Through the Flaming Sword

I recently participated in a panel sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in which I was asked to talk about Quaker blogs. The questions given me were:

How is the Quaker faith practiced in the blogosphere? How do you see virtual Quakerism informing our Faith as it embraces the digital age?

Download a list of Quaker blogs as of March 2019.

I’m not sure I had much to say of value, but I did make one substantive contribution, at least: as part of my preparation, I tried to hunt down all the Quaker blogs in the blogosphere. There’s quite a few. Here’s a link to that list, organized alphabetically by blog title. For some that I was familiar with, I added very short comments.

Below are some of the thoughts about the Quaker blogosphere that I shared at the event, though somewhat revised after further thought.

Blogging as written ministry. I think most bloggers approach their blogs in a way similar to their vocal ministry, in that we seek to be Spirit-led. But, at least in my case, there’s more preparation and more care for craft.

Blogging as “preaching”. We don’t allow preaching in our (unprogrammed) meetings for worship anymore. Several much-used guides for vocal ministry explicitly encourage short as an important trait of acceptable messages.

This modern constraint for brevity, plus the additional constraint of a programmed end to worship after one hour, tend to suppress some vocal ministry, especially what we used to call gospel ministry, which might unpack some scriptural passage. That’s takes a while.

It also denies the fruits of what I will call preparative meditation. Some of my vocal ministry hangs around forming in my head for weeks or even months. Then one Sunday, it matures and bears fruit and I finally feel called. But the preparation often has given it some substance. It’s not going to be a very short message.

I think we’re losing something with this ethos around ministry that suppresses what you might call preaching, that prescribes brevity in messages, and that thinks that a message has to arrive full-blown on the spot, or it’s “prepared”.

Meanwhile, I suspect that some of us are displacing our “preaching” into our blogs.

The blogosphere as surrogate community. I suspect that for some of us, this digital community serves us in ways that our home meetings do not.

The blogosphere as theological laboratory. Some of us are “theologians”—we want to explore Quaker faith, not just as religious ideology, but also in terms of the community’s dynamics, and as prophetic voices. We want to ask and try to answer important questions facing the Quaker movement and our meetings and institutions. Publishing options for Quaker theologians are extremely limited (though not non-existent). I think Quaker bloggers are an important petri dish for Quakerism as it evolves under some pretty serious pressures, both external and internal. Quaker blogs have become a home for Quaker prophecy, broadly understood in the way meant by William Taber in his pamphlet The Prophetic Stream.