So Isaac Smith is back with the third installment of his growing series, “Difference Between a Gathered Meeting and a Focused Meeting” and this time he’s referencing two writers on Quaker matters, Michael J. Sheeran and yours truly.
In my previous posts, the distinction between gathered and focused meetings seemed connected to one’s religious outlook, and thus related to the divide between Christ-centered and universalist Quakers that has bedeviled our faith for centuries. But as Sheeran and Kelley argue, the more fundamental divide in the liberal branch of Quakerism is between those who seek contact with the divine and those who don’t.
My post is, as Smith puts it, “nearly fifteen years old,” which is about the length of a social generation. I’m not sure if I’m in a good position to pontificate about what has and hasn’t changed. Much of my Quaker work is with interesting outliers, either one-or-one or as part of a loose tribe of Friends who passionately care about Quakerism and are willing to go into the weeds to understand it. I have very little recent experience with committees on local levels.
One useful concept that I’ve picked up in the last fifteen years is that of “functional atheism.” This bypasses a group’s self-stated understandings of faith to look at how its decision-making process actually works. An organization that is functionally atheist might be full of very devout people who together still decide actions in a completely secular way. I would guess this has become even more the norm among the acronymic soup of national Quaker organizations in the last fifteen years. In that time a lot of bright ideas have come and gone which flashed briefly with the fuel of donor money but which didn’t create a self-sustaining momentum to keep them going long term. Thinking more strategically about what people are seeking in their spiritual lives might have helped those cast seeds land on more fertile grounds.
The Difference Between a Gathered Meeting and a Focused Meeting (3)
Bonus: the 14-year-old comments on my piece include some gentle whining about Friends Journal between myself and a regular reader at the time. Now that I’m its senior editor I’m sure there remains plenty to grumble about.
Isaac Smith is back adding some nuance to his parsing of the differences between Quaker worship experiences:
If you’re swept up in a net, you’re off balance; you don’t have the same certainty about yourself and your surroundings as you did before. Part of what it means to be gathered is that uncertainty, that trust in something even if you don’t fully understand it.
https://theanarchyoftheranters.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/the-difference-between-a-gathered-meeting-and-a-focused-meeting‑2/
When I think of Friends in Africa, I generally picture the large East African yearly meetings in Kenya and Uganda which trace their beginnings to three evangelical Friends who arrived in Kenya in 1902 and set up a mission in Kaimosi.
In this month’s Friends Journal Paul Ricketts profiles a smaller Quaker outpost on the Atlantic coast in Ghana. A group of Americans traveled there last year as a delegation of the Fellowship of Friends of African Descent.
Ghana was also the departure point of millions of enslaved Africans headed toward death and misery in the Western Hemisphere. Paul takes us to infamous Elmina Castle, where the ships were loaded with chained human cargo. I always enjoy stories of Quaker intervisitation but this one is especially poignant.
www.friendsjournal.org
Redditor havedanson has started a thread on Quaker vision:
Our faith is anything but respectable. So why do we act like it now? Why do we play respectability politics? Why are we ashamed to offend or want to be seen as the good people? Or are we more consumed with correcting each other than with changing the world?
Quaker vision
byu/havedanson inQuakers
Sometimes I’m remiss at actually sharing articles I’ve worked on as part of my duties as Friends Journal’s editor. It’s especially ironic this week given that one of the most talked-about recent Quaker articles comes from the February FJ issue.
Don McCormick’s piece has a bold title: Can Quakerism Survive? He talks about thr decline that many Friends geoups have been experiening and wonders who it is that might have. vision for twenty-first century Friends.
The article has garnered over eighty comments. The range and depth of that conversation has been humbling as as editor. But this is a good cross-section of visions of Quakerism. An excerpt from McCormick:
Over the past 40 years, I have been part of and seen organizations that had high ideals and did good work but were focused on internal dynamics and paid little attention to threats to their existence. As a result, they went under. I worry that our yearly, quarterly, and monthly meetings will also.
Great tweetstorm by lifelong Friend Susanna Williams on why she left Quakers and why she remains so attached to Quakers:
Quakerism has ruined me for other faith experiences- I was empowered from an early age to have a direct & personal relationship with God, to give vocal ministry (as I first did when I was 12), to dive into silent worship.
Where are the new Quaker meeting plants? Where are the dinner worship groups? Where is the connection with the Spirit? Where is the space for Friends to encounter and share authentic faith journeys?
This reminds me of some of the themes I wrote about in The Lost Quaker Generation (turning fifteen this year) and 2013’s Quakerism Left Me by Betsy Blake. Should the kind of Friends community Susanna’s looking for really be all that rare? Click on the link to read the 10-part story.
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I’m always happy when Johan Maurer wades into an online discussion, as he can often gives a steadying long-term view of panics. He’s jumped in with perspective on the viral article of the week, Don McCormick’s Can Quakerism Survive? from the February Friends Journal.
Johan reminds us that alarms about the future of Quakerism has long been ringing and draws on Joshua Brown’s warnings about New York Yearly Meeting from 30 years ago! Lest we chalk all this up an incessant alarmism, Johan gives some stats about that yearly meeting. Uh-oh:
7,070 (in 1955)
5,124 (in 1985)
3,241 (in 2015)
But Johan goes beyond that to ask some questions that we really need to sit with. For example, he asks:
Given that we are a microscopic percentage of the world Christian movement, do we have an inflated sense of our own importance? Or, to put it more positively, could we rest contented that our influence on Christian discipleship will last beyond our institutional survival?
This is a must-read blog for anyone anywhere on the Quaker spectrum
blog.canyoubelieve.me
Much of what I do for fun is curate interesting Quaker blog posts, news items, and articles.
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