What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Witness & Service
March 8, 2014 § 5 Comments
Bringing G*d into the world in social action—witness and service.
We have a reputation as a socially engaged religious community and, more than any other religious community perhaps, we elevate social witness to a central place in our religious identity.
The testimonial impulse arises within individuals as spirit-led concern, as feelings of anguish at suffering and oppression, as compassion for those who suffer and are oppressed, both human and non-human, and as a desire to do something about it. That our religion offers these feelings a welcoming home in the community is a deep, powerful, and profound aspect of Quakerism.
For hundreds of years, Friends who felt these emotions, and who felt prompted by the Light within them to act on their feelings, brought their concerns to their meetings for discernment and support in the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. To be fair, it seems that for most of this time, the impulse was mostly to evangelism as traditionally understood, to travel in gospel ministry, though we always have had our John Bellers, our John Woolman, our Elizabeth Fry, our Lucretia Mott.
For most of our history, what I am calling the “witness impulse” was usually a prompting to witness to individuals to change their ways, rather than an attempt to address the root sources of suffering and oppression in the structures of society and their systemic dimension. I think of Elizabeth Fry teaching women prisoners to read or John Woolman traveling from household to household urging Friends to stop holding slaves.
Also, Friends who felt led to more focused, more practical, more truly witness-oriented action often faced inertia, if not resistance. I think of John Bellers, for example, who in the early 18th century repeatedly presented practical solutions to poverty to what was then London Yearly Meeting, and got nowhere.
It seems to me that what we now think of as “witness” work really only got going with the rise of liberal Quakerism at the turn of the 20th century. By “witness ministry” I mean spirit-led work aimed at righting wrongs, changing the social order, getting at the roots of human suffering and oppression, rather than evangelizing individuals and treating the symptoms with charity.
When liberal Quakerism realized its identity during and after the Manchester Conference in England and the Richmond Conference in the United States, and Friends like Rufus Jones, John Wilhelm Rowntree and his brother Seebohm saw a new imperative in the Christian gospel, Quakerism entered a new era. This corresponded with the rise of the Social Gospel movement more broadly, a religious reaction of conscience against the ravages of industrial capitalism and the inequities of the Robber Baron era.
Then came World War I and the recovery of an active peace testimony that required of Friends true sacrifice in the face of social persecution and state prosecution. For the first time since the Lamb’s War of the 1650s, Quakers were defying social norms and the laws of the state and trying to change the social order itself from the light in their conscience, and a new consciousness was formed in us by adversity, sacrifice, and the need for a public defense of our witness. Quakers came out of the Great War a different people
But we were at the same time dismantling the traditional processes and structures for Quaker ministry. By the 1920s, in most parts of Quakerism, we had stopped recording ministers and elders and stopped writing minutes of travel and service. Instead, we started forming committees.
The American Friends Service Committee in the US and the Friends Service Committee in Great Britain set the standard. We had Committees of Industry and Social Order. Now we have committees for everything and most Friends know no other structure for their witness ministry.
I have said this elsewhere, but here I must repeat: I believe that committees do not serve us well as the structure for bringing G*d into the world in witness ministry.
I believe they quench the spirit in many ways. I believe they distort in harmful ways the ministries they are organized to pursue. I believe we should stop using them. I believe we should return to the faith and practice of Quaker ministry as the way to bear our concerns in the world, but modified to meet modern needs.
I know from experience sharing these ideas with Friends that people freak out when they hear what I am proposing. Or rather, when they think they have heard what I’m proposing. I have found that Friends have a very hard time really hearing what I am saying because they hear instead an attack on the work that the committees are doing rather than a critique of committees as a structure for doing the work. So I will say over and over again that I am not proposing that we lay down the ministries that our witness committees are pursuing; I am proposing that we move away from committees as the structure we use to do it. The ministries matter; the committees are just structures.
I know, also, that I am proposing a truly revolutionary shift in our culture. You my reader may find yourself resisting my arguments because it seems that I want to take away something that you value with the utmost fervor. Let me reassure you that I do not want to take away a single work that G*d has inspired you and others to do on behalf of Truth. I only want to release it from the shackles that I believe our committee structure has bound them with.
In the next couple of posts I want to lay out the reasons I believe we should abandon committees organized around a concern and a strategy for working our way forward into a new culture of eldership for witness ministry.
What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Outreach, Part III
February 28, 2014 § 6 Comments
Social Media
Friends are pretty far behind the curve with social media, I think, mainly because our median age is so high. This seems quite natural to me. I know that in my life, there just isn’t room or time for the kind of active online life that drives Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and the rest. It’s hard enough to keep up with this blog. But we could be experimenting more and asking those who are involved more to share their interest and energy with the meeting.
For instance, nowadays your meeting probably does need a Facebook page. For one thing, this is one of the platforms through which people will search for you, especially younger people. In fact younger people are the main reason to have a Facebook page. And a Twitter account, for that matter.
These media present problems, however.
First, if a static, unchanging website is bad, an empty and dead Facebook page may be even worse. So someone has to keep up with it. Who? Most meetings are already having trouble filling more important roles in the meeting.
Second, people have to Like your Facebook page before they will receive your postings, so you have to start off with a campaign to get members to Like your page. In my experience, this progresses slowly, especially if there’s not much going on on your page.
Third, many Friends don’t even have a Facebook page themselves, or they’ve stopped paying attention to the one they opened years ago out of curiosity or a sense of resigned necessity. I don’t pay much attention to mine. The population that really does pay attention is going to be a very small portion of your meeting. But some of them are going to be young.
What to do?
See if you can find someone who is engaged in that world and who actually does want to manage the page. Maybe make this a project of your First Day School. But don’t micro-manage them or exhibit other forms of paranoia about what they might do on your Facebook page. If you can’t trust them, don’t ask them. And if you can’t trust yourselves to leave them alone, don’t get a Facebook page. I say this because I know of a meeting that is anxious enough about what someone might be doing on the meeting’s Facebook page that the person who manages it doesn’t feel it’s safe to do it.
Get in the habit of thinking about the meeting’s activities as opportunities to post. Use it to post highlights from your minutes. Do you already use GoogleGroups to communicate within the meeting using email? Some of what gets communicated this way may be appropriate for a Facebook page posting. Encourage members to repost things that catch their attention. Think of your Facebook page as the time after meeting in which you give announcements.
Find other meeting’s Facebook pages, those in your quarterly and yearly meeting, especially, and other nearby meetings of other affiliation, if there are any. Then Like their page, and get them to Like yours. Then you will all know what each other is up to. This might be the most valuable use for a meeting Facebook page, as a kind of regional newsletter.
And accept your limitations: do what you can do and don’t feel bad about the rest.
Other connections
QuakerQuaker. Perhaps most of my readers will already know about QuakerQuaker.org, but many people in your meeting may not. QuakerQuaker is a platform for conversation among Friends and it gathers together Quaker blogs from all over. It offers a digest that will periodically bring featured blog entries straight to you by email. This is a great way to follow the Friendly blogosphere. Spread the word; put a notice in your meeting’s newsletter.
LinkedIn. Friends are also holding conversations on various topics on LinkedIn. Check it out.
Twitter. Twitter seems even less valuable to the majority of Friends than Facebook, as a constant, sustained social media presence. But it might be far more valuable as a tool for local, short-term communication inside events, especially crowd events like yearly meeting sessions. New York Yearly Meeting publishes a daily newsletter during its week-long summer sessions, and these items could be tweeted as well as posted on Facebook, in addition to appearing in the printed handouts (though the yearly meeting’s summer sessions site on Lake George has notoriously bad cell phone coverage). This would also allow Friends who cannot attend sessions to get a more or less real-time feel for what’s going on without being there. And Twitter would be good for getting the word out about spontaneous events. I remember one year we came out of the dining hall at NYYM summer sessions to a huge double rainbow. Time to tweet the photo.
Outreach online
I wonder whether one of best new ways to reach out to non-Friends with the Quaker message might be to actively participate in the wider online religious community and especially, communities formed around spirituality more generally defined. This is just an idea, not something I have tested yet, though I plan to try it out when I get the time. But websites like beliefnet.net offer platforms for conversation about religion in which lots of people are talking to each other. If we were participating and self-identifying as Quakers, we might reach some of these people. So also for the very many websites and forums and Facebook and Ning groups organized around spirituality, separate from “religion”. Many people have abandoned “religion” but are dedicated to the life of the spirit more broadly defined and earnestly seek community. I would think we would be very attractive to some of these people.
Likewise for the websites and blogs of nonprofits and activist organizations in areas touching on our testimonies. I think we could be building alliances between our witness committees and these non-Quaker organizations, or at least sharing our spirit-led perspective with them, if we were a real presence in their conversations.
The danger with this latter effort would be that we will attract some people who might accelerate our trend toward secularization, which is already a problem in our witness life, in my experience. I have seen so many witness minutes that would leave you completely unaware that a Quaker community—or any religious community—had written them, so full were they with cogent but totally secular arguments as rationale.
Likewise, reaching out to the people in the “spirituality” cyber-world would inevitably attract people who might resist the religious impulse that lies at the heart of Quakerism—or ought to. We already suffer considerably from such influences, with lots of refugee members who are allergic to “religion”, people who think of meeting for worship as little more than group meditation, and activists who barely understand the role of the spirit in the testimonial life.
Thus it behooves us to maintain our identity as the Religious Society of Friends and to be clear, with ourselves and with newcomers, that we are a religion, that as a community we are Christian (if a bit “neo”), whatever our individual experience is. The last thing we want is to accelerate these trends ourselves by misrepresenting Quakerism in an exclusively universalist mold.
This gets back to message, being clear about who we are and what we have to say. And that brings us forward to the third aspect of outreach—being a warm, welcoming community that knows how to answer newcomer’s questions, so that people who come to check us out might decide to come back.
What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Outreach, Part II
February 22, 2014 § Leave a comment
Websites
Once we have become clear about what we have to say, then we are ready to explore how we say it.
The best outreach, of course, is personal contact—inviting people we know to meeting, putting up tables at local events, inviting the public to events in our meetinghouse. But I suspect that very many of our new attenders are seekers who have found us on their own somehow. How do they find us?
Nowadays, most people find almost everything on the internet. Mostly, they are relying on search engines. This means that your meeting absolutely must have a website if you want people to find you.
I encourage you to visit Joshua Brown’s blog arewefriends in which he analyzes and compares the websites of 34 yearly meetings in North America and some Quaker organizations. The blog entry has a long list of really valuable questions to answer about your website. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable I think this entry, this list, and the accompanying comparative analysis is. Click the following for the blog entry “What does your yearly meeting website say about you?” and the following for a very useful table comparing websites, “Yearly Meeting and Quaker Organization Websites”.
Ideally, your website meets the following qualifications:
- It should be attractive—if not actually pleasing to the eye, then at least not truly ugly. (There are a lot of really ugly Quaker websites out there.) But more importantly . . .
- It must have attractive content. That is, the visitors to your site must find what they are looking for. More about this below in the section on Audience.
- It should be active, rather than static. It should be obvious that things are happening on it, which signals that things are happening in the meeting.
- It should be current. What a turnoff to find content that is two years old, or even four months old.
- It should be search engine optimized. That is, it should at least be registered with all the major search engines, it should have the basic meta tags (code that search engines use to refine search results), and it should have at least one sentence on the home page that lays out clearly the information that seekers are likely to want. This makes it more likely that your sentence will show up as a sentence in the search engine result, where it could answer many of the practical questions a seeker is likely to have right away. This sentence should also appear in the Description meta tag. For example:
- “Hometown Quaker Meeting (congregation) meets to worship every Sunday at 10 am in a light-filled modern building [beautiful historic building; a welcoming space that we rent from X Y Z; etc.] at 123 Main St., Hometown, US 11111. Please come! You are welcome to join us.” Or something similar.
- You should avoid using Quaker jargon in your url, your page titles, menu titles, content headings, and content text, unless you explain them right away. Examples:
- “Monthly Meeting”. I believe that you should never use the phrase “monthly meeting” in public outreach content, especially not in your url. It gives people unfamiliar with Quakerism no useful information about your meeting and it suggests that you only meet for worship once a month. And trying to explain what “monthly meeting” really means will make their eyes roll up inside their head. If “monthly meeting” is part of your domain name (e.g., hometownmonthlymeeting.org), get a new domain name. If your banner (the part at the top of your website with your name and logo, or whatever) says “monthly meeting” in it, change it to “Quaker Meeting” or just “Meeting”.
- Add “congregation” in parentheses after “meeting” somewhere prominent and early on your home page, and in your descriptive sentence. Don’t leave people guessing about what a “meeting” is.
- Avoid Quaker acronyms. Write out American Friends Service Committee, etc.
- If you use the word “testimonies”, explain what they are.
- Likewise, be careful with “witness”: people may associate it with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and they may not know what it really refers to.
- The basic information. Don’t make people hunt for basic information; they won’t. Make sure your home page includes:
- your address with zip code (people want this for their Google maps search);
- your phone number;
- your contact email address or some easily recognizable way to contact the meeting without using the phone (usually a contact page with a tab in the menu);
- the times for worship;
- a link to a Google or Mapquest map, or at least, to a page with directions to your meeting place.
People are used to finding an organization’s address and phone number in the footer of web pages, but you might think about putting your phone number somewhere more prominent.
Audience.
As a guide to what kind of content your site should have, think about who your audiences are. You will have at least two:
- an internal audience—members and attenders of your meeting; and
- an external audience—mostly people who have either happened on your site by accident or, more hopefully, people who are looking for you: seekers.
It should be clear to all kinds of visitors that they have come to the right place and where to go next to find what they want.
Seekers will be looking to find you, to know when you worship, and to get some sense of the meeting and of Quakerism more generally. In this latter regard, you will want your home page to be welcoming and to clearly offer access to more information about Quakerism. Pictures of the meetinghouse and worship space and of people in the meeting greatly enhance your welcoming presence.
As for explaining Quakerism more generally, seekers are likely to want answers to some basic questions: what do you believe? and what can I expect from your worship service?
In my experience, answering these questions in the process of upgrading your website often leads a meeting to ask really deep and valuable questions about your identity. This can be very enlivening—and it can be quite contentious. However, when you are done, you will be able to answer these questions with confidence, so walk closely and optimistically in the Light as you discern. Consider also the possibility of linking to other sites for some of this content. Friends General Conference and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting have attractive websites with pretty good resources in this area.
- FGC: Is the Quaker Way right for you?
- Philadelphia Yearly Meeting: Introducing PYM Quakers.
- Britain Yearly Meeting: Introducing Quakers (I personally do not like Britain Yearly Meeting’s approach; it is far too “universalist” for me, but I offer it as a resource.)
Process.
As I said, developing a website or upgrading the one you have is an exciting and a challenging project. I recommend that the committee in charge of the project be rather small and that the meeting consciously agree to give this committee its confidence and the freedom to work unencumbered by Quaker “red tape”. Let them bring fairly well-developed proposals to the meeting for comment and approval. At all costs, avoid writing the content in committee or, worse yet, from the floor of the business meeting. Assign someone the job and then review it.
Ideally, you will have at least one person on this committee who knows a little bit about websites and how to organize their development, plus someone fairly knowledgable about Quaker faith and practice, and someone with outreach experience. I realize, however, that very often you won’t have the human resources you really need, especially a technical person. What then? Take a look at other meetings’ websites in your region to find the ones you like the best and see whether you can bring their web guru in as a consultant, if only to meet with your committee once to help you learn how to think and create a project outline. Or check with your yearly meeting. Or with either FGC or FUM, both of which have some resources for web development.
Web services.
You need to bring into in the meeting’s institutional memory two specific sets of information related to web services, if you haven’t done so already:
Domain name. Your domain name is your website’s name (e.g., hometownquakermeeting.org). If you don’t already have a webesite, you have to choose and pay for a domain name; if you already have one, you need to know who owns the account, what the account details are, especially the financial terms of the contract (when it is due and how you are going paying for it), and how to log in to the account. Very often, someone in the meeting has taken this on, but the meeting should own it. If this person moves on, dies, or gets distracted, you will be stuck. Decide who will keep this information, and especially, who should pay for your domain name and how.
Hosting service and content management system (CMS). Your hosting service is the company that provides the servers that your website lives on. The CMS (if you have one) is the interface you use to develop and maintain the site, which can be provided by your hosting service or some third party. As with the domain name, bring the hosting service account and the CMS account into the meeting structure, so that you have an institutional memory of who your hosting service and CMS providers are, what the account logins are, and who and how you’re paying for them (many CMS providers, like WordPress, are free).
Quaker Cloud. Let me recommend here FGC’s hosting service Quaker Cloud. It’s a little pricey, relative to the alternatives, but still not so much in absolute dollars: $120/year for meetings of 50 and under, $240 for larger meetings, when paid annually. That said, it really has a lot to recommend it. It’s attractive in a Quaker plain way. It’s easy to use. Your online assets will be in Quaker hands, not those of some corporation. You will have good support. And the service includes platforms for securely managing your minutes and your meeting member directory. Most importantly, their staff will help you get going.
Content.
Content comes before structure. The first thing to do is to identify your audiences: to whom will you be providing this content? Who will be coming to your website and, most importantly, what do they need from you?
You probably will be tempted to start thinking right away about what your meeting has to say. Turn it around: ask instead what the visitors to your site will need, and let that guide the kind of content you develop and how you say it. If you think you still have something else to say beyond visitor needs, then say that, too.
Well, this post is already very long, so no room for social media. Maybe in the next post.
Evangelism Reconsidered, Part Two
February 12, 2014 § 7 Comments
Here is my second installment on What is Quakerism for? — Evangelism Reconsidered.
I ended my first post on evangelism by saying that I believe that the Christ should stand at the center of our collective message, whether we personally have experienced him there or not. In my opinion, a presentation of “the Quaker message” that does not include our message about Christ isn’t a Quaker message.
In this post, I want to explain why I believe “the Quaker message” must include the Christ. For me, that message is essentially about the Christ, but not about salvation from divine judgment, as traditional evangelism claims.
Private experience and public message
“The Quaker message” is not the same thing as our own personal theology (or non-theology) or our own ideas about what Quakerism is. We are representing the whole Society when we speak to non-Friends about Quakerism. The testimony of integrity requires that we do not presume that our own experience is normative or even descriptive of all Friends, let alone prescriptive.
(“Prescriptiveness” is precisely what we Liberal Friends dislike so much about “evangelism” as traditionally practiced, the claim that salvation in Christ is the only thing that really matters and you better believe or else. We would be quite disingenuous to decry evangelical prescriptiveness while practicing it ourselves by presuming that our form of Quakerism is the only legitimate one.)
Our theological diversity is one of the reasons we often are so paralyzed by the question, “What do Quakers believe?” We often don’t feel we can speak confidently for all Friends, and it gets so complicated to start off with a whole bunch of disclaimers, and it takes so long to cover all the versions of Quakerism—that we tend to say nothing at all. Or—we do in fact presume to share our own version of Quakerism as normative, against the testimony of integrity.
I feel very strongly that the Liberal Quaker message ought to be truly inclusive. Our collective openness to whatever the positive spiritual or religious experiences of other people are, which is so central to the Liberal Quaker identity, absolutely must include, not just openness to the experience that other Friends have had of Christ, but also openness to the messages they bring to us from that experience. Actually, “openness” is too weak a word. We should embrace the Christ when we evangelize—when we share Quakerism with others, when we are bringing the Quaker message into the world. And we should embrace the Christ-centered messages of our fellow religionists.
But I do draw the line at forceful exclusiveness, the assertion—by anybody—that someone else’s religious experience is not legitimate, not the truth, not enough. How dare we make such a claim? And on what authority? Our personal experience—or lack of experience—in the case of Liberal Friends? Or, in the case of some evangelical Christians, on our personal reading of a book?
That’s what it comes down to with some evangelical Christians—their authority for their claim to be right comes primarily from their personal interpretation of the Bible. This claim not only disrespects other people’s interpretation of Scripture; it disrespects Scripture itself, as though the Bible were not ceaselessly surprising, confounding, mysterious, and even sometimes, just plain opaque and self-contradictory; that is, totally open to varying interpretations and emphases.
But what about the assertion that someone else’s experience is not true Quakerism? Most of us do have our own ideas about what true Quakerism is, I suspect. Certainly I do. I am filling this blog with my opinions about “true Quakerism”. This post is my take on “true Quakerism”. So sometimes there’s quite a difference between the movement as it is in its various forms and our own ideas about what constitutes true Quakerism.
For instance, I have trouble accepting programmed, pastoral Quakerism because of the way it constrains and suppresses universal and open ministry, which, in my opinion, is one of the essentials of our faith and practice. On the other hand, I know Friends who feel that a Quakerism without Christ at its center is no true Quakerism. Well, about that I can agree, with some caveats.
So this gets really complicated. At least it does for me.
The Christ and the Quaker message
When we speak to people on behalf of “Quakerism”, I believe . . .
- we should not ignore the Christian roots of our history and the subsequent Christian history of Quakerism’s unfolding over the centuries;
- we should not ignore our current Christian demographics as a worldwide movement;
- we should not pretend that we have in good gospel order at some point “left all that behind” and redefined our movement as post-Christian; and
- most importantly, we should not deny the divine spirit that gathered us as a people of God in the first place and that still gathers the vast majority of Friends today. Even if this is not our own experience.
I believe in Christ. I believe that the Christ was—and is—the “gatherer” of this peculiar people, as George Fox envisioned from Pendle Hill and then effected at Firbank Fell—even though I do not experience the Christ this way myself. (Well, maybe I do, actually; this is where it gets complicated.) I cannot with integrity deny the testimony of so many Friends about Christ, his presence today, and his role in our origins. Can you?
Actually, as I just implied, I do have my own experience of the Christ. I have experienced something that presented itself as the Christ a couple of times, as a presence in meeting for worship, accompanying psychic manifestations that were pretty impressive at the time. I have several times experienced a deeply gathered meeting for worship and, as I have written in a couple of entries on the gathered meeting, I choose to call the consciousness of the gathered meeting the Christ consciousness, even though I have never experience his presence among us explicitly in a gathered meeting.
The consciousness of the Christ is all we can actually experience of the Christ. Even if we narrowly define Christ as the divine reality of Jesus of Nazareth, as traditional Christianity does, the risen Jesus is now a consciousness; we do not experience him in the body, through our eyes and ears and normal consciousness, as did his disciples. To experience the Christ in our time, one must enter an extraordinary consciousness, just as Paul did; and George Fox. One must “come up in the spirit through the flaming sword”. Well, it’s not always so dramatic. But the transformational experience of the Christ is a visitation of an extra-ordinary consciousness.
As I have also said elsewhere, I therefore believe that at times (quite often, actually), the Christ is gathering us now (and, in fact, has always gathered us) without his name tag on. Put another way, I choose to call the consciousness of the gathered meeting the Christ-consciousness, even when, as is mostly the case, he does not declare himself explicitly as Jesus the Christ, recognizing that this is theological speculation on my part.
Such speculation, such “notions”, are not “Quakerly”. We do not base our religious lives on theological ideas that we do not know experientially ourselves. So for me this “belief” that the Christ is the presence in our midst is a matter of personal intellectual choice, and it’s not really very important to my personal religious life as a result. It is my experiences that are of primary importance to me, not the ideas I’ve come up with to explain them.
But we are talking about our collective voice, what we say on behalf of the whole Society of Friends to those who are inquiring about Quakerism. Sharing our personal experience is probably the best way to share Quakerism with others, up to a point. But we inevitably come to a point where we must speak beyond our experience on behalf of Quakerism as a whole.
Nor would my experiences of the Christ pass a traditional evangelical litmus test. On the other hand, the assertion that true religion, true Christianity, true Quakerism, must proclaim Jesus as savior is also a theological idea, one interpretation of Scripture among many possible ones.
Once someone has experienced Christ as their savior, well now they know their own Truth. It is obvious that the Christ is the savior for many, many people. And what a blessing that is. But on what grounds could anyone with integrity claim that I must accept their experience as prescriptive for myself? Because that’s how they read the Book? And because they believe that not only is the Book the ultimate authority, but their interpretation of the Book is the ultimate authority?
Thus I am inclined to draw a line here: I cannot welcome with integrity the exclusive, prescriptive message that salvation in Christ is the only true religion. This is a matter of personal faith. It is based on an interpretation of one book (well, a library, really), filtered by thousands of years of (sometimes apostate) tradition, whose message was mutating even while its own books were still being written.
I believe that the essential Quaker message is that only inward experience of the Christ matters, and not belief in a certain religious ideology, however ancient and established that ideology might be. Thus we must respect that inwardness and eschew projecting our own inward experience on others. Others must be allowed their own inward experience.
But what is the Christ that we can proclaim? The Christ is a consciousness that tradition believes was the divine consciousness of the Jesus of Scriptures. But that consciousness has throughout history manifested itself in forms that run along a spectrum . . .
- from absolutely clear and personal experience of Jesus Christ as savior;
- through the rather more mysterious and uncertain experiences that Mary Magdalene and the guys on the road to Emmaus and Paul himself had of the risen Jesus, in which it took some time, teaching, and revelation to understand what was happening;
- to the modern gathered Quaker meeting in which, although we are certain that we are gathered, we are not certain how we are gathered, only that we sense a presence in the midst, perhaps, or at least, we sense each other sensing each other in some mysterious communion.
That is the Christ that I feel we can proclaim:
- that we were gathered originally as a peculiar people of God by a spirit, a consciousness, that those Friends testified was Jesus Christ;
- that throughout our history, the spirit of Christ has continued to guide us and strengthen us, heal us and save us, inspire us and reveal new truth to us; and
- that still today our meetings are gathered in Christ, in a spirit of love and truth, a spirit that we hold is continuous with the Quaker experience of the Christ’s revelation in Jesus himself and throughout our history, even though we do not—and never have—always explicitly experienced that spirit as Jesus Christ.
I believe we have a message to proclaim, and it should include—let me rephrase that—I believe it should be established on, not just the history of our experience of the inward Light of Christ as a people, but the reality that the Quaker Way points directly to the Light of the Christ, however we name it or experience it ourselves.
For myself, I choose to accept the testimony of so many Friends that the Light I have experienced is the Light of Christ, even if it dos not declare itself to me as such. I choose to accept that it is the Christ who gathers us as a people of G*d, whether we all recognize that consciousness as the consciousness of Jesus the Christ or not in that moment of gathering.
And I believe that the first thing out of our mouths when proclaiming the Quaker message—when we are evangelizing—should be the joyous promise and reality of direct communion with the Divine in the Light of Christ. We Liberal Friends can then go on to talk about the Light, or the Inner Light, or even, I suppose, that of God in everyone if we feel compelled to (even though, as I have written before, we misuse our tradition when we use this phrase this way).
In fact, many times our listeners will need this kind of bridge from Christ-language to more inclusive language in order to really hear our message. We know this because many of us need this bridge. But the Christ is the mainland and we “post-Christians” are on the island, and I for one am grateful that modern Liberal Quakerism offers me a causeway between the two.
Our tradition says that it was the Christ who awakened us as a people of G*d, that it is the Christ who gathers us even today. And our tradition has always claimed to be universal in this—that the light of Christ enlightens everyone who is coming into the world, as the gospel of John puts it in the King James Version.
Yet clearly, not every act of enlightenment comes with the name of Jesus Christ tagged upon it. Inward religious experience takes many forms and runs across a very wide spectrum of clarity and assignation. Even Luke, in his three different tellings of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, gives us three different accounts of what happened, and even Paul himself had to be taught by Ananias what his experience meant.
Thus, even if we cannot explicitly own the experience of the Christ’s “enlightenment” ourselves, it still could be true that it is Christ who “enlightens” us. We certainly can’t claim that it isn’t Christ. So when we are sharing the Quaker message—when we are speaking on behalf of the tradition—I believe that we should respect it enough to share it with integrity, and not project upon it the limitations of our own experience.
For me, the way to present this complicated message is to say that part of my evolution as a Liberal Quaker is the revelation that the message of Jesus is universal and that, for me, the communion I experience in the gathered meeting, the healing, the inspiration and guidance, and yes, the salvation, that I might experience inwardly as an individual, are the experience of the Light of Christ, even if I do not explicitly experience it as such. This obviously is a matter of faith, since I do not know it experientially. But it still belongs in my presentation of Quakerism, notwithstanding the limitations of my own experience. And finally, the people to whom I may be speaking are themselves free to experience the Light in whatever way it reveals itself to them, as the Christ—or not.
Evangelism Reconsidered, Part One
February 12, 2014 § 2 Comments
I have been surprised to find how much I have to say about evangelism. I think this is because it gets to what I feel are two essential questions, at least for Liberal Friends: what is our message and what is the place of Christ in that message? I had promised in my last post to offer a positive exploration of evangelism as one of the purposes of Quakerism, and when I got started, I ended up with two really long posts following different threads, but often crossing the same ground. So I am going to publish them separately but simultaneously, and hope you will accept the inevitable repetition.
Evangelism, the Quaker Message, and the Christ
In the Greek of Christian Scripture, evangelion means to proclaim the good news. For centuries, Friends have proclaimed the good news that salvation from sin can be found in the direct experience of the Light of Christ and needs no outward mediator—no priests, no outward sacraments, but only the direct experience of the Christ. Furthermore, this salvation through direct communion is available to anyone, for the Light of Christ is universal; it enlightens everyone.
I believe that Friends do have good news to proclaim. However, as I said in my last post, I believe that the Quaker message is bigger, more inclusive, and more positive than just salvation in Christ, though this obviously is one of the purposes of Quakerism and demonstrably a great blessing to those who find in him their savior.
Thus I propose that our purpose, our message, is to bring souls to Christ, irrespective of “salvation”, and inclusive of salvation. My Liberal Quaker readers might be more comfortable with “awakening people to the Light within them”. I think “bringing people to Christ” and “awakening people to the Light within them” are the same thing. And I do believe that the Christ belongs at the center of our message, even for those of us who have not personally experienced the Christ as Jesus Christ.
I want to diverge for a moment and talk about how we know such things, how we make the connection between the Liberal Quaker’s Inner Light (or “that of God”, or whatever you want to call it) and the spirit of Jesus the Christ, the spirit of the man who walked the deserted places of Galilee and Judea, who taught, enacted, and embodied the kingdom of God, and of whom people have had visions and visitations throughout the centuries.
Interpreting mystical experience of—and as—the Christ
I have had a number of “mystical” experiences. Two of them were of Jesus appearing in the midst of a meeting for worship as an apparition that connected me directly and psychically to inward things that were happening to others in the meeting. In both cases, he stood right behind someone who would in moments rise to speak powerful ministry. I felt that he was connecting me to them in some way.
In my own formative spiritual experience, I was visited by a presence in the midst of a very deep and overwhelming altered state induced by an intense sweat lodge ceremony. This presence had a name, a voice (made of sounds repeated in patterns), and a mission. It took me weeks to understand the voice’s message and the messenger’s mission. It took help from someone with a little shamanistic training to find my footing inside the experience right after it happened. I have conducted my spiritual life as a covenant with this spirit ever since. But what is that spirit, really?
Even really powerful “visionary” experiences are extremely subjective; the vague, “still small voice” experiences that are much more common are even more subjective. These experiences are full of mystery, of questions. Was it real? Was it real as it presented itself—can I take the experience at face value—or was it essentially symbolic in its manifestation? Where did it come from? Was I communing with an independent spiritual entity, or an archetype in the collective unconscious, or “merely” projecting from my own unconscious—or all of the above? What does this experience mean? What mental and spiritual tools do I need to better understand it? Is the help I get from others to gain understanding to be trusted, or are my human mentors just guessing or projecting, too, or at least limited by their own mental and spiritual tools?
You can see all these questions playing out in accounts in Scripture of such events. Peter, James, and John have no idea what’s going on at first in the transfiguration. When Jesus walks across the sea in the darkness, his own disciples do not recognize him. The men to whom the risen Jesus appears on the road to Emmaus do not recognize him, even though they walk with him for hours talking specifically about Jesus’s career and death—until they “break bread” with him. Paul gets help from Ananias in understanding his visitation. The disciples often don’t even understand Jesus’ parables, let alone their visions, and he has to interpret his stories for them.
I love thinking about these questions, but they don’t really go anywhere. I end up making intellectual choices based on what makes the most sense to me. But I know that really I am just speculating.
So my own approach is to accept transcendental experiences on the terms in which they present themselves; I take them more or less at face value. I wait to see what else is revealed. And I acknowledge to myself that what I’ve experienced could just be inside my head; or at least, that something else might be going on that I do not yet perceive or understand.
This is not skepticism. I do not doubt the experience. But I hold it lightly, gingerly, expecting that more about it may be revealed—but not necessarily.
This is why I accept at face value the testimony of Friends, both ancient and modern, who knew and know Jesus Christ inwardly. This is why I will not deny the testimony of others or try to redefine their experience into terms that work better for me, just as I don’t want others to redefine for me what my experience means. I do not translate other people’s messages into terms I like better, as many Friends do. I try to embrace their language as their truth, and potentially, therefore, as my truth, too. For how many stories do we have of some Friend awakened to a new truth by another Friend’s challenging vocal ministry? Margaret Fell and Elizabeth Fry come to mind immediately.
The Christ today and the Quaker message
And this is why I feel free to assume that the Christ is still working in people’s hearts and in the midst of Quaker meetings, still saving us, still gathering us, still teaching us, still healing us, still leading us into new revelation. Just because he is not wearing his name tag does not mean he is no longer alive, present, and active.
On the other hand, just because the Bible tells us he is alive, present, and active doesn’t necessarily mean that he actually is. This is all a mystery. Thus some would say that it is a matter of faith: we are left to simply believe it or not. I don’t agree. I won’t “believe” something I haven’t experienced. Instead, I “entertain” it: I give it a room of its own in my mind and heart and it is welcome to dwell within me while we try each other out. I will give it shelter, I will even feed it with my Bible study and prayer, share it with other visitors into my life, play with it, and try to learn from it.
Sometimes, a new belief—an idea I’m entertaining that does not rest on direct experience—starts paying rent. It bears fruit. It is confirmed by experience, or at least comes to feel so right that I now consider it a member of my inner household. Or not. I have a whole boarding house of ideas that I am still working with experimentally, using them to approach my life when they seem useful, but without the convincement that comes with direct experience.
The idea that the Christ is a consciousness, that, in practical terms, the Christ is the consciousness of the gathered meeting, seems increasingly right to me, ever since the opening that came while writing my series on the gathered meeting in this blog. And for years, I have been entertaining the idea that the Christ, the consciousness that the evangelists were trying to convey in the gospels, is still among us and still working within us, but without “a name tag”, as I put—without declaring his identity or demanding our confession.
Thus, in the same way that I entertain new ideas and beliefs, I feel that the Christ has been “entertaining” me, that as a non-Christian Friend, I am a guest in the house that Christ built. I am grateful that I have been welcomed. I try to respect the Master of the house and the human stewards who know him personally. I try to know him personally myself, through study and prayer and meditation.
I have arranged the furniture in the room I occupy in this mansion to suit my religious sensibilities, but I don’t try to move the furniture in the rest of the house around without sharing a process of discernment with the other inhabitants, hopefully with the explicit invitation to the owner—the Christ—to join us and guide us.
Put more plainly, I do not claim that my Liberal, post-Christian Quakerism is the only legitimate Quakerism, or, even worse, that traditional Christ-centered Quakerism is somehow illegitimate, or at least passé, or that we have somehow outgrown it or laid it aside. I do not claim that our core belief is that “there is that of God in everyone”, not at least without linking it to the Christ and acknowledging that this is relatively new light that is still being tested.
I said that I feel we should explicitly invite the Christ into our meetings for worship, our meetings for business in worship, and our other discernment processes. This is pretty rare in Liberal Quaker meetings. When we’re at our most attentive and faithful, we acknowledge that we labor under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our discernment, but we rarely name “the Spirit” as the spirit of the Christ. (And all too often, we are actually just trying to reach a consensus, anyway, rather than a true sense of the meeting.)
Well, if the Christ isn’t going to manifest himself clearly to us and, like me, we are not willing to just “believe” as a matter of faith without experience, then dropping back a notch in our language to “the Spirit” makes sense. Only never should we forget or deny the testimony of Friends over centuries and among us today that we actually are gathered in the Christ, or as I prefer, the Christ-consciousness. For that is what the Christ is—a consciousness, a spirit. Even if that consciousness was the same consciousness Jesus of Nazareth possessed, now, today, Jesus the man is gone, and all we presently have is the consciousness of the Christ.
This is why I believe that the Christ should still stand at the center of our message, whether we have experienced him there or not. And so, this is how I express the good news that we Friends can offer the world, as I presented it in my previous post:
There is in everyone a light that can guide and strengthen us to do the right, that can awaken us to the wrong we have done and are about to do, that can heal us, that can save us from our demons and relieve us of our inner suffering, that can inspire us to acts of kindness and to creativity, that can lead us to become the people we were meant to be, and that can open to us direct communion with God (however you experience God), both as individuals and as a community. We Quakers have experienced this light as the Light of Christ, as a Spirit of Love and Truth, as a Presence in our midst, as that which has gathered us as a people of God and continues to guide our meetings and the Quaker movement into the future, when we are faithful to its call. In this light, G*d is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth.
What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Evangelism
January 31, 2014 § 9 Comments
Typical of a Liberal Friend, only now, after unpacking all the other subjects under “Bringing people to G*d”, have I realized that I had left out one crucial (if you’ll forgive the pun) category—evangelism, bringing souls to Christ.
If we were not seriously allergic to the word itself and what it usually stands for, we Liberal Friends might redefine “evangelism” as energetically getting the Quaker message out there, with the goal of bringing people to Quakerism—evangelism as outreach, essentially. But of course, that begs the question of what “the Quaker message” is. And it evades the basic question implied by evangelism: what is our relation to the Christ and to salvation in Christ? And we don’t want to bring people to Quakerism with our evangelism, anyway; it is to G*d, to the Light within them, to the Christ, that we want to awaken them. If they end up finding their religious home with us, great.
I do think that Liberal Quakers should be “energetically getting our message out there”. And I do have an answer for what the Liberal message could be—and it includes the Christ. In a nutshell:
There is in everyone a light that guides and strengthens us to do the right, that awakens us to the wrong we have done and are about to do, that heals us, that saves us from our demons and relieves us of our inner suffering, that inspires us to acts of kindness and to creativity, that leads us to become the people we were meant to be, and that opens to us direct communion with God (however you experience God), both as individuals and as a community. We Quakers have experienced this light as the Light of Christ, as a Spirit of Love and Truth, as a Presence in our midst, as that which has gathered us as a people of God and continues to guide our meetings and our movement into the future, when we are faithful to its call. In this light, G*d is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth.
What my understanding of evangelism does not include is the more forceful and exclusionary evangelical message that salvation in Christ is the only thing that really matters and you better believe or else.
In fact, nothing about what I call the salvation paradigm of evangelical Christianity works for me:
- I do not believe that sinfulness is the only aspect of human nature that really matters in religious life, or that it is even the most important aspect of human nature.
- I do not experience God as primarily, let alone essentially, a lawgiver, king, and judge—a divine being defined primarily by will and who expresses his (sic) love primarily by his willingness to forgive us and kill his only son in order to do it. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son?” I don’t think so, or he is a monster, like Kronos.
- I do not confine my understanding of sin to disobedience against such a God and his laws or will. My most serious sins have victims; they are sins against people, not against a divine lawgiver and judge.
- Nor do I believe that even my most egregious sins would so inflame this God that I deserve eternal damnation under his judgment.
- I would not believe that the human sacrifice/divine sacrifice of God’s son would ever be required to save me from this fate, either, even if I believed in such a fate.
- And I do not believe that all I would have to do to escape this fate is to accept this sacrificial son as my savior.
I recognize that traditional Quakerism doesn’t base human salvation on simple acceptance of a set of beliefs, either. Rather, we have believed that only inward alignment toward and experience of Christ can bring salvation.
Now, I have experienced the light in the conscience, as early Friends put it. I have since childhood sought constantly to turn toward the light within me, that it might reveal to me the wrong things I have done and the right things to do, and help me to resist wrongdoing. I had experienced this light long before I had learned about Quakerism, the Light of Christ, or the Inner Light of modern liberal Quakerism.
And of course, I have failed many, many times—uncountable times—to follow the light. Does that mean I am damned, because I have repeatedly turned away from the light within me, and haven’t asked this divine judge to forgive me for it or named or experienced his son as my savior? And is this struggle with wrongdoing the only role of the Light in a truly religious person’s life? I do not believe so.
I am not saying that the Christ is not a savior. I know people who have been saved by Christ, who have been released from their demons and their inner suffering by Christ, and I believe their testimony, and I can see what a great blessing it has been.
No, I am saying that the Christian gospel and the Quaker message can both be much bigger and in general more positive than a preoccupation with sin and “salvation in Christ” would suggest. The good news we have to proclaim includes salvation in Christ, but there’s a lot more to it; it is fuller and richer than this, and more universal, more exciting to more people.
Furthermore, I do not think that the conventional evangelical message that I laid out above is faithful to Christian scripture, anyway. At least it is not faithful to the gospel of Jesus as we have it in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
The conventional evangelical gospel comes, it seems to me, mostly from Paul, and from John the evangelist, and I think they both got Jesus wrong. Or put it this way, if I must hew to Scripture in the first place: given the huge and, in my opinion irreconcilable, disparities between the Jesus of the synoptics, the Jesus of John, and the Christ of Paul, I feel I must choose which seems more faithful, and the Jesus of the synoptics seems to me closer to the truth.
But I don’t want to get into this right now. Unpacking Steven Davison’s interpretation of Scripture in this matter would take an awful lot of blog posts. Another time, perhaps. Back to “evangelism”.
For me, the conventional evangelical understanding of “salvation” is essentially a pathological preoccupation. It makes human nature a disease and for the cure, it focuses only on a battle with evil and is preoccupied with death—our death, the death of the Christ, and even the death of the whole world.
For me, human nature is a blessing, not a disease, notwithstanding that it is made of both shadow and light, of—yes—disease and suffering and evil, but also of love and community and communication and science and striving for the good, and striving for truth and for wholeness. Human nature is art: blues riffs on Eric Clapton’s fretboard, van Gogh’s Starry Night, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus at Colonus, Balanchine’s Serenade. And, yes, Adolf Hitler, the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, napalm, the bomb. And Gandhi, MLK, Sojourner Truth, and the Friends I know who have followed a call into prison ministry. My point is that the light of Christ inspires truth and art and goodness and progress and life. It does not just reveal to us our shadows.
I know this does not square with the gospel as George Fox and early Friends believed it and preached it. Yes, I have stepped outside the stream in which even those Friends who gave birth to the Liberal Quaker movement at the turn of the twentieth century lived their religious lives. My approach is not traditional Quakerism, I admit it. I have to admit it: I think these Friends got it wrong, too. Well, not wrong so much, as lopsided. They emphasized the darkness too much. They “preached up” sin too much, even though Fox famously railed against his contemporaries for “preaching up sin”. His point was that they didn’t preach up salvation from Christ acting within us. My point is that the whole sin-salvation framework focuses our spiritual attention too narrowly and in the wrong direction.
Why obsess about sin and salvation when there is so much good and beauty going on in the human world? Why obsess, I ask? I do not deny evil and I do not recast sin as simply “missing the mark”, as many Liberal Friends do. There is too much sin and oppression in the world to deny it or to think of it as just a mistake. Sin and evil are real and so is salvation. But why obsess about it? Why narrow religion to that concern only?
No, for me, one of the gifts of the experience of the light within us is that the light shines in all directions. It shines inward and outward, it illuminates the way forward and it reveals our hidden shadows. For me, true religion radiates in the same way, in all directions. It does not just focus on sin, judgment, and salvation. It also leads us forward in revelation, while it heals us along the way. And that is the direction I choose to face.
Well, I’ve ranted about my rejection of evangelism as evangelical Christianity traditionally understands it, without expressing much of my positive vision for it—this in unconscious mimicry of the very thing I am criticizing: here I am focusing on the negative myself.
See? When you become preoccupied with an enemy, you become like the enemy. If you focus on sin and sinfulness and judgment and damnation and the torture and blood of the cross, you become pathological. Your thoughts fill up with darkness and wrong and this crowds out thoughts of the good and the light. This historical theological preoccupation is why Paradise Lost and the Inferno are great works of poetry and nobody reads Paradise Regained and the Paradiso. This is why we know all about hell and its horrors and we have Hieronymous Bosch, and our vision of heaven is puerile, sterile, and boring. Our legacy religious ideology is an obsession with darkness and it tends to crowd out all the other colors in the light.
Well, I’m ranting again. I hunger so much for a religion of the positive. I remember something Timothy Leary used to say: that traditional religion said, “For God’s sake, feel bad”, when, instead, we should “for God’s sake feel good”.
So, in the next post, a positive vision for evangelism and for the role of the Christ in an inclusive message that I think we Liberal Quakers could proclaim with confidence and enthusiasm.
January 18, 2014 § 3 Comments
Dear Friends:
In my post on “Doing G*d’s Work” two posts ago, I mentioned a blog entry by Howard Brod that touched on some of the same issues. I have gone back to reread that entry and, for the first time, I have read all the comments.
I think this entry and the discussion that follows is so good that I want to bring it to your attention again. Here’s the link:
Here are some of the quotes from the comments that spoke to me:
Our wide acceptance of people does attract many seekers, but it will only hold a small percentage. When I’ve spoken to those who have moved on, the most common response is that they wanted to move deeper into their faith exploration, but that the meeting was either uninterested or was uncomfortable with it.
When I sit on clearness committees for membership, people speak of wanting to be in a community of like minded people who share their values. When asked about their personal spiritual practice, most don’t have a response.
About 2 years ago, I attended a Quaker spiritual retreat that drew from multiple meetings (liberal and evangelical) over a 2 state area. When the group was asked “why are you here?”, every single liberal (and all were long time Friends) said, “because I need something more and my meeting doesn’t get it.”
In a nutshell, we accept people where they are, but we leave it at that. In my experience, we not very good at sharing our faith with one another, about nurturing spiritual growth or about gently challenging each other to take the next step in the Light.
And this:
Our testimonies, Quaker process and even unprogrammed worship have become our golden calf. We forget that there is Something More behind them.
But this is just a random smattering. The entire discussion is really valuable written ministry, in my opinion.
What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Fellowship & the Angel of the Meeting
January 11, 2014 § 16 Comments
In his class on Quakerism at Pendle Hill, Bill Taber taught that many Friends in the 19th and especially the 18th centuries believed in “the angel of the meeting”, that each meeting had its own angel. Friends got this idea from the book of Revelation, chapter 1:17 through chapter 3. Chapters two and three are letters written by “the one like the Son of Man” (Christ) to the angels of seven churches in Asia Minor. For example:
To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand (the seven angels; 1:20), who walks among the seven golden lamp stands (the seven churches; 1:20).
Bill said that some Friends who had a reputation for effectively ministering to troubled meetings would travel to labor with them, and before even meeting with any of the parties involved, they would ask for a meeting for worship with the whole community. In the meeting for worship, they would try to commune with the angel of the meeting, in order to learn first hand from the meeting as a whole what the condition of the meeting was, without the filter of accounts from the human members.
Ever since learning this, I have tried to commune with the angel of the meetings that I’ve visited and I greet the angel of my own meeting at the beginning of worship. Three times have I had an experience of a meeting’s angel, twice quite dramatically. I don’t actually remember where the third instance was, but the other two were Rahway-Plainfield in New Jersey and Santa Cruz, California. I have never experienced the angel of my own meetings, but that is because they are partly a manifestation of myself as one of the meeting’s members. That’s what the angel is, the spirituality of a meeting, and thus a projection, if you will, of all its members. It’s really hard to spiritually commune with your own true self.
This faith and practice isn’t New Age balderdash. It is literal biblical Quaker Christianity in a unique manifestation.
Most of us already have some inkling of this kind of thing. We have had the experience that, as soon as you enter a new meeting’s meeting room, you can begin to sense something of the meeting’s personality and this sense deepens as you worship with them or talk to its members.
And lucky for us, we even have some guidelines about what is going on and how to commune with a meeting and its angel in this way. I am talking about the theologian Walter Wink’s extraordinary series of books on “the Powers”—his catchword for the various spiritual entities mentioned in Christian Scripture. I am especially referring to the chapter in the second book in the series, Unmasking the Powers, on the angels of churches. [Note: I just learned that Walter Wink died a few years ago. He was easily my favorite theologian. He made really valuable contributions to our understanding of the gospel. I’m sad.]
Wink’s approach is very modern: he looks at the Powers as the interior spirituality of things, not as the conventional beings with wings and semi-divine powers that we have in popular culture. In section three of the introductory book Naming the Powers, two of his chapter headings will give you a sense of his approach: “The Powers are the inner aspect of material reality”, and “Heaven is the transcendent “within” of material reality”.
I think his insights are so good that I want to quote extensively from Unmasking the Powers on the angels of churches.
What is the angel of the meeting?
It would appear that the angel is not something separate from the congregation, but must somehow represent it as a totality. . . . The angel would then exist in, with, and under the material expressions of the church’s life as its interiority. As the corporate personality or felt sense of the whole, the angel of the church would have no separate existence apart from the people. . . . Angel and people are the inner and outer aspects of one and the same reality. The people incarnate or embody the angelic spirit; the angel distills the invisible essence of their totality as a group. The angel and the congregation come into being together and, if such is their destiny, pass out of existence together. The one cannot exist without the other. (p. 70)
Is the angel of the church then real? On the question of the metaphysical status of angels I have no direct knowledge. . . . I am inclined to follow a more functionalist approach. What the ancients called the angel of a collective entity actually answers to an aspect of all corporate realities: they do have an inner spirit, though our culture has been trained to ignore it. To that degree their angels are real, whether they possess personal metaphysical reality apart from their function or not. Their function is manifested by their personality and their vocation. (p. 71)
The “vocation” of the angel of the meeting—what is its purpose and how should this inform our relationship with it?
Far from being perfect heavenly beings, these angels encompass every aspect of a church’s current reality, good and bad alike. In the same way that I am at every moment simultaneously who I am and who I might become, the angel encompasses both what the church is and what it is called to be. . . . (p. 72)
The coexistence of these two aspects within a single image may be confusing, but this complexity is precisely what gives to this category its heuristic power. Sociological analyses of a congregation can lift up aspects of its personality, but can make no normative statement about what it should become. Theological analyses can speak about vocation [what it is called to become], but tend to do so in global generalizations and categorical imperatives that make no allowance for the unique problems and possibilities of individual congregations. The angel of the church provides us with an exceedingly rich category for congregational analysis, while at the same time providing us with a biblical image for reflecting theologically on the congregation’s unique vocation. The angel gathers up into a single whole all the aspirations and grudges, hopes and vendettas, fidelity and unfaithfulness of a given community of believers, and lays it all before God for judgment, correction, and healing. (p. 73)
In the letters to the churches in Revelation, Christ as the Son of Man* lays out observations about the condition of each church and then prescribes the changes that it should undertake and the rewards that await them if they “conquer”. These are pastoral letters intended to shine the Light on the churches’ shadows and show them the way to grace. The last letter ends with a passage that was a favorite of George Fox when talking about turning toward the light of Christ:
Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. (Rev. 3:20)
Discerning the angel of the meeting.
Wink goes on to describe ways in which we can discern the angel of a meeting.
If we wish to discern the angel of a church, then, we first need to see what is there. Once we have become acquainted with its personality we can ask about its vocation. If the congregation and its physical structures are the outward manifestation of the angelic spirit, then the inner reality should be made manifest by its outer concretions. So we can start from the visible, isolating the manifest characteristics of a church and asking what each reveals about its angel. The items that I will highlight are merely suggestive, certainly not exhaustive, and would serve as but starters for a full analysis of a church. [He then discusses the following areas:]
- architecture and ambiance;
- economic class and income, social and ethnic background, education, age, and gender of the members;
- the meeting’s power structure;
- how the meeting handles conflict;
- the form of worship (liturgy); and
- history—how the meeting sees itself.
Many of these aspects are quite different from one Christian denomination to another, but they vary a lot less among Friends. Think of the difference between a Congregatational church in New England versus a Roman Catholic cathedral, in terms of architecture, power structure, and liturgy, etc. Nevertheless, I think they all apply to some degree to Quaker meetings. I think of Fifteenth Street’s huge meetinghouse in Manhattan compared to my meeting’s modest house in Yardley, PA. This is especially true with the way we handle conflict and our histories. So we need our own markers, in addition to the ones Wink provides. I suggest the following:
- any history in the separations—Orthodox, Hicksite, Wilburite?
- committee structure—what committees does the meeting have and how many are there relative to their meeting size;
- presence or absence of recorded ministers, Friends traveling or serving under minutes, and attitudes toward recording, minutes of travel, and other formal programs for ministry and spiritual formation and nurture;
- presence or absence of potlucks, Friendly Eights, and other opportunities for socializing;
- existence or absence of corporate witness, outreach, and ecumenical participation in the wider community;
- number of families with children and the state of First Day School;
- state of adult religious education;
- presence or absence of meeting retreats;
- percentage of members and attenders who attend meeting for worship and meeting for business in worship;
- ratio of attenders to members;
- gender and age mix among the meeting’s leadership (clerks and committee clerks);
- presence or absence of Bible study and attitudes toward the Bible;
- “tolerance” (or intolerance) versus welcoming of all kinds of vocal ministry, especially of biblical and Christian content and of prophetic witness;
- number of Friends active in the regional meeting and the yearly meeting;
- number of Friends whose knowledge of Quaker faith, practice, and history prepares them to teach these things in the meeting.
Ministering to the meeting through its angel
Wink’s whole approach to the angels of churches focuses on vocation—on helping churches become what they are called to be, for their members and in the world. He himself is a very dedicated activist theologian, having written a whole book on apartheid back in the 1980s, and he gave us a breakthrough interpretation of Jesus’ “resist not evil” teachings (“if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to them the left”, etc.). His extraordinary reading revealed Jesus as anything but passive, but rather, as a master of the jiujitsu move against oppression—turning nonviolent protest into a challenge for the oppressor (a topic for a later post).
Like him, and like those early Friends, I believe we can use the idea—the reality, in my experience—of the angel of the meeting to help transform our meetings, especially when we fall into conflict. The last section of Wink’s chapter on the angel of the church is a case study of how this framework was actually used by a pastor of a congregation.
But the angel is not itself an agent of change. “That role, the letters [in Revelation] make clear, belongs to the “one like a human being,” the Christ.
. . . no matter how far the congregation has deviated from the divine will, the knowledge of that will is still encoded in its “higher self,” the angel. (p. 78–79)
It is only the “one like a human being” [meaning an angel who has the form of a human, rather than an angelic body; that angel is Christ] who can bring the churches into line with the will of God. . . . God must suddenly appear to the congregations as outside their ken. They must experience a jolt of recognition: we are out of phase with the will of God.
That Otherness that lays such a radical demand on these insignificant congregations must be revealed to them, however, in a way that is not wholly discontinuous with their history. Hence the role of the intermediary, John [writer of Revelation], who is a part of their sameness and yet has beheld the Otherness and can unmask the ways their existence is out of line with their vocation. . . .
In the final analysis only Christ as the Spirit of the whole church (emphasis mine) can change a church, and only the renewed presence of that spirit can bring the churches into line with their supreme vocation. Only as changes in personnel, programs, and relationships take place in congruence with that vocation will genuine transformation take place. For that reason the single most important element in Revelation 1–3 is not the letters as such, but the primal vision that makes them possible: the vision of Christ as the Ultimate Human (1:9–10). Change requires all our strength and sagacity but it also requires that we sit quite still until we have discerned the angel and have been caught up in a vision of what it could become if it were alive to the divine presence that “walks among the seven golden lamp stands” (2:1). . . .
This requires discerning the lineaments and characteristics of a church’s angel. It means holding its present reality up before the one who is present in its midst (emphasis mine) for judgment or affirmation. It involves accepting and loving its present reality, however corrupt, just as one would any other sinner. Churches are like people: they do not change in order that they might be accepted; they must be accepted in order that they might change. If we accept and love the wounded angel, praying for a vision of its true personality (rather than imposing our own), and engaging with others in the struggle to discern the true nature of its calling, then the whole congregation may move toward it organically. (pp. 80–82)
Walter Wink is a Christian, of course, and so he turns to Christ, following the text of Revelation itself, and he takes for granted the value of this very strange book in the Bible for the congregations and readers he is addressing. I wonder how this language is going over with my post-Christian readers?
I highlighted three phrases that seem quite close to Quaker tradition. The reason he uses these phrases may be that Wink does, in fact, attend a Quaker meeting fairly frequently. He knows our tradition. I hope that these phrases will give my readers a door into how this thinking might work for us.
I believe that his approach, which marries sociology to spirituality, is just the kind of approach that should appeal to even our post-Christian meetings. This was one of the fruits for me of my exploration of the gathered meeting—discovering how Christ can be understood as the consciousness of the gathered meeting. Though he is much more, Wink describes Christ as the consciousness of the church as a whole, as the angel of the meeting that is the whole of the universal church. And it was Wink’s books on the Powers that came back to me when I started exploring the relationship between the Christ and the gathered meeting.
Meanwhile, Wink’s approach does, I believe, also provide us with tools that can help us minister to our meetings. At the very least, this framework reminds us that spirit is involved in the dynamics and the conflicts of our meetings, not just sociology—not just human feelings and relationships, but also the inward standing wave of identity and direction that is a meeting’s life—its spiritual momentum, if you will.
Which helps to explain why meetings resist change. They have momentum. They have a certain spiritual mass and direction already, and you can’t turn them at will. You must address this inner dimension of meeting life to bring it transformation, just as you must address the outer dimensions of a meeting’s life.
Well, this has turned into a really long post. I quoted a lot, but there’s lots more. I hope it’s been worth it. I cannot recommend Walter Wink’s books enough, and perhaps some of my readers will find this compelling enough to buy these books and read this whole chapter for yourselves.
Thanks for hanging on this long.
* The Son of Man is the only title Jesus takes for himself in the gospel of Mark. Literally, it translates as “son of Adam”, which is a Hebrew and Aramaic idiom for mortal, or human. But in translations, the title is usually capitalized because it not only is a title, but refers to a specific angelic manifestation of Jesus who will return to judge the world at the end time. This is an exceedingly rich image, deriving meaning from its use in the books of Daniel and Revelation, in addition to the gospels, especially Mark, and also the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch, which the letter of 1 Peter quotes verbatim, so we know the early Christians considered at least parts of it to be divinely inspired. I believe understanding the “Son of Man” is the key to understanding why Jesus came to be understood as divine. But to unpack that claim would take a long monograph. Thus—for another time and another venue.
What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Doing G*d’s Work
January 10, 2014 § 5 Comments
[Reminder: I use the asterisk in the middle of G*d to stand in for whatever your experience of God is.]
Note: I have more to say about Fellowship as the mission of the Quaker meeting, but I want to do a little research first, so I am going on to the meeting for business in worship and will return to Fellowship in a subsequent post.
When I asked one of my grown sons a while back why, after being raised a Quaker, he has not continued, he answered, “Because meeting for worship is a bunch of blowhards saying the same things every week and meeting for business is about things that don’t really matter.” Something like that.
I think there’s probably more to it than that. And I think he might have a rather different experience of meeting for worship if he went to some other nearby meetings. But I doubt that the meeting for business would be different.
I once statistically analyzed the business of a yearly meeting over a year, as recorded in its minutes. The vast majority of that business was irrelevant to the kingdom of G*d *. Only three pieces of business out of some 120 minutes came to the Yearly Meeting floor in gospel order, that is, originating in a local meeting and passing on through a regional meeting to the yearly meeting because that was the appropriate body for it; and one of these items was a fairly routine request for a disbursement from a trust fund asking for help with meetinghouse repairs.
Almost all of the yearly meeting’s business was generated by the yearly meeting’s committees. Most had to do with either the mechanics of the meeting sessions or money. Most of the business affected only the yearly meeting organization (by which I mean the yearly meeting’s committees and the Friends under appointment to those committees, and the apparatus of the Yearly Meeting sessions). Most of our business is, to use the most shocking and crass expression possible, spiritual masturbation. It brings forth almost nothing in the world we live in, which is in dire need of spirit-led ministry. It is a waste of the Seed.
A lot of our business is quite mundane, it’s true. Property matters, budget stuff, routine reports from committees on their work. We have to do this work, and it is boring at the surface level of management. So we all sit there doing it, usually with the utmost conscientiousness, in my experience. Fine.
But we do sometimes get lulled into a pro forma treatment of this work. Put another way, we let ourselves fall into habit—and out of worship. And our meetings for business are supposed to be meetings for worship. Often, the tone of our business meetings is to get out of there as soon as possible. And it’s not always just tacit. My own meeting cuts fifteen minutes off the meeting for worship that day so that we can get out earlier.
Clerks, both the presiding clerk and committee clerks, can help maintain a spirit of worship by being prepared and thoughtful about the agenda, trying to help committees present effectively, maintaining a good period of silent waiting between items, knowing Quaker process well, and setting a worshipful tone throughout.
Then there are the decisions that are contentious or otherwise difficult. Two things really get on my nerves in the way we often handle difficult business. The first is our habit of asking for voiced approval before everyone who might have an objection has been heard, which forces the meeting to return to its discernment after approving something—which feels very odd to me and often results in some chaos in the discernment. Second, and often in tandem with this first dynamic, we often do our discernment by editing the text of a minute, focusing on tweaks to the language and often devolving into points of grammar and semantics, instead of focusing on the guidance of our Teacher.
I feel that clerks should pointedly ask for objections to a verbally proposed test minute, and do so repeatedly until no one speaks up; then ask the recording clerk to read her/his record of the minute that’s just been presented verbally by the presiding clerk—and then ask again for objections and corrections until no one speaks up; then ask if s/he may take the body’s silence as approval. (Doing this also means you don’t have to reread and approve this minute later in the process of approving minutes.)
But the basic problem remains: where is the kingdom-work? Why do we do so little that addresses directly the spiritual lives of our members or the woes of the world? Even when we approve a minute of conscience, all we are usually doing is laying down some words. Maybe we issue a press release or in some other way broadcast our words. Still just words.
I believe the root problem behind our lackluster business agendas is that we have lost the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. I know I keep saying this, but this is my ministry—to recover the central role that I believe ministry could and should play in our personal and corporate spiritual lives. I believe that the faith and practice of Quaker ministry is the very soul of Quaker spirituality, both personal and collective.
Currently, our standing committees generate most of our business. I believe that some of the work that some of our committees do should be treated as ministries under the care of the meeting and in the hands of people who feel led to do the work, with committees of support and oversight when appropriate. I’ve written about this before.
However, we do need standing committees for some of our work, especially that which concerns the necessary and routine business for which we have fiduciary responsibility: property, money, the corporation. But I question the use of standing committees that are organized around concerns, like our witness committees, advancement, outreach, even religious education. But that’s another blog post.
If we actively taught—trained, really—our members in the faith and practice of ministry as a personal path, ministries would arise, hopefully even flourish. By “ministry” I mean clear leadings to do something to enrich our members’ spiritual lives or to bring G*d’s love, healing, compassion, and justice into the world. Then we would have some great work to do in our meetings for business in worship, helping to discern and support these leadings—are they spirit-led, what exactly is our Friend led to do, what can we do to help, does our minister need oversight, how do we track the ministry’s progress, when should s/he and we lay it down?
Imagine business meetings so packed with G*d’s work that we have to lay over property decisions, or simply leave them in the hands of our competent property committee! For this kind of work, young people like my son might show up. In fact, they probably would be bringing a lot of the work, if our meetings fostered this kind of religious environment.
One other thing would deepen our business meetings and invite some kingdom-building: extended periods of open worship without an agenda at all, except a kind of non-binding focus on the life of the meeting and its members and on the world we live in, leaving the more open-ended, not-focused worship to our regular meetings for worship.
* Saying “kingdom of G*d” is like saying “mankind”—it carries bad gender baggage, and I would like to use some other phrase. I hope my readers will accept that I mean what the Greek of Christian scripture really connotes with the word “basileus“, which translates clumsily in English. For us, influenced by Latin more than Greek, “kingdom” is an abstract noun. It denotes a place and a state governed by a man. But the Greek basileus is, like most Greek nouns, a verb-noun: it’s a noun built from a verb. So a gerund would be more faithful: “ruling”, without the “-dom” on the end, would be a better translation: the “ruling of God”, rather than the “kingdom of God”, the state in which God rules.
Through the Flaming Sword 