Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker

Traddy Quakers?

October 4, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Relat­ed to last week’s dis­cus­sion of a lack of what one ex-Friend calls “punk-rock Quak­erism,” there’s always been a small sub­set of younger Lib­er­al Friends who have want­ed to go deep­er into Quak­er faith and prac­tice. Some joined Friends just for this, hav­ing devoured the Jour­nal of George Fox or Pen­n’s No Cross No Crown or Kel­ly’s Tes­ta­ment of Devo­tion before ever step­ping into a meet­ing­house, while oth­ers have slow­ly evolved as they learned more about Friends. Some­times they go plain for a spell; most of the time they even­tu­al­ly leave.

In her Sep­tem­ber Friends Jour­nal arti­cle, Young Friends Want What Ear­ly Quak­ers Had, Olivia Chalk­ley talks about the young Catholic tra­di­tion­al­ist scene (aka “the tradddies”):

As a Twit­ter user, I have a front row seat to the bizarre wave of tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholi­cism that’s sweep­ing New York’s Dimes Square arts scene and gar­ner­ing media atten­tion. In my own life, I have numer­ous friends and acquain­tances who were raised with lit­tle to no reli­gion and are now start­ing Bible study groups, attend­ing church reg­u­lar­ly, and even tak­ing cat­e­chism classes.

What would this look like for Friends? Olivia says it would have pro­gres­sive val­ues (her 2020 Quak­er­S­peak inter­view is A Quak­er Take on Lib­er­a­tion The­ol­o­gy). How could we do out­reach to young adults who might want a more seri­ous and nerdy Quak­erism with­out alien­at­ing spiritual-but-not-religious seek­ers look­ing for a spiritually-neutral hour of silence? (See Pare­to Curve out­reach.) Also the big ques­tion: is this just a fever dream for a few of us stuck in a bub­ble? Is there real­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty for some­thing wide­spread enough to call a move­ment? Youth-led Quak­er move­ments have hap­pened before: New Swarth­moor, Young Friends North Amer­i­ca, and Move­ment for a New Soci­ety all cre­at­ed hip sub­cul­tures (albeit with­out overt spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in the lat­ter’s case). On a small­er, decid­ed­ly less-hip fash­ion, net­works like New Foun­da­tion Fel­low­ship, Quak­er­Spring, Ohio YM’s out­reach efforts, and School of the Spir­it all con­tin­ue to pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties for nerdy Friends want­i­ng to go deep into Quak­er spirituality.

I’m a bit skep­ti­cal, to be hon­est, but some things in the wider spir­i­tu­al cul­ture have been chang­ing the calculus: 

  • As Olivia points out, Gen­er­a­tion Z is more unchurched than any in recent mem­o­ry; some of its mem­bers are look­ing for some­thing more sub­stan­tial and directive;
  • The inter­net con­tin­ues to make non-mainstream move­ments ever eas­i­er to find and com­mu­ni­ties eas­i­er to organize; 
  • Online wor­ship has made it eas­i­er for seek­ers to “shop around” for a non-local spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty that might bet­ter “speak to their con­di­tion,” to use the Quak­er lingo.

These cul­tur­al changes aren’t lim­it­ed to youth, of course. A reg­u­lar Quak­er Ranter read­er emailed me a few weeks ago to say that she’s start­ed attend­ing online wor­ship hun­dreds of miles away after her long­time meet­ing “become less and less a wor­ship­ing com­mu­ni­ty and more and more a  col­lec­tion of nice indi­vid­u­als.” The at-a-distance meet­ing “it is the spir­i­tu­al home I had stopped look­ing for!” I’m kind of curi­ous where these cur­rents are going to be tak­ing Friends of all generations.

Olivia and I talk about much of this in the lat­est FJ Author Chat.

One corner of Quaker renewal at 20

September 5, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Twen­ty years ago this week I wrote one of my most wide­ly shared blog posts, “The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and Quak­er Renewal.” 

I was on fire that sum­mer, mak­ing con­nec­tions with a bub­bling up, grass­roots “emer­gent church” move­ment and find­ing oh-so-many unex­pect­ed sim­i­lar­i­ties between these frus­trat­ed, authenticity-seeking younger Evan­gel­i­cals and my super-Liberal East Coast Quak­er world. A lot of the prob­lems were clear­ly gen­er­a­tional and I was lap­ping up new posts by Cana­di­an blog­ger Jor­dan Coop­er. One day he shared a chart from the­olo­gian Robert E. Web­ber’s new book, The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals: Fac­ing the Chal­lenges of the New World, that showed the “dif­fer­ences between the mod­erns (tra­di­tion­al and prag­mat­ic evan­gel­i­cals) and the post­mod­ern (the younger evan­gel­i­cals).”

The chart was like a secret decoder ring for me. Web­ber might have been think­ing of more tra­di­tion­al church­es, but with a lit­tle trans­la­tion it lot of it sure explained a lot of what I was see­ing in Quak­erism. Old­er Friends want­ed youth min­istry that was a “Church-centred pro­gram” while I and my dis­af­fect­ed cohorts want­ed “prayer, Bible study, wor­ship, social action.” Old­er Friends thought of Chris­tian­i­ty as a “ratio­nal world­view” or a form of “ther­a­py” where­as I longed for a “com­mu­ni­ty of faith.”

Not much hap­pened after I clicked post. Face­book and Twit­ter weren’t around to pro­mote it. My blog was more-or-less me talk­ing to myself. But over the course of the next few years peo­ple found it. They must have been ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions and see­ing what Google turned up. The com­ments have some future Quak­er blog­gers (was this the first post Chris Mohr found and fan-emailed me about?). Even more remark­able, it includes some very unlike­ly Evan­gel­i­cal Friends, like the then-youth pas­tor at First Friends Can­ton and the then-general sec­re­tary of Iowa Year­ly Meet­ing. At the time I was answer­ing the book­store phone at Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, the most Lib­er­al insti­tu­tion bas­tion of U.S. Quak­ers. To find com­mon cause across this the­o­log­i­cal spec­trum was quite unusu­al then (and alas, prob­a­bly now).

What’s changed after twen­ty years? Well, after a num­ber of false starts there are pro­grams to train younger Friends and bring them into insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism (Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice, Pen­dle Hill’s Con­tin­u­ing Rev­o­lu­tion con­fer­ence, and the 1992-founded Guil­ford Col­lege’s Quak­er Stud­ies Pro­gram deserve spe­cial shoutouts). Blogs and lat­er social media have cre­at­ed forums for dis­parate Friends to talk togeth­er in infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions. I’m con­tin­u­al­ly amazed that Friends Jour­nal mag­a­zine (of which I’m senior edi­tor) and Quak­er­S­peak videos can be accessed any­where with­out pay­wall, mak­ing our sto­ries wide­ly acces­si­ble. But some things haven’t changed. We’ve had rounds of Quak­er schisms, espe­cial­ly in North­west, Indi­ana, and North Car­oli­na Year­ly Meetings. 

And how much has changed for indi­vid­ual young adult Friends? The Sep­tem­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal is devot­ed to younger Friends and one break­out arti­cle is Olivia Chalk­ley’s “Young Adults Want What Ear­ly Friends Had.” Olivia came to Friends as a teen and has had the advan­tages of the new­er youth pro­grams — attend­ing Guil­ford QLSP and work­ing at a Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice fel­low — yet so much of her arti­cle felt like top­ics I dis­cussed on Quak­er Ranter back before my tem­ples went gray. For example:

We often don’t think about the poten­tial Friends who slip through the cracks because there’s not much to grab hold of: those who don’t know where to turn in the silence, not hav­ing a sol­id foun­da­tion in Scrip­ture, Chris­t­ian ethics and social teach­ings, or even Quak­er his­to­ry; those who feel alien­at­ed by the meet­ings in which Friends cringe if you talk about Jesus Christ, or even about God; and those who sim­ply can’t fig­ure out if we are Chris­t­ian or not, due to mixed mes­sag­ing and lack of con­vic­tion among mem­bers of their meet­ings. These obsta­cles must be rec­og­nized and addressed as part of our efforts to present acces­si­ble path­ways to entry, not only for the young adults hun­gry for reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty but also for the poor and work­ing class­es among which reli­gious belief tends to be high, accord­ing to recent Pew studies.

I guess it’s some progress that this arti­cle is pub­lished by Friends Jour­nal and not sit­ting bare­ly read on a per­son­al blog. But as I look back at this twenty-year anniver­sary I find it a lit­tle sad we’re still strug­gling with iden­ti­ty and mes­sag­ing. Maybe this is a peren­ni­al, never-answerable issue for a denom­i­na­tion, espe­cial­ly one as decen­tral­ized as ours. Or maybe it’s some­thing we can con­tin­ue to fig­ure out. Mid-twentieth cen­tu­ry Friends were able to work out a mod­ern vision of Quak­erism that was pow­er­ful enough to reunite and regal­va­nize a dwin­dling Quak­er move­ment; what would our vision look like?

Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal
Emer­gent Church Move­ment: The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and Quak­er Renewal 

A look at the gen­er­a­tional shifts fac­ing Friends. I’m cur­rent­ly read­ing Robert E. Web­ber’s The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals: Facing…

Quaker Ranter Quak­er Ranter 

What is and isn’t Quaker, hunting edition

August 14, 2023
· Martin Kelley

On the face of it, it may be kind of weird for a veg­an like me to like an arti­cle about hunt­ing (much less pub­lish a recipe for squir­rel quiche) but any­one who brings in Thomas Clark­son to talk about Quak­er cul­tur­al val­ues is some­one I’ll lis­ten to.

[Clark­son’s] con­tem­po­raries were blind­ed by tra­di­tion and nev­er stopped to ask, “how far are they allow­able?” amidst con­cerns of human con­duct. Even the phras­ing “how far are they allow­able” sug­gests a lim­it. Per­haps hunt­ing is an allow­able and accept­able way of life up to a cer­tain point: that point being need­less vio­lence and danger.

Allowable Diversions
Allow­able Diversions 

A Friend explores the moral­i­ty of hunting.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

The “loudmouth New York Quaker Jew” who’s a second-gen Hiroshima survivor

August 8, 2023
· Martin Kelley

A sur­pris­ing twist in this sto­ry: Leslie Sus­san’s father was a U.S. film­mak­er who blamed his fatal ill­ness on the atom bombs that fell on Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki. I like her attitude:

Being Quak­er hasn’t made me any less Jew­ish. Ever since I was a young teen, basi­cal­ly, my atti­tude toward being Jew­ish has been that I will nev­er argue with a Jew who says I’m not Jew­ish and I will nev­er deny to a goy that I’m Jewish.

Her father documented the devastation at Nagasaki and Hiroshima — now she's considered an honorary second-generation survivor
Her father doc­u­ment­ed the dev­as­ta­tion at Nagasa­ki and Hiroshi­ma — now she’s con­sid­ered an hon­orary second-generation survivor 

Leslie Sus­san’s father was a film­mak­er who blamed his fatal ill­ness on the atom bombs that fell on…

The Forward The Forward 

Belong behave believe

July 2, 2023
· Martin Kelley

From Kei­th B on Red­dit:

Recent­ly I came across the Believe/Behave/Belong mod­el, which was new to me, as was the amount of hand-wringing about it in main­stream church​es​.In British Quak­er Meet­ings the pref­er­ence seems to be: belong, behave, and the belief will take care of itself.

In the U.S. Quak­er con­text, I’ve long attrib­uted the belong-first mod­el to the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Friends who bro­kered a peace between the fac­tions in East Coast Friends 1and affect­ed a reunion with­in the most of the largest East Coast year­ly meet­ings, while also influ­enc­ing a West Coast Bean­ite move­ment that stressed agree­able­ness and prac­tice over theology.

Howard Brin­ton was one of the fig­ures who brought it alto­geth­er. He thought mem­ber­ship was a func­tion of feel­ing like you belonged in the com­mu­ni­ty, he more-or-less invent­ed the mod­ern tes­ti­monies (aka “SPICES”), and focused on Quak­er process as the glue that holds us togeth­er. It was a pow­er­ful refor­mu­la­tion that realigned and reded­i­cat­ed mod­ern lib­er­al Quakerism.

But focus­ing on belong­ing­ness does make it hard to state what we col­lec­tive­ly believe, as one can belong to a meet­ing while hold­ing spir­i­tu­al beliefs uncon­nect­ed to any his­tor­i­cal Quak­er beliefs. I think that’s why we rely so much on con­ver­sa­tions, like the ones we have on blogs and Reddit.

I recent­ly got into a bit of a Face­book ruf­fle over a region­al Quak­er body that put an AI chat­bot on its web­site (and then post­ed an arti­cle full of glar­ing fac­tu­al inac­cu­ra­cies, since delet­ed). It seems to me that AI cir­cum­vents the need to have per­son­al dis­cus­sions. I’d like to encour­age more Friends, and new Friends, and Quaker-curious seek­ers to talk and debate and syn­the­size and then talk, debate, and syn­the­size again. No one’s going to set­tle the answers. The belong-behave-belief mod­el only works if we keep active­ly ques­tion­ing one another.

Update: On Face­book, Melin­da Wen­ner Bradley says that she’s been shar­ing this Belong-Behave-Believe “great rever­sal” in out­reach work­shops and pre­sen­ta­tions and that the idea comes from Diana But­ler Bass’s Chris­tian­i­ty After Reli­gion (here’s a 2012 video of her pre­sent­ing on the book).

Quaker reflections on simplicity

June 30, 2023
· Martin Kelley

From Eileen Kinch:

As fol­low­ers of Christ, we have been com­mand­ed to seek first the King­dom of God. Sim­plic­i­ty is set­ting aside any­thing that gets in the way of seek­ing the King­dom. The Book of Dis­ci­pline of Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing states: ‘The call … is to aban­don those things that clut­ter [our lives] and to press toward the goal unham­pered. This is true simplicity.’

Five things Friday roundup: Quaker reflections on simplicity | Anabaptist World
Five things Fri­day roundup: Quak­er reflec­tions on sim­plic­i­ty | Anabap­tist World 

Men­non­ites and Friends (Quak­ers) are dif­fer­ent groups with dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al and the­o­log­i­cal his­to­ries. Yet these groups have some…

Anabaptist World Anabap­tist World 

As the pho­to cred­it states, this was one of my pic­tures – way back from the 2009 Con­ser­v­a­tive Gath­er­ing at the Lam­peter Meet­ing­house near Lan­cast­er, Pa.

Functional theology

May 26, 2023
· Martin Kelley

Johan’s book group is read­ing an old lec­ture by Jones, The Nature and Func­tions of the Light in the Thought of George Fox and he reflects on the approach:

Can­by exem­pli­fies a typ­i­cal Quak­er approach to the­ol­o­gy: it’s often func­tion­al. He does­n’t spend time defin­ing “light,” he finds the dis­tinc­tion between “nat­ur­al light” and the Light of Christ unhelp­ful; he does­n’t cling to or gen­er­ate doc­trines. Instead, he describes how the Light of Christ actu­al­ly seems to work in our lives.

Source

I appre­ci­ate Johan’s dis­tinc­tion of func­tion­al the­ol­o­gy here. Every so often my wife will ask me what I think about some spe­cif­ic point of doc­trine, say the nature of Christ. As a Catholic, ana­lyt­i­cal thinker, and reli­gion nerd, this is the kind of thing she nat­u­ral­ly pon­ders, but I rarely give her a very sat­is­fac­to­ry response. I often know the “right” answer accord­ing to tra­di­tion­al ortho­dox Chris­t­ian creeds and I’m always curi­ous what oth­ers make of ques­tions like these, but what I myself believe is shaped and large­ly bound­ed by my own expe­ri­ences of Christ work­ing in my life. I’m adding Jones’s arti­cle to my read­ing list.