Tag Archives ⇒ vision

Tempations, shared paths and religious accountability

June 29, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Some­times it seems as if mod­erns are look­ing back at his­to­ry through the wrong end of the tele­scope: every­thing seems soooo far away. The effect is mag­ni­fied when we’re talk­ing about spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. The ancients come off as car­toon­ish fig­ures with a com­pli­cat­ed set of worked out philoso­phies and pro­hi­bi­tions that we have to adopt or reject whole­sale. The ide­al is to be a liv­ing branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intel­li­gent­ly con­verse with the past and nego­ti­ate changes?

Let’s talk Friends and music. The car­toon Quak­er in our his­tor­i­cal imag­i­na­tion glares down at us with heavy dis­ap­proval when it comes to music. They’re squares who just did­n’t get it.

Get­ting past the cartoons

Thomas Clark­son, our Angli­can guide to Quak­er thought cir­ca 1700, brings more nuance to the scru­ples. “The Quak­ers do not deny that instru­men­tal music is capa­ble of excit­ing delight. They are not insen­si­ble either of its pow­er or of its charms. They throw no impu­ta­tion on its inno­cence, when viewed abstract­ly by itself.” (p. 64)

“Abstract­ly by itself”: when eval­u­at­ing a social prac­tice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tem­pa­tions? Quak­ers are engaged in a grand exper­i­ment in “chris­t­ian” liv­ing, keep­ing to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral liv­ing. The warn­ings against cer­tain activ­i­ties are based on obser­va­tion borne of expe­ri­ence. The Quak­er guide­lines are wikis, notes com­piled togeth­er into a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of which activ­i­ties pro­mote – and which ones threat­en – the lead­ing of a moral life.

Clark­son goes on to detail Quak­er’s con­cerns about music. They’re all actu­al­ly quite valid. Here’s a sampling:

  • Peo­ple some­times learn music just so they can show off and make oth­ers look talentless. 
  • Reli­gious music can become a end to itself as peo­ple become focused on com­po­si­tion and play­ing (we’ve real­ly decon­tex­tu­al­ized: much of the music played at orches­tra halls is Mass­es; much of the music played at folk fes­ti­val is church spirituals). 
  • Music can be a big time waster, both in its learn­ing and its listening.
  • Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won’t say any of these are absolute rea­son to ban music, but as a list of neg­a­tive temp­ta­tions they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very con­scious­ly has music as a cen­ter­piece. It’s very beau­ti­ful, but I always appre­ci­ate the pas­tor’s reminder that the music is in ser­vice to the Mass and that no one had bet­ter clap at some per­for­mance! Like with Friends, we’re see­ing a delib­er­ate bal­anc­ing of ben­e­fits vs temp­ta­tions and a warn­ing against the snares that the choice has left open.

Con­text con­text context

In sec­tion iv, Clark­son adds time to the equa­tion. Remem­ber, the Quak­er move­ment is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of ear­ly Quak­ers] was prin­ci­pal­ly in the hands of those, who made a liveli­hood of the art. Those who fol­lowed it as an accom­plish­ment, or a recre­ation, were few and those fol­lowed it with mod­er­a­tion. But since those days, its progress has been immense… Many of the mid­dle class­es, in imi­ta­tion of the high­er, have received it… It is learned now, not as a source of occa­sion­al recre­ation, but as a com­pli­cat­ed sci­ence, where per­fec­tion is insist­ed upon to make it worth of pur­suit. p.76.

Again we see Clark­son’s Quak­ers mak­ing dis­tinc­tions between types and moti­va­tions of musi­cian­ship. The labor­er who plays a gui­tar after a hard day on the field is less wor­ri­some than the obsessed ado­les­cent who spends their teen years locked in the den prac­tic­ing Stair­way to Heav­en. And when music is played at large fes­ti­vals that lead youth “into com­pa­ny” and fash­ions, it threat­ens the reli­gious soci­ety: “it has been found, that in pro­por­tion as young Quak­ers mix with the world, they gen­er­al­ly imbibe its spir­it, and weak­en them­selves as mem­bers of their own body.”

Music has changed even more rad­i­cal­ly in the suceed­ing two cen­turies. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it’s ubiq­ui­tious and often invol­un­tary (you can’t go shop­ping with­out it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of iso­lat­ed lis­ten­er­ship. Then, what about DIY music and sin­ga­longs. Is there a dis­tinc­tion to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between are­nas and cof­fee­house shows? And move past music into the oth­er media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, com­put­ers, glossy mag­a­zines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsess­ing over Amer­i­can Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion? 

Does a social prac­tice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral cen­ter? What if we turned off the medi­at­ed con­sumer uni­verse and engaged in more spir­i­tu­al­ly reward­ing activ­i­ties – con­tem­pla­tive read­ing, ser­vice work, vis­it­ing with oth­ers? But what if music, com­put­ers, radio, is part of the way we’re engag­ing with the world?

How to decide?

Final­ly, in Clark­son’s days Friends had an elab­o­rate series of courts that would decide about social prac­tices both in the abstract (whether they should be pub­lished as warn­ings) and the par­tic­u­lar (whether a par­tic­u­lar per­son had strayed too far and fall­en in moral dan­ger). Clark­son was writ­ing for a non-Quaker audi­ence and often trans­lat­ed Quak­erese: “courts” was his name for month­ly, quar­ter­ly and year­ly meet­ing struc­tures. I sus­pect that those ses­sions more close­ly resem­bled courts than they do the mod­ern insti­tu­tions that share their name. The court sys­tem led to its own abus­es and start­ed to break down short­ly after Clark­son’s book was pub­lished and does­n’t exist anymore.

We find out­selves today pret­ty much with­out any struc­ture for shar­ing our expe­ri­ences (“Faith and Prac­tice” sort of does this but most copies just gath­er dust on shelves). Month­ly meet­ings don’t feel that over­sight of their mem­bers is their respon­si­bil­i­ty; many of us have seen them look the oth­er way even at fla­grant­ly egre­gious behav­ior and many Friends would be out­raged at the con­cept that their meet­ing might tell them what to do – I can hear the howls of protest now! 

And yet, and yet: I hear many peo­ple long­ing for this kind of col­lec­tive inquiry and instruc­tion. A lot of the emer­gent church talk is about build­ing account­able com­mu­ni­ties. So we have two broad set of ques­tions: what sort of prac­tices hurt and hin­der our spir­i­tu­al lives in these mod­ern times; and how do we share and per­haps cod­i­fy guide­lines for twenty-first cen­tu­ry right­eous living?

Reach up high, clear off the dust, time to get started

June 8, 2008
· Martin Kelley

It’s been a fas­ci­nat­ing edu­ca­tion learn­ing about insti­tu­tion­al Catholi­cism these past few weeks. I won’t reveal how and what I know, but I think I have a good pic­ture of the cul­ture inside the bish­op’s inner cir­cle and I’m pret­ty sure I under­stand his long-term agen­da. The cur­rent lightening-fast clo­sure of sixty-some church­es is the first step of an ambi­tious plan; man­u­fac­tured priest short­ages and soon-to-be over­crowd­ed church­es will be used to jus­ti­fy even more rad­i­cal changes. In about twen­ty years time, the 125 church­es that exist today will have been sold off. What’s left of a half mil­lion faith­ful will be herd­ed into a dozen or so mega-churches, with the­ol­o­gy bor­rowed from gener­ic lib­er­al­ism, style from feel-good evan­gel­i­cal­ism, and orga­ni­za­tion from con­sul­tant culture.

When dioce­san offi­cials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sen­tence and nod their heads approv­ing­ly. The con­spir­a­cy is real.

But I don’t want to talk about Catholi­cism again. Let’s talk Quak­ers instead, why not? I should be in some meet­ing for wor­ship right now any­way. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbring­ing after eleven years with us because she want­ed a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty that shared a basic faith and that was­n’t afraid to talk about that faith as a cor­po­rate “we.” It seems that Catholi­cism won’t be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the East­ern Ortho­dox church? For that mat­ter should I be run­ning off to the Men­non­ites? See though, the prob­lem is that the same issues will face us wher­ev­er we try to go. It’s mod­ernism, baby. No focused and authen­tic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the ques­tions of course. Why would some­one who dis­likes Catholic cul­ture and wants to dis­man­tle its infra­struc­ture become a priest and a career bureau­crat? For that mat­ter why do so many peo­ple want to call them­selves Quak­ers when they can’t stand basic Quak­er the­ol­o­gy? If I want­ed lots of com­ments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ulti­mate­ly the ques­tion is futile and beyond my figuring.

Anoth­er piece to this issue came in some ques­tions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few oth­ers this past week in prepa­ra­tion for his upcom­ing pre­sen­ta­tion at Wood­brooke. He asked about how a par­tic­u­lar Quak­er insti­tu­tion did or did not rep­re­sent or might or might not be able to con­tain the so-called “Con­ver­gent” Friends move­ment. I don’t want to bust on any­one so I won’t name the orga­ni­za­tion. Let’s just say that like pret­ty much all Quak­er bureau­cra­cies it’s inward-focused, shal­low in its pub­lic state­ments, slow to take ini­tia­tive and more or less irrel­e­vant to any cam­paign to gath­er a great peo­ple. A more suc­cess­ful Quak­er bureau­cra­cy I could name seems to be doing well in fundrais­ing but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more inter­est­ed in donor-focused hype than long-term pro­gram implementation.

One ene­my of the faith is bureau­cra­cy. Real lead­er­ship has been replaced by con­sul­tants and fundrais­ers. Finan­cial and staffing crises – real and cre­at­ed – are used to jus­ti­fy a water­ing down of the mes­sage. Pro­grams are dri­ven by donor mon­ey rather than clear need and when real work might require con­tro­ver­sy, it’s tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quak­er read­ers who think I’m talk­ing about Quak­ers: no I’m talk­ing about Catholics. Catholic read­ers who think I’m talk­ing about Catholics: no, I’m talk­ing about Quak­ers. My point is that these forces are tear­ing down reli­gios­i­ty all over. Some cheer this devel­op­ment on. I think it’s evil at work, the Tempter using our lead­er’s desires for posi­tion and respect and our the desires of our laity’s (for lack of a bet­ter word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I’m tired of think­ing that maybe if I try one more Quak­er meet­ing I’ll find the com­mu­ni­ty where I can prac­tice and deep­en my faith as a Chris­t­ian Friend. I’m stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feel­ing: Fox and the Pen­ing­tons and all the rest talked about iso­la­tion and about reli­gious pro­fes­sion­als who were in it for the career. I know from the blo­gos­phere and from count­less one-on-one con­ver­sa­tions that there are a lot of us – a lot – who either drift away or stay in meet­ings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty for these out­sider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our struc­tures look like? If we let the gener­ic church­es go off to out-compete one oth­er to see who can be the bland­est, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

20080608-xcjchpscnwekhsh85kg2hr7nbf.previewI guess this last para­graph is the new revised mis­sion state­ment for the Quak­er part of this blog. Okay kids, get a step stool, go to your meet­ing library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out vol­ume one of “A por­trai­ture of Quak­erism: Tak­en from a view of the edu­ca­tion and dis­ci­pline, social man­ners, civ­il and polit­i­cal econ­o­my, reli­gious prin­ci­ples and char­ac­ter, of the Soci­ety of Friends” by Thomas Clark­son. Yes the 1806 ver­sion, stop the grum­bling. Get out the ribbed pack­ing tape and put its cov­er back togeth­er – this isn’t the frig­ging Library of Con­gress and we’re actu­al­ly going to read this thing. Don’t even waste your time check­ing it out in the meet­ing’s log­book: no one’s pulled it down off the shelf in fifty years and no one’s going to miss it now. Real­ly stuck?, okay Google’s got it too. Class will start shortly.

Talking like a Quaker: does anyone really care about schism anymore?

September 28, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Over on my design blog I’ve just post­ed an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ur­al web pub­lic­i­ty – there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­i­ty. The sites do get vis­it­ed, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cif­ic func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing with­in Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­ment­ed on Johan Mau­r­er’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing’s report on Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuak­er, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larg­er issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuak­er link by a light­heart­ed call for an Inter­na­tion­al Talk Like a Quak­er Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m hap­py to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­i­ty vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tion­al schism? For all my brava­do I’m as much an insti­tu­tion­al Quak­er as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tion­al pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Year­ly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quak­er gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my year­ly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­al­ly pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to year­ly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quak­er pub­lish­er com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­er­al Friends’ most wide­ly read intro­duc­to­ry book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a total­ly made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after pub­li­ca­tion – even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quak­er insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­i­ty to influ­ence the Quak­er cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they real­ly so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­i­ty of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­i­ty? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or camp­ground – fac­tor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tur­al forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quak­er mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?

The Quaker time capsule

September 6, 2007
· Martin Kelley

I’m read­ing Bill Taber’s fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry of Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends called The Eye of Faith. Like any good his­to­ry there’s a lot of the present in there. There’s a strong feel­ing of deja-vu to the scenes of Friends in con­flict and var­i­ous char­ac­ters come to life as much for their foibles as their strength of char­ac­ter (there’s more than a few blog­gers echoed there). I’m now a few years into the sec­ond great sep­a­ra­tion, the Wilburite/Gurneyite split that brewed for years before erupt­ing in 1854.

I’m not one of those Friends who bemoan the var­i­ous schisms. The diver­si­ty of those call­ing them­selves Friends today is so great that it’s hard to imag­ine them ever hav­ing stayed part of the same body. Only a strong author­i­tar­i­an con­trol could have pre­vent­ed the sep­a­ra­tions and even then, large mass­es of the “los­ing” par­ty would have sim­ply left and regrouped else­where: the only real dif­fer­ence is that one par­ty stops using the Quak­er name. Here in South Jer­sey, where the only Gur­neyite meet­ing was­n’t rec­og­nized by either Philadel­phia year­ly meet­ing for almost a hun­dred years, we’ve got dozens of Methodist “meet­ing hous­es” with grave­yards full of old Quak­er fam­i­ly names. Fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ries could be writ­ten of Friends who did­n’t both­er to squab­ble over meet­ing­house deeds and sim­ply decid­ed to con­gre­gate under anoth­er banner.

One con­cept I’m chew­ing on is that of the “rem­nant.” As I under­stand it, the doc­trine comes large­ly from Rev­e­la­tion 12 and is used by small theologically-conservative Chris­t­ian sects to explain why their small size isn’t a prob­lem; it’s kind of like Mom say­ing it’s bet­ter to do the right thing than to be pop­u­lar. When the rem­nant com­mu­ni­ty is a rel­a­tive­ly iso­lat­ed locale like Bar­nesville, there’s also the image of the Land That Time For­got, the place where the old time ways has come down to us most ful­ly intact. There’s truth to the pre­serv­ing pow­er of iso­la­tion: lin­guists claim the Ozark hill­bil­ly accent most clear­ly mir­rors Shake­speare’s. But Ohio Friends aren’t sim­ply Jed Clam­pet­t’s Quak­er cousins.

Like most rur­al Quak­er year­ly meet­ings, Ohio Year­ly Meet­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive has lost much of its mem­ber­ship over the last hun­dred years. I don’t have sta­tis­tics but it seems as if a good per­cent­age of the active mem­bers of the year­ly meet­ing hail from out­side south­east­ern Ohio and a great many are con­vinced Friends. This echoes the most sig­nif­i­cant change in U.S. Quak­erism in the past fifty years: the shift from a self-perpetuating com­mu­ni­ty with strong local cus­toms and an almost eth­nic sense of self, to a soci­ety of con­vinced believers.

The keen sense of self-sufficiency and iso­la­tion that held togeth­er tight-knit Quak­er com­mu­ni­ties over the cen­turies are large­ly non-sustainable now. In our media-saturated lives even Bar­nesville teens can get the lat­est Hol­ly­wood gos­sip and New York fash­ions in real time. Yes it’s pos­si­ble to ban the TV and live as a media her­mit in a com­mune some­where, but even that only gets you so far. Once upon a time, not so long ago, a Friend could sit­u­ate them­selves in the wider Quak­er uni­verse sim­ply by com­par­ing fam­i­ly trees and school ties but that’s becom­ing less impor­tant all the time. For those of us who enter into the Soci­ety of Friends as adults – majori­ties in many year­ly meet­ings now – there’s a sense of choice, of don­ning the clothes. We play at being Quak­er until voila!, some mys­ti­cal alchem­i­cal process hap­pens and we iden­ti­fy as Quak­er – even if we’re not always quite so made-over into Quak­er­ness as we imag­ine ourselves. 

At the Ohio ses­sions a few Friends real­ly loved Wess Daniel’s state­ment that “A tra­di­tion that los­es the abil­i­ty to explain itself becomes an emp­ty form” (see his wrap-up post here). One Ohio Friend said he had heard it pos­tu­lat­ed that iso­lat­ed and inward-focused com­mu­ni­ties like Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive were God’s method of pre­serv­ing the old ways against the onslaught of the mod­ernist age (with its mock­ing dis­be­lief) until they could be rein­tro­duced to the wider world in a more for­giv­ing post-modernist era. Looked at that way, Quak­erism isn’t a quaint rel­ic in need of the same botox/bleach blond “NOW!” makeover every oth­er spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tion is get­ting. Think of it instead as a time cap­sule ready to be opened. An inter­est­ing the­o­ry. Are we ready to look at this pecu­liar thing we’ve dug up and reverse-engineer it back into meaningfulness?

Update:

Kirk W. over at Street Cor­ner Soci­ety emailed me that he had recent­ly put the Jour­nal of Ann Bran­son online. She fea­tures heav­i­ly in the mid­dle part of Taber’s book, which is the sto­ry of Con­ser­v­a­tive Ohio find­ing its own iden­ti­ty. Kirk sug­gests, and I agree, that her jour­nal might be con­sid­ered one of the arti­facts of the Ohio time cap­sule. I hope to find some time to read this in the not-too-distant future.

Christian revival among liberal Friends

August 15, 2007
· Martin Kelley

There’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion in the com­ments from my last post about “Con­ver­gent Friends and Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives” and one of the more inter­est­ing comes from a com­menter named Diane. My reply to her got longer and longer and filled with more and more links till it makes more sense to make it its own post. First, Diane’s question:

I don’t know if I’m “con­ver­gent,” (prob­a­bly not) but I have been involved with the emerg­ing church for sev­er­al years and with Quak­erism for a decade. I also am aware of the house church move­ment, but my expe­ri­ence of it is that is is very tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to Quak­erism. I real­ly, real­ly hope and pray that Chris­t­ian revival is com­ing to lib­er­al Friends, but per­son­al­ly I have not seen that phe­nom­e­nom. Where do you see it most? Do you see it more as com­mit­ment to Christ or as more peo­ple being Christ curi­ous, to use Robin’s phrase?

As I wrote recent­ly I think con­ver­gence is more of a trend than an iden­ti­ty and I’m not sure whether it makes sense to fuss about who’s con­ver­gent or not. As with any ques­tion involv­ing lib­er­al Friends, whether there’s “Chris­t­ian revival” going on depends on what what you mean by the term. I think more lib­er­al Friends have become com­fort­able label­ing them­selves as Christ curi­ous; it has become more accept­able to iden­ti­fy as Chris­t­ian than it was a decade or two ago; a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of younger Friends are very recep­tive to Chris­t­ian mes­sages, the Bible and tra­di­tion­al Quak­er tes­ti­monies than they were.

These are indi­vid­ual respons­es, how­ev­er. Turn­ing to col­lec­tive Quak­er bod­ies there are few if any beliefs or prac­tices left that lib­er­al Friends would­n’t allow under the Quak­er ban­ner if they came wrapped in Quak­erese from a well-connected Friend; the social tes­ti­monies stand in as the uni­fy­ing agent; it’s still con­sid­ered an argu­ment stop­per to say that any prof­fered def­i­n­i­tion would exclude someone.

I’d argue that lib­er­al Quak­erism is becom­ing ever more lib­er­al (and less dis­tinc­tive­ly Quak­er) at the same time that many of those in influ­ence are becom­ing more Chris­t­ian. It’s a very pro­scribed Chris­tian­i­ty: cod­ed, ten­ta­tive and most of all indi­vid­u­al­is­tic. It’s okay for a lib­er­al Friend to believe what­ev­er they want to believe as long as they don’t believe too much. Whether the qui­et influ­ence of the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of conservative-friendly lead­er­ship is enough to hold a Quak­er cen­ter in the cen­trifuge that is lib­er­al Quak­erism is the $60,000 ques­tion. I think the lead­er­ship has an inflat­ed sense of its own influ­ence but I’m watch­ing the exper­i­ment. I wish it well but I’m skep­ti­cal and wor­ry that it’s built on sand.

Some of the Christ-curious lib­er­al Friends are form­ing small wor­ship groups and some of these are seek­ing out recog­ni­tion from Con­ser­v­a­tive bod­ies. It’s an aching­ly small move­ment but it shows a desire to be cor­po­rate­ly Quak­er and not just indi­vid­u­al­is­ti­cal­ly Quak­er. With the inter­net tra­di­tion­al Quak­er view­points are only a Google search away; sites like Bill Samuel’s “Quakerinfo.com”:www.quakerinfo.com and blogs like Mar­shall Massey’s are break­ing down stereo­types and doing a lot of invalu­able edu­cat­ing (and I could name a lot more). It’s pos­si­ble to imag­ine all this cook­ing down to a third wave of tra­di­tion­al­ist renew­al. Ohio Year­ly Meeting-led ini­tia­tives like the Chris­t­ian Friends Con­fer­ence and All Con­ser­v­a­tive Gath­er­ings are steps in the right direc­tion but any real change is going to have to pull togeth­er mul­ti­ple trends, one of which might or might not be Convergence.

Our role in this future is not to be strate­gists play­ing Quak­er pol­i­tics but ser­vants ready to lay down our iden­ti­ties and pre­con­cep­tions to fol­low the prompt­ings of the Inward Christ into what­ev­er ter­ri­to­ry we’re called to:

From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his dis­ci­ples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suf­fer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, say­ing, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his dis­ci­ples, If any man will come after me, let him deny him­self, and take up his cross, and fol­low me. Matthew 16:21 – 28.

Convergent Friends, a long definition

July 25, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Robin M posts this week about two Con­ver­gent Events hap­pen­ing in Cal­i­for­nia in the next month or two. And she also tries out a sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion of Con­ver­gent Friends:

peo­ple who are engaged in the renew­al move­ment with­in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, across all the branch­es of Friends.

It sounds good but what does it mean? Specif­i­cal­ly: who isn’t for renew­al, at least on a the­o­ret­i­cal lev­el? There are lots of faith­ful, smart and lov­ing Friends out there advo­cat­ing renew­al who don’t fit my def­i­n­i­tion of Con­ver­gent (which is fine, I don’t think the whole RSoF should be Con­ver­gent, it’s a move­ment in the riv­er, not a dam).

When Robin coined the term at the start of 2006 it seemed to refer to gen­er­al trends in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends and the larg­er Chris­t­ian world, but it was also refer­ring to a spe­cif­ic (online) com­mu­ni­ty that had had a year or two of con­ver­sa­tion to shape itself and mod­el trust and account­abil­i­ty. Most impor­tant­ly we each were going out of our way to engage with Friends from oth­er Quak­er tra­di­tions and were each called on our own cul­tur­al assumptions.
The coined term implied an expe­ri­ence of sort. “Con­ver­gent” explic­it­ly ref­er­ences Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends (“Con-”) and the Emer­gent Church move­ment (“-ver­gent”). It seems to me like one needs to look at those two phe­nom­e­non and their rela­tion to one’s own under­stand­ing and expe­ri­ence of Quak­er life and com­mu­ni­ty before real­ly under­stand­ing what all the fuss has been about. That’s hap­pen­ing lots of places and it is not sim­ply a blog phenomenon.

Nowa­days I’m notic­ing a lot of Friends declar­ing them­selves Con­ver­gent after read­ing a blog post or two or attend­ing a work­shop. It’s becom­ing the term du jour for Friends who want to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves from business-as-usual, Quakerism-as-usual. This fits Robin’s sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion. But if that’s all it is and it becomes all-inclusive for inclu­siv­i­ty’s sake, then “Con­ver­gent” will drift away away from the roots of the con­ver­sa­tion that spawned it and turn into anoth­er buzz­word for “lib­er­al Quak­er.” This is start­ing to happen.

The term “Con­ver­gent Friends” is being picked up by Friends out­side the dozen or two blogs that spawned it and mov­ing into the wild – that’s great, but also means it’s def­i­n­i­tion is becom­ing a mov­ing tar­get. Peo­ple are grab­bing onto it to sum up their dreams, visions and frus­tra­tions but we’re almost cer­tain­ly not mean­ing the same thing by it. “Con­ver­gent Friends” implies that we’ve all arrived some­where togeth­er. I’ve often won­dered whether we should­n’t be talk­ing about “Con­verg­ing Friends,” a term that implies a par­al­lel set of move­ments and puts the rather impor­tant ele­phant square on the table: con­verg­ing toward what? What we mean by con­ver­gence depends on our start­ing point. My attempt at a label was the rather clunky conservative-leaning lib­er­al Friend, which is prob­a­bly what most of us in the lib­er­al Quak­er tra­di­tion are mean­ing by “Con­ver­gent.”

I start­ed map­ping out a lib­er­al plan for Con­ver­gent Friends a cou­ple of years before the term was coined and it still sum­ma­rizes many of my hopes and con­cerns. The only thing I might add now is a para­graph about how we’ll have to work both inside and out­side of nor­mal Quak­er chan­nels to effect this change (Johan Mau­r­er recent­ly wrote an inter­est­ing post that includ­ed the won­der­ful descrip­tion of “the love­ly sub­ver­sives who ignore struc­tures and com­mu­ni­cate on a pure­ly per­son­al basis between the camps via blogs, vis­i­ta­tion, and oth­er means” and com­pared us to SCUBA divers (“ScubaQuake​.org” anyone?).

Robin’s inclu­sive def­i­n­i­tion of “renew­al” def­i­nite­ly speaks to some­thing. Infor­mal renew­al net­works are spring­ing up all over North Amer­i­ca. Many branch­es of Friends are involved. There are themes I’m see­ing in lots of these places: a strong youth or next-generation focus; a reliance on the inter­net; a curios­i­ty about “oth­er” Friends tra­di­tions; a desire to get back to roots in the sim­ple min­istry of Jesus. What­ev­er label or labels this new revival might take on is less impor­tant than the Spir­it behind it.

But is every hope for renew­al “Con­ver­gent”? I don’t think so. At the end of the day the path for us is nar­row and is giv­en, not cho­sen. At the end of day — and begin­ning and mid­dle — the work is to fol­low the Holy Spir­it’s guid­ance in “real time.” Def­i­n­i­tions and care­ful­ly select­ed words slough away as mere notions. The newest mes­sage is just the old­est mes­sage repack­aged. Let’s not get too caught up in our own hip verbage, lec­ture invi­ta­tions and glo­ri­ous atten­tion that we for­get that there there is one, even Christ Jesus who can speak to our con­di­tion, that He Him­self has come to teach, and that our mes­sage is to share the good news he’s giv­en us. The Tempter is ready to dis­tract us, to puff us up so we think we are the mes­sage, that we own the mes­sage, or that the mes­sage depends on our flow­ery words deliv­ered from podi­ums. We must stay on guard, hum­bled, low and pray­ing to be kept from the temp­ta­tions that sur­round even the most well-meaning renew­al attempts. It is our faith­ful­ness to the free gospel min­istry that will ulti­mate­ly deter­mine the fate of our work.

Two Years of the Quaker Ranter and Quaker Blogs

October 10, 2005
· Martin Kelley

An amaz­ing thing has hap­pened in the last two years: we’ve got Friends from the cor­ners of Quak­erism shar­ing our sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences, our frus­tra­tions and dreams through Quak­er blogs. Dis­en­chant­ed Friends who have longed for deep­er con­ver­sa­tion and con­so­la­tion when things are hard at their local meet­ing have built a net­work of Friends who under­stand. When our gen­er­a­tion is set­tling down to write our mem­oirs — our Quak­er jour­nals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chap­ter about becom­ing involved in the Quak­er blog­ging community.

Image4
My per­son­al site before and after it became “Quak­er Ranter.”

When I signed off on my last post, I promised I would con­tin­ue with some­thing on “blogs, min­istry and lib­er­al Quak­er out­reach.” Here’s the first of the follow-ups.

As I set­tle in to my sec­ond week at my new (and newly-defined) jobs at FGC, I won­der if I be here with­out help of the Quak­er Ranter? I start­ed this blog two sum­mers ago. It was a time when I felt like I might be head­ed toward mem­ber­ship in the lost Quak­er gen­er­a­tion that was the focus of one of my ear­li­est posts. There were a lot of dead-ends in my life. A cou­ple of appli­ca­tions for more seri­ous, respon­si­ble employ­ment with Friends had recent­ly gone nowhere. Life at my month­ly meet­ing was odd (we’ll keep it at that). I felt I was com­ing into a deep­er expe­ri­en­tial knowl­edge of my Quak­erism and per­haps inch­ing toward more overt min­istry but there was no out­let, no sense of how this inward trans­for­ma­tion might fit into any sort of out­ward social form or forum.

Every­where I looked I saw Friends short­com­ing them­selves and our reli­gious soci­ety with a don’t-rock-the-boat timid­i­ty that was­n’t serv­ing God’s pur­pose for us. I saw pre­cious lit­tle prophet­ic min­istry. I knew of few Friends who were ask­ing chal­leng­ing ques­tions about our wor­ship life. Our lan­guage about God was becom­ing ever more cod­ed and ster­il­ized. Most of the twenty-somethings I knew gen­er­al­ly approached Quak­erism pri­mar­i­ly as a series of cul­tur­al norms with only dif­fer­ent stan­dards from one year­ly meet­ing to anoth­er (and one Quak­er branch to anoth­er, I suspect) .
With all this as back­drop, I start­ed the Quak­er Ranter with a nothing-left-to-lose men­tal­i­ty. I was ner­vous about push­ing bound­aries and about broach­ing things pub­licly that most Friends only say in hushed tones of two or three on meet­ing­house steps. I was also dou­bly ner­vous about being a Quak­er employ­ee talk­ing about this stuff (liveli­hood and all that!). The few Quak­er blogs that were out there were gen­er­al­ly blogs by Quak­ers but about any­thing but Quak­erism, pol­i­tics being the most com­mon topic.

Now sure, a lot of this has­n’t changed over these few years. But one thing has: we now have a vibrant com­mu­ni­ty of Quak­er blog­gers. We’ve got folks from the cor­ners of Quak­erism get­ting to know one anoth­er and hash out not just our sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences, but our frus­tra­tions and dreams. It’s so cool. There’s some­thing hap­pen­ing in all this! Dis­en­chant­ed Friends who have longed for deep­er con­ver­sa­tion and con­so­la­tion when things are hard at their local meet­ing are find­ing Friends who understand.

Through the blog and the com­mu­ni­ty that formed around it I’ve found a voice. I’m evolv­ing, cer­tain­ly, through read­ing, life, blog con­ver­sa­tions and most impor­tant­ly (I hope!) the act­ing of the Holy Spir­it on my ever-resistant ego. But because of my blog I’m some­one who now feels com­fort­able talk­ing about what it means to be a Quak­er in a pub­lic set­ting. It almost seems quaint to think back to the ear­ly blog con­ver­sa­tions about whether we can call this a kind of min­istry. When we’re all set­tling down to write our mem­oirs — our Quak­er jour­nals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chap­ter about becom­ing involved in the Quak­er blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty. In Howard Brin­ton’s Quak­er Jour­nals he enu­mer­at­ed the steps toward growth in the min­istry that most of the writ­ers seemed to go through; I sus­pect the jour­nals of our gen­er­a­tion will add self-published elec­tron­ic media to it’s list of clas­sic steps.

When I start­ed Quak­er Ranter I did have to won­der if this might be a quick­est way to get fired. Not to cast asper­sions on the powers-that-be at FGC but the web is full of cau­tion­ary tales of peo­ple being canned because of too-public blogs. My only con­so­la­tion was the sense that no one that mat­tered real­ly read the thing. But as it became more promi­nent a curi­ous phe­nom­e­non hap­pened: even Quak­er staff and uber-insiders seemed to be relat­ing to this con­ver­sa­tion and want­ed a place to com­plain and dream about Quak­erism. My per­son­al rep­u­ta­tion has cer­tain­ly gone up because of this site, direct­ly and indi­rect­ly because of the blog. This brings with it the snares of pop­u­lar praise (itself a well-worn theme in Quak­er jour­nals) but it also made it more like­ly I would be con­sid­ered for my new out­reach job. It’s fun­ny how life works.
Okay, that’s enough for a post. I’ll have to keep out­reach till next time. But bear with me: it’s about form too and how form con­tributes to ministry.

PS: Talk­ing of two years of Quak­er blog­ging… My “Non​vi​o​lence​.org turns ten years old this Thurs­day!! I thought about mak­ing a big deal about it but alas there’s so lit­tle time.

Twenty First Century traveling ministry: of uberQuakers, selfish Friends and the search for unity

July 28, 2005
· Martin Kelley

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Short­ly after fin­ish­ing my sec­ond year at Guil­ford Col­lege, I set out to under­stand what brought me there. Dur­ing the stress­ful process of decid­ing which col­lege to attend, I felt a strong but slight­ly mys­te­ri­ous urge to explore Quak­erism in my under­grad­u­ate years. Two years lat­er, this same urge led me to buy a motor­cy­cle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spir­i­tu­al jour­ney up the East­ern seaboard vis­it­ing Quak­er meet­ings. While Guil­ford had excit­ed and even irri­tat­ed my curios­i­ty about the work­ings of Quak­erism, I knew lit­tle about how Quak­ers were over a large area of the coun­try. I want­ed to find out how Quak­ers worked as a group across a wide area of the coun­try, and if I could learn how to be a leader with­in that community.

July 26th, 2005: Clarence and Lilly Pickett Fund project report

The Transport: Evan Welkin as he came through South Jersey.

Traveling by many horses

The Route: I visited roughly 29 meetings houses and Quaker places of worship on my trip and met with groups from 15 of them. In a couple of instances, I only met with individuals from various meetings. (Click on map for larger image).

evanmap

The pur­pose of my trip as out­lined by my let­ter of intro­duc­tion was:

“…the devel­op­ment of con­struc­tive and enrich­ing spir­i­tu­al dia­logue between all branch­es of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. I plan to trav­el from South to North, speak­ing with meet­ings about how (or whether) they feel their region­al cul­ture affects their the­o­log­i­cal beliefs with the intent of gain­ing a greater under­stand­ing of the ‘spir­i­tu­al state’ of indi­vid­ual meetings.“

I was very com­mit­ted to keep­ing this vision open-ended in order to iden­ti­fy com­mon threads with­in con­ver­sa­tions I would have with Friends. I hoped in the dis­cus­sions I might iden­ti­fy whether there was some aspect of “region­al fla­vor” to a Quak­er meet­ing in South Car­oli­na ver­sus one in New Jer­sey, for exam­ple. I hoped to iden­ti­fy what these dif­fer­ences might be and some­how look for a com­mon Quak­er thread that ran beneath them I could address with all Friends. In addi­tion, I planned to take pic­tures of meet­ing­hous­es along the way to see if what peo­ple said about their meet­ings was at all reflect­ed in their meet­ing­house archi­tec­ture. In all hon­esty, how­ev­er, I was most inter­est­ed in sim­ply gain­ing a greater under­stand­ing of how Quak­erism is prac­ticed over a very large area of the US. As a Quak­er myself, I want­ed to know what it meant to tru­ly own up to and under­stand this part of my iden­ti­ty and to strength­en my spir­i­tu­al being and hope­ful­ly inspire others.

My ini­tial plans for this project were to pur­chase a motor­cy­cle, learn to ride it and dri­ve from Key West in Flori­da to Maine vis­it­ing Quak­ers along the way. I want­ed to stay near the coast, if for no oth­er rea­son than to have some kind of geo­graph­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity from the Atlantic to ground me along my way. The actu­al imple­men­ta­tion of my plan dif­fered slight­ly in it’s phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion, but I still found it to be a spir­i­tu­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­leng­ing endeav­or. I trav­eled along the route indi­cat­ed on the attached map, cov­er­ing rough­ly 4,200 miles over the course of the trip. I began in Greens­boro, North Car­oli­na and trav­eled south to St. Peters­burg, Flori­da. From St. Peters­burg, I trav­eled all the way along the East­ern Seaboard more or less to New York City. From there, I returned to the South by way of Greens­boro to fin­ish in Nashville Tennessee.

The prepa­ra­tion for my project was sig­nif­i­cant, most notably in respect to my trans­porta­tion. Before my deci­sion to take on this project, I had only once rid­den a motor­cy­cle, and my hazy mem­o­ry of the occa­sion makes me think it was just a brief ride on the back. Pur­chas­ing, insur­ing, licens­ing and learn­ing how to dri­ve a motor­cy­cle was a very involved under­tak­ing that required a con­sid­er­able amount of com­mit­ment to over­com­ing my fear. The process helped me become men­tal­ly pre­pared for the trip, though, by test­ing my phys­i­cal self so great­ly. In addi­tion, I wrote to over 50 Quak­er meet­ings all along the East coast intro­duc­ing myself and ask­ing them to con­sid­er meet­ing with me. As meet­ings respond­ed, I gave them an idea of when I might be in their area and we set up ten­ta­tive vis­it­ing dates. The pur­pose of the trip as out­lined in that let­ter changed over the course of my project, but I will return to that. In addi­tion to these two most time-consuming aspects of my project, there were quite a num­ber of oth­er small­er details to be tak­en care of that are inher­ent to any major trav­el. Pur­chas­ing gear, tun­ing up and prepar­ing my motor­cy­cle for long dis­tance tour­ing, dis­cussing details with my home meet­ing about the trip, etc. were some of the oth­er tasks to be com­plet­ed. For the most part, I did all of this alone. While I had Max Carter to help with some of the pre­lim­i­nary envi­sion­ing and last minute con­tact pos­si­bil­i­ties, I took on most every­thing myself. My home meet­ing was far away and could prac­ti­cal­ly offer very lit­tle in terms of coor­di­nat­ing efforts from that dis­tance. I was not sure how to pre­pare for the trip spir­i­tu­al­ly but left with an open heart and a strong com­mit­ment to be as open as possible.
I was pre­sent­ed with quite a num­ber of chal­lenges on my trip, and it appeared that those obsta­cles came either in the form of spir­i­tu­al or prac­ti­cal tri­als along my way. Some of my prac­ti­cal chal­lenges were the theft of my cam­era ear­ly in the trip, the mat­ter of food and lodg­ing and the sheer effort of trav­el­ing over very great dis­tances day after day. The cam­era was sig­nif­i­cant loss because it made the process of gath­er­ing pic­tures for pre­sen­ta­tion much more dif­fi­cult. I had to rely on the poor qual­i­ty and much slow­er pro­cess­ing of a dis­pos­able cam­era for most of my trip. In gen­er­al, I had a sense of who I would stay with city by city along my route, but it was dif­fi­cult to not know any of these peo­ple in advance beyond let­ters and to rely on them so much for their gen­eros­i­ty. I real­ize that this demand­ed quite a degree of flex­i­bil­i­ty both on my part and theirs; this, like my stolen cam­era, helped me learn to adapt and try to be as gra­cious as pos­si­ble. The phys­i­cal strain and men­tal alert­ness I need­ed to trav­el long dis­tances was very tax­ing, result­ing in my deci­sion to not go as far as I had orig­i­nal­ly planned.

A prac­ti­cal issue that did affect the out­come of my project was which meet­ings end­ed up respond­ing to my let­ter of intro­duc­tion. I only received any word back from about half of the meet­ings I wrote to. Of those, I was dis­ap­point­ed that despite the fact I wrote to a large num­ber of Quak­ers both pro­grammed and unpro­grammed, I received a much small­er num­ber of respons­es from pro­grammed meet­ings and of those I did, a num­ber ‘dis­ap­peared’ after the ini­tial con­tact. This may have been entire­ly by chance, but none the less I found my expe­ri­ences with pro­grammed Friends to be dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly enrich­ing for their being so few and I regret­ted their brevi­ty. There­fore, most of my obser­va­tions were among unpro­grammed Friends and I shy away from mak­ing com­par­isons between “unpro­grammed” and “pro­grammed” Friends in this report because I sim­ply didn’t feel like I met with enough unpro­grammed Friends to tell.

In addi­tion, the inter­nal chal­lenge all these prac­ti­cal chal­lenges brought on made it dif­fi­cult to remain spir­i­tu­al­ly cen­tered. Con­stant spir­i­tu­al dis­cus­sion left me strug­gling to be light­heart­ed. I can’t tell if this made my lat­er dis­heart­en­ment with group con­ver­sa­tions greater or whether the dis­cus­sions them­selves dis­heart­ened me. As time went on though, my frus­tra­tions with the dynam­ics I wit­nessed in meet­ings right from the begin­ning of my trip onwards increas­ing­ly affect­ed my open­ness. I relied more and more on a reg­i­ment­ed con­ver­sa­tion for­mat, lim­it­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for spon­tane­ity of spir­it. By the end I felt like a slight­ly strange gen­tle­man who ris­es every week at about the same time in meet­ing for wor­ship with a mes­sage that seems unfor­tu­nate­ly sim­i­lar to the same thing he said the week before.

With the goal of cre­at­ing “enrich­ing spir­i­tu­al dia­logue” so promi­nent­ly placed as my goal for this trip, I spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time fig­ur­ing out what this meant and how it might be achieved. If I were able to cre­ate this dia­logue on my trip, I some­how felt that this would be imme­di­ate­ly ben­e­fi­cial to both Quak­ers and Quak­er insti­tu­tions by cre­at­ing a greater sense of vital­i­ty and uni­ty with­in them. I began to real­ize how sub­jec­tive uni­ty and vital­i­ty are. A dis­tinc­tion I failed to rec­og­nize in my ide­al­ized con­cep­tion was the dif­fer­ence between uni­ty of indi­vid­u­als, such as a good con­ver­sa­tion between myself and a host, and uni­ty of meet­ings, such as a group meet­ing and shar­ing con­ver­sa­tion. As time went on, I began to become frus­trat­ed in group dis­cus­sions and to try to “argue” my inter­pre­ta­tion of uni­ty and vital­i­ty in much the same way I saw oth­er Friends doing. I had hoped Friends them­selves would sug­gest points of uni­ty with­in Quak­erism, but often I just heard folks talk about what they believed in to the exclu­sion of oth­er beliefs. For instance, I asked many meet­ings what they might do as a group if some­one rose in meet­ing and brought a very evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian mes­sage to wor­ship. While at first many spoke about “try­ing to accept that mes­sage” as equal to any oth­er, it seemed that in essence many felt threat­ened by the ques­tion and that I should ask it at all. It seemed that few meet­ings had any estab­lished process of “elder­ing” or hold­ing indi­vid­u­als account­able for the group. I am cer­tain­ly not evan­gel­i­cal nor am I sure I am Chris­t­ian, but I some­how felt accused of being both in these con­ver­sa­tions and there­fore felt less wel­come. There were sev­er­al points on my trip where I strug­gled to find any hope Quak­ers could be lead to unite amongst each oth­er, and it was the dis­tinc­tion between indi­vid­u­als and groups that made all the difference.

Observ­ing group dynam­ics and look­ing for con­ti­nu­ity or uni­ty with­in Friends Meet­ings as a whole along my jour­ney was very hard for me. There were sev­er­al notable excep­tions, but as I fin­ished my trip I found myself ter­ri­bly dis­heart­ened in gen­er­al by much of the group behav­ior I wit­nessed with­in the meet­ings I vis­it­ed. In meet­ings were I felt most suc­cess­ful and use­ful the mem­bers appeared not only to care deeply about each oth­er and the vital­i­ty of their indi­vid­ual meet­ings, but were strong enough to work out­side their own com­mu­ni­ties to engage cor­po­rate­ly in the wider body of Quak­erism and the world at large. They had clear ways of hold­ing indi­vid­u­als account­able to the group as a whole and did so. I did not feel I found this sense in many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed though, how­ev­er briefly, and could not tell how ben­e­fi­cial my vis­it might be to them. I was sur­prised to be so dis­heart­ened after see­ing folks so quick­ly, but often it appeared very obvi­ous­ly in group con­ver­sa­tions full of Friends inter­rupt­ing or con­tra­dict­ing each oth­er or from side com­ments I heard from indi­vid­u­als later.

I strug­gle to write these words because I felt cared for and looked after by folks from all the meet­ings I vis­it­ed, but I still could not help but feel sad when vis­it­ing meet­ings who steadi­ly lost mem­bers, strug­gled to take care of basic busi­ness or suf­fered from inter­nal feuds. Many meet­ings in Flori­da were in the process of build­ing new meet­ing­hous­es, and while the com­mon cause of such a large order of busi­ness seemed to bring them togeth­er, many Friends in these meet­ings expressed con­cern that it was only a tem­po­rary fix. In fair­ness, many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed along the way were in fact wor­ship groups and not ful­ly meet­ings, but rather than this being a step­ping stone to a more estab­lished order, it seemed that many of these wor­ship groups strug­gled to keep the few mem­bers they had and seemed to not feel ter­ri­bly con­nect­ed as a group.

What appeared to be the main caus­es of this dis­uni­ty, how­ev­er, was the unfor­tu­nate fact that it seems many Friends are Quak­er for self­ish rea­sons. I’m sor­ry to say it, but that was my impres­sion of why so many meet­ing groups strug­gle to find an effec­tive group process. In many of the meet­ings I vis­it­ed it appeared that Friends not only expect­ed com­plete accep­tance of their per­son­al spir­i­tu­al path, but also their polit­i­cal, ide­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al ones as well. Like in the case of the evan­gel­i­cal mes­sage ques­tion, it appeared that an evan­gel­i­cal per­son was not sim­ply threat­en­ing to indi­vid­u­als in their spir­i­tu­al beliefs, but also in their inferred polit­i­cal lean­ings and cul­ture. This seemed to show me that the meet­ing was not actu­al­ly for embrac­ing peo­ple in a group atmos­phere as adver­tised but more a cul­tur­al, ide­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal sup­port group for like-minded indi­vid­u­als. “Quak­ers couldn’t be Repub­li­can. I can’t stand Repub­li­cans” . This is where the realm of the indi­vid­ual butted up against the cor­po­rate in my eyes.

The beau­ty of silent wor­ship, as many Friends agreed, was it’s abil­i­ty to speak to so many dif­fer­ent Friend’s con­di­tions while still being such a cru­cial­ly group-centered act. In the ear­ly days of Quak­erism, it appeared that this act of wor­ship was a cor­ner­stone for the con­nec­tion that could be felt between indi­vid­u­als in a group set­ting in busi­ness meet­ing, com­mu­ni­ty din­ners or the world at large. From what I saw on my trip, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion and ful­fill­ment of the indi­vid­ual appears more and more accen­tu­at­ed as Quak­erism pro­gress­es rather than ful­fill­ment of the whole meet­ing. When faced with a con­fus­ing or chaot­ic busi­ness process, for instance, it seems in many cas­es that every per­son wants to revert to the way THEY make deci­sions best as the ide­al way for the group. I would has­ten to add that I did not even attend one busi­ness meet­ing along my trip, and that my con­cern for the issue of busi­ness specif­i­cal­ly comes from many, many direct com­ments from indi­vid­u­als frus­trat­ed by their group’s busi­ness meet­ings. I saw on my own that many Friends have so many dif­fer­ent inter­ests and such com­plete­ly busy lives out­side meet­ing, it appears the most they can do to attend­ed worship.

So per­haps the para­dox of the indi­vid­ual and group with­in a uni­ver­sal spir­it is what Quak­erism can ben­e­fit from explor­ing today. I found my atten­tion so often turned to the great folks I found along my way who spoke direct­ly to my con­di­tion. I met so many incred­i­bly inter­est­ing, thought-provoking, eccen­tric, kind and inspired peo­ple on my trip, I can­not help but be awed and impressed. I cer­tain­ly found a kind of uni­ty between them and myself. While I can­not be sure my actions ben­e­fit­ed Friend meet­ings in total­i­ty, I know that my con­ver­sa­tions with Friends were both inspir­ing to me and the peo­ple I found along the way. I believe I bright­ened some folks’ days and gave them a chance to tell their sto­ries. The faith required to get on the road each day, not know­ing where I would end up by night­fall was awe­some and it stretched me con­sid­er­ably in a way that I think Friends appre­ci­at­ed. I am sure that I will con­tin­ue to be in con­tact with Friends I met along the way and will con­tin­ue to think about these issues with them.

In terms of this trip as a foun­da­tion for Quak­er lead­er­ship, I must say I was a put at a bit of a loss at what that might mean. Some­one men­tioned it might be like “herd­ing cats.” One lead­er­ship role I did see often, which wor­ried me, was that of the “überQuak­ers,” as we at Guil­ford like to call them. It appeared that in many instances, I end­ed up stay­ing with the mem­bers of meet­ings who were the “movers and shak­ers” of their meet­ings for their dogged ded­i­ca­tion to the meet­ing as a whole. Sad­ly, in many instances these folks seemed to bear a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the affairs of their meet­ings, spir­i­tu­al­ly, logis­ti­cal­ly and ener­get­i­cal­ly. They did not resent this role, but it appeared to me that they were rarely con­scious­ly cho­sen for that min­istry by the group but instead had the posi­tion thrust upon them. These folks were com­pli­ment­ed by an unfor­tu­nate­ly large seg­ment of Friends, often plead­ing busy sched­ules, who appeared to be unable to com­mit to the meet­ing beyond the cathar­sis of meet­ing for wor­ship. Part of wit­ness­ing this left me ques­tion­ing my com­mit­ment to Quak­erism by the end of my trip. If this is how Quak­erism works, why should I even both­er devel­op­ing ‘lead­er­ship’ to become an “überQuak­er”? While it may not have burnt out those who I stayed with along the way, why would I pur­pose­ly stick my neck out for the ben­e­fit of the group as a whole when it seems that few oth­ers are actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in any­one but them­selves at the end of the day? It is not that I begrudge self­less­ness by any means, but Quak­erism can­not sur­vive on the self­less­ness of some and depen­dence of many. Or at least it should not in my eyes.

Per­haps what wor­ries me is that with the amount of time and effort I put into this trip, I am already falling into the “überQuak­er” mind­set. “Well, if things aren’t going right I’ll just have to do some­thing myself and decide how they can be fixed.” This is my great fear. This is not the think­ing of a vital, post-authoritarian reli­gious soci­ety. I imag­ine a vital Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty that is full of folks with var­i­ous com­mit­ments, but all with a shared desire not only to come to wor­ship togeth­er but to do busi­ness togeth­er, reach out and make sac­ri­fices to bring in new mem­bers and active­ly take on projects as a meet­ing that all can agree are the Spirit’s will. I would like to see a much greater sense of group inten­tion­al­i­ty, but I know that is not some­thing one indi­vid­ual can force. I have learned that I have a great deal of per­son­al growth to go through before I am ready to con­tribute as I would like to the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. I think in many ways this trip made me feel more inex­pe­ri­enced and appre­hen­sive with Quak­erism but I strive for that place of faith and con­fi­dence. I am begin­ning a book about my expe­ri­ences on this trip, in addi­tion to cre­at­ing a dig­i­tal pre­sen­ta­tion fea­tur­ing the meet­ing­house pic­tures I took.

I wish I could say I knew this trip was God’s will, but the rhetoric with which many peo­ple have invoked God’s name in my life has blurred the lines between spir­i­tu­al sur­ren­der and ego­tis­ti­cal manip­u­la­tion. As one par­tic­u­lar­ly astute Friend put it “As with so much else in life, imple­ment­ing our inten­tions should allow for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being self con­ceit­ed.” Much of what I found along my trip reflect­ed strug­gles with­in oth­ers about the will of God in their lives, some of which start­ed ear­ly in Friend’s lives and some that only began when they took Quak­erism as their own. Iron­i­cal­ly, it appears that the dif­fer­ence I was look­ing for in geo­graph­ic dis­tri­b­u­tion was actu­al­ly sur­pris­ing­ly absent over such a large area. All the Friends I talked to were in some way strug­gling with the issue of how they fit into the larg­er group, a com­mu­ni­ty of the Spir­it and of Quak­er busi­ness. As I sought to find par­al­lels in my con­ver­sa­tions with Friends, I was con­stant­ly remind­ed of the push and pull of the indi­vid­ual will ver­sus the will of the whole. In many Friends eyes, this strug­gle is fun­da­men­tal­ly a dance between the indi­vid­ual and answer­ing to the Spir­it that is with­in us all.

Some Queries I made up for myself along my trip were:

  • How do I remain secure and non-threatened in my own faith to be open to others?
  • What are my blind­ness­es or bias­es from my Quak­er roots?
  • What is self­less­ness and is it ideal?
  • How do I know what is my will and what is the will of God?