We are called to renew our roots as Christians and as Quakers. An Adult Young Friend at FWCC recently asked me what would bring us Friends back together? My reply was, “Christ called us together in the beginning, and Christ will call us back together.”

Keep up the good fight, Martin. I pray for you and other Friends to come together in Love.

May I please write to you off line?

Please send me an e mail.

Thanks

Timothy

I agree with you that we may be guilty as Christians, but I think it has more to do with unfaithfulness and not putting forth a “Quakerism worth believing in.” I think this is largely due to our own compromises and inability to read “the signs of the times.”

Otherwise, I fail to understand why reaction and renewal need to be separate things. In fact, I’d argue one without the other is misguided.

@Timothy: my “agenda,” as you so politely put it, is to share the good news of Christ’s presence and love and guidance, and to share hundreds of years of Quaker/Christian know-how of how to hear and act on it. Everything else is distraction.

I am as sure of the truth of the Society suffering from Friends’ lack of commitment to the transformation of themselves, their meetings and their world as I am about the falseness of renewal through oversight and (external) discipline as ends (remember, there are no means). My study tells me that’s how we got the fractured Society that we have today, with the separate domains whose witness has become a whisper.

I appreciate your call to step outside the current domains, but for what? To set up another? If that is not where you want to be in five years then you are not expressing yourself very clearly. Perhaps I have a log in my ear that causes me to hear much I appreciate from within your movement and yet much that causes me to wonder how, in Gamaliel’s scheme, it will come out.

A radical inclusiveness of the kind that I find expressed in early Friends literature–the kind that Joel and Hannah Bean looked back on–abides in patient humility with that which contends with it. Expressions like “screw them” doesn’t seem consistent with such a faith and practice and that makes it harder for me, as I say, to hear. Perhaps the spirit underlying such a response makes it more difficult for others to hear, as well. Or perhaps you’re not on the right side of Gamaliel’s dichotomy. I don’t know. In the course of time it will be known.

The inclusiveness of which I speak does not see or seek a day in which everyone says the name Jesus/Christ, but, rather, one in which I can say that name as the ground of my faith and the “post Christians” and those otherwise grounded will be accepting of that. The day I see and seek is one in which all the names of God will be included as elaboration on the Light which is, as you know, what Fox, Penn, Woolman and others experienced–the “movement” that, heeded and obeyed, conformed people to it regardless of what forms or theology they claimed.

Right now in the part of the Society in which I find myself planted–never intended to become a domain but rapidly approaching that condition–people do say negative things about Christians–going so far as to rename us, to give us a cute (perhaps less threatening?) pet name–Christo-centric.

No, of course that’s not right. It’s a name imposed on us (sometimes from within our own number and perhaps even starting there) to remind us that we are not the only geese on the lawn.

The negative comments about the Christian church will stop, I think, at some point after those of us who are Christians stop making negative–or at best conditional or qualified or oh, so tolerant positive–remarks about other people’s spirituality. We may accept the reality of other geese but we are making the biggest mess on the lawn. We bring on the reaction we find so painful.

“How does it feel?” goes the old song.

As you look outward–while not advising folks to leave their meetings (yet?)–I entreat you to look inward; both at the husk you apparently consider your meeting to be and at yourself. When asked why he did not leave his yearly meeting after it was converted from his beloved Orthodox faith and practice to that of American Protestantism, Joel Bean responded:

“I was directed to His own perfect example. He never separated Himself from His people in all their opposition and enmity toward Him. He did not disown the Church of His Birthright, though it disowned Him.” (letter to R. H. Thomas, 2nd Month 8, 1899)

Godspeed, Martin.

Don’t let it wear you down. God has great work for you to do.

Here’s more info on Convergent October — http://snurl.com/3qe04 [convergentfriends_org]

In Christian Friendship,

Laura