the dust off your sandals and move along?

Write For Friends Journal — Submit Writing For Quaker Publication

Friends Journal is an independent magazine serving the entire Religious Society of Friends. We welcome articles, poetry, art,…

Friends Journal

Here’s another installation of mom stories, originally written for a longer obituary than the one running in today’s paper.

A single parent, she earned an associates degree at Rider College in Trenton and worked as a secretary at a number of Philadelphia-area based organizations, include Women’s Medical College and the Presbyterian Board of Publications. In the mid-1960s she became an executive secretary at the newly-formed Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company. An office feminist, she liked recounting the story of the day in the 1970s when the women of the office united to break the dress code by all wearing pant suits. A senior vice president was on the phone when she walked into his office and is said to have told his caller “My secretary just walked in wearing pants.… and she looks terrific!”

When Colonial Penn later started an in-house computer programmer training program, she signed up immediately and started a second career. She approached programs as puzzles and was especially proud of her ability to take other programmers’ poorly-written code and turn it into efficient, bug-free software.

In the early 1990s, she moved into her own apartment in Jenkintown, Pa. She reclaimed a shortened form of her maiden name and swapped “Betsy” for “Liz.” During this time she became a committed attender at Abington Friends Meeting. As clerk of its peace and justice committee, she worked to build the consensus needed for the meeting to produce a landmark statement on reproductive rights. As soon as it was passed she said, “next up, a minute on same-sex marriage!” In the late 90s, that was still controversial even with LGBTQ circles and I imagine that even the progressive folks at Abington were dreading the thought she might put this on the agenda!

In her late 60s, she bought her first house, in Philadelphia’s Mount Airy neighborhood. She loved fixing it up and babysitting her grandchildren. She never made any strong connections with any of the nearby Quaker Meetings only attending worship sporadically after the move. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2010, she took the news with dignity. She moved into an independent living apartment in Atco, N.J. and continued an active lifestyle as long as possible.

I had the pleasure of an author chat with Jeff Perkins, executive director of Friends Fiduciary Corporation, the organization that provides financial services to Quaker meetings and is on the forefront of socially responsible investment. We talked about the kind of activism that happens on investor conference calls. Jeff’s article, Main Street Activism and Wall Street Advocacy: Strange Bedfellows?, appears in the June/July issue of Friends Journal.