“So That Truth Might Flourish” by Thomas Jeavons

Below is a wonderful quote from Thomas Jeavons on how truth might flourish in our lives. It offers us a wonderful vision for the new year:

“The life of faith requires that we have vision, that we be attentive and obedient to revelation. It requires that we have a sense of the potential for God’s work to take place in and through us— the capacity to apprehend the ideals which we can grow to embody and personify in our lives. It also requires an awareness that much of what we must do to live life fully in faith has been revealed and is to be heeded— a commitment to being mindful of what Friends have long called Truth and right order in our lives…

We must be cognizant of how much God has already shown us and our ancestors about what it means to be in harmony with divine purpose. These revelations are available to us in the Bible, in the journals of our Quaker forbears, in the devotional literature, and in the rich and varied record of human history… It is the challenge to become a people with a vision…so that Truth might flourish in our lives for the benefit of all. It is the challenge to become the people God wishes us to be.”
— Thomas H. Jeavons, 1987.

“Quaker Authority” by Tony Lowe, Pastoral Minister, Fancy Gap Friends (NCYM-FUM)

The chief priests and teachers of the law together with the elders came up to him. ‘”Tell us by what authority you are doing these things,” they said. “Who gave you this authority?”

From the very beginning it was clear that George Fox and those early Quakers wanted to be sure that their was no religious hierarchy in the Society of Friends. Having seen and experienced religious authority that was positional in nature (appointed bishops, archbishops, parish priests, etc.), Fox wanted to be sure that there was only one authority among Friends and that was the Living Christ. And the mark of his authority on individuals was not serving in a particular office or position, but rather His presence in their lives.. This was the basis for the testimony for equality, each person had direct access to God, and therefore one could be used as an instrument of God just as readily as any other.

While we still profess to believe this, putting it into practice is something else again. Since the inception of the pastoral system in the latter half of the nineteenth century, there has been a tendency on the part of some meetings and some pastors to elevate the role of the pastor to more than just one minister among many in a meeting. Like many Protestant churches, there are some Friends meetings where the pastor functions more like the CEO of a business, having the final say so on virtually every decision the congregation makes.

This change in authority can also be seen clearly in our language. In many Yearly Meetings, executive secretaries have become superintendents and standing committees have become administrative boards. In many cases these changes are more than lingual. They indicate a centralization of authority, and even though good people often fill these positions, their authority is still positional in nature. And this system perpetuates itself by convincing people that their own spiritual authority comes not from daily living in the Spirit of the Living Christ, but from serving in positions where they have a sense of power and control and importance. In my opinion, this is one of the main reasons our Yearly Meetings go through power struggles. We have led people to believe that the number of committees or boards they serve on and the power and prestige that goes with such appointments is the real measure of their spirituality. In that sense, we have created our own corporate ladder of success and expect true leaders to climb it.

Some might argue that some kind of structure has to exist in order for the work of Friends in the world to get accomplished. While that may be true, it is still an incredible thing touching on the miraculous when a gathered body unable to find unity on an action or issue goes into a period of deep silence from which clear direction emerges, often from the hesitant words of one not accustomed to speaking their truth in large groups. In order for this to happen, however, it means we must lay aside time sensitive agendas that offer the gathered body no more than the opportunity to be a rubber stamp, and really live into the notion that God can and does speak through any and all, not just to those who hold positions of leadership or those who created the agenda..

One of the things I truly enjoy is coming across the journal of some obscure Friend of long ago who wrote not expecting to be read or become famous, but simply to detail his or her struggles to be true to the calling of the Christ within. And in them I find authority, not because they were widely known or held seemingly important positions, but because they knew experientially where true authority lay.

“Let’s Really Be Friends – With One Another” by Tony Lowe

   Having just completed the first decade of the 21st century, I believe that if we as Friends are honest we will have to admit it has not been a time of much unity or growth. Although there have been some bright spots like the work of Convergent Friends and the Young Adult Gatherings that have brought folks from all the branches and traditions of Quakers together for some memorable weekends, we pretty much remain a divided people perhaps more polarized today that at any point in our history. Thousands of dollars have been spent by Quaker organizations and communities on consultants to help us identify and develop purpose and vision; yet many of us are still floundering. Traditional and well established Quaker institutions are struggling to survive in our current economic climate. In many places the future does not look bright for the Religious Society of Friends.
It seems to me that our identity and purpose remain rooted in those things for which our Society has stood since its inception, a fairly unique set of spiritual understandings which we refer to as the testimonies. Convergent Friends derive their name from conservative meaning those core values which have identified Quakers through the years, and emergent which speaks to the present, thus saying in their very name we are seeking to live out traditional Friends’ testimonies in a way that is meaningful and relevant to the world in which we live. How do we do that? Maybe a good starting place is with one another. What would it look like if we applied our traditional testimonies to the ways we interact with one another?

1) Simplicity – as originally understood by Friends, simplicity was about not being overly encumbered with the things of the world, not just material things, but giving too much of one’s time to the world and its pursuits rather than living out of a place of simple trust in God. What if we made an intentional decision to live that way corporately as well? What if we trusted in God’s ways rather than the world’s ways? Rather than playing politics and making sure that those with whom we are in agreement are in positions of control and power, what if we got ourselves and our agendas out of the way and let God have control of our monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, yearly meetings, and other Quaker organizations? In the Yearly Meeting to which I belong there has been a power struggle going on between left and right, liberal and conservative for as long as I can remember. And along the way folks have stooped to underhanded and less than honest ways to stack committees with people from “their side” in order to be sure they have control of the Yearly Meeting. What if instead of asking ourselves what we want we simply trust God to work through the process without our assistance?

2) Peace – may be our greatest area of doublespeak. Friends understood from the beginning that to follow the way of Jesus was to seek peace and pursue it. Our greatest failing in this area is our seeming inability to practice peace with one another. Go and sit in a Friends’ meeting for worship and business and see what happens when a controversial issue arises. Hostile and violent language suddenly erupts. People are condemned and demonized by those who disagree with them. I think of our Amish brothers and sisters and how they dealt with the tragedy at one of their schools a few years ago. How much more effective would our voices be in calling the world to peace and reconciliation if we showed what it was like by practicing it with one another?

3) Equality – All kinds of inequalities still exist among Friends. There are pastoral meetings that would not even consider a woman to be their minister, ironically some that were started by women. There are still meetings where color of skin is an issue and meetings that are accepting of immigrants only if they can speak English, and meetings where people’s sexual orientation is the determining factor as to whether or not they can be members rather than whether or not they love Jesus. What would our future look like if we accepted one another in the same way God accepts us?

4) Integrity – to early Friends this meant living out what they believed daily. I have a favorite quote from Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, “what I believe is not what I say, it’s what I do.” Integrity means just that. I don’t profess to believe things that I don’t practice. I don’t profess to believe something because someone else does, or to please my friends or to be accepted by my community. I believe something because it has been shown to me experientially to be true and right. It’s interesting that therapists and counselors say there is an inverse relationship between argument and belief, that is we tend to argue harder when we feel less sure about the rightness of our position. What would it look like if we were willing for the sake of integrity to admit we could be wrong? What if we lived up only to the Light we actually have and allowed space for others to do the same?

5) Community – a word we confuse with affinity and believe we can only be in community with folks who think and believe exactly as we do. What we all long for and need is real community, a place where we can affirm one another in those things in which we are in unity, respect one another in the places we don’t agree, and love one another regardless. What kind of communities would that produce?

Maybe we really don’t need a new vision, or new mission statements or new purpose. Maybe what we need is to live out these testimonies in our relationships with one another. It was said of the New Testament church and also of early Friends that people were attracted to them because of the love they demonstrated for one another. How different might Quakerism look and how much more impact might we have on the world if the same could be said of us?

“Quakers and Universalism” by Tony Lowe, Pastoral Minister, Fancy Gap Friends

There seems to be a great deal of discussion taking place of late about whether or not early Quakers were universalists. Many modern Friends struggle with or even reject what they perceive to be the exclusive claim of Christianity to be the only valid path to God, and they question whether or not there was something broader and more universal in the message of the early Quakers.
Quakers were universalists in the sense that they believed as Robert Barclay says, “there is an evangelical and saving light and grace in everyone, and the love and mercy of God toward mankind were universal both in the death of his beloved Son the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the manifestation of the light in the heart.” Barclay refers to the Light within, the seed of God, or that of God in every person as a universal saving principle. So early Friends were universalists in the sense that they believed there was that of God in each and every person.
They were not, however, universalists in the sense that we use the word today. They did not believe that every religion was a path to God. They in fact did not believe that any religion was a path to God. Fox himself makes the claim that he was called to bring people out of or off of the world’s religions and into “a new and living way.” And the religion Fox was calling people out of was not Islam or Buddhism, it was actually Christianity as it was being practiced in England by the Catholic church, the Church of England, the Puritans, and a variety of other dissenting groups. Fox found in all of the churches of his day a tendency to rely on the wisdom of the leadership, their traditions, or their own interpretations of the Scriptures rather than Christ himself.
For Fox and the early Friends, the issue was not whether or not a person claimed to be Christian or Muslim, it was whether or not they were “minding the Light”, following the leading of the Inward Christ. They understood as we sing in a Quaker children’s song “there’s a Light that is shining in the Turk and the Jew.” They also bore witness that this same Light was in the red man and the black man, and every other person that inhabited the earth, and that if followed, it would lead every man and woman into a vital, living relationship with God. Fox tells a story in his journal about an encounter he had with a Native American man while visiting in North Carolina that confirmed to him that the red man had the same light in his soul as he himself did.
Barclay says that while knowledge of the Scriptures is useful, a person can actually find and follow the Light within without having any outward knowledge of Christ’s life, death, or resurrection. The saving power is in the Light itself rather than the name by which it is called. Thus all people can come to know and be known by God, but not by following the teachings or practices of a particular religion. In fact, no matter what the religion, whether it be Islam, Buddhism, or Protestant Christianity, when its precepts are contrary to the guidance of the Christ within, we must follow the Light we have been given. So in that sense while there may indeed be some good in all religions, there is also that which is false and contrary to the Spirit of Christ in all religions that must be resisted. For the early Friends there was only one true religion and that was following the leading of the Christ within. It was both personal in the sense of individual guidance and leading, and at the same time universal in the sense that it was in the heart of every person.
William Penn expressed it this way. “The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls everywhere are of one religion. When death takes off the mask, they will know one another though their various liveries make them strangers here

“The Spirit Behind the Letter” by Tony Lowe (Pastor, Fancy Gap Friends)

We search them (the Scriptures) because ‘They are they that testify of me.’ It is the living Christ we want to find, the eternal revealer of the will of God. It is the spirit behind the letter that we need
                                                Robert Barclay

Throughout their history, Quakers have often found themselves to be at odds with their Christian neighbors over their understanding of Scripture, both how it is interpreted and how it is to be used. One such instance was in the decades preceding the American Civil War when Quakers became involved in the underground railroad, a network of trails and safe houses dedicated to helping enslaved persons in the South escape and find freedom in other parts of the country. Obviously, this was not something that endeared the Society of Friends to their slave holding neighbors, but their actions also came under fire from many of the churches in the South for actually being against the plain teaching of the Scriptures.
The Bible, according to many churches in the pre war South, upheld slavery as a normal and accepted part of life. The apostle Paul told those who were slaves to “be content with being a slave.” When the slave Onesimus ran away from Philemon, even though Paul was very fond of him, he did not aid the runaway slave in his quest to be free, but instead sent him back to his master. Others pointed to a somewhat obscure story in Genesis after the great flood when Noah cursed his son Ham and declared his descendants would be the slaves of his brothers. Then since Ham’s descendants according to the story ended up in the area we now know as Africa, some churches maintained that it was because of this curse that Africans were slaves, and therefore it was God’s will that they remain so.
The Quakers involved in the underground railroad had no answer for these charges that they were intentionally going against the Bible except to say that the same Bible recorded the words of Jesus that the two greatest commandments were to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. And from their point of view, one could not truly love his or her neighbor and allow them to remain in chains. Whether or not their actions were contrary to the teachings of the Scriptures they would not say, but they were clear that taking no action against slavery was contrary to the spirit in which and by which those same Scriptures were given.

Those Quakers involved in the underground railroad did not speak for Friends everywhere, however. Maybe some were intimidated by the criticism of other churches, or fear of reprisal from their slave holding neighbors, or perhaps they were concerned that there was a fugitive slave law on the books, and those who refused to obey it were lawbreakers. Whatever the reason, it is a little known but true fact that in the years just prior to the Civil War, participation in the underground railroad was a disownable offense in North Carolina Yearly Meeting.

One hundred years later the names of those Friends who opposed the underground railroad have been long forgotten, but Quakers swell with pride when they talk about the exploits of Levi and Katie Coffin, and Alan Jay and others who acting on the immediate guidance of the Living Christ dared to go against not only their Bible believing neighbors, but risked disownment by their own faith tradition as well. In fact although a small minority of Quakers were actually involved in the underground railroad, it has become one of the things for which the Society of Friends is best known. In fact throughout the history of the Society of Friends, most of our greatest moments have been those in which we departed from the “letter of the law” and as Barclay says sought instead “the spirit behind the Letter.”

“Pharisees” by Tony Lowe (Pastoral Minister, Fancy Gap Friends, North Carolina Yearly Meeting)

You can’t read the gospel narratives without noticing how often Jesus had confrontations with the Pharisees and other religious leaders of his day. Some of them are almost humorous, like the time the disciples were caught red-handed so to speak harvesting grain and eating it on the Sabbath which invariably leads to the question how did the Pharisees happen to be in the same wheat field ? Others are more poignant, like the time Jesus was in the synagogue on a Sabbath and saw a man with a crippled hand and wanted to heal him. The Scripture says he looked around the room hoping to see the light of compassion for the man in someone’s eyes. He looked at them one by one and saw nothing but coldness and hostility, but he healed the man just the same.

We normally identify with Jesus in these encounters and think what bad guys the Pharisees were, and that if we were in their place we could have never been that blind or that wrong. But the problem with the Pharisees and other religious leaders of Jesus’ time wasn’t that they were wrong, but that they were right. They had both Scripture, at least their interpretation of it, and tradition on their side. Using those tools they had constructed a religious framework for the nation that served their purposes very well. It more or less kept people in line; it kept them coming to the temple and observing the feasts and holy days of their ancestors. It also kept the tithes and offerings coming in so that the religious status quo could be maintained and supported. Small wonder they were upset when someone came along who seemed bent on destroying the boundaries of their carefully constructed religion.

The Pharisees were too rigidly sure of their own “rightness” to believe that God could or would act outside the framework they had created, a framework based on their own experiences and expectations. They were masters at creating the proverbial “God box” where the Divine was welcome to act as long as he didn’t come out of the box.

But as I read these stories, it occurs to me that they may not be there just for us to point the finger at the Pharisees and pontificate about how wrong they were. In our Quaker tradition, apologist Robert Barclay talks about the value of seeing the experiences of the characters in the Scripture mirrored in our own lives. And while a mirror that shows a Pharisee looking back may not be the image most desired, it does tell us that we need to ask ourselves the same question. Are there places where I am blind to what God is doing because it goes beyond the way I have experienced God in my own life or because it doesn’t fit my expectations of what He might do? Are there places where we simply refuse to see what God is doing because to acknowledge it would mean admitting that we were wrong? What if it means re-thinking our interpretation of Scripture, or coming into conflict with our own faith tradition?

Can we be followers of the God of the unexpected, or like the Pharisees do we need a safe, reasonable God who never colors outside the lines of our own expectations? Next time you read one of those stories, look carefully at the Pharisee and see if he doesn’t remind you of someone

A Lenten Quaker Thought

On this first day of Lent, this quote by Isaac Pennington seems appropriate for us to consider:

“The first way of meeting with the Spirit of God, is as a convincer of sin.  Here is the true entrance; this is the key that opens into life eternal; he that can receive it, let him.  It is not by soaring aloft into high imaginations and forms of worship; but by coming down into this low thing. This is the first and most proper work of the Spirit of God towards fallen man, whereby he makes way toward the writing of God’s law in the heart; namely, to convince of sin.”

We often see this awareness of sin in our life as a negative thing.  In reality, it becomes to us a gift as we are able to see ourselves honestly in the light of Christ.  Pennington reminds us that true spiritual growth is not often through ecstatic worship or some type of hyped up worship experience.  True spiritual growth often comes when we experience this inner convincement of our own personal self-absorbption and self-centeredness.  It is, as Pennington says, “…the key that opens into life eternal.”  This “eternal life” is that  quality of life that is experienced as we live in an interactive relationship with God. God becomes a living person and we find we are on a journey that makes us come alive in our soul.  The lenten journey can be difficult but it can be the way to new life.

“What Does A Quaker Look Like?”

The other day I sat by my good friend and Friend, Jack Kirk. Jack is a seasoned and weighty Friend with a heart of gold. He always has an encouraging word for everyone and truly believes that Quakerism’s best days are ahead of us. Talking with him during the breaks of our Board meeting reminded me of an article he had written for Quaker Life back in 1999. It was one of his better ones – and Jack has written some good ones. The title was, “What Does A Quaker Look Like?” In the article Jack picked up on the theme of of Quakers as plain people. Here, in Jacks own words, is how he describes the Quaker:

“When I am contending that Quakers should look like plain people, I am not talking about outward plainness. It’s difficult to define outward plainness in a group setting – in fact, it’s a dead-end street. The plain of which I’m thinking is a plain that starts at the inner core of our lives as we relate to the Living Christ. It is an inner search as we ask ourselves questions like these:

> Can I live without pretense?
> Can I live without pretending to know something about everything, as though I have all the answers?
> Can I live without pretending to be superior and more important than others?
> Can I live without whining and complaining all the time, as though my problems give me the right to harbor a special grudge against the management of the universe?
> Can I speak the plain truth in kindness?
> Can I live without the pretense of being perfect – admit when I am wrong and ask for forgiveness when I’ve failed?
> Can I be honest enough to laugh at myself when I’ve done something stupid?
> Can I live without demanding recognition, remembering that Jesus was not recognized at the moment ofhis Triumph?

That’s the kind of plain I mean – living without pretense. That’s the authentic living to which we are called. Quakers should look like plain people.”

Plain and simple as always. Thanks Jack!

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