Tag Archives ⇒ quakers

Indigenous and Quaker Both

January 27, 2026
· Martin Kelley

There’s often an implied us-them dichoto­my when Quak­ers talk about Indige­nous Peo­ples so I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by com­mu­ni­ties that are both. My col­league Sharlee DiMenichi wrote about the hand­ful of month­ly meet­ings — and an entire year­ly meet­ing — in the U.S. that are major­i­ty Indige­nous.

I love com­pli­cat­ed iden­ti­ties like this. There’s a lot of dis­cern­ment that goes on about how to incor­po­rate Indige­nous and Quak­er ele­ments into life. For many, it seems a sur­pris­ing­ly nat­ur­al fit. This is true else­where, in parts of Africa and South Amer­i­ca, where mis­sion­ary Quak­ers’ beliefs meshed with the belief sys­tems of pre-colonial eth­nic groups, allow­ing an easy transition.

Also of inter­est is that these meet­ings are all Chris­t­ian, which demog­ra­phers tell us is the norm for Native Amer­i­cans today.1 Decolo­nial­ism means some­thing very dif­fer­ent for those who are com­mit­ted to hold on to Christianity.

Just a moment...
Just a moment… 
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Unintentional Consequences, Intentional Repair

January 8, 2026
· Martin Kelley

I wrote the open­ing col­umn for the Jan­u­ary Friends Jour­nal, which looks at Indige­nous Peo­ples and Friends. As reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog already no doubt know, I’m a fan of local his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly contact-era and colo­nial his­to­ries and espe­cial­ly about rela­tions with the Indige­nous Lenape and the enslaved Africans.

The whole issue is real­ly pow­er­ful and I hope you find it as enlight­en­ing as I did.

Where I live, in one of the colonial-era Quak­er colonies of the Mid-Atlantic Unit­ed States, there has long been a benev­o­lent por­tray­al of Quak­ers’ rela­tions with the local Indige­nous Peo­ples. We are told that ear­ly Friend William Penn nego­ti­at­ed the Treaty of Shacka­max­on with Lenape leader Tama­nend, a moment memo­ri­al­ized by parks, stat­ues, and a famous paint­ing by Ben­jamin West. The great French philoso­pher Voltaire declared it “the only treaty nev­er sworn to and nev­er bro­ken.” The new set­tlers bought each plot of land from the local Lenape bands. Vio­lence in the first half-century of Quak­er gov­er­nance was rare; coop­er­a­tion and good will were the norm.

And yet: there is no fed­er­al­ly rec­og­nized Indige­nous Nation left in this for­mer Lenape ter­ri­to­ry. Every boat­load of Quak­ers that sailed up from Delaware Bay brought the threat of anoth­er round of dead­ly small­pox. Every creek dammed to pow­er a mill cut off the spawn­ing fish runs that stocked upland creeks. Every pig let loose from an Eng­lish farm­stead ate through near­by Lenape maize and squash plantings.

Talking about Who We Believe In

December 11, 2025
· Martin Kelley

I talked with Tom Gates this week about the nature of belief. He has an arti­cle in the cur­rent Friends Jour­nal titled “Beyond What Words Can Utter.”

We agreed that a lot of Quak­er belief can only be expe­ri­enced, not described, which makes for dif­fi­cul­ties when doing out­reach. It’s easy to go into nuance once some­one has com­ing into the meet­ing­house and is par­tic­i­pat­ing in an edu­ca­tion pro­gram but how do we get them off the street in the first place. Tom said:

I’m com­fort­able with Christ lan­guage and the inward light of Christ. And I know there are friends who are not, and there are good rea­sons why they’re not. I’m not deny­ing that. in these new­com­er ses­sions a per­sis­tent ques­tion is: Are Quak­ers Chris­t­ian? And how do you under­stand that? And they’re most­ly com­ing from back­grounds and oth­er kind of more con­ser­v­a­tive churches.

And so that’s a live ques­tion for them because in some sense they all left those church­es because the fun­da­men­tal­ism was grat­ing on them. I always pull off this thing from my shelf, it’s the Reader’s Guide to George Fox’s Jour­nal by Joseph Pick­vance. And he makes a fas­ci­nat­ing state­ment: the com­mon­est cause of mis­un­der­stand­ing of Fox’s teach­ing today is a fail­ure to real­ize how wide and deep and func­tion­al is the mean­ing that quote Christ had for him. 

Our dis­cus­sion ranged quite a bit, from Art Larrabee’s “Nine Core Quak­er Beliefs” to Mar­cus Borg’s Heart of Chris­tian­i­ty and 1653’s Saul’s Errand to Dam­as­cus, by James Nayler and George Fox. I def­i­nite­ly need to do some more reading!

Full show notes and a tran­script are avail­able.

Tom has also writ­ten a follow-up post on Quak­er belief on his blog. 

Young adults profiled in publications

December 7, 2025
· Martin Kelley

Two recent arti­cles in pub­li­ca­tions have got­ten some buzz. One writ­ten by AP reporter Luis Andres Henao looks at a rise of young adult inter­est in Friends and pro­files a dra­mat­ic increase in atten­dance at Arch Street Meet­ing in Philadel­phia. It’s been reprint­ed in a lot of news­pa­pers. It quotes a Valerie Goodman:

“It feels like I can have a minute to breathe. It’s dif­fer­ent than hav­ing a moment of med­i­ta­tion in my apart­ment because there’s still all of the dis­trac­tions around,” Good­man says. “And it’s crazy being in a room full of oth­er peo­ple that are all there to expe­ri­ence that themselves.”

The oth­er is a beau­ti­ful essay by a new UK Friend, who explains the appeal of the silence:

It was as if some­one had turned down the vol­ume of the world, and all that remained was my feel­ings, sit­ting raw and open like a wound. Rather than run­ning, I sat for an hour and let them wash over me. I left with a fresh­er per­spec­tive and spent the rest of the day in a calm daze. For the first time in a while, I felt anchored to some­thing greater than myself.

What Do Quakers Believe?

December 1, 2025
· Martin Kelley

How’s the old joke go? Ask five Quak­ers what they believe and you’ll get ten answers. Undaunt­ed, Decem­ber’s Friends Jour­nal tries to give some answers to the ques­tion any­way. I very much hope that indi­vid­ual Friends will find view­points they real­ly like as well as ones they real­ly don’t like, or at least don’t agree with. That there are no pat answers is itself part of the answer to the question.

Bonus: we’ve been work­ing on expand­ing our inter­na­tion­al inclu­sion in the mag­a­zine and an arti­cle from Sal­vado­ran Jas­son Areva­lo on the role of Quak­er pas­tors is the first fruits of our new Latin Amer­i­can cor­re­spon­den­t’s out­reach efforts.

Letter Regarding FUM Finances

October 23, 2025
· Martin Kelley

I thought that the expose on Earl­ham Col­lege was going to be this week’s Quak­er finan­cial melt-down sto­ry but Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing did the prover­bial “hold my beer” and announced it’s in seri­ous finan­cial per­il.

Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing (FUM) is the largest Quak­er mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tion in the world. Sim­pli­fy­ing quite a bit, it grew out of the Gur­neyites, the more churchy branch of Quak­ers who often adopt­ed min­istry and inter­na­tion­al mis­sions. Those mis­sions are the rea­son why there are so many Quak­ers in places like East Africa and Bolivia. Most of the world­wide body of Friends are part of that move­ment and many are for­mal mem­bers of FUM.

The­o­log­i­cal­ly, today’s FUM is a “big tent” asso­ci­a­tion that tries to hold togeth­er a wild­ly diver­gent set of beliefs and cul­tur­al norms, with gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty being the most com­mon light­ning point. There’s always cor­ners of FUM threat­en­ing to leave or threat­en­ing to with­hold mem­ber­ship dues. There was seri­ous talk in the 1990s of a “realign­ment” that would split up FUM along evan­gel­i­cal and uni­ver­sal­ist lines but some­how that’s nev­er quite hap­pened and the tent has held. To its cred­it the big tent approach means that FUM has been a key facil­i­ta­tor of cross-branch dia­logue among North Amer­i­can Friends.

The finan­cial prob­lem is pret­ty straight­for­ward, a sto­ry as old as nonprofits:

Our audits have not been done in a time­ly fash­ion, inter­nal finan­cial con­trols have been miss­ing, and we did not ensure that good account­ing prac­tices were being fol­lowed. We have not been care­ful enough in review­ing finan­cial infor­ma­tion giv­en to us or in devel­op­ing the abil­i­ty of new board mem­bers to under­stand FUM’s com­plex finan­cial structure.

I’m gen­uine­ly sur­prised that FUM lead­er­ship was this asleep at the wheel but I sym­pa­thize. A non­prof­it I worked for in the 1990s went through a sim­i­lar cri­sis when a few years of back­logged audits came back and showed us we were in far worse shape than we had imag­ined. The oth­er major U.S. Quak­er asso­ci­a­tion, Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, went though some­thing sim­i­lar in the 1980s; the sto­ry I’ve heard is that the lawyers told them they were broke to go bank­rupt and they fig­ured their way out of the finan­cial hold.

Many non­prof­its go through boom and bust cycles but this sounds more than just that. I do hope Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing can pull through.

Letter Regarding FUM Finances
Let­ter Regard­ing FUM Finances 

Dear Friends, we will put the bad news first: at our cur­rent income and expen­di­ture rate, FUM will…

mailchi.mp mailchi​.mp

Reviving Queer Worship

October 15, 2025
· Martin Kelley

In my lat­est author pod­cast inter­view, I talk with R.E. Mar­tin and Jason A. Ter­ry about the efforts to bring back wor­ship focused specif­i­cal­ly on the queer com­mu­ni­ty to Friends Meet­ing of Wash­ing­ton (FMW). I espe­cial­ly appre­ci­ate the work of con­nect­ing with elders who par­tic­i­pat­ed in this wor­ship in decades past — through the worst of the AIDS epi­dem­ic and through the strug­gle for grow­ing accep­tance of the 1990s.

You can watch the full episode of my talk with R.E. and Jason and read their arti­cle, “Advices and Que[e]ries: Cho­sen Fam­i­ly and Cho­sen Ances­tors.”

The Octo­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal is specif­i­cal­ly about affin­i­ty groups: how and why and when we might break off into wor­ship groups that specif­i­cal­ly include and exclude Friends. Octo­ber authors Vanes­sa Julye and Cur­tis Spence are inter­viewed as part of this mon­th’s Quak­ers Today pod­cast episode, “Quak­ers & Affin­i­ty Spaces: Find­ing Whole­ness in a Sep­a­rat­ed World.”

South Jersey Trips

September 26, 2025
· Martin Kelley

Odds and ends: last week­end my Friends meet­ing took a trip to John Wool­man Asso­ci­a­tion in Mount Hol­ly, New Jer­sey, ded­i­cat­ed to the 18th cen­tu­ry Quak­er abo­li­tion­ist; high­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you’re in the area. On the way out of town I vis­it­ed the Shinn Cur­tis Log House from 1712, which was so encased by addi­tions over the cen­turies that the orig­i­nal house was for­got­ten until demo­li­tion of the lat­er house in the late 1960s. 

My state pub­lic media PBS sta­tion has announced they’re ceas­ing oper­a­tions next year, hit hard by both fed­er­al and state bud­get cuts. Wedged between two top-five U.S. media mar­kets (New York and Philly), statewide news is often an after­thought to their sta­tions, so our PBS has been impor­tant. It’s also com­mis­sioned lots of quirky local his­to­ry doc­u­men­taries. In oth­er media news, I’m excit­ed for next year’s Man­dalo­ri­an movie, though my two Star Wars kids are wor­ried that the trail­er is too cute.

Glad to see my new col­league Ren­zo Car­ran­za in the lat­est Quak­er­S­peak.