A few weeks ago I had a freelance writing job reporting on the discussions in two breakout sessions at a conference for leaders of Jewish camps. The two sessions I covered were titled Connecting Camp to College and Beyond and Keeping Up with the Changing Face of the Jewish World. In both sessions, the attendees were preoccupied with the process by which young people form their religious identities and with the problem of how to serve young people in that process when their young people don’t care a hoot about the institutions and traditions that sponsor and support their camps. I could have been listening to a discussion at a Quaker yearly meeting or conference center—the same heartfelt concerns, the same conflicts and confusion in the face of forces both within their institutions and their traditions and in the wider world, that are hard to understand and even harder to deal with creatively.

Just a couple of weeks later, I had a long conversation with my younger son, who is 38, has a young family, and was raised Quaker. For many years, he and his brother went to New York Yearly Meeting sessions and its Junior Yearly Meeting program and to the youth programs at the Yearly Meeting’s conference center, Powell House. They loved it. In fact, it was their love of NYYM sessions that brought me into Quakerism. They both self-identify as Quakers. Neither one attends meeting or participates in Quaker institutional life, which they find boring and irrelevant to their lives. Specifically, Adam mentioned meetings for worship in which the same blowhards could be expected to say the same things week in and week out and meetings for business obsessed with process and with trivial concerns, while the world around them burned.

Adam exemplifies the issues with which both Quakers and those Jewish camp leaders are struggling:

• young people who are forming personal and spiritual identities seemingly independently of their religious traditions, and often in reaction to those traditions;
• who have formed very strong bonds with their peers in the bosom of religious institutions, and with those peers, have been exploring what their spirituality is, having rejected the identities offered to them by those very institutions;
• who, under the circumstances, are cobbling together spiritual identities with elements pulled from here and there, using whatever beliefs, ideas and practices they’ve come across more or less accidentally in their journeys so far;
• who clearly embrace “spirituality” and often clearly reject “religion”;
• young adults who feel disconnected from their original religious homes for lots of reasons, many of these reasons merely a result of their life circumstances, and who are drifting farther away from their religious homes the older they get;
• and young adults with young families who want to raise their kids in a community that is at least values-based if not religious, who I think trust Friends meetings to do right by their children in this regard (since it did right by them), but who find that meeting does little to nurture them as adults.
• Meanwhile, they call themselves Quakers—at least they do so selectively, when it seems to properly identify them in a given situation—but they aren’t actually being Quakers in community.

I felt very similar things about the Lutheran church that I grew up in. I left the Lutherans mainly for two reasons: most of the parishioners (including my father) supported the war in Vietnam; but more importantly, I didn’t know a single person in that church who was having the kind of transforming religious experience for which I yearned. Well, there was one: Pastor Harmony, the associate pastor, who was, fittingly, our organist and choir director. He was an uninspired sermonizer, quiet and uncharismatic, unlike our main pastor. But he loved Bach. He was really getting off on those Bach preludes.  And he described to me mystical experiences that, at the time, I didn’t fully understand, but I knew that something real had happened to him.

I think that’s what’s behind our young people’s dissatisfaction. The adult Quakers around them are just going through the Quaker motions and those motions are not visibly getting them off. They don’t see anybody having profound religious experience as Quakers. They want something more, something real and relevant.

A big part of the relevance problem is the relative inexperience of youth. When you’ve never owned property, or managed a large, complex budget, or had employees, or tried to organize the collective life of a community, especially without the help of professional staff, then the business of all that management holds no interest. But this does not account for the glaring lack of items on the business agenda that address the woes of the world. Often the best that it gets is a too-long and often whacky and belabored discussion that finally leads to a minute—just a minute, words on a piece of paper that are lost to memory by the next business meeting.

More problematic, though, is the apparent lack of genuine religious experience, especially when the history of Friends is so full of such experience—George Fox having visions, John Woolman working against slavery, Elizabeth Fry in the prisons, the emotional depths of Thomas Kelly. Our kids hear these stories and then wonder what happened. Why isn’t the same thing happening today?

Why are so few meetings being gathered in the Spirit with enough frequency, in ways that are truly palpable, that would demonstrate to our young people that this tradition is still alive with that Spirit? (Maybe it isn’t.) Why are those among us who are prophetically led so few and so invisible that our young people don’t know about them? Why do we so consistently resist prophetic leadings among us?

Meanwhile, I think the Holy Spirit may just be moving among our young people—or about to be. The Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the fervor and anger evinced when Philadelphia Yearly Meeting cut its Young Adult Friends staff position, the tiny bit of buzz that reaches my aged ears here on the periphery of our youth community—I believe these events and trends suggest that something is happening, or is trying to happen, anyway, among the young people of the world, including our own.

Will our young people, who are putting together spiritual identities that they call Quaker, but which don’t look like anything we elders would call Quaker, bring those gifts back to us? Or will they split, like I did, and try to figure it out on their own? Will young adult Friends give birth to a movement for renewal, as young adult Friends have done so many times before in our history? And if they do, will we resist it or nurture it? Will we recognize and welcome spiritual identities that they’ve cobbled together from here and there (just like many of us did), even though none of it reflects the Quaker tradition? Does our tradition have anything to offer them that would work for them?

We will resist whatever they do, of that I’m certain. We have every other time in our history that young people have tried to move us in a new direction. But some of us might try to nurture it, as well. And in the past, we often have finally said “yes” to God’s new direction.

In the meantime, in anticipation of the rising of the Spirit, we have work to do. First, we have to listen and keep our eyes open. We have to go beyond the anguished insistence that, yes, young people are the future of Quakerism and we do love you, claims that are both empty and lame when nothing else happens. I’m not talking, necessarily, about restoring funding to YAF staff positions or other purely institutional responses. The institutions themselves are the problem here. I am talking about the kind of openness to leadings that we bring (theoretically) to meeting for worship, brought in humble attention to our young people, to their lives and words, to their yearnings and their anger and disappointment.

Second, we must experiment. We must open ourselves to new forms of Quaker faith and practice, if only to keep ourselves nimble and in the habit of entertaining new ideas. This means challenging ourselves, forcing ourselves to let things go. Can we focus specifically on the things that turn young people off and try to do something about them? About blowhards, for instance, or boring business agendas?

Third, and most important, I think, we need to learn, explore, teach and practice techniques for deepening our spiritual and religious lives. I would start with Richard Foster’s A Celebration of Discipline and start playing with Quaker versions of all of the disciplines he discusses. I would focus especially on meditation and fasting, two disciplines that, for thousands of years, have reliably led to genuine religious experience. Specifically, I would start with centering prayer: make sure every meeting and every member and attender knows how to do it (it could not be simpler) and has had a chance to experience it. We already know these things work. Just sitting quietly in a meetinghouse once a week doesn’t seem to deliver spiritual experience that is transforming enough often enough to convince our young people.  Or to attract many newcomers, for that matter.

And how could it? Attend meeting just one hour a week and then pepper that hour with a blowhard or two, and your chances of meeting God are pretty slim.

Now an awful lot of Friends do not “believe” in a “God” you could “meet.” Many Friends have drastically lowered the bar for what constitutes “religious experience.” One only needs to listen to the vocal ministry in our meetings: messages that are simply personal, heartfelt, and uplifting qualify as “religious experience.” Very heartfelt and uplifting messages are as good as it gets. The warmth of shared community is evidence enough of the Light.

Don’t get me wrong. This is great stuff and absolutely necessary for healthy religious community. But comfortable sharing amongst ourselves will not bring religious renewal to the Quaker movement. And we’ve already taught our kids how to do it. They have sharing down solid. Do we have anything else to teach? And, more importantly, are we ourselves teachable, if the Holy Spirit should light a fire among them? I am praying that it does, and I am praying that we are.

Tagged: spiritual renewal, Young Adult Friends, young friends

 “Where are Quakers with the insistent question of homosexuality?”  Are we welcoming and affirming? Or do we proclaim homosexuality a sin, asking that those with the ‘affliction’ renounce their desires?

I asked these questions in early April seeking responses from Friends in various Yearly Meetings across the United States.  I’m grateful for the many responses that came back.  I didn’t hear from every Yearly Meeting, but I heard from enough to begin to see the pattern – and that pattern is both expected and unexpected. 

“Of course we are divided,” I said in that original post, and indeed we are.  In a nutshell, FUM and Evangelical Friends are firm that homosexuality is a sin.  FGC Friends are mostly welcoming and affirming of LGBTQ folk and willing to marry same-sex, loving couples. Conservative Friends are also inclined to be welcoming and affirming. 

You can find all the responses I received in the comments to the original blog post posing the question: www.quakerquaker.org/profiles/blogs/homosexuality-among-frie.... 

The issue remains difficult in many parts of Quakerdom.  Some FGC Yearly Meetings are still fermenting on the question, some Monthly Meetings more resolved than others.  FUM and Evangelical Friends largely consider the matter settled for all time despite rumblings of disagreement from some individuals, perhaps a growing number.  A few Yearly Meetings are worshipfully seeking unity on the matter, for example Ohio YM (Conservative).  Probably a larger number are not considering the matter either because they want the issue to stay settled as it is or because they are weary of talking about it. 

 The unexpected part of the pattern for me was the posture of Conservative Friends.  One respondent wrote, “I just heard from someone on QuakerQuaker who indicated that Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) and North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative) are for the most part welcoming to gay Friends and same sex marriage. So might it be that unprogrammed worship might be the common denominator that permits the Spirit to flow more freely without artificial constraints, and is more conducive to progressive revelation - whether the tradition is conservative or liberal.” 

 Perhaps, but I don’t think so.  I think the key to the pattern has to do with how Friends view the Bible. Evangelical Friends (virtually all) and FUM Friends (many) take the Bible not only seriously but as the inerrant word of God.  Because there are a few texts in the Bible that appear to view homosexuality as a sin, that’s the end of the matter.  Many FGC Friends have wandered away from the Bible, and so do not feel that constraint.  They are led as worship together has taken them.

 Conservative Friends are worshipfully attentive to the Bible but do not take it as the Last Word.  Here is the Iowa YM (Conservative) Faith and Practice on Continuing Revelation:  “Truth does not change but individual and corporate perception does.  Friends acknowledge that Understanding of Truth may change through careful attention to the leading of the Holy Spirit.  Truth is revealed continuously if gradually through the living link with God in a person’s heart.  Careful discernment and testing of leadings help guard against lightly discarding long‐held understandings of Truth or being distracted by fanciful “notions.” Though the Bible includes words of God¨ it is not the entire Word of God.  It can be understood through revelation of the Spirit, thoughtful study, and reflection.” (The Faith and Practice disciplines of Conservative Friends in North Carolina and Iowa say similar things.)

 The posture of Conservative Friends toward the Bible, taking it as worthy of faithful, continuing study but not taking it as the inerrant or final word, opens the door to seeing that homosexuality is no sin. 

 I’ve written a piece for Friends Journal entitled 

Homosexuality: A Plea to Read the Bible Together.  I believe Friends will find unity difficult to find, on this and many other matters, if we do not read and value the Bible together, taking the Bible as having spiritual weight with us in the manner that Conservative Friends affirm, AND also welcoming further guidance from the Holy Spirit – recognizing the yeast in Continuing Revelation.  

Some might find this an odd title for a blog post, perhaps thinking it is a tautologous question, like ‘Why am I a Quaker Quaker?’ But as it happens, some people are wondering whether one can be a Christian and a Quaker, especially within a liberal Yearly Meeting in 2012. In attempting an answer, I offer my own experience of what I feel it means to be a Christian Quaker.

This blog post grew out of a discussion on Facebook where a Friend challenged me, questioning what I meant by being a Christian Quaker. In the discussion which followed, a Friend proposed a dilemma for Christian Quakers: it looks like being a Christian and a Quaker either involves a diluted, trivial sense of ‘Christian’, or committing oneself to a demanding package of beliefs which could well be incompatible with contemporary liberal Quakerism. I suggest that this dichotomy is false. One can be a Christian in a substantial sense, while being at home within contemporary liberal Quakerism.

But before I get too far down the road, I want to make an important caveat about statements of faith and doctrine: they’re not the main issue. What is important is a transformative, living experience of God in one’s life. Here I agree with a recent blog post from Nate Macy:

‘I don’t remember the early church having statement of faith background checks before they let people do ministry. The qualification seemed to be, “is the Spirit at work in your life?’

This Friend speaks my mind!

So we should focus on our experience of the Spirit, not the complexities of doctrine and theology. But in writing this post, I do feel led to be fairly specific about my beliefs and experience, in the hope that this might clarify where I am coming from, and respond to the false dichotomy I mentioned in my introduction. I prefer ‘experience’ to ‘belief’, since my spiritual journey has been much more about experiencing God and the Inward Christ in my heart, rather than an intellectual process of assenting to propositions. This seems an odd position for an analytic philosopher to be in. I have tried to make sense of it on this blog before.

So, first of all, what is my experience of God and Christ? I blogged about this several years ago. So I won’t rewrite that piece in its entirety. In summary, my primary experience of God is through a real, present, inward Christ. I experience this saving grace in my life and am thankful for it. Christ is the most meaningful aspect of God for me, because he became human, suffered and died for us. Experiencing God through Christ helps me understand that God is loving, tender and graceful. I don’t feel that it is important to get into a complex debate about trinitarianism vs. unitarianism. For me, the key point is that the Spirit of Christ is real, present, and is available to all of us. By attending to the Spirit of Christ we can access grace, insight and strength which takes us beyond our human capacity. Also, we don’t need to have read or heard the Bible story to access this Spirit of Christ.

Where does my experience and understanding of God and Christ come from? Is God only in the Bible? In my experience, inward, immediate revelation comes directly from the Spirit. The Bible is useful, but is not the primary source. In this I follow Robert Barclay. He points out that:

• The Bible itself doesn’t claim to be the primary source
• The Bible is a divinely-inspired human endeavour, so not perfect
• The Bible was inspired by the Spirit, which we can also access directly

So there is no need to place the Bible above the Spirit as a source of guidance from God. ‘The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life’ (2 Corinthians 3). Drawing on Barclay again, I agree with his distinction between ‘mystery’ and ‘history’. Barclay says we are moved primarily by the mystery of the Spirit; the history as told in the Bible is important but secondary. If we profess the history but have no experience of the mystery, Barclay says, we are not Christians.

What do I understand by sin and redemption? I see sin as doing things which make us distance ourselves from God. Lots of human activity, trivial and serious, can block us from experiencing God. So sometimes we have to work hard to stay on the right track. But this isn’t our work alone: we rely on the grace of Christ to help us find the right path. So it’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that our human experience and capacity is insufficient to follow God’s path – we can, and do, get it wrong. The good news is that help is at hand. The especially good news is that this help is unconditional and universal. Wherever we are at, Christ is ready to meet us.

Like all Quakers, I believe we are all ministers: we don’t need a separate priesthood to access the Spirit. Also, we are all capable of speaking God’s truth to one another. I agree with the quote from Nate above, that the key question for ministers is: ‘is the Spirit at work in your life?’ I have experienced powerful ministry from Friends who have prayerfully prepared, searched their hearts and ministered from the Bible. I have experienced equally powerful ministry which simply consisted of an act of kindness, or words or reflections which had no obvious connection to the Bible. I was once lead to give ministry in a meeting which drew largely on a comedy sketch by the Two Ronnies. Unsurprisingly, I believe that worship can take many forms and doesn’t have to happen in a special place. The important thing is accessing the Spirit which is the root of our experience of God.

Prayer is an important part of my life. It can be silent waiting prayer in Quaker meeting. It can be a time alone to share what is on my heart with God. I think of prayer as a way to realign myself with God and the universe. We often end up praying when we feel hurt, frustrated or afraid. I sometimes pray about quite specific things, but I don’t find that prayer magically ‘fixes’ everything. Instead, the act of praying reminds me that the Spirit of Christ is there, ready to give me peace, strength and reassurance. So I find that prayer transforms me, rather than the world outside me.

Though this post is long, I have covered every point of ‘traditional’ Christian doctrine. But the briefest glance at Quaker experience and theology from the beginning will show why experience of the living inward Christ is the main thing, not fine points of doctrine.

A final question remains: how do my beliefs and experiences square with being part of a liberal Quaker community? I think this depends on what you mean by ‘liberal’. Here are three possible interpretations:

1. ‘Liberal’ means being ready to be moved by ministry from anyone, regardless of language or experience
2. ‘Liberal’ means censoring your language, and avoiding sharing anything which might challenge or change anyone
3. ‘Liberal’ means to reject Christianity as unQuakerly

I’m fully signed up for the first definition of ‘liberal’, and I think it’s easy to see that this definition is unthreatened by Quaker Christianity. Clearly, the third definition of ‘liberal’ is false! The second definition is bad, too. In my view, a faith community where people hold back from sharing what the Spirit has given them is a dead community. So I believe that being a Christian is perfectly compatible with the important sense of liberal Quakerism.

A fair bit of what I have written draws on Barclay’s Theses Theologicae and his Apology for the True Christian Divinity. If you’re not familiar with these texts, they are a classic statement of Quaker beliefs, and definitely worth a read. A quick note: I also agree with Barclay that outward sacraments (baptism, communion) are not a necessary part of the Christian experience.

Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom (1826)

(part one, part two)

It would be great if our Friends meetings and churches could improve access to our faith communities through clear signs (in the literal sense). It would also be good if we provided visitors, once they've found us, with straightforward language to help them understand what we're doing when we gather. But today I'm thinking of "signs" in a different sense: the evidence that we gather and act in submission to the Holy Spirit.

The use of "signs" in this sense appears in the Bible in several places--prominently in Mark 16:20 (a verse that doesn't appear in all early manuscripts). Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it. (New International Version; context.)

John Wimber, a Quaker pastor who went on to become one of the foundational figures in the Vineyard movement, asserted that supernatural signs and wonders would or should accompany authentic Christian ministry. I don't doubt that miraculous signs can happen, but I see Mark's teaching as being just as directly relevant to those aspects of Friends faith and practice that bear the undramatic label "testimonies"--a label that has the twin deficiencies of being in-group jargon and so tame that it conceals the "sign" qualities of Quaker discipleship.

The peace testimony--a life lived in obedience to the Prince of Peace and in defiance of the massive historical reliance of peoples and nations everywhere on violence--is to me a confirming sign of the reality of the Gospel. We don't practice nonviolence just because we're nice people or clever people, nor do we practice it because we don't believe evil should be confronted. I'm passionate about upholding this testimony because it is evidence that we've put our trust in the promises of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. We have not become Christians to make our lives convenient for the principalities and powers of this world, but to keep company with Jesus and with all those who believe what he says. I have no use for a cerebral, miracle-free faith, but the daily walk of peace is actually a daily miracle.

We practice simplicity because it is likewise an evidence of the reality of the Gospel. In the early years of our marriage, the money for our food and rent was cobbled together through a variety of low-paying jobs, some of them very temporary, but Judy and I realized in prayer that we were being taught to rely on daily bread rather than long-term security. I am a natural worrier; without that confirming "sign" I can't imagine the stresses I'd have endured. Not that I've always remembered this lesson, but the experience of learning it remains vivid today.

The role of the church in maintaining the testimonies of peace and simplicity was driven home when our meeting (First Friends Meeting, Richmond, Indiana, USA, at the time) adopted a policy that the church would support members whose refusal to pay the military portion of their taxes led to prosecution and seizure of money or assets. The whole church was saying that we've reoriented ourselves to a perspective in which Caesar no longer dictates what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar. How can this rejection of conventional wisdom in favor of the reality of the Gospel be seen as anything other than a sign? Has your church made and announced this choice as well?

The equality of men and women in leadership and ministry is also a sign! It flies in the face of centuries of behavior in both worldly systems and the worldly captivity of the church. With the weight of all that oppressive practice on us, we put our faith that the Holy Spirit is fully capable of appointing and equipping leaders--who are we to strain the Spirit's witness to satisfy those who cling to privilege?

Sometimes it appears to me that the Friends movement is in danger of growing timid and tired because we've reduced our testimonies to lists and forgotten their miraculous dimension. I remember that there was an elderly Friend at our meeting in Richmond who frequently challenged our complacency. One time she got up and asked the whole church, "When was the last time you led someone to Christ? When was the last time you counseled a conscientious objector?" She didn't get an answer, but even in that awkward moment I rejoiced that someone was prophetically connecting the dots: peace isn't just a teaching, it's a sign.

---

George Packard, the "People's Bishop." Based on this article, I can't claim that Packard is a perfect example of a sign-bearing evangelist in the sense I mean, but it's worth thinking about.

"What if Quakerism were a movement again?"

"The Higgs Boson, aka the God Particle, Explained with Animation."

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