Membership — in a Yearly Meeting?
July 31, 2018 § 6 Comments
A young adult f/Friend that I know and some of her friends (not sure how many of them have the capital F) are considering asking New York Yearly Meeting to give them membership. (Technically in my friend’s case, I suppose, she would be asking for a transfer of membership, since she’s already a member of a monthly meeting by birth.)
My initial reaction was negative. But then I began thinking about it and now I’m not so sure.
From the point of view of her monthly meeting, on the surface it looks like a loss. But in fact, they have already lost her. So that’s a “0”.
From the point of view of the yearly meeting, it would essentially be recording what is already a reality, that she treats the yearly meeting as a surrogate meeting already, and is quite active in its life. In addition, it would theoretically cement deeper relationships with the other young adult friends in her cohort and support an aspect of yearly meeting life that it’s always struggled with, the place and engagement of its young adults. So I’ll call that a “+1”.
On the other hand, the yearly meeting is ill equipped to provide her with most of the “services” that monthly meetings provide. This gets to the third part of the relationship, benefits and costs to the Friend herself. So far, she has apparently not yet felt the need for the monthly meeting services I am referring to, by which I mean:
- pastoral care, including the care of a meeting for marriage, the conduct of a memorial meeting when she dies, and conduct of a clearness committee for solving a personal problem;
- spiritual formation and support, including regular worship, regular religious education, and discernment and support for a leading or ministry; and finally,
- the unique fellowship one gets from the more intimate community life of a local meeting.
To be fair, the yearly meeting does dedicate some time at each of its sessions to memorialize deceased members who have been an important part of the life of the yearly meeting, so I bet she would get that; and anyway, she won’t be around to know. And the yearly meeting does enjoy truly deep fellowship—lots of Friends who know each other well and love each other well. This, I suspect, is the reason she thinks of the yearly meeting as her surrogate meeting. So that’s a “+1”.
Furthermore, the yearly meeting could take on many of these other roles. But its resources—especially its human resources—are already stretched almost to the breaking point. I imagine that it would decline to take them on, and rightly so, in my opinion. But apparently, this Friend does not want or need those things.
For my part, without meaningful pastoral care, regular worship, spiritual nurture, and a fellowship that goes deeper than just three annual meetings could provide, what does “membership” mean? All that’s left is Quaker identity and a sense of belonging to the unique spiritual community that is New York Yearly Meeting. To me, that’s a half-baked Quaker life.
On the other hand, all the renewal movements in Quaker history have been youth movements, and their innovations have been resisted by their elders every time, and usually wrong-headedly. Fox and his cohort were themselves young adults when they got started. So were the Friends who began experimenting with programmed worship. So were the Friends who gave birth to the liberal Quaker movement around the turn of the twentieth century.
Those were all resistance movements. Those young people were unsatisfied with the status quo, couldn’t get a meaningful response to their concerns from their elders, and took matters into their own hands.
So in my next post, I want to look more carefully at what today’s young adult Friends might find so unsatisfying, think about whether this membership in a yearly meeting solves the problem, and whether something else might. Now it’s extremely presumptuous for me to speak for them, so this will just be speculation on my part, and I expect I’ll be wrong about some of it. But maybe it will spark a conversation.
Be Careful What You Ask For
July 20, 2018 § 8 Comments
Donald Trump’s movement is, in many regards, an apocalyptic movement. Theologian Adela Yarbro Collins describes apocalyptic faith this way:
“apocalyptic faith often correlates with marginality, cognitive dissonance, and relative deprivation. ‘Marginality’ is a sociological term referring to the social status of an individual or group as anomalous, peripheral, or alien. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ refers to a state of mind that arises when there is significant disparity between expectations and reality. . . . ‘Relative deprivation’ identifies the self-understanding of those whose expectations or perceived needs are not being satisfied.”
The folks who voted for Trump, the marginalized white working class and white evangelicals of all classes, have been left behind by an economy that once offered ladders to a better economic future. They have been abandoned by political institutions and structures that once represented their interests, most importantly, the Democratic party. And/or they are held in contempt (they’re deplorables) by Americans who have rejected many of their value-defining institutions, like church, and their culture-defining, or tribe-defining, social practices and signifiers—they are “latte-sipping, Birkenstock-wearing” people whose kids play soccer instead of football and baseball.
Apocalyptic faith believes things are so bad that only a supernal* intervention can bring deliverance. Usually, this means God. In practice, though—that is, in the face of these oppressive forces and institutions in the real world—the extra-worldly intervention needs human agents. It needs prophets and messiahs. For the Trump movement, the prophets are the right-wing media; the messiah is, of course, Trump himself.
This helps explain why many evangelicals voted for Trump in spite of his obvious faithlessness and corrupt character—he’s not the one who is acting, really; it’s God. And God can use a broken tool, even a pagan one, just like he used the Persian emperor Cyrus to release the Israelites from captivity in Babylon. And anyway, we’re all sinners. And even Jesus was broken—though he took on human brokenness deliberately in order to save us.
The thing about apocalyptics is that they don’t give up their worldview, even when—as inevitably happens—it has demonstrably failed to deliver them. This means that when the corrupt world is not overturned as expected, apocalyptics often go ballistic. This is because you become apocalyptic in the first place when you already think things are as bad as they can get and are completely out of your control. You already feel desperate and helpless—though you still have your anger. The messiah is your last hope. When he (always a “he”) fails, that anger, coupled with utter despair, flares out in violence.
David Koresh (“Koresh” is the Hebrew transliteration of “Cyrus”) and his Branch Davidians are a prime, relatively modern example. But post-Pauline apocalyptic Christianity is itself the paradigmatic example—marginalized Christians have been expecting the apocalypse any minute now off and on for 2,000 years.
Thus, when Trump fails and is dethroned—when he has been crucified—his “base” may explode. The prophets will rage against their scapegoats. The messiah may try to take down as much of the temple as he can, Samson and Delilah style. The racists may lash out (even more) against black and brown people. The xenophobes may unleash mob violence against immigrants and especially, against Muslims. The Christians may hunt down their usual target, the Jews. The gun nuts may start shooting. The global warming deniers may start setting forest fires. The militia types may target federal buildings.
I’m just sayin’. I’m a little worried that we may regret it if we get what we’re asking for here—Trump’s spectacular and rightly-deserved come-uppins.
* Supernal: being or coming from on high.
Worship Sharing and Vocal Ministry
July 9, 2018 § 13 Comments
Yesterday, my meeting got a lot of personal sharing and basically no vocal ministry. My judgment, of course, though I know I am not alone in feeling this way. It wasn’t really a meeting for worship as much as a large worship sharing session. This is a decades-long trend among liberal Friends.
What is the difference between worship sharing and vocal ministry? How might meetings and worship and ministry committees in particular make the distinction between these two kinds of spoken message more clear, for they are clearly somewhat confused in the minds of many of our worshippers?
Worship sharing is sharing; vocal ministry is ministry; that is, it is service, which is the root meaning of “ministry”. Traditionally, vocal ministry is service to God, or the Spirit, if you will. But also service to each other, and to the worshipping community. I’ll talk about what I mean by “service” shortly. But back to the difference between the two.
Worship sharing starts with an “I” statement by definition. In meeting for worship, it usually stays with I until it ends. While it comes from one’s self and is about one’s self, worship sharing nevertheless does foster a “We”. This We is a community more deeply bonded through a shared understanding of the “I” who has spoken. Worship sharing builds community.
Vocal ministry starts with “You” and it stays with You until it ends. While the message may pick up personal elements along the way, from its initial impulse to its final words, it has a direction out from the self toward one’s fellow worshippers and/or toward the community as a gathered body. It, too, fosters a We, but this We is a community more deeply bonded through a deeper experience of the Spirit. Vocal ministry answers that of God in one’s fellow worshippers. It brings spiritual blessing to the community.
The language of the message carries practical indicators of which kind of message it is. A worship sharing message virtually always starts with the pronoun “I” and it doesn’t lose this first person singular perspective until, perhaps, the very end. For such a message often comes with a lesson of some kind at the end, and it is this lesson that I suspect feels to the speaker like a potential blessing that would qualify it as vocal ministry.
Very often, if we had just heard the lesson without its personal and often anecdotal preamble, it would have felt much more like Spirit-led vocal ministry. So why quibble about it? Because, by the time we get the lesson, it is so saturated with “I” that it has trouble lifting off the ground to transform the We. Our consciousness has been so deeply drawn into personality that it hinders the transpersonal character we hope for in vocal ministry.
More importantly, though, the worship sharing message has no real direction toward the We. It is self-reflective. It projects a mirror out from the self to show us more of the self. Even the lesson at the end is often just a final reflection of a personal take-away, a sharing of what the I got out of the experience recounted, offered in the hope that it will be inspiring to others, as well. Which it often is. We listeners often can take something away from the account for our selves. That’s the power of worship sharing. But that doesn’t make it vocal ministry, in the traditional mold.
Vocal ministry will certainly pick up elements from the I, from the personality of the speaker and/or from their experience, but it starts somewhere else and its going somewhere else. It starts from an inward depth, a motion whose roots run deeper than mental reflection on an event, which is the form most of this sharing takes, or from mental musings. Reflections and musings live in everyday consciousness. You don’t have to go deep to get them.
More importantly, though, vocal ministry doesn’t stop moving. It rises up from somewhere deeper within us than everyday consciousness, it may pick up some of the I on the way, but it’s headed out and it doesn’t look back.
It’s a service. We have been waiting, as a waiter waits in a restaurant until a patron needs water or their food, and when it’s ready, we bring it to them. And while we are serving, our focus is entirely on those whom we serve.
We meet their needs, we answer that of God within them, in our own style, of course. But our job is to feed the sheep, to deliver the bread of life, to offer living water. Not to share an anecdote and the nugget we took away from its experience.
The Purpose of Vocal Ministry
July 2, 2018 § 5 Comments
What is the purpose of vocal ministry? What are we trying to do when we stand up to speak in meeting for worship?
George Fox answered this questions some 350 years ago in a letter that is now famous amongst us for its use of the phrase “that of God in every one”.
This letter was not a doctrinal document. He wasn’t trying to explain how we should believe. It was a pastoral epistle. He was tying to describe how we should behave. In particular, he was addressing those Friends who were speaking in public; he was talking about vocal ministers and their ministry.
In that letter he says, “Ministers of the spirit must minister to the spirit that is transgressed and in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one.” He would soon equate this captive spirit with “that of God in every one”.
A few lines later, he gets into the part most of us are familiar with, though we don’t often hear it in full: “And this is the word of the Lord to you all and a charge to you all in the presence of the living God [invoking the kind of language used by the Hebrew prophets to begin an oracle; see Jeremiah 2:1, Ezekiel 15:1, Hosea 4:1, Amos 3:1, etc.]: be patterns, be examples, in all countries, places, nations, islands, wherever you come; that your carriage and life my preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them you may be a blessing and make the witness of God in them to bless you. Then to the Lord God you will be a sweet savour and a blessing.” (Journal of George Fox, Nickalls edition, p. 263)
Then we will “walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in every one” . . . “Cheerfully” here does not mean in a good mood. Fox is using an older and deeper meaning for cheer that we no longer use: for him, to cheer means to lift up in the spirit, to bring blessings to.
And the “world” over which we will walk (not “the earth”, as we often hear it misquoted) is the “world” of the gospel of John: “That was the true light which lighteth every one who comes into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew (recognized) him not.” (John 1:9–10) “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33) The world resists the Word. The world is all the forces in the world that resist the truth, resist the gospel, resist inner transformation.
“Then you will walk cheerfully over the world” means, then you will overcome the forces that resist transformation in God’s spirit by answering that of God in every one, by lifting them up, by leading them out into the light, by being a blessing unto them.
Fox is saying that there is a witness of God, a spirit in each of us that is in captivity, and that spirit cries out. It cries out for God, for liberation, for wholeness and fulfillment in the Spirit. And the purpose of ministry, both of word and deed, is to answer that cry. The purpose of vocal ministry is to lead the captive spirit within each of us out of the darkness and into the light.
Through the Flaming Sword 