Meetings and Ministry, Part 4: Reviewing Faith and Practice

August 7, 2025 § Leave a comment

Yearly meetings should review their books of Faith and Practice to ensure that they treat minutes of travel and service fully, including what to do with such minutes when a member transfers membership. The recommendations below are based on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s entry on minutes of travel and service, which is rather brief but it covers the essentials pretty well.

The F&P entry on minutes of travel should:

  • Process. Lay out the process for clearness regarding the leading—to whom a Friend with a leading should go and what the clearness for discerning a leading should be. Lay out the process for writing the minute, and for its approval.
  • Minute’s content. Provide guidelines for the content of the minute—nature, scope, and duration of the proposed service, affirmation of the meeting’s support, room for endorsements.
  • Support. Consider forming a spiritual support committee of some kind for the minister while pursuing their ministry.
  • Release. Recommend that the meeting consider ways to help release the minister from obstacles to their service, if there are any.
  • Companionship. Recommend traveling with an elder or companion, if possible.
  • Meeting endorsement. Recommend endorsement by the regional meeting and the yearly meeting if the travel will extend beyond the region or the yearly meeting.
  • Visitation endorsement. Recommend asking that the bodies being visited endorse the minute, on its back or on an attached page, giving the name of the body visited, its location, and the date of service, comments on the character and quality of the service, and a signature and date of signature by the person(s) presiding in the visited body.
  • Reporting. Provide guidelines for reporting back to the meeting, perhaps annually.
  • Laying down. Provide guidelines for discernment and the laying down of the minute with final reporting when the minister and the meeting are clear that the minister has been released from their leading by the Holy Spirit.
  • Transfer of membership. Provide guidelines for both the transferring meeting and a member’s new meeting regarding the transfer of the minute and of care for any spiritual support that the transferring meeting may have convened for the minister.

Meetings and Ministry, Part 3: Travel Minutes in the Digital Age

August 3, 2025 § 3 Comments

I have a minute of travel for the fostering of the gathered meeting among Friends, which was originally written by Central Philadelphia Meeting. But I have since then transferred my membership to Princeton Meeting in New Jersey. Both meetings are in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. PhYM’s Faith and Practice is not clear about how to deal with the transfer of such a minute as part of a transfer of membership, so both meetings have had to work much of it out on their own. Princeton Meeting has just approved a new draft of the minute, so now that ministry is under Princeton’s care.

I want to post about the issues that transferring a minute raises later. Here I want to talk about how we handle minutes of travel and service in a time when many meetings don’t really know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry very well, when our books of discipline are not necessarily much help, and especially, when we often “travel” and serve virtually rather than in person.

Let’s start with the traditional practice using a hard copy of the minute.

Using a hard copy

Presenting the minute. I’m not sure how a minute of travel was presented to the meeting being visited in the elder days. Did the clerk of the minister’s meeting send it ahead of the visit, or did the minister bring it with them and present it themselves? Did they bring a letter from the clerk also, or was the minute sufficient in itself. I suspect the latter, but I hope some of my readers might know for sure.

Endorsing the minute. As I understand it, in the elder days the clerk or someone representing the body being visited endorsed the minute afterward on the back of the minute. This would include:

  • the name, location, and other relevant description of the body visited and the date of visitation, 
  • comments about how the ministry was received, and 
  • a signature with the date of signature. 

In the Quakerism class I took with Bill Taber at Pendle Hill, if I remember correctly, he said that endorsement often was something quite minimal, such as, “Friend Steven Davison visited X Meeting in Y city, Z state on A of B month C year. His ministry was found acceptable. Signed Weighty Quaker, A’ of B’ month, C’ year.” Assuming, of course, that the ministry was acceptable. If there was some perceived problem, then the endorser said whatever seemed appropriate. 

Using an electronic copy

Nowadays, however, we often “travel” to give our ministry virtually through Zoom or some other internet-based conferencing tool. I have done just this for an FGC program on the gathered meeting earlier this year and for a Pendle Hill program on the gathered meeting during the pandemic. Neither I nor the sponsors of either of those programs followed these formal steps, so the questions of how to present the minute and how to endorse it in this virtual situation didn’t come up. I did tell FGC about my minute, but neither one of us took the matter further. But I think we should have; I wasn’t paying good attention.

But if we had tried to follow tradition, how would I have presented a digiital minute and how would they have endorsed it? Should we have used a digital copy of the minute in the first place?

Hard copy or digital?

Mailing the hard copy back and forth would be a bit cumbersome but staying analog has its appeal. For one thing, the conventions of practice for this are more or less settled and pretty straightforward. But more important, endorsing a digital copy turns out to be awfully complicated. I’ve been experimenting with doing so with my own minute’s pdf file as a learning exercise, and whew—not easy. I’ve tried one thing after another before settling on something that is still cumbersome, but I hope it meets the need, since I suspect that some circumstances will require the use of a digital version of the minute.

Here are my thoughts.

Creating the minute. The minute’s original hard copy format will almost certainly be a printed Word file, but its ultimate format will be a pdf so that the minute can’t be overwritten by accident. Normally, the clerk of the meeting would sign the minute after printing it, but this complicates things: now, in order to create a pdf file that includes the signature, you have to scan it. You could just let the typed name of the clerk stand for the signature and just save the Word doc as a pdf. But that doesn’t solve the problem of how to endorse the pdf.

Preparing for endorsement. To solve that problem, I would add a couple of pages to the Word doc for the endorsements before you scan it, maybe with a heading at the top of each of these extra pages like “Endorsements”. Then scan it to create a multi-page pdf file.

So what do you call this digital file?

Filename. I think the filename needs four elements:

  1. the minister’s name;
  2. the minister’s meeting;
  3. a descriptive, like “minute of travel”; and
  4. the date it was approved. 

For example: “Steven Davison – Minute of Travel – Princeton Meeting – Approved 07-12-2025”.

Presenting the minute. Whatever the traditional practice was, I think that the clerk of the meeting should send the minute along with an accompanying letter on behalf of the meeting and the minister. I don’t necessarily think it would be inappropriate for the minister to do it. But I prefer the clerk sending the minute for a number of reasons: 

  • This gives more weight to the ministry; it reflects and confirms that the meeting is behind the ministry. 
  • It unburdens the minister and relieves her or him from some potential awkwardness in presenting one’s self.
  • It ensures that the meeting has a centralized record of all the doings around the ministry. At some point, the ministry will likely be laid down and/or the minister may no longer be around, and then all might be lost if she or he is the sole recorder of the minute’s travels.

I think the sender should bcc her or himself so that the sender has a copy of the email with the minute and accompanying letter or body of the email and they can store both in whatever virtual folder the meeting and/or the minister have created for such things. See the item on storage below.

Endorsement. Now—how do you endorse a pdf file of a travel minute? This is why you have to add those extra pages to the Word doc. Since most people will be using Adobe Reader to read the minute and Reader doesn’t let you write on a pdf file, the preparation for endorsement will have to take place on the Word file before the pdf is created. Here’s how I would provide for the endorsements:

In the accompanying letter, the sender asks the receiving clerk to do the following once the minister’s service is done:

  1. Print the multi-page pdf file of the minute;
  2. write by hand (legibly) the endorsement on the added page for endorsements, including the meeting or visited body and date of service, comments, signature and date of signature;
  3. re-scan the whole document, creating a new pdf file with the same filename; and
  4. return the rescanned pdf file to the the clerk of the minister’s meeting and /or the minister.

Process and storage. The final question is where do the Word file and pdf file live between visits? As I said above, I think the meeting itself should keep a record of all the travels of the minute, even if the minister is doing this also. These records should not be on a personal computer hard drive, but rather on a cloud drive, so that it’s not dependent on a member who may leave the meeting for some reason. The login information for this drive* should be shared between at least two people: the clerk of the meeting and the meeting’s treasurer, this latter because the meeting’s financial accounts presumably are also being kept in a central location that is independent of personnel changes. If the meeting has a physical filing system, I would create a file with this information to be stored in that filing cabinet, also. And maybe there are other people in the meeting to include, like the meeting’s recorder (the person responsible for the meeting’s membership statistics) and its secretary, if the meeting has these positions.

* I would keep all the meeting’s digital accounts in a central digital location: website hosting service login, its payment method and contract renewal settings; likewise for the same information for the Facebook account; and so on. I know of at least two meetings who lost their websites because the website’s management was in the hands of someone who either dropped the ball or left the meeting and the hosting service expired without anybody knowing

Meetings and Ministry, Part 2: My Story

July 28, 2025 § Leave a comment

A Leading Leads to Frustration, and to New Leading

In 1990, Buffalo Meeting in New York asked New York Yearly Meeting’s Friends in Unity with Nature Task Group to bring them an earthcare program on the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day. A f/Friend and I answered their call.

On Saturday night before the program on Sunday, I was sitting up praying over my notes for the following morning when an opening came to me that pushed its way in front of my preparations. It came out of nowhere—well, as it turns out, it came out of Spirit-where—and it would not go away. It was this: If Christ was the Word “through whom were all things were made and without whom nothing was made that was made,” as John 1:3 puts it, then destroying creation is re-crucifying Christ.

Now this was what Friends in the elder days called a cross to the will: my will and my intentions and expectations were being crucified. Because I was in those days actively hostile to Christ, Christianity, and the Bible.

But I had been raised in a pretty pious and active evangelical Lutheran family and I knew the Bible pretty well. And the more I thought about it, the more important this new idea seemed, and the more it ramified—the more I remembered and discovered that I could say to Buffalo Meeting. But I did not want to say it. And I was pretty sure that Buffalo Meeting wouldn’t want to hear it.

But the Holy Spirit had seized me by the scruff of the neck and would not let me go. I had to scrap my original notes and go with this crazy new thing. So I gave Buffalo Meeting a little Bible-based sermon and, as I remember it, they did in fact give it a rather cool reception.

It was weird. Or wyrd, in the Old Norse sense of the origins of the word, a situation that was so important the gods were involved. God was involved. And it didn’t stop there.

Over the next few weeks, the original opening expanded and ramified and it dug in. Eventually, I felt I was called to write a book of Bible-based earth stewardship theology—another cross to the will. I did not want to do this. First of all, I knew it meant probably years of research; I didn’t know nearly enough. I had read none of the earth stewardship theology that had been written up to that time, and I didn’t know the Bible well enough to treat it properly. But more importantly, I still felt hostile to Christianity and the Bible. 

So I brought my leading to my meeting. I asked for an oversight committee. I knew that my prejudices threatened to thwart or distort my faithfulness and I wanted my meeting to help me stay faithful.

In my first meeting with ministry and counsel, they did not understand what I was asking for, even though some weighty and seasoned Friends served on that committee. I went away frustrated. But I still felt it was important to get some support. So I went back to them. This time, some of them understood just enough to actually misunderstand in a new way. 

“We can’t tell you what to think,” they said. I didn’t want them to tell me what to think, I wanted them to tell me if I was going off the rails. “That’s for your editor to tell you,” they said. That would be way too late, I said. In the end, they said no again.

I was left to my own discernment and discipline. I hustled some financial support and went to Pendle Hill for two terms in 1991 to begin research on the book. There, I was mentored by Bill Taber and Doug Gwyn, who taught Quakerism and the Bible respectively. My time with them and at Pendle Hill confirmed my calling and gave me the support I needed. I reclaimed the love of the Bible I had had as a teenager. I stopped being Christ and Christianity’s adversary. And the course work with Doug and Bill deepened my knowledge of and commitment to the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. The experience deepened my love for and commitment to the Quaker way. It changed my life.

And: the leading to write that book and the frustrating experience I had with my meeting led to two new leadings, both of which I still carry as ministries. The first was—is—to foster in our meetings the recovery of our traditions regarding ministry, so that others with leadings would not be left bereft, as I had been. The second was a sustained and intensive study of, the Bible, such that I have for years now moderated a weekly online Bible study and written another (unpublished) book on the gospel of Jesus, which grew out of the things I learned writing the first one; and I have two more in my head and heart.

Meetings and Ministry, Part 1 : Introduction

July 28, 2025 § Leave a comment

I’m starting a new series of posts that looks at how our meetings recognize gifts in ministry, how we help emerging ministers discern their calling, and how we support their ministries.

I’ve been away from this blog more or less for quite a while, but I think I’m back. I have been paying attention to publishing my poetry and more recently, I’ve been working on a couple of submissions to Pendle Hill. One of these is on the meeting’s role in supporting vocal ministry. At the same time, while thinking and praying and writing in a deep and sustained way about vocal ministry for many months, my own ministries are in an exciting and exercising period of engagement and transition.

In the middle of all this, I became aware of the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry, which I mentioned in my last post, and I participated in the development of “The Public Friends Recording Process,” which the Incubator’s convener Windy Cooler shepherded

Back in 1992, I had been part of a three-person team that updated New York Yearly Meeting’s process for recording gifts in ministry and soon after that, I served on the first clearness committee convened under the new guidelines to consider the recording of a Friend’s gifts. We did recommend recording to the Yearly Meeting and they approved it. So I have been carrying a concern for the recognition, discernment, and support of gifts in ministry for a long time.

All this focus and activity around our meetings and their support of our ministers and their ministries has reactivated my own call to a ministry focused on fostering greater attention in our meetings on these concerns. It has produced new openings that I want to share with you my readers and raised questions that I hope my readers will be led to answer, here in this blog, but also in your own meetings.

Much of this exploration will be personal, as many of these issues are front and center for me and my meeting right now. But some of it will be about our tradition, our faith and practice, our history and our experience.

In the next post, I want to start with the story of my own first call to ministry and how it has led to this moment.

Friends Incubator for Public Ministry

July 27, 2025 § 1 Comment

I’m spreading the word here of a new Quaker ministry: Friends Incubator for Public Ministry. Here’s how it describes itself: It is “a bold, Spirit-led initiative to reweave the fabric of public ministry in the Religious Society of Friends.” And: “The Friends Incubator for Public Ministry empowers emerging Quaker leaders and their communities through spiritual formation, education, and collaboration, revitalizing public ministry to create a vibrant, modern Quakerism for today’s world.” Windy Cooler is the Incubator’s convener.

The Incubator website features a great blog, the Incubator sponsors events, and it is sponsoring a Fellowship for Public Ministry, which they describe as follows:

Our inaugural cohort learning experience is designed for those called to public ministry, their elders, and their worshipping communities. From April 6–12, 20026, we’ll gather at Pendle Hill for an in-person retreat to begin this journey together. Five participating meetings will explore how to faithfully discern, support, and hold public ministry accountable within their unique community contexts. This retreat marks the beginning of a two-year transformational process tailored to the needs and gifts of each meeting and minister involved.

The deadline for applying for the fellowship is September 1.

I am very impressed by Windy and by the Incubator—what it’s doing and the Spirit in which it’s doing it. I feel called to a ministry myself that is completely congruent with its mission: fostering the recovery and innovation of our traditions of ministry and especially, helping our meetings embrace this tradition.

I am right now in the middle of an exciting spiritual exercise in this area: I have a travel minute focused on fostering the gathered meeting originally written by Central Philadelphia Meeting and a support group nominally under its care. But I’ve transferred my membership to Princeton Meeting and now the two meetings, the support group, and I are working out how this transfer should take place, since our Faith and Practice isn’t clear or thorough on this matter.

In future posts, I will talk more about this process, which has been very enlivening.

Herbert Hoover, Part 1

July 10, 2025 § 1 Comment

Herbert Hoover

I’ve returned to work on my book on Quakers and Capitalism, an economic history of Friends and otheir fortunes and of Quaker contributions to capitalist culture, especially to industrial capitalism. I’ve done much of the research up through the All Friends Conference in London in 1920. Now I’m turning to the key Quaker figures in political economics in the 20th and 21st centuries.

No one is more important in this category, perhaps, than Herbert Hoover (1874–1964). He was born a seventh-generation Quaker into West Branch Meeting in Iowa just six years before that meeting divided along Gurneyite–Wilburite lines; both of those meetings exist today. But at age 11, he was orphaned and was sent to be raised by his mother’s brother, Dr. Henry John Minthorn in Newberg, Oregon, an extraordinary man in his own right.  

Dr. Minthorn had breathed life back into 2-year-old Bertie as he lay near death from croup. Dr. Minthorn went on to found Friends Pacific Academy, which is now George Fox University.

Hoover was a truly august and significant figure, despite his bad rep from his handling of the Great Depression, which has been mischaracterized, anyway. Here’s a list of his accomplishments “constituting an almost unbroken record of success” *:

  • He graduated from the very first class of Stanford University with a degree in geological engineering.
  • By age 24, he was the superintendent of a very rich gold mine in Western Australia.
  • At 27, he managed a coal mining operation in China.
  • By 40, he was legendary in the mining community and a multi-millionaire.
  • He was the first president born west of the Mississippi, the first to use radio in his campaign, the first to have a telephone on his desk in the Oval Office, the first commerce secretary to reach the White House, summoned to service by more presidents than any other American chief executive, including by Wilson, Coolidge, Truman, and Eisenhower.
  • By his death, he had been awarded more honorary degrees than any other American. 
  • But most important, his relief efforts saved more human lives than any other individual in human history. He was the greatest humanitarian of the First World War and took part in the Versailles peace negotiations, and, according to his friend John Maynard Keynes, was “the only man who emerged from that ordeal with his reputation enhanced”
  • After the war, his American Relief Administration fed millions, including millions of children; its European Children’s Fund was the forerunner of CARE.
  • During the drought and famine of 1921–23, as President Harding’s Commerce Secretary, he persuaded Harding to allocate $20 million for food and medicine for Soviet peasants.
  • In 1927, he rescued and rehabilitated the Mississippi Valley during the Great Flood that inundated hundreds of thousands of acres and swept away whole towns.
  • He was the first president to use the government’s resources against the economic cycle of boom and collapse. He erected more public works in four years than were built in the previous twenty, distributing them to counties of highest unemployment rather than according to political influence, refusing to barter patronage for votes.
  • He got a divided Congress to pass more constructive legislation than had any previous president who served in hard times and incubated a number of ideas that were integral to the New Deal.
  • He pioneered summit diplomacy, initiated the Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America, and worked tirelessly for international peace.
  • He reformed prisons, revised the legal code, improved worker conditions with the Norris-La Guardia Act, and improved the health and welfare of children.
  • No law he signed was declared unconstitutional. None of his appointees were dismissed for corruption. He created a lean bureaucracy and preserved labor peace.
  • He won his office in a landslide, then lost in a landslide, and was denounced ironically by Franklin for doing too much too son, exploding federal debt, and wasting taxpayer dollars.
  • He remained extremely active in public affairs for the rest of his life. He drifted to the right as time went on, becoming the conscience of GOP philosophy. He became “the single most important bearer of the torch of American conservatism between his own administration and that of Ronald Reagan.”
  • He led another relief effort after WWII. 
  • He chaired commissions to reorganize the executive branch under Truman and Eisenhower.
  • He became active with the Boys Club of America.
  • He wrote a lot of books.

I plan to share more about this Friend in future posts as I read his biographies.

*  Herbert Hoover: A Life, by Glen Jeansonne, with David Luhrssen.

The Goal of Quaker Meeting

July 9, 2025 § Leave a comment

I’ve just read Building the Life of the Meeting, the Annual Michener Lecture for 1994 presented to Southeastern Yearly Meeting by William and Fran Taber, published as a pamphlet and available from SEYM. In it (page 11), Fran Taber defines “the goal of Quaker meeting” this way:

“to open each participant to the ongoing work of God, which is to renew within me the image of the Divine in which I was created; to draw all present into a sense of unity in which the living presence of the Holy Spirit is enjoyed together; and to lead us individually and corporately into faithfully carrying out the varied ministries and service to which we are called.”

I could paraphrase it thusly: the goal of worship is inward spiritual transformation, gathering in the Spirit (the gathered meeting), and the activation and support of ministry. This seems both succinct and thorough to me, and inspired truth.

Thank you, Fran. I remember you with warmth and deep gratitude.

Spiritual Pastoral Care

July 8, 2025 § 2 Comments

I found myself thinking last Sunday morning in worship about something that happened a long time ago and is still an issue for us Friends, I think.

Sometime in the 1990s when I was serving on New York Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Counsel Coordinating Committee, someone came to the committee during annual sessions looking for spiritual counseling, pastoral care for their spiritual life. I don’t know anything about the particulars of that person’s request and I wasn’t involved in how we ultimately dealt with it, but I do remember the meeting in which the committee struggled to meet this person’s needs.

No one in our memory had ever come for pastoral care of their spiritual life and we weren’t really sure what to do or who should do it. We had to meet the need on the fly. We had no collective structure or experience in place.

So this experience woke me up to some things that I’ve not paid attention to for a while and they came back to me that morning in meeting. 

The first is that our pastoral care committees often are not prepared to offer spiritual nurture and pastoral care to Friends in need of spiritual counseling. We tend not to think of pastoral care as including spiritual nurture. We’re focused on helping with health problems, family problems, maybe even financial problems, and so on. Not on Friends who find themselves in a spiritual dry spell, or feeling that their prayer life is going nowhere, or feel cut off from God somehow, when God had before seemed present and nurturing, or who feel lost in a “dark night of the soul,” or who don’t feel motivated to continue whatever spiritual practice they have, but who feel guilty about abandoning it, Friends who know how good it is for them, how good it has been, but now just don’t feel like it.

Meanwhile, this is one of those areas that falls between the charges of pastoral care committees and worship and ministry committees. Which committee should prepare for this, and to which committee would members go? Have we ever posted some kind of notice, so that they would know? Maybe w&m committees are the place to answer these needs. And would the committee be ready to meet the need?

The practical reason that our committees aren’t often prepared to meet this need is, I think, that our members just don’t come to us with this kind of request, so we’ve not been forced to figure it out, and we haven’t had the imagination to prepare in advance. I imagine that this is because most of our members don’t actually have that kind of spiritual life, and maybe our committee members don’t either. How many of our members have a regular prayer or devotional life that could inexplicably dry up, or a practice of some kind that no longer calls to them, even though they want it back. Or they haven’t ever felt the active presence of the Spirit in their lives and in their souls in some way that could leave them feeling bereft if that presence were to go away. 

I suspect that for most of our members, going to meeting for worship and embracing “Quaker” as part of their personal identity is the sum of their spiritual lives. Which for many Friends is enough; maybe. Or maybe some members do have a deeper spiritual yearning, but it hasn’t quite consciously emerged yet, or they don’t know what to do about their sense of something missing.

What would our meetings do about it? Should we do something about it? What is Quaker spirituality beyond just attending meeting for worship and identifying with the Quaker way?

A practical way to approach these questions would be to simply ask our members: do you want more in your spiritual lives than just meeting for worship? We might start by asking our committees to ask themselves what their committee members’ own answers are to these questions and whether the committee is interested in furthering this project, including getting up to speed as spiritual nurturers somehow. Then maybe hold a worship sharing session with a committee member in each small group, or make this question part of however our pastoral care committees keep in touch with members and attenders.

This is spiritual formation at work: finding out what our members want from their spiritual lives and, for those who want it, providing the resources and support they need to pursue it. Quite a few may not want it. That’s fine. But for those who are willing to explore or deepen their own spiritual formation, we would be fulfilling what I think is one of a Quaker meeting’s primary missions. I would work on the “build it and they will come” principle: get prepared, spread the word, invite Friends to programs.

Liberal Theology—A Definition

June 30, 2025 § 2 Comments

I’ve just finished reading The Foundations of Liberal Quakerism, by Stephen W. Angell, the 45th Annual Walton Lecture presented at the Annual Southeastern Yearly Meeting Gathering of Friends in 2008 and published as a pamphlet available from SEYM. It describes the historical precursors of liberal Quakerism, especially the writings of William Penn, progressive Friends in the Midwest, and Lucretia Mott and the Progressive Friends movement (see also Chuck Fager’s books on this movement). I highly recommend Stephen Angell’s pamphlet.

Stephen Angell starts with some definitions and he quotes Garry Dorrien, a historian of liberal Christian theology, with this definition, which I found useful:

“liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.”

According to my own studies, this very aptly describes the priorities of the young adults who gave birth to liberal Quakerism in the late 19th century, whose new sensibilities emerged fairly decisively with the Manchester Conference in Britain in 1895. The most famous of these young Friends were John Stephenson Rowntree and Rufus Jones.

The sciences. These young Friends embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution and the critical study of the Bible that had begun in Germany earlier in the century. These two advances, one in the natural sciences and the other in the social sciences, were directly related to each other in their influence, since the theory of evolution required an all-new look at the creation story in Genesis and by extension a new kind of relationship to the Bible’s authority and role in religious life.

Individual reason and experience. Those young Friends were desperate for a place in a Quaker culture of eldership that had become ossified and restrictive; they wanted their voices heard and they wanted a theology that matched their religious experience, and vice versa.

Ethics. They revolutionized how Christian moral principles should be applied to society’s problems. In the evangelical view that had dominated Quaker culture for roughly a century, social problems derived from sin, and so the solution to these problems was evangelism: bring people to Christ and they will act more righteously, and society will follow. But social science was just then realizing that social ills had structural elements that both constrained and transcended individual moral choice. The signature development along these lines was Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study in Town Life, which proved scientifically that poverty in the city of York was not due to the poor’s moral failures—sex (too many children), drink, gambling, and other vices—but simply because they were not being paid enough. Capitalism was the problem, though he didn’t put it that way.

Atonement. Friends had always emphasized the transformation of the soul by the immediate and inward work of Christ over the theology of blood atonement on the cross, at least until the evangelical revolution in Quakerism that began around 1800. These young liberals reclaimed the earlier emphasis on God’s direct moral guidance.

Credibility and relevance. And they wanted their faith to be relevant, they wanted to be able to stand on their faith as a foundation and in their faith as a frame for their message and work to make the world a better place. And for that, they needed a theology that spoke to their time.

Quakers and Theology

June 10, 2025 § 1 Comment

I’ve been editing a submission to Pendle Hill Pamphlets on the faith behind the gathered meeting. It would be sequel to my earlier pamphlet The Gathered Meeting, which focused more on the experience, the history, and the practice of the gathered meeting, and on what might foster the gathered meeting. This new essay is more about the faith side of the faith and practice duo regarding the gathered meeting. 

It’s about what’s going on when we are gathered in the Spirit, and how we talk about what’s going on. It’s a theology of the gathered meeting.

Theology—yikes. Let’s not talk about that. I suspect that many Friends in the “liberal” branch of the movement will react negatively to this topic, perhaps quite viscerally. Haven’t we fought each other enough over theology? But I’m here to make a case for theology, for doctrine, for what we have to say. 

Not dogma! Not something you have to believe to save your soul or to be one of “us” on the inside of an exclusionary religious community. I’m talking about what we think and how we think about our Quaker history, practice, and experience. I’m talking about what we have to say, to seekers, to those folks checking us out to see if we’re their spiritual home, what we have say to our kids, to each other—to ourselves.

So I am an unapologetic Quaker theologian. But what do I mean by that? What is a Quaker theologian? 

For me, it’s trying to think of the best questions I can ask about my religion’s faith and practice, its history and experience. About my own Quaker religious experience, the spiritual experiences I’ve had in the context of meeting for worship and as I practice the Quaker way understood more broadly. Being a Quaker theologian is trying to ask the best questions about my community, its history and tradition and future prospects. And then I try to answer them, with integrity and creativity, while trying to remain grounded in experience.

Why? Why ask these questions; why pursue such answers? 

Because what we think and how we think about these things do affect our religious experience. What we think and how we think about our practice, our history and traditions affect the course of our religious movement. Mindset, worldview, frameworks of thought—these do matter. They’re not the most important thing; no, actual experience remains paramount—“What canst thou say?” 

But experience takes place in context, and part of that context is mindset, worldview, frameworks for understanding. They help to shape our experience, and experience helps to shape our understanding. It’s a feedback system: faith and practice, in dynamic relationship with each other over time, evolving and emerging in real time, sometimes, right before our eyes, as the promise of continuing revelation continues to be fulfilled. For revelation has content.

One more pushback against a certain kind of resistance to “theology”. I have been eldered for being in my head, which is a condition presumed to be at the expense of my heart and my spirit. Isn’t that just like a man, that person said, in so many words. And ain’t I a man, to coopt Sojourner Truth.

As if the very many transcendental experiences I’ve had in this blessed life could not have happened to someone who’s too much in his head, like me. As if the life of the mind and the life of the heart and soul could ever be separated. As if a spiritual path, let alone a religious path, with its history and traditions and testimonies and distinctive practices, could not be one holistic, holy whole in someone’s life. And as if gender necessarily defined one’s spiritual and religious potential.

But to be fair, one can get out of balance. I do get out of balance. We all do. But the heart is arguably better than the mind at unbalancing a person. Or perhaps I should say the unconscious mind, which often has the heart in its secret capture.

That’s where Quaker discernment comes in. With her or his mind, someone asks some questions and then offers some possible answers. Continuing revelation is now on the table. Time for the community to test these ideas and see if they stand in truth and beauty and usefulness. Is it from the Light, or not?

That’s the role of the Quaker theologian: to be a servant of continuing revelation, at the prompting of and accountable to, the Holy Spirit in discernment.

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