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.

I like the story of the Friends at William Penn University in Iowa discovering some of the positive qualities of plain dress from a internet challenge. And Gail Melix (Greenwater)‘s reflection on being both Quaker and Indigenous is quite moving.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

The Quaker connection is not just the venue of course. The earliest Friends in the Marlton area enslaved Africans, which was the norm among Quakers in the earliest colonial days. From my readings, slavery was on the decline (immigrating Germans were a more desirable workforce) until the disruptions of the French and Indian war threatened to kick the slave trade back into high gear, which in turn inspired a new generation of Quaker abolitionism. This included Joshua Evans, of what later became Marlton/Cropwell, who was a traveling companion of the more well-remembered John Woolman in his antislavery traveling ministry.

By the early nineteenth century, most Quaker towns in South Jersey had freed Black towns nearby, on land typically deeded by Quaker farmers. Friends have a tendency to sometimes over-sell our historical involvement in the Underground Railroad but the real key to the railroad’s success were these freed Black towns. In the area around Cropwell, a town called Milford (now Kresson) served this role. I don’t know anything about it specifically but Schopp has studied it, along with lots of these historical Black towns and I’m very interested to learn more about them.

Follow the link below for some more on Milford, including a TV episode featuring two descendants of the Truitt family and partly filmed at Cropwell Meeting.

People have been commenting a lot on this chart Friends Journal shared on social media last week. Originally published in the August 1991 issue, what I love most about it is its 1990s-era flowchart design. What would it be today—some punchy infographic perhaps? We dove into the archives because this month’s issue is all about Quaker vocal ministry and at least two of the feature articles mention these kinds of charts.

From Paul Buckley:

There is a frequently reproduced diagram that graphically guides potential speakers through a series of questions they are to consider when they feel an urge to rise and speak. These examine whether a potential message is divinely inspired; whether it is intended for the speaker alone or for others present; and whether this is the right time and place to deliver it. These resources are all useful, but they only address one half of the act of vocal ministry: one that is, by far, the smaller and perhaps less important portion. The other part is the ministry of listening, and we are all called to be listening ministers.

From Edna Whittier:

Since the beginning of the Religious Society of Friends, written advices have guided Friends. Yearly meetings’ faith and practice books, Pendle Hill pamphlets on vocal ministry, and individual monthly meetings’ “Welcome to Quaker Worship” handouts have guidelines for speaking or not speaking in meeting for worship. In 2019, Friends General Conference even published a poster of a circle flow chart with guidelines for delivering a message during worship.

This version is below. Yes, it is very 2020’s infographical in design! (PDF; a similar version was produced for a Pendle Hill pamphlet by FGC staff Barry Crossno and Brent Bill, PDF).

But I link to the articles because these kinds of when-to-speak kind of charts can always become problematic. As Betsy Cazden replied on Twitter: “The people who need it least will spend the full hour obsessing about the flow-chart and will never speak. The people who need it most never will.” Just a few weeks ago I was sitting on a bench in Cropwell (N.J.) Meeting testing and retesting my motivations and leadings to rise and give ministry. I gave a final breath to stand up when I heard the “good morning Friends” followed by the sounds of hands slapping on hands in rise-of-meeting handshakes. Over the years I have learned not spend my whole hour obsessing but had not realized this meeting’s worship was only 45 minutes!

Further reading: An Expected Miracle, a 2023 post about the (often unnecessary) pressures of Quaker ministry.

Updating as I find more

Their “mission” work consists of farming, teaching, music and woodworking and language translating, lots of transporting children and teens. It also involves preaching each week, and participation in funerals, weddings, and other traditional pastoral duties, all aimed at introducing people to Jesus.

Their “mission” work consists of farming, teaching, music and woodworking and language translating, lots of transporting children and teens. It also involves preaching each week, and participation in funerals, weddings, and other traditional pastoral duties, all aimed at introducing people to Jesus. 

http://www.liberalfirst.com/opinion/our-great-commission

I have put this talk together in ebook form complete with lots of pictures and illustrations and formatting that adds to the reading experience. I wanted to share this with all of you and make it as accessible as possible, so it is free to download. It should work with most modern-day eBook readers and apps. If that doesn’t work for you, I have also turned the talk into a downloadable .PDF.

http://gatheringinlight.com/2018/11/20/new-ebook-remixing-faith-now-available/

• 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
• 1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
• 2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

• 1937: 114,924
• 1957: 122,663
• 1967: 122,780
• 1972: 121,380
• 1977: 119,160
• 1987: 109,732
• 1992: 101,255
• 2002: 92,786
• 2012: 77,660
• 2017: 81,392

Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):

• 1937: 122,166
• 1957: 131,000
• 1967: 129,200
• 1977: 132,300
• 1987: 139,200
• 2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s¹ and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.

That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions ², we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign³ or it may be a statistical phantom.⁴ I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post and have corrected them above.

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