Toward Collective Quaker Witness

I’m interested in the concept of “convergent Friends” that Robin M. has recently posted about on her blog.

I’m also interested in Amanda’s essay on Halloween, about how she likes frivolity, and wonders whether and how that can be of service to God, too.

I'm definitely encouraged by the seeking we are doing together here on the Internet, as well as the reports from Friends about what's going on in their home meeting or church, in FGC workshops, and at some yearly meetings. And my friend Chris Moore-Backman just led his workshop Walking with Gandhi at Ben Lomond Quaker Center a week ago; he'll reprise it again in late January. He briefly reported it went well. (He was carrying his 2-month-old daughter who was napping and I was chasing my own boys, so it wasn't an ideal time to catch up!)

To me, these are all signs of an interesting ferment happening among and around us toward a larger and clearer sense of the Religious Society of Friends.

Yet, underlying this, what strikes me about individual Friends’ attempts to figure out their approach to witness to the love of God is just that: It is very often individual in nature. A familiar example in the blogosphere is through consideration of plain dress for our times. Of course, many Friends benefit from a group clearness process, but that process is usually framed as testing the leading of an individual Friend. How often have those clearness committees gone back to the community as a whole and said, "Friends, we believe we must strongly consider whether this Friend's leading applies to us all"? Not too often!

Even plain Friend Scott Savage, author and former publisher of Plain magazine, said that he and his family stuck out a bit in their meeting community in Ohio.

So: How do we discern our corporate witness together? When we gather in meetings for worship and meetings for worship for business, how do we allow the Spirit to move through us as a group? Do we even really try?

And: How can we discern at that level when we are like spiritual strangers to one another, even within the same unprogramed monthly meeting? (I won’t presume to speak for people’s experiences in Friends churches.) When we come from different spiritual environs and different traditions and different individual interpretations?

Paul’s letter to the Romans gave me some inspiration on this topic recently.

(Tangential Note: I’ve been reading the Greek Scriptures in reverse order, which is a fascinating way to read them, for me. The later books of the scriptures remind me vividly that apocalyptic, fundamentalist Christians have a lot of textual support for some of their positions. I tend to forget that, since I’ve always paid more attention to the Gospels, Acts, and the “authentic” Pauline epistles than the later epistles and Revelations.)

Anyway, Paul reminds us that new ways are opening: “We are released from the law, to serve God in a new way, the way of the spirit in contrast to the old way of a written code.” (Rom. 7:6)

Just as Paul was saying he was released from the Mosaic law to enter into a new and always-present relationship to God, modern folk should see themselves as released from whatever their written code may be, whichever tradition it may be from, to live into this new relationship to God and to each other.

Paul writes, “The universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and is to enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Friends, let us live into that liberty, the glorious liberty.