Modern Quaker culture places a strong emphasis on what Shinran would have called ‘self power’ — political activism, the effort to embody ethical values in our daily lives, and the conscientious performance of social responsibilities.… Perhaps surprisingly, the original Quaker inspiration was strongly focussed on ‘other power’. It was faith in the Inward Guide, rather than their own efforts, that early Friends relied on to guide their lives and to endure suffering and persecution. This Inward Guide, Teacher, Light or Christ was understood as something apart from our own resources: it was the presence and activity of God within each person.

In a surprise to no one, I’m a fan of using the inward power as a guide toward outward action, but of course they’re two sides the same coin. As we find our inward spiritual teacher, our lives begin to conform to right living, which in turn helps us to be more sensitive to spiritual prompts. It’s a virtuous circle that brings us closer to the Spirit and also changes what us moderns call our “lifestyle.”

I started off as a peace advocate in my late teens, spurred into deciding issues of violence and force in part because of family pressure to enlist in the naval academy. As I started to explore communities of peace I kept running into Quakers. I sensed that there was something more to their motivation than just right-politics and it was that spiritual grounding that drew me in. Nowadays I see a lot of Quaker political action that doesn’t use a vocabulary of faith. I trust that the Friends engaged in the work are being guided and strengthened by what Barnett describes as “the other power” but I worry that we lose the moral force of spiritual witness when we don’t articulate the spiritual underpinnings. Are we embarrassed by the weirdness of our spirituality? Do we think it will put off potential supporters? Unpracticed in its articulation? 

Self Power & Other Power

“Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience…

transitionquaker.blogspot.com

It has been the task of the whole meeting not just of one or two; there has been an awareness that what they are doing now will need to change and evolve. And there has been a care and nourishing of us as parents too, with our own spiritual journeys and need for nurture.

I know, from talking to other Quaker parents – and, very sadly, from parents who would love to explore Quakerism but who have felt discouraged or unwelcomed – that we have been particularly lucky. Lucky not because we found a Quaker community with a ready-made children’s meeting, but because we found a meeting willing and ready to welcome, to make space, where there was a sense of gladness that we were there.

Welcoming families in meetings

How do we rejoice in the presence of children in our meetings and nurture their spiritual growth? Alistair…

Quakers

A community empowered by spiritual gifts is not culturally narrow. This assertion is backed by vast hopes and very little experience. Many Friends meetings and churches yearn for cultural and racial diversity, but seem to be stuck arguing about theoretical ideals rather than choosing to examine hurdles: location, unintended or unexamined “we-they” messages (no matter how benevolent or progressive the intention), and a tendency to see non-members as objects of service rather than co-equal participants already part of “us” in God’s story. But most of all, I believe that spiritual power unites while cerebral analysis divides.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/01/what-is-our-vocation.html

Me as a Puerto Rican coming into Quakerism, I find a lot of white paradigms, silence in and of itself is not exclusively colonialism, but I think the way that Quakers sometimes lean into silence beyond the spiritual side of it, the conflict avoidance side of being a Quaker, these are the things that don’t necessarily resonate with me, culturally speaking

https://www.afsc.org/blogs/acting-in-faith/quakers-afsc-oskar-castro

I have been struck by the word “anointing”. Elizabeth Bathurst (as quoted by David Johnson) wrote: “But I brought them the scriptures, and told them there was an anointing within man to teach him, and the Lord would teach them himself.” We are not very used, I think, to the term among Friends today. Among charismatic Christians it is much more common, and seems to be used in both the sense of being given spiritual gifts… But I think Elizabeth Bathurst, following the apostle John, as she says, is using the word in a slightly different sense to either of these, and it is a sense we as Quakers should recognise.

Anointing

Whether you believe in an intelligent Satan (along the lines of Peter Wagner’s ideas) or a more impersonal mechanism of demonic evil (Walter Wink), we shouldn’t pretend that such nodes just go away. Their evil persists. The basis for apology and repentance is not white guilt or shame or any form of self-flagellation. Instead, it is to conduct spiritual warfare against the demons of racism and oppression and false witness, to declare them off-limits in the land that we now share, so that we can conduct our future stewardship—and make our public investments— in freedom and mutual regard.

I’m drawn to the old notion of “The Tempter” as a force that leads us to do what’s personally rewarding rather than morally just. I think it explains a lot of internal struggles I’ve faced, even in simple witnesses. As Johan says, these massive injustices can’t just be undone but they need to be recognized for the immensity of their scale. I’ve also seen this weird way in which progressive whites can blithely disregard Native American perspectives on these issues. Listening more and waiting for complicated answers seems essential in my opinion.

Another good deep-dive for Friends interested in this is Betsy Cazden’s Friends Journal 2006 article, Quaker Money, Old Money, and White Privilege. It’s one I turn to every so often to remind myself of some of our monied Quaker norms. Johan gives a pass to William Penn but I think it’s important to remember that his colonial ambitions were deeply enmeshed in at least three different wars and conveniently served the political calculations of two empires, the perfect storm of an opportunity for a group of pacifist idealists.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/11/quakers-and-native-americans-its.html

Traditionally, Quaker meetings recognized and nurtured individuals who had spiritual gifts as ministers, elders, or overseers. These roles could be filled by men or women, and their service extended over the entire congregation.

Many Friends have dropped the term “overseers” in recent years, out of concern for how the word is so associated with slavery. As I understand it, early Friends’ use of the word came from its use as an English translation for Episkopos in the New Testament. They considered themselves to be re-establishing early Christian models. For example, Acts 20:28:

Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

Bible translations that were geared toward a Catholic audience tended to stick to Latinized words and went with “bishop” over “overseer.” Quakers worried about the connotation of the word could propose that we just start naming bishops. It’s not as nutty as it might seem, as there are anabaptist churches who use the term to talk about roles within individual churches. Of course, sometimes name changes also mask changes in theology and I noticed that some of the more liberal Quaker meetings dropped “overseer” with a speed which they are not otherwise known for. Friends today are a lot more individualistic than Friends were when our institutions were set up — there are many good reasons for this in our histories. But I do hope we’re continuing to find adequate ways to notice and care for our members.
 

We need all three – and more

I had been kicking around writing something on the uses and abuses of creeds in the Quaker tradition, but then I discovered that Ben Wood had written a fairly definitive version of that essay already. So read that instead.

Ben’s 2016 piece on Quakers and creeds is definitely worth a read. I checked my records and I must have missed it at the time, so I’ll share it now. He goes deep into the kinds of creeds that Penn and Barclay gave in their writings but also what the earlier Christian creed-makers were coming from. He also comes to today. Here’s a taste:

we cannot be creed-makers before we are story-preservers and story-tellers. We cannot hope to resolve differences unless and until we dig down into our own Quaker story; unless we come to terms with its power and implications. At least part of our sense of spiritual malaise is a reticence to engage with the depth of the Quaker tale. Partly that reticence is about a lack of teaching ministry among Friends. We haven’t given each other the tools to become skillful readers of our own narrative. We have assumed that people can just ‘pick this stuff up’ through a mysterious process of osmosis. This has led to a fragmentation of understanding about the meaning and implications of Quaker grammar.

In my world, talk of creeds has sprung up recently following the QuakerSpeak video of Arthur Larrabee’s nine core principles of unprogrammed Friends. His principles seem fairly descriptive of mainstream Liberal Friends to me, but predictably enough the video’s comments have people worried about any formulation: “Espousing core beliefs—no matter how well intentioned—risks introducing a creed.” One of my pet theories is that the mid-century truce over theology talk that helped Quaker branches reunite (at least on the U.S. East Coast) has stopped working.

Quakers and Creeds