Frequently Asked Quaker Questions: FAQQs

By the time this is published, I'll be packing for the Ben Lomond Quaker Center workshop called "Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism for the 21st Century." I'm going because I know some of the organizers. :) I'm looking forward to it.

Before that, though, the draft minutes from our February business meeting are in, and I wanted to share the questions we collected at the meeting to use in our Frequently Asked Quaker Questions (FAQQ) series at San Francisco Meeting:

• Why do Friends worship in silence?
• What is meant by “testing” leadings?
• What does it mean to “let our lives speak”?
• What is the connection between spirituality and action?
• Is there a political “litmus test” for being a Quaker? Do all Friends have the same political beliefs?
  
• What about all the other Quakers? What other kinds are there besides – and even within – unprogrammed Friends?
• What's the difference between meditation in our private lives, and meditation together as a group?
• Why do children come for 15 minutes?
• Who’s in charge?
• Do you have to be a Christian?
• What do Quakers think about paying taxes that support war?
• What is the role of civil disobedience among Friends?
• How do we make the peace testimony active and valuable?
• How do Quakers make decisions?
• Is there a spiritual “litmus test” for Quakers?
• Why don’t Quakers wear all grey anymore? Am I allowed to wear fancy clothes to meeting?
• How do Quakers hold marriages and memorials?
• How do Quakers invest?
• What do we mean by equality?
• What is the Quaker view of the Bible?
• How do Quakers feel about the sacraments?
• How do Quakers feel about sex? art? music? alcohol? gossip? hell? sin? capitalism? joy? dancing? queerness?
• What do Quakers mean by “clearness”?
• Do Quakers have a sense of humor?
• Why do Quakers ask so many questions? And queries?

We'll sort through these and make them available to our Ministry and Oversight Committee members, who are signing up to lead these approximately 15-minute discussions at the rise of meeting for anyone who wants to participate, whether a new or long-time participant.

Agenda for an introduction to Quakerism

Last Sunday at San Francisco Meeting, a member of our Ministry and Oversight Committee and I led a two-hour session, "An Introduction to Quakerism." We decided to take a hint from Quaker Quest and lead with the faith not the history.

Twelve people participated. Not huge, but significant. Three people were at our meeting for the first time that day, and two of them had never been to a Friends meeting before. I thought it was brave of them to stay for the whole two hours.

It seemed to go well. We got a nice email afterwards from a longtime member of our meeting, thanking us for doing the session and saying he learned something from both of us.

Here is the agenda we worked from, though what we actually said was of course different from what we wrote ahead of time:

1. Silent Worship

2. Introductions and Icebreaker:
Say your name, when you first attended a Friends meeting, and share something you remember from that first time (or, if you can’t recall, then say something about a meeting that was special for you in some way)

3. Faith: Blake

• Foundational points from early Friends, based on Wilmer Cooper’s A Living Faith
• Encounter with the divine in silence, unmediated, etc.
• Inner Light/That of God in all humans
  

4. Practice: Blake

• The encounter with the divine leads us to work this out in our lives
• Aspects include various testimonies: how do our lives testify to our experience of truth?
  

5. History: Chris

• Religious ferment in 17th Century England; Puritans, revolution, Seekers.
• Fox: Great people to be gathered. One, Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition.
• Fell: ally who provided base of operations in North of England
• Integrity, truthtelling, no oaths, no tithe, interrupting church services => oppression
• No tithe = no access to state schools, so they set up their own Friends Schools.
• Quakers and rise of capitalism: Gwyn, Covenant Crucified
  
• Success of Penn’s holy experiment w/religious tolerance.
• Social witness: abolitionism, penitentiaries and prison reform, peace;
• Growing awareness of racism among Friends past and present, despite history of abolitionism
• Environment growing more important for many Friends today
  

6. Queries

• How do our Quaker roots guide us today?
• Where do we find inspiration from our Quaker roots?
• Where do we want to branch out from those roots?
• How do we “let our lives speak” as Friends? What are our lives saying?

7. Silent Worship

Quaker Quest: The Other QQ

Prompted by a post by Contemplative Scholar about evangelism among (unprogrammed) Friends (Should Quakers Become More 'Evangelical'?, I looked up the Quaker Quest website. I attended a short presentation they did at the FGC Gathering under the aegis of the FGC advancement and outreach. Their tagline is Quakerism -- "a spiritual path for our time."

Quote: "Quaker Quest aims to help you find out about the Quaker way of life. We have found that people enquiring about us want to hear what we have to say, talk to each other and us about it, get an idea what sort of people we are and experience Quaker worship."

I highly recommend the website: http://www.quakerquest.org.

It includes a forum for discussion, which appears to be just over a month old. Okay, lunch break is over. I'll have to think about how we might apply this in San Francisco another time.