First up in our features is Joann Neuroth’s “Putting Our Money Where Our Hearts Are,” a look at how her meeting in Lansing, Michigan, took seemingly tiny steps that have grown into signifiant community outreach and investment.

When we catch our breath to add it all up, we realize that the volunteers who “feed the pantry” daily have put $11,000 of food in that box each year. It feels a bit like loaves and fishes! Where did it come from, one grocery bag at a time? We are pretty sure anyone proposing an $11,000 program back in 2020 would have been quickly set straight about limits to our capacity. But one can of soup at a time, we have truly surprised ourselves.

How Meetings Use Money

January 2025

Friends Journal

Polls and analysts confirm a growing trend for people to tune in almost exclusively to those news sources which reinforce their own opinions and condemn the others — regardless of quality, the use of facts, opinion, bias, and misinformation. Experts call this “source bias.” My straight-talking Quaker mother referred to it as “people trying to sell you a pig in a poke” — people trying to convince you of a point of view by giving you limited or false information, trying to sell you a pig in a bag when you can’t see it or examine it. Communist countries and dictatorships are masters at this.

https://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/news/20190203/faith-freedom-of-press-essential-to-democracy

Various January server bills are coming due in the next week and the Paypal account is empty. Between domain registrations, server bills, and the Ning service the site can often rack up over $50 in a given month.

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We could use a little momentum. A decade ago, as I was getting started with this, platforms like Facebook took advantage of our desire for a simpler option and used it to silo up our data, lock and key. We lost an exciting blogosphere in the midst of all of this—and the first step towards getting it back is by realizing that ownership should be a first class citizen, whether or not we eventually give away those words, sell them, or keep them close to our chest. A blog that you own, that you pay the hosting bill for? That’s the first step—a form of expression that should be the future (because after all, how awesome is it that anyone can own a printing press?!?) but somehow became the past.

I haven’t been updating this Quaker Daily Read as much as I’d like over the last month or so. That’s partly the result of an early December vacation and then the chaos of late December holidays with the family. I’m sure I’ve missed some great posts that I should have shared but there’s also days when I run through my RSS collection (I use Feedly to follow about a hundred or so blogs) and find nothing particularly fresh or interesting. I’d love to see more of us trading the Facebook dopamine-rush immediacy for some more thoughtful writing and conversation.

https://tedium.co/2019/01/01/2019-independent-blogging-trends/

My speculations, therefore, center around around what a Quaker Village might look like, understanding “village” to mean “small community” (hundreds or thousands, but not millions). How do these people live? How do they put their Christian values into practice?

Let’s say it’s a hundred years from now, when all of us are safely dead. Or maybe we’d like to accelerate the timeline?

For me, a hallmark of Quakerism is its egalitarianism and commitment to rotating roles. That’s not a feature of every branch I realize, and those who decry “outward forms” may consider Oversight, Property Management, Children’s Program etc., to be the opposite of “primitive” by definition. Perhaps such infrastructure seems too complicated, too much like everyday life. I realize we use our words differently.

I like the qualification to imagine this 100 years from now. It gives us a bit of time to sort out all of the inconvenient roadblocks of current apathy and resistance to change. One of the techniques Amazon is said to use is to start any new project ideas with a press release as a way to make sure the final product is focused on actual customer needs. Kirby’s piece reminds me of this. What would it look like to have a strong vision of the Quaker communities we’d like to live in someday?
http://www.quakerquaker.org/forum/topics/what-is-primitive-christianity

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

Friends, if our Quakerism is not prophetic, if it fails to speak truth to power, then what’s the use of it? If it is not grounded in an apocalyptic vision, a conviction that the Kingdom is at hand, then what do we have to offer the world?

Friends Need to Tell the Truth

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is “a new Quakerism,” and oddly enough, I’ve been hearing other Friends unknowingly echo this phrase back to me. It seems to me that many Friends, even those who consider themselves “convinced,” are hungry for more than what the Society has to offer.

Of course it’s part of our tradition that it needs to be forever reborn. You can’t recycle sermons or use the prop of your university learning as a crutch. We are never to know what might happen when worship starts, since the idea is that it’s directly led in the moment by Christ. It’s also a part of our tradition that forms are forever calcifying and that we need to remember why we’re here and who’s brought us together. Glad to see the work continue.

A New Quakerism