Return from Blogging vacation

A huge part of being a Quaker is being meticuluous about speech. Let your "yes" be "yes" and your "no" be "no". Be a person of few words, and what words you use, let them reveal integrity. I've been consciously working on plain speech with my spoken words, but, for some reason, I haven't using the same standards with my typed words. I've experienced conviction over this recently, and so I'm trying to be plain in my blogging.

David Johns writes in a recent QRT:
"Quakerism, as it were, dies the death of a thousand qualifications
when one tries to describe it. Nearly every assertion of a characteristic
or a belief or a commonality may be qualified with the statement,
“Yes, but there are other Friends who…” Quakerism is, so it seems,
what Quakers do and Quakers do whatever they like. This might
be the pinnacle of religious freedom, or it may be the end of the
movement—perhaps it is both."

How I react to this is this way: it seems like many Quakers are dissatisfied with what they have within Friends. And so they will go looking for something else that has the air of religion or spirituality. As someone who was not raised within Friends, and still finds Quaker forms very nurishing, I am frustrated. I want to shake "wandering Quakers" and tell them, "It doesn't get better than primitive Christianity recovered! "

I recently met a Friend from a conservative, Wilburite meeting. We've been dialoging via email. I find the notion of conservative Friends ("closest thing to George Fox's meetings") very attractive. No chasing after newer, shinier versions of Christianity. Instead, Wilburites have a sense of being it "that which cannot be shaken".

I think this is on my mind because, at my church, we are beginning another autumn small-group curriculum. When I look back over the last three or four years at the effectiveness of doing small-groups this way (throwing out another program), I fail to see much impact. Not that there hasn't been any; there just hasn't been much. It seems like we go chasing after the latest, the newest, the hotest, all the while overlooking the "pearl of great price" within our midst.