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.

The tone of this post is "frustration." I am currently reading two books: Dean Freiday's Nothing Without Christ and David Kinnaman's unChristian. I just finished a section in Nothing Without Christ where Freiday lays out Arthur O. Robert's understanding of Fox's vision of the "Church Restored." What an idyllic and wonderful vision of the Church! And then I read through unChristian, which details how screwed up American Christianity is. How wonderful the Christian Church could be, and yet how misguided and distracted it is! This alone would cause any sensitive Christian to dispair, but what adds to my frustration is that I see my own church, my own brothers and sisters in Christ, much more like what is described in unChristian than what is presented by Roberts and Fox. I want to do something with my frustration, but I have no idea what to do or where to begin. I am not hopeless; but it feels like I've been given a tangled bird's nest of fishing line the size of a basketball, and I'm being asked to untangle it. What to do? Where to begin?

I'm never quite sure what meets the definition of irony, but, to me, the issue of communion, and the controversies that surround it, strikes me as very ironic. A Greek word used in the New Testament that is frequently translated as "communion" is the word, "koinonia". The irony lies in that koinonia also means "fellowship" or "joint participation". What ought to produce togetherness can frequently bring strong differences of opinion and dis-jointedness. This is what Isaac Pennington and George Fox referred to as "strife and jangling about outward Things, and Shaddows,..." For Quakers, the solution to this irony is to focus on the Real Presence of the Risen Christ, "in whom there is no strife but Life and Peace."
Of course, that doesn't solve all the problems. The question then becomes, "how to focus on the Presence?" For many, who haven't grown up amongst Friends or haven't entirely become convinced Friends, they still cling to outward symbols, like bread and wine, as helpful or even necessary for connecting to Christ's Presence. There is a 300 year-old tendency amongst Friends to be tolerant towards those who have differing opinions. However, then a new problem can arise: a meeting containing those who require outward symbols and well as those who don't. Can a meeting survive for very long with two differing groups? One side can point to their own meaningful experience and background of the use of outward symbols, while the other side can point to their own experience without symbols and the vast preponderance of Quaker faith and practice. Yikes!
I am not saying that I have the answer. The direction I'm exploring, as a Friends elder, is the practice of "laboring", meaning that I'm laboring with those in our midst who are not yet convinced. I'm doing this with temerity, because I believe elders ought to do, as Becky Ankeny says, "the hard work." And this is hard work for me, an introverted, don't-make-waves kind of person.
In addition to boldness, I'm trying to be gentle. I often find those whom I disagree with often have arrived at their positions genuinely, and I like praising and affirming the avenues they have taken. But then, as an elder and a convinced Friends, I attempt to lead them in a different direction.
I will try to report on how this is going.

Why do I call this blog "sown roots?" For me, I was not born within Friends. I was 26 years old, and I had bounced around three or four different denominations. In hindsight, I was, like Fox, looking for something which spoke to my condition. I came to Friends through my fianceé, and I could tell fairly quickly that I had found something which could have a deep impact upon me. There was something different about Quakers that I wanted in my life. And so, I began to explore Quaker roots. Harold Antrim was my pastor and he offered a class on Friends. I eagerly took his class, which lead me to exploring more in depth. I even earned a Master's degree from Western Evangelical Seminary in Church History & Thought in order to explore Quakerism more extensively. Through all of this study and searching, I came to one, life-altering realization, which is best summed up by Thomas Kelly: "This experience of the Divine Presence, as a repeatedly realized and present fact, and its transforming and transfiguring effect upon all of life, this is the central message of Friends.

My condition was spoke to and transformed by the Risen Christ. At the churches I had been at before Friends, their Christ was the Christ of 2,000 years ago. Friends, however, testified to a Christ of today, here and now. The atoning work achieved by Christ upon the cross makes it so that we can experience and have a relationship with God in 2010.
These roots, that Christ can speak to anyone's condition and transform him or her, I do not leave as admirable antique theological ideas. Rather, I sow them in my relationships, in my family, and in my church. What springs up from this sowing, I leave up to God.

I seems to me that much of my growth as a Christian involves learning to recognize "idols", removing their influence and reorienting myself toward the True Shepherd. One way that I've learned to recognize idols is to see what in my life serves as a replacement for God. An idol is anything or anyone, apart from God, that I derive from a sense of security, identity and/or hope. Those are things I ought to find sourced only in God.
Let's look at identity. There are plenty of voices and forces in the world, going all the way back to my childhood, that are very willing to tell me who I am. They will lable me "unloveable", "unworthy" or "bad". These identities, however, are not the identity that God has given me. To God, I am beloved. When I permit another to lable me in any other way than beloved, then I am giving an idol a place in my life. Colin Saxton, at men's retreat a couple of weeks ago, described a discipline in which he, early in the morning, before even rising from bed, endevors to see himself as God sees him. I read of such a practice in one of Frank Laubach's books, and I've been trying to incorporate it into my life. What I tell myself, over and over, is "I am nothing, but beloved", "I am nothing, but beloved." My idea behind this chant is to remind myself that I have no other identity except the one I find from God, and that is that I am beloved. I find that I have to remind myself of this truth throughout the day, as old idolatrous tapes get activated in my head.
I share this as one begger to any other begger who is still looking for Bread, Living Bread.

What happens in Silence

I did not grow up in Friends meetings. I came to Friends from a traditional evangelical Protestant church. It is an uneasy feeling when a person unfamiliar with a practice is immersed into a new practice, like silent worship. Quakers have a strong tendency to avoid proscribing methods to a practice; in hindsight, the hope (I think) is a new Friends will find their way on their own. Of course, the newly convinced is not on his or her own. The Holy Spirit is attending to that person, maybe like an excited parent watching a six-year old riding a bike without training wheels for the first time. Years later, after having become comfortably familiar with connecting with God in silence, I read Punshon's book, "Encounter with Silence". I could only smile as Punshon described his experiences and memories of his initiation into silent worship. The things Punshon went through, I went through.
Why do I find silence nourishing? I think it is because of the image I hold in my mind and heart when I connect with God in silence. I am a parent, as is God. As a parent, I miss the days when I could hold my son (who is now too big) in my arms and have him be still and quiet and just let me hold him. I believe that God longs for something similar with me. God longs for me to quit my busy-ness and chatter and to allow God just to hold me in stillness. So much of worship is what can we do in noise and activity to praise God; in silence, we are quitting our efforts and opening our "selves" to tender closeness with God on God's terms.