The question of where this ubiquitous acronym came from, and when, regularly comes up in Quaker discourse (mostly recently on Reddit here). I sometimes answer with the bits I’ve dug up but rather than reinventing the wheel each time, I thought I’d write it all down. I invite people to add what they know in comments and I’ll edit this.

1940s

Howard Brinton was the inventor of our modern idea of a “testimony” in the 1940s, and his original list was community, harmony, equality, and simplicity. He was the Philadelphia-area born Friend who helped organize unprogrammed Friends on the U.S. West Coast in the early part of the twentieth century. Brinton had a knack for simple explanations that expressed the emerging consensus of a new generation of Friends who were healing from the nineteenth-century schisms. Finding new ways of talking about our commonalities was a central part of the work of reconciliation. From his tour de force 1952 masterpiece, Friends for 300 Years:

The meaning of the group in Quaker practice can be suggested by a diagram. Light from God streams down into the waiting group. This Light, if the way is open for it, produces three results: unity, knowledge, and power. As a result we have the kind of behavior which exists as an ideal in a meeting for worship and a meeting for business. Because of the characteristics of the Light of Christ, the resulting behavior can be described in a general way by the four words Community, Harmony, Equality, and Simplicity.…

He included a chart, which honestly doesn’t help much with my understanding of the metaphysics of it all.

1975

Reader Tomas Mario Kalmar sent me a paper called Learning Community prepared by the Education Commission of Australian Yearly Meeting that lists six “characteristics that distinguished Quaker education”: a religiously guarded education, community, non-violence, equality, simplicity, and an experiential curriculum. The list is largely based on Howard Brinton’s work but I include it here because it shows how Friends were remixing and repurposing his list. Learning Community actually looks pretty good and fairly timeless and Tomas gave me permission to repost the PDF here.

1980–90s

In a Reddit thread a few years ago, macoafi wrote: “My in-laws were children in first day school in the 1980s and 1990s, and they learned 4 testimonies, no acronym. (Peace, truth, simplicity, equality).” At some point Brinton’s harmony started being called peace so this is mostly his list except for truth being swapped for community.

1981

Commenter Sharon writes:

I first heard SPICE at the 1981 FGC gathering in Berea KY! At the time it didn’t sit well with me as I found it too glib. I was still working out what God wanted my life to testify too.

This would put it nearly two decades before from any documented instance I’ve seen. It is also well before any instance I’ve seen that included an I for integrity. I admit I’ll remain skeptical until I see further evidence, though it is possible that someone remembered it from the Berea gathering and started reusing it in the last 1990s.¹

1990

Wilmer Cooper was an Ohio Wilburite Friend who went on to become first dean of Earlham School of Religion upon its founding in 1960. Thirty years later he published A Living Faith, which was built on an ESR course called Basic Quaker Beliefs. In the preface he writes: “It is my hope that this work will help Friends gain a fuller understanding of their Quaker heritage and theological roots, while providing for non-Quakers a comprehensive answer to the questions: ‘Who are the Quakers?’ and “What is Quakerism?’ ” In its final chapter Cooper has two lists, which each have four testimonies. His religious testimonies are:

• belief that we can have direct and immediate access to the living God;
• we can no only know the will of God but can, by God’s grace, be enabled to do the will of God.
• the Quaker experience of of community as expressed in the “gathered meeting.”
• the sacramental view of life.

His social testimonies are:

• Peace Testimony
• simplicity
• equality
• integrity

He expands to give a paragraph to each of his eight testimonies but obviously the second list is much pithier.². He does say that this isn’t a canonical list, that different Friends will have different lists, and concludes the section on testimonies by, well, testifying: “Friends believe deeply that if they submit themselves to God and live by the Light of Christ they will be enabled to live by the truth of the Gospel.” It’s worth noting that the later SPICE/S formulation didn’t include any of the religious ones (you could perhaps try to claim community dervices from his religious testimonies list but I don’t generally hear the SPICES C described in the kind of spiritual language Cooper used).

The next year Cooper wrote a Pendle Hill pamphlet that focused on integrity. As far as I’ve seen Cooper is the first to include an I for integrity, setting the stage for our familiar acronym.

Mid-1990s

My wife Julie insists that she remembers talk of SPICE/S back when she was in high school starting to get involved with Friends (circa 1994). She didn’t attend a Quaker school so this would have been in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting circles, probably specifically South Jersey.

Late 1990s

In a comment to this very post, Pendle Hill editor Janaki Spickard Keeler says that when she was working a 2023 pamphlet with Paul Buckley, they tracked SPICE/S to a Friends Council for Education listserv for educators (perhaps E‑Quakes, which was started in 1996 according to a FCE history). Janaki writes: “No one came forward as being the first to come up with the idea, but they shared it along themselves and it spread. They estimate this happened around 1998.” The pamphlet quotes Tom Hoopes, who started as director of education for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1998: “I encountered it in use by one of the monthly meetings of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and I thought to myself, ‘what a great mnemonic device for helping people to remember what we Quakers claim to prioritize, and to try to practice!’” Tom told Janaki and Paul that he didn’t remember the identity of the Friends meeting.

1999

The Summer 1999 edition of Salem Quarter (N.J.) News reports that Woodstown Meeting created a SPICE rap in for a First-day School program which also included songs from Spice Girls. Yes it’s as unique as it sounds:

What’s the word? SPICE!!!! What’s the word? SPICE IS THE WAY TO GO!!!!
Simplicity is simple, and you know it’s right. Squanderin’ money gets ya into a fight.
Peace, it rules, and you know that it’s true. It’s the thing I need to get along with you. Don’t yell and sing those fightin’ songs, when you can help others and right their wrongs.
Integrity is always bein’ true to your word. It’s the most honest testimony I’ve ever heard.
Livin’ and a‑sharin’ all together’s really fun. Community is helpin’, workin’, playin’ all in one.
Equality means everyone is equal, and that’s cool.
Respecting other is what’s right and is the golden rule!!

Note that the article gives a clue on source: “After reading a short article in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting News with the acronym SPICE highlighting the testimonies… [we] were inspired to incorporate this into our First Day School Program at Woodstown MM.” The oldest copy of PYM News available via Archive.org is tantalizingly close—Nov/December 1999. That seems to be when PYM started posting its newsletter.³

2003

Google finds a PDF of a 2003 talk given to a Unitarian Universalist church by Salt Lake City Friend Diana Lee Hirschi in 2003 talking about SPICE.

2004

I myself first complained about SPICE in 2004 (note it hadn’t gotten a second S yet). I complained that this kind of list of secular testimonies were too restrictive. I really was a Quaker Ranter back then; also I was really kind of hard on Brinton, who I appreciate more now.

2006

I like to search the Friends Journal archives to see when new terms show up. New terms are often bandied about by particular Friends or within sub-groups, where they might circulate for a few years without getting into wider usage. As far as I’ve been able to determine, the first reference to SPICES in Friends Journal is a 2006 article by Harriett Heath titled “The Quaker Parenting Project: A Report.” She’s lays it out as an attempt to teach Quaker children without resorting to dogma:

There are several different lists of testimonies. We started with one commonly referred to by the acronym SPICES: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship—but we found that there were other issues not addressed by this list. Service is an integral part of Quakerism in our efforts to live our faith; should it be a testimony? Education has been historically an integral part of Quakersim; should it, too, be included? Where does worship—time set apart—fit in?

Her project eventually picked a different list because they didn’t want to be bound by the dictates of fitting into an acronym. They included conflict and growth and service (which sometimes is listed as the final S).

2007/2008 videos

In 2007, British Friends could produce a video called “The Quaker Testimonies” that didn’t mention SPICE/S and ranged over other non-acronymed testimonies such as one for respect and another against oath-taking. If you listen carefully, I think at least one of the speakers must have heard of SPICE because he seemed to be organizing thoughts around it.

In 2008 I talked about SPICE and spiritually getting deeper with testimonies in a YouTube video and accompanying blog post.

2009

Brinton scholar Anthony Manousos did a deep dive on SPICES. Although Anthony claims Briton invented SPICES per se, I think he just invented the idea of testimonies and the initial list that included three of them (four if you count the harmony/peace change).

2011

Less than two years after Heath’s article, Mark Dansereau and Kim Tsocanos, the co-heads of Connecticut Friends School in Wilton, Conn., published an annotated list of SPICES in Friends Journal, explaining that their school was built on these “Six Quaker Values” (yes, italicized and capitalized) and that they applied and wove them into each activity in their curricula. This might be one of the oldest fully-intact listings still easily available on the web. This has become one of the most visited pages on Friends Journal website.

2012

By this time SPICE/S was becoming ubiquitous. See this blog post from Northwest Yearly Meeting and a video Brent Bill put together to promote an upcoming introductory workshop at his meeting in Indiana.

Paul Buckley gave a talk in 2012 that highlighted the role of Wilmer Cooper, an Ohio Friend perhaps most well remembered for founding Earlham School of Religion in 1960. In 2023, Paul Buckley wrote a pamphlet from Pendle Hill, Quaker Testimony: What We Witness to the World, edited by Janaki Spickard Keeler, during which they determined the late 1990s date.

2013

Someone around 2006 I was standing in a meal line at a Quaker event with California Friend Eric Moon and we started to talk about testimonies. It was the start of a great conversation, cut short by some interruption or another before we even hit the dessert station. When I started as Friends Journal editor I asked him to write something. 2013’s Categorically Not the Testimonies was the result. We also talked in an early Quaker Author Podcast.

So where did the SPICES formulation come from? It ultimately derived from Brinton’s list, with harmony morphing to peace and WIl Cooper’s integrity adding an I. Given its pedagogical nature, it was probably coined by educators. It’s a good teaching tool, easy to remember and something you can easily weave into a multi-week class.

Since there’s nothing particularly religious about the SPICE/S list, it can work in an essentially secular environment that might be allergic to religious-sounding Quaker theology. This would include Friends schools appealing to a non-Quaker audience or a Liberal Friends Meeting that wants something non-controversial to teach the kids. I never hear anyone talk about it being derived from “characteristics of the Light of Christ,” as Brinton did when he introduced it.

In the last few years it’s become pretty ubiquitous on TikTok and other short-form video (Discovering Quakers, _gloyoyo_, itsmekatevee).⁴ If you have five minutes to tell a general audience about Quakers, bite-sized descriptions are important. Also: some of these content creators are probably younger than the term itself. Also: I’ve finally grown into the Old Man Yelling at the Clouds meme. SPICES is here to stay.

Is SPICES all that terrible? No, not really. It can be handy. But it is pretty annoying that we’ve confused a list of generic values for belief. And it’s super annoying that even that list of values is hemmed in by the requirement that every component fit into a silly acronym.⁵

What’s funny about the mystery of this is that there’s a very good chance that the person who first listed out SPICE is still around. There’s a box in someone’s garage packed with late-1990s newsletters, one of which lists it out for the first time in print. Anyone with any information can comment below or email me at martink@martinkelley.com.

The scale of the newer forms of online media is really staggering, as is the simplicity of starting a channel. There’s no need to incorporate or find funders or write mission statements: you just start talking to the computer. It quickly becomes all-consuming of course, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into the topics and scope of the channel. All the popular TikToks also have lots of edits to speed them up. It’s a lot of work to do this part or full-time.

Griffin talked about being known for a thing and remaining passionate about it even in a vacuum. It’s the follow-your-passion advice: loving what you do will pull people to you and you will find a way to turn it into a business.

In some ways, I feel that at least some of the work my colleagues and I are doing ⁶is akin to an outfielder scanning the sky for pop balls coming in from these internet mentions. When a popular influencer talks about Quakers I’m sure hundreds of fingers open a new tab to ask “What is a Quaker?” and “What Do Quakers Believe?” We hopefully show up in the search with easily-digestible answers and links to Quaker communities. I asked Gloria and Griffin for ideas about how we could better support inquirers they might send our way. We’re doing a lot already—good search engine optimization, catchy URLs—but there was some good advice on using Instagram better and really simplifying our messaging and turning it into stories.

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

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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.

Now the astronauts had used that same rhetorical strategy but on a planetary and even interplanetary scale. Speaking the words of Genesis, they sent a message of healing to a wounded world; they expressed a certain cosmic humility about our place in the universe; and, most of all, they shared goodwill, jaw‐dropping in its simplicity, with “all of you on the good earth.” A moral and existential vision took hold of me in that moment and has never let go. Though I couldn’t have articulated it as such then, it was a realization of original goodness.

Genesis: Outer Space and Inner Light

Outer space and Inner Light

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How can we achieve a flexible simplicity – living by the essence of the Quaker approach but not treating old habits as sacrosanct? Early Quakers saw simplicity as stripping out of their lives the superfluous activities and things – John Woolman called them ‘cumber’ – so that they could more fully follow the leadings of the Spirit.

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My sort-of response to Callid’s great Youtube piece on the Quaker testimonies, I compare the classic testimonies to a wiki: the collective knowledge of Friends distilled into specific cautions and guides. “We as Friends have found that.…” I do talk about how the recent “SPICE” simplification (simplicity, integrity, integrity, community and equality) has robbed our notion of testimonies of some of their power.

In the last fifty years it’s become difficult to separate Quaker testimonies from questions of membership. Both were dramatically reinvented by a newly-minted class of liberal Friends in the early part of the twentieth century and then codified by Howard Brinton’s landmark Friends for 300 Years, published in the early 1950s.

Comfort and the Test of Membership

Brinton comes right out and says that the test for membership shouldn’t involve issues of faith or of practice but should be based on whether one feels comfortable with the other members of the Meeting. This conception of membership has gradually become dominant among liberal Friends in the half century since this book was published. The trouble with it is twofold. The first is that “comfort” is not necessarily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first generation of Friends had used Brinton’s model there would be no Religious Society of Friends to talk about (we’d be lost in the historical footnotes with the Muggletonians, Grindletonians and the like). One of the classic tests for discernment is whether an proposed action is contrary to self-will. Comfort is not our Society’s calling.

The second problem is that comfortability comes from fitting in with a certain kind of style, class, color and attitude. It’s fine to want comfort in our Meetings but when we make it the primary test for membership, it becomes a cloak for ethnic and cultural bigotries that keep us from reaching out. If you have advanced education, mild manners and liberal politics, you’ll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meetings. If you’re too loud or too ethnic or speak with a working class accent you’ll likely feel out of place. Samuel Caldwell gave a great talk about the difference between Quaker culture and Quaker faith and I’ve proposed a tongue-in-cheek testimony against community as way of opening up discussion.

The Feel-Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also reinvented the Testimonies. They had been specific and often proscriptive: against gambling, against participation in war. But the new testimonies became vague feel-good character traits–the now-famous SPICE testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality. Who isn’t in favor of all those values? A president taking us to war will tell us it’s the right thing to do (integrity) to contruct lasting peace (peace) so we can bring freedom to an oppressed country (equality) and create a stronger sense of national pride (community) here at home.

We modern Friends (liberal ones at least) were really transformed by the redefintions of membership and the testimonies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our current testimonies are the ancient ones. I think an awareness of how Friends handled these issues in the 300 years before Brinton would help us navigate a way out of the “ethical society” we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the radical transformation of the testimonies. The main accomplishment of East Coast Quakerism in the mid-twentieth century was the reuniting of many of the yearly meetings that had been torn apart by schisms starting in 1827. By the end of that century Friends were divided across a half dozen major theological strains manifested in a patchwork of institutional divisions. One way out of this morass was to present the testimonies as our core unifying priciples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Christians (even as post-Christians), our core commandment is simple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37–40 and Mark 12:30–31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker testimonies also hang on these commandments: they are our collective memory. While they are in contant flux, they refer back to 350 years of experience. These are the truths we can testify to as a people, ways of living that we have learned from our direct experience of the Holy Spirit. They are intricately tied up with our faith and with how we see ourselves following through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I’m sure that Howard Brinton didn’t intend to separate the testimonies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a modern liberal audience. By popularizing them he made them so accessible that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin testimonies of plainness and simplicity. First the ancient testimony of plainness. Here’s the description from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world’s corrupt language, manners, vain and needless things and fashions, in apparel, buildings, and furniture of houses, some of which are immodest, indecent, and unbecoming. And that they avoid immoderation in the use of lawful things, which though innocent in themselves, may thereby become hurtful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are calculated more to please a vain and wanton mind, than for real usefulness; and let tradesmen and others, members of our religious society, be admonished, that they be not accessary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, minding the grace of God which brings salvation, and teaches to deny all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his blessing, and be instrumental in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there’s nothing in there about the length of one’s hem. The key phrase for me is the warning about doing things “calculated to please a vain and wanton mind.” Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neighbors; immoderation makes it hard to hear God’s still small voice; self-sacrifice is necessary to be an instrument of God’s love. This testimony is all about our relationships with God and with each other.

Most modern Friends have dispensed with “plainness” and recast the testimony as “simplicity.” Ask most Friends about this testimony and they’ll start telling you about their cluttered desks and their annoyance with cellphones. Ask for a religious education program on simplicity and you’ll almost certainly be assigned a book from the modern voluntary simplicity movement, one of those self-help manuals that promise inner peace if you plant a garden or buy a fuel-efficient car, with “God” absent from the index. While it’s true that most Americans (and Friends) would have more time for spiritual refreshment if they uncluttered their lives, the secular notions of simplicity do not emanate out of a concern for “gospel order” or for a “right ordering” of our lives with God. Voluntary simplicity is great: I’ve published books on it and I live car-free, use cloth diapers, etc. But plainness is something different and it’s that difference that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called “SPICE” testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality) and you’ll find the modern notions are secularlized over-simplications of the Quaker understandings. In our quest for unity, we’ve over-stated their importance.

Earlier I mentioned that many of the earlier testimonies were proscriptive–they said certain actions were not in accord with our principles. Take a big one: after many years of difficult ministering and soul searching, Friends were able to say that slavery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep communion with God; this is different than saying we believe in equality. Similarly, saying we’re against all outward war is different than saying we’re in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of casting everything in postitive terms, sometimes we need to come out and say a particular practice is just plain wrong, that it interferes with and goes against our relationship with God and with our neighbors.

I’ll leave it up to you to start chewing over what specific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our ministers and meetings found that a particular practice was against our testimonies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of ministering with them and laboring with them. It would be hard. Feelings would be hurt. People would go away angry.

After a half-century of liberal individualism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is something to Quakerism, that it does have norms and boundaries. We would need all the love, charity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, especially because it’s work with members of our community, people we love and honor. We would have to follow John Woolman’s example: our first audience would not be Washington policymakers , but instead Friends in our own Society.

Testimonies as Affirmation of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our values in secular terms. An ability to talk about pacifism with our non-Quaker neighbors in a smart, informed way is essential (thus my Nonviolence.org ministry [since laid down], currently receiving two millions visitors a year). When we affirm community and equality we are witnessing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we’ve contributed to the national and international discussions on these topics.

But for all of their contemporary centrality to Quakerism, the testimonies are only second-hand outward forms. They are not to be worshiped in and of themselves. Modern Friends come dangerously close to lifting up the peace testimony as a false idol–the principle we worship over everything else. When we get so good at arguing the practicality of pacifism, we forget that our testimony is first and foremost our proclamation that we live in the power that takes away occassion for war. When high school math teachers start arguing over arcane points of nuclear policy, playing armchair diplomat with yearly meeting press releases to the U.S. State Department, we loose credibility and become something of a joke. But when we minister with the Power that transcends wars and earthly kingdoms, the Good News we speak has an authority that can thunder over petty governments with it’s command to quake before God.

When we remember the spiritual source of our faith, our understandings of the testimonies deepen immeasurably. When we let our actions flow from uncomplicated faith we gain a power and endurance that strengthens our witness. When we speak of our experience of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the authority as others recognize the echo of that “still small voice” speaking to their hearts. Our love and our witness are simple and universal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Hallelujah: praise be to God!

Reading elsewhere:

• James Healton has a great piece on the testimonies over on Quakerinfo.com. The One Testimony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ’s role in the testimonies. Be sure to check out Quakerinfo’s list of testimony resources.

I heard about this conference almost by accident, from a listing on Quakerinfo’s Christian Renewal page. It was hard to get details about it, as my emails to the organizers kept getting lost, but finally I did hear back. Sessions included:

• The Simplicity of Our Witness to That Which We Know Within
• The Witness of Our Meetings, Our Lives, and Our Words
• Being a Witness to Christ’s Presence and Power in a Time of Strife
• Living Our Witness in a Secular Age.
• Our Witness in Scripture and Friends Writing

So what did I think of the conference?

I liked meeting the workshop leaders and fellow participants. There are very sincere, devote Friends who are aware of the need to have the Society of Friends look more closely at our roots. The New Foundation Fellowship has been around since the mid-70s and gathered around a series of Lewis Benson’s talks about George Fox and early Friends. They publish a number of interesting books and pamphlets. The Christian Friends Conference is relatively new and I never found how quite how it differed from NFF: there was so much overlap between the two groups that that it was hard for this outsider to figure out the difference.

I felt very welcomed, especially by the event organizer (who went out of her way to attend to my strange vegan diet). The weekend’s agenda was upended at the last moment by the absence of NFF organizer Terry Wallace, who was too ill to come.

Many of the sessions were on the intellectual side–prepared speeches read from notes. I suspect this is the legacy of Lewis Benson, who was very much a presence at the conference even though he died over fifteen years ago. I missed the kind of mystical, don’t-speak-unless-led spirit of old quietist conservatives and the extended worship sessions that are becoming popular with post-liberal conservative Friends. Somewhere between these extremes there’s a balance and I wondered if NFF could reach the larger audience it deserves with just this lecture format.

Size, aka there are more Christian Friends than this:

The first impression was how small the gathering was. I suspected this would be the case when I saw so little publicity. As the weekend came near, I mentioned it to a few Philadelphia-area Christian Friends, who were surprised to hear that such an event was happening. Most sessions had about eight people and maybe two dozen or so Friends circulated through during the weekend. Most of the participants already knew each other and were members of New Foundation Fellowship and/or Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative).

This was kind of a shame. With almost 12,000 members, there are certainly more Christians embedded in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting than there are in New Foundation Fellowship and Ohio Yearly Meeting combined. This kind of a conference could have easily attracted more people than this. Many small Quaker organizations act more as support groups for a core group of people who share interests and a desire to see each other regularly (I’ve joined these kinds of groups in the past, mistakenly thinking they would get excited if they realized how many people they could attract with only a little outreach). I don’t know if this was the dynamic with NFF/CFC but no one seemed to be too concerned at the small turnout or limited publicity in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The NFF never put this event up on their website calendar and the CFC doesn’t even have a website, which has become a crucial outreach tool for any small, geographically-dispersed new initiative that wants to reach its intended audience.

Divides and Reaching Across:

I also felt sort of sad for the self-imposed divide going on here. In between sessions, Seth Hinshaw, clerk of Ohio Yearly Meeting, asked me about FGC and then asked each of the other people there at the time if they had ever been to the FGC Gathering. Almost none had. I know the Gathering can be a depressing place for a Christian Friend, but if you want to go fishing for new disciples, there’s nothing like it. Just the presence of grounded traditionalist Friends at the Gathering does a lot to dispel stereotypes and generate good will.

When Jack Smith (Ohio YM, CFC) gave his spiel on the Christian Friends Conference, it sounded very much in the same spirit as FGC’s Traveling Ministries Program. There’s a shared impulse to look anew at traditions and to make the time to tell stories with one another, one on one, in an authentic sharing sprit. Call this the spirt of the age and label it post-liberal, emergent church, whatever–there is a lot more kinship here than we think and a lot of opportunities to go beyond our circles to connect with others.

Geographically Scattered Meetings:

From conversations and reading the Ohio Yearly Meeting minute book I learned more about a very geographically diverse meeting–Rockingham Friends. Although there’s a physical town in Virginia after which it’s named, only a few members of the meeting actually live nearby. The great majority live across the country and around the world, made up of Quaker Christian Friends holding dual membership in a local yearly meeting and in Rockingham. I’ve had wonderful fellowship in the Spirit with the Rockingham Friends I’ve met (I spent some time with the London cohort last Spring). While many meetings have long-distance members on the books (it’s not uncommon to find a Philadelphia-area meeting that claims hundreds of members but only has a few dozen people on First Day), Rockingham Friends outside Virginia seem to value and affirm their affiliate membership (link to the Ohio book of discipline). It would be fascinating to hear more about how business meeting works and to understand the impulse and benefits of being part of a geographically-diverse meeting like this.

I find it fascinating that the most socially-conservative yearly meeting in the U.S. would have one of the most ground-breaking concept of membership. Perhaps it’s part of an evolving twenty-first century model. Many people within the Religious Society of Friends and in the larger religious world have a closer sense of identity with an intentionally-defined identity group than they do with their local meeting. Perhaps the most lively, spirit-led example in the Quaker world had its mid-winter gathering in the same Burlington meetinghouse a few weeks later: FLGBTQC, Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns. I didn’t attend but all reports were that it was a much bigger gathering. (I can also guarantee that there were more Christian Quakers in the meetinghouse that weekend, an irony that deserves some chewing over sometime in the future).

Final Thoughts:

I’d certainly go again. There was some very good, thought-provoking conversations there. Is this the springboard of a Christian renewal that will sweep throughout all branches of the Religious Society of Friends? Well, probably not. But it is another rivulet making its way into the future and a interesting group to go paddling downstream with on a weekend in January.