What Can We Say?

The Essentials of Quaker Faith

An answer to the question, “What do Quakers believe?”

 

I have finished a very long essay with the title “What can we say?” as an answer to the question, “What do Quakers believe?” I wrote its first draft in 1991 or ’92, when the initial openings first came to me and I’ve been refining it ever since.

I started moving it into this blog so that Friends could comment on it, but I discovered that it just does not work in this format very well. It’s too long and breaking it up into segments seemed to fragment it too much. So I offer What Can We Say? — The Essentials of Quaker Faith as a downloadable pdf file. And here, I am just publishing the introduction and a table of contents. I invite your comments.

Introduction

When someone asks a Friend (at least, a Quaker from the ‘liberal’ branch of Friends), “What do Quakers believe?”, we often find ourselves fumbling for an answer. How can you give an answer that is true to the depth of our tradition and yet simple enough and short enough to serve in the situation? How can you give an answer that honors the full breadth of our tradition, that includes Friends from Kenya and Philadelphia, from London and La Paz, from Richmond, Indiana, and Barnesville, Ohio?

Such an answer was given to me in 1991 at the Friends Consultation on Quaker Treasure sponsored by Earlham School of Religion and Quaker Hill Conference Center in Richmond, Indiana. I tell the full story of that experience in a different essay, but I can say here that it was one of the most important in my Quaker life. The openings that came to me in that gathering arose in one of the most gathered meetings of Friends I have experienced.

I felt then and feel today that these answers were not just given to me, but were given to the whole body. As I have meditated on them in the decades since, they have both deepened and expanded within me. In this essay, I attempt to present the original openings from the consultation and the fruits of my meditation upon them since.

I try to show where these Quaker essentials come from in scripture and in our own tradition and how they inform the aspects of the Quaker way that are distinctive to us. This essay is thus a kind of primer in Quaker essentials.

A word about “belief”. We Friends feel that the question What do Quakers believe? is, in a way, the wrong question. “Liberal” Friends, anyway, are less interested in tenets of belief and more interested in the direct experience of the Divine. Nevertheless, people will naturally ask us this question; we ask it of ourselves. It’s an important question and it deserves an answer. The people who ask the question deserve an answer. We should be able to answer it clearly and forthrightly.

So here is how I answer that question. The six “principles” listed below serve as a kind of elevator speech, a concise summary of the essentials. The sections that follow unpack these six essentials, elaborating with a paragraph or two on the distinctive elements of Quaker faith and practice that relate to these essentials.

Friends believe (because we have experienced it ourselves) in . . .

1. The Light—Direct, unmediated, personal communion with G*d. *
2. The gathered meeting—Direct, unmediated communion with G*d as worshipping communities.
3. Continuing revelation—G*d is continually revealing G*d’s self through G*d’s ongoing presence.
4. Life as sacrament and testimony—G*d calls us to live our faith in practice.
5. Love—Love is something we are called to do, not just something we feel.
6. What canst thou say?—We base our religious lives on what we ourselves have experienced.

Table of Contents

The Light

• The Light
• Listening spirituality
• Transformative spirituality
• Openings . . . Leadings . . . Ministry
• Vocal ministry in meeting for worship
• The sacraments
• The Bible
• Equality before G*d
• Universal grace

The gathered meeting

• Silent, waiting worship
• Business under the leadership of the Holy Spirit
• Ministry
• Corporate discernment and the individual
• Minutes for travel or service
• Gospel order
• Outward forms, ‘days and seasons’
• Opportunities
• Advices & Queries
• State of the Society reports
• Recording

Continuing revelation

• Continuing revelation/illumination
• New leadings
• Biblical authority and interpretation
• Creeds
• Openings, leadings, ministry, and callings
• Vocal ministry

Life as sacrament and testimony

• Quaker spirituality of listening
• Quaker ministry
• The testimonies
• Witness
• Service
• Missions and evangelism

Love

What canst thou say? — personal experience

 

Note: The asterisk I use when writing the word G*d stands in for whatever your experience of God is, not wishing to impose my definition upon you or to leave you wondering whether I mean by God the same thing that you would. Because the word God carries so much weight and yet so much freight, many Friends today simply shy away from using it and speak of the Spirit or the Divine or some such more neutral word. Some Friends find that the word God makes them anxious, and so don’t even like to hear it. Having been in both these conditions myself, I have nevertheless come round to the view that you can’t talk meaningfully about Quakerism without it. Yet some way round the difficulties seems worth trying. My solution is to use the full variety of terms that Friends have used historically and use today—but returning always to G*d.

I do have my own working definition of God. For me, God is the Mystery Reality behind our spiritual and religious experience—whatever that experience is. These experiences are real. We know this because we are transformed by them, for the better. But they also are transcendental; they transcend normal experience, normal consciousness, they transcend our senses and our understanding. We don’t know where they come from or even what their full meaning is, at least not necessarily right away. We know something bigger than ourselves lies behind them, within them. Something dwells in the depths of our experience below our conscious awareness. These experiences are therefore full of mystery, and yet they are real. That real mystery I call God.

I write G*d with an asterisk to honor your definition of God.

 

Spirit, Authority, and Northwest Yearly Meeting

Another yearly meeting has convulsed because one of its constituent monthly meetings has decided to welcome LGBT Friends fully into their communion; that is, they have decided to start marrying same sex couples. Some time ago, a number of meetings left Indiana Yearly Meeting because one of their number, West Richmond Friends Church, chose to open its arms in this way and the eldership structure of the Yearly Meeting chose to exercise discipline over the matter. Eventually, West Richmond Meeting and a number of other meetings left Indiana Yearly Meeting and formed a new Association of Friends.

Now Northwest Yearly Meeting has expelled West Hills Meeting of Portland, Oregon, for doing the same thing.

Actually, it was not, apparently, the gathered body of the yearly meeting, but the Board of Elders of Northwest Yearly Meeting who expelled West Hills. On the yearly meeting’s website, the Board of Elders is described as “a wise, discerning, and spiritually mature group of Friends who help encourage the overall, spiritual welfare of NWYM.” One of their responsibilities is to “Oversee matters of church discipline and doctrinal dispute.”

I can recommend this blog by the church’s youth minister for some information about what’s happened.

Somewhere in the confusing flurry of blog posts and Facebook posts around this event, I think I read that some meetings threatened to leave the yearly meeting if it did not dissociate itself from West Hills.

This is one of the signature forms of passive aggression among Friends, to hold a meeting hostage to your opinions or feelings. “If you do [x], then I’ll do [y].” Or, “If you don’t do [x] . . . “

When a Friend or a meeting acts this way, they are essentially pitching over the side their submission to the work of the Holy Spirit in the meeting, believing that they already know what God wants the meeting to do.

I feel that clerks faced with this kind of extortion should urge the aggressors to rethink their aggression, and if the aggressors do not reconsider their actions, the meeting should move on to some other business, hoping that the aggressors will rediscover their discipleship, their surrender to the living movement of the Holy Spirit among them, rather than submit to their fears.

For I suspect that the Friends who wanted to expel West Hills feared something. What? What was there to fear in remaining in communion with a meeting that marries same sex couples?

Because this is an evangelical Christian community, they almost certainly feared—ultimately—God’s judgment.

I suspect they also feared, in the medium term, a collective moral “slippery slope”, a gradual slide toward full communion with LGBT Friends in other meetings, a kind of infection of the impure that might ultimately spread to the yearly meeting itself. More on “purity” in a moment.

Perhaps they feared the breakdown of authority and discipline, since their Faith and Practice condemns homosexuality (see the excerpts below), and not to enforce the testimony of the book of discipline is—well, to let discipline lapse.

It’s worth noting, however, that the yearly meeting was in a process of discernment on the human sexuality section of its book of discipline when it “released” West Hills Friends Church, so the letter of the law was in place when they expelled the church, but the spirit was in question.

Ultimately, this is all about authority—the authority of scripture—or rather, of your own interpretation of scripture; the authority of yearly meetings over monthly meetings; the authority of elders over the moral lives of members; and the authority of the legacy of discernment passed down to us by past believers, especially those who wrote, edited, redacted, and compiled the scriptural canon (and the book of discipline), over the present knowledge of God’s will by a gathered body of Friends worshipping under the leadership of the spirit of Christ.

Against this latter, some Friends will argue that God’s will does not change, and so the testimony of scripture carries ultimate authority unto the present day. This raises a whole bunch of interesting questions.

For one, as I said in an earlier post, God’s will actually has changed when it comes to the definition of marriage. At least, that’s the apparent message one gets from tracking the changes evident in the Bible. So, also, with the status of slaves and of women in the Bible. And the impulse to collective violence and war. And the nature and destiny of the human soul. And the description and location of heaven and hell. And . . . well, you get the idea.

But more importantly, the Quaker experience of continuing revelation, of new light being revealed by Christ as to how to walk in this world (or continuing illumination, if you like, the experience that new light will reliably rest in biblical testimony if you read scripture in the Light in which it was written, even when it seems on the surface not to)—new light, I say, has historically opened the Quaker movement to new ways that seem contrary to Scripture on a surface reading.

The signature example for me is the outward practice of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. According to a surface reading of the Bible, Jesus commanded his followers to do both. Friends have followed the spiritual logic of Jesus’ teaching to its core: You must be baptized in the water and the spirit. For God is spirit and we worship in spirit and in truth. True conviction and true communion take place within the human heart. And Jesus repeatedly demonstrated a preference for truthful inward experience over empty outward forms. He even predicted the utter destruction of the ultimate outward form of his people and his time, the temple in Jerusalem.

Thus, in a meeting for marriage we practice almost no outward forms. We meet in silent, expectant waiting for the Holy Spirit. We testify in our vocal ministry to the working of the Spirit in the lives of the couple and in the life-union into which they are entering. Based upon our experience of the Presence, in the room and in the people being married, we record the work that God has already done to unite them in sacred love and sign a certificate as witnesses.

Marriage is an inward working of the Holy Spirit. Can we not testify to the bonding of sacred love between Friends of the same sex? Can we not feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in a meeting for marriage when such a love is manifest?

Or do we turn to the ultimate outward religious form of our own time—the Bible—to deny this as a possibility? I am not talking about the Bible as revealed to us in the Spirit in which it was written. I am talking about a surface reading of a handful of prooftexts. I am talking about our interpretation of these texts. I am talking about carrying forward into our time from a time two and three thousand years ago of a notion of purity that Jesus expressly rejected and that Paul, conflicted as he was, rejected when it was convenient for him to do so. Christianity would not be a Gentile movement today if Paul had not jettisoned the ancient Jewish attitudes towards purity law.

So I believe that the question of authority raised by West Hills’ expulsion from Northwest Yearly Meeting comes down to a question of whether the living, revealing spirit of Christ is really our governor, the Holy Spirit that is manifest when we are gathered in the Spirit in meeting for worship, when we are following Jesus’ commandment to love one another, and when we do not let outward forms obstruct the Light of revelation.

Excerpts form Northwest Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice

Faith Expressed through Witness

18. Christian Witness to Human Sexuality

We hold that only marriage is conducive to godly fulfillment in sexual relationships for the purposes of reproduction and enrichment of life. We consider sexual intimacy outside marriage as sinful because it distorts God’s purposes for human sexuality. We denounce, as contrary to the moral laws of God, acts of homosexuality, sexual abuse, and any other form of sexual perversion (see “Human Sexuality,” p. 80). The church, however, as a community of forgiven persons, remains loving and sensitive to those we consider in error. Because God’s grace can deliver from sins of any kind, we are called to forgive those who have repented and to free them for participation in the church. [page 11]

Human Sexuality

[Added in 1982] Friends believe that the divine intent of marriage is to fulfill the emotional, spiritual, and physical needs of humankind and that only within the bonds of marriage divinely ordained can there be a beautiful sexual relationship for the purposes of reproduction and life enrichment. Adultery and fornication are sinful because they distort the purposes of God for the right ordering of human sexuality.

Friends believe that the practice of sexual perversion in any form is sinful and contrary to the God-ordained purposes in sexual relationships. These perversions include sexual violence, homosexual acts, transvestism, incest, and sex acts with animals. The sin nature is capable of vile affections when humankind rejects the moral laws of God.

Scriptures relating to these distorted and perverse forms of sexuality include Genesis 19:1-13; Deuteronomy 22:5; Leviticus 18:20, 22, 23; Romans 1:24-28; 1 Corinthians 5:1, 2 and 6:9-20. Neither in the Scriptures nor in church history have these practices been regarded as consistent with righteous living.

Friends do not accept as members those involved in these perverse practices; neither do they permit them to hold positions of responsibility or leadership in the church. However, Friends believe that the grace of God is adequate to cleanse and deliver from all sin (1 John 19; 2 Corinthians 5:17), and they desire to be tender and sensitive to all people, ready to express kindness, love, and forgiveness. See also Jude 7, 8; Colossians 3:5-7; and Revelation 2:18, 27. When the erring one has been repentant, the past should not be remembered. As Christ called and blessed those whom He forgave, so must His followers. Friends must not hinder the forgiven person from holding membership or having responsibility in the church.

Friends churches should exercise concern for their members on matters of sexuality and should discipline offenders in love and truth (see “Rules of Discipline” p. 46). [page 80]

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement: What Can We Say?

What can we say?

. . . when seekers ask what Quakers believe? Here is one version of the answers I’ve been working on.

An “elevator speech”:

We believe that there is in everyone a Light—

• a light in the conscience that can guide and strengthen us to do the right, that can awaken us to the wrong we have done and are about to do;
• a light that can heal us, that can strengthen us to live better lives, that can release us from our demons, make us more whole, relieve us of suffering, and lead us to redemption;
• a light that can inspire us to acts of kindness and to creativity;
• a light that can lead us to the deepest fulfillment and the “peace that passes all understanding” and into acts of kindness, service, and witness;
• a light that can help transform us into the people we were meant to be;
• a light that can open to us direct communion with God (however you experience God), both as individuals and as a community.

We Quakers have experienced this light as the Light of Christ, as Jesus Christ himself, as the Spirit of Love and Truth, as a Presence in our midst, as that which has gathered us as a people of God and continues to guide our meetings and the Quaker movement into the future.

In this Light, through this Light, God is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth. In this Christ-spirit we are sometimes gathered in our worship into a joy-filled ttanscendental communion with God and with each other.

That’s my “elevator speech,” a quick answer to a deep question. But of course, we can say a lot more than this. So here is a more fully developed presentation of Quaker “beliefs”.

Six Quaker essentials

The Light. We believe that there is a principle in every person (often called the Light, the Seed, “that of God”) that can know God directly and that yearns for this intimate communion.

•     Because we experience the Light inwardly, we do not practice many of the outward forms that other religious communities practice; we do not rely on outward sacraments for God’s grace.
•     Because the Light is universal, we believe that all people are equal in God’s sight and this informs how we treat them.
•     Because we all have access to the Light, we have no professional clergy that are thought of as intermediaries between God and the individual worshiper. But we have not laid down the clergy itself; rather, we have no laypeople, for all of us are potential ministers. We believe that God can and does call each one of us into service or ministry directly and in various ways, most commonly, to speak from the Spirit in our meetings for worship. And for this, we need no special education or ceremonial ordination, but only attention to the promptings of the Spirit and a willingness to be faithful to the call.
•     This, in fact, is the essence of Quaker spirituality: to be open always to God’s guidance and to listen always for God’s call into service, and to answer the call faithfully when it comes.

The gathered meeting. Ever since the 1650s when Quakers were first gathered as a dedicated people of God, we have felt that the same Light and Spirit that dwells within each individual also loves and guides us as a community.

•     Just as we believe that each individual can enjoy a direct relationship with God, so also we believe that the same Holy Spirit leads the worshipping community.
•     Thus many of our meetings hold our worship in waiting, expectant silence, turning our full attention toward God and leaving off any outward liturgical forms like the Bible readings, collective prayer, hymn singing, and prepared sermons that are featured in most religious services. We worship in utter simplicity in order not to crowd out God’s direct voice or drown out the still, small voice within each of us.
•     However, many Quaker meetings hold “programmed” worship that is more like other protestant churches, with hymn singing, Bible readings, prepared collective prayer,s and sermons. These meetings feel that these outward forms help the meeting commune with God.
•     We also conduct the business of the meeting in meetings for worship under the direct leadership of the Holly Spirit, having no professional human leadership or hierarchies. We have a number of distinctive community tools to discern God’s wish for us.

Continuing revelation. We believe that direct communion with God means that God is still teaching God’s people.

•     God’s revelation did not end with the Bible; rather God is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth.
•     Thus, in answer to God’s continuing revelation over the centuries, we have laid down the outward practice of the sacraments, we have always recognized God’s prophetic inspiration of women ministers, we have struggled against slavery, and, in some yearly meetings, we fully welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into our fellowship, even though the Bible seems to some on the surface to condemn homosexuality, condone slavery, deny women’s role in ministry, and require outward sacramental practice.
•     And we remain open to new light, expecting that God will intend further changes for us in the future.

“Let your lives speak.” We believe that God calls us to live our inner faith in outward practice, to live our lives as testimony to the Truth that has been awakened within us, leading us to alleviate suffering, injustice, and oppression, and to amend their causes. As a movement, we have come to unity on a number of stands of conscience, which we call our “testimonies,” and we seek to be open to new truth as to how we should live, as individuals, as a faith community, and as a society.

Love. We believe that “love is the first motion,” as we say, the commandment by which we should live our lives—that we should love God, love our fellow human beings, and love the creation we share with all other living things.

Direct experience. While “What do you believe?” is an important question, one that deserves a clear and straightforward answer, Friends often focus on a rather different question, one posed by George Fox in the 1600s and from which I derive the title for this little series on Quaker beliefs:

• “You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?”
•     In other words, even though we do have a distinctive set of beliefs, Friends try to focus more on experience than on doctrine. For us, the essential question is: what is your experience of God? And we seek to ground our religious lives on what we have ourselves experienced, rather than on the inherited experience of others, however valuable that tradition might be.

 

Each of these core beliefs can be unpacked further to get into all of the other beliefs and practices that distinguish Friends, which I have only just touched upon here. That’s for a subsequent post.

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement: Outreach & Inreach

Outreach and Inreach

Quaker renewal depends on “advancement”, on advancing Quakerism—reaching people who hunger for what we have to offer, but haven’t found us yet, and being ready for them when they come. Thus there is both an outreach and an inreach dimension to Quaker advancement.

A lot of the posts in this Quaker-pocalypse series so far have been about inreach, the project of deepening the spiritual life of the meeting into maturity so that we are ready when seekers come.

But now I want to turn to outreach. Or really, to the bridge we must inevitably build between the two—how we present our faith and practice to these seekers when they ask—what do Quakers believe?

For very often, this is the first thing seekers ask us.

When people ask us this question, we often stumble in our answer. We often start with a bunch of disclaimers about how diverse our theologies are, and how we can’t really speak for all Friends, and really, I can only speak for myself . . .

Then we are likely to start by saying that we believe that there is that of God in everyone—which isn’t true! “We” don’t believe this; only some liberal Friends do. And, while it may be true that many, or even most, liberal Friends believe there is that of God in everyone, this turns what George Fox meant by this phrase on its head and has only been used by us this way since Rufus Jones started it around the turn of the twentieth century.

And anyway, just what does it mean to say that there is that of God in everyone? What does “that of” mean? What do we mean by “God” when we use the word this way? And how do we know there is that of God in other people? Are all of the Friends who profess a belief in “that of God” in other people so psychic that they have actually experienced the “that of God” in someone else? Or do we just believe it because we believe it of ourselves?

After perching all 350 years of our exceedingly rich, centuries-old tradition on this one slender, 100-year-old notional pedestal, we then go on to say, maybe, that we believe in “the testimonies”. But we don’t “believe in” the testimonies; we hold them as truths that have been consistently revealed to us over the centuries, but what we “believe in” is the guiding and strengthening power of the Light and a G*d who breaks into the community’s life with new truth about how to live when we turn toward the Light in our individual and collective discernment.

We need more of an answer than this when people ask us what we believe. What canst we say?

I have been working on an answer to this question of what we believe for decades. I received an answer in 1991 and I’ve been trying to refine it ever since. I now have several versions, and I want to publish them here, but most are quite long, so I will have to publish them as downloadable pdf files. And, as usual, now that I look at them again after some time away, I find I have some things to add and some things to change, so they’re not ready yet.

My latest effort, however, is fairly short and designed to be easier to read online. I will publish it next. But first, I want to provide a resource, a set of links to how various Quaker organizations present the essentials of Quaker faith and practice.

Various Quaker answers to the question, what do we believe?

• Friends General Conference offers a general introduction to Quakerism and videos.
• Friends United Meeting offers a set of Frequently Asked Questions.
• Evangelical Friends Church International gives us an evangelical Quaker answer.
• Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has a fairly well developed and attractively presented section on the Quaker way.
• New England Yearly Meeting also has a Frequently Asked Questions approach.
• Ohio Yearly Meeting offers a simple Conservative Friends perspective.
• Friends World Committee for Consultation offers an introduction to the kinds of Friends around the world.
• QuakerSpeak.org features videos on dozens of Quaker topics.

 

Marriage, Same-sex Marriage, and the Bible

Caring, as is often the case, more for “institutions” and principles than for real people, Conservative Christians have decried the recent decision from the Supreme Court to declare same-sex marriage legal throughout the land. My mostly accidental exposure to their rhetoric for their opposition suggests arguments along two lines: a history-tradition argument that marriage has always been between one man and one woman and there must be good reasons for that, and a biblical argument that starts with Adam and Eve, not with Adam and Steve, etc. I have heard the two sets of arguments put together in talk about the constancy of God’s will.

However, God’s will has been anything but constant over the millennia recorded in the Bible. There is no one biblical ethic on marriage, sex, and family life. There may be a traditional ethic on sex and family in the history of the church, but that tradition rests on a rather narrow selection of texts in the Bible. As with virtually every aspect of biblical interpretation, everybody inevitably picks and chooses what they think supports their position.

For the accepted forms of family life have changed at key moments in the life of the biblical tradition. Some examples:

• First, the Hebrew Bible takes polygamy for granted. All the patriarchs had more than one wife. Furthermore, you can see a tension manifest in their marital relationships in which the tradition is seeking to impose patriarchal patterns over what were obviously more matriarchal—or at lease matrilocal—realities in these marriages. Sarah, in particular, has a power in the relationship that is uncharacteristic of patriarchal marriages. She does what she wants, most of the time, and, significantly, Abraham is buried in Sarah’s tomb, not the other way around. Some have made the case, by which I am swayed myself, that she, and possibly also at least one of Isaac’s wives, were priestesses who enjoyed some of the prerogatives bestowed on priestesses in some of the current ancient Mesopotamian cultures This provides the only believable explanation I have ever read of Sarah’s and relations with Pharaoh and Abimelech and Rebekah’s relations with Abimelech again.
• Who can you marry? The book of Judges, which covers the period during which the newly formed people of Israel settled in the highlands of Palestine, is full of both women and men who were murdered or sacrificed over changing patterns of family, including most famously, the story of Samson and Delilah. These stories often reveal divisions over marrying out of the covenant, and specifically, of marrying Philistines. Interestingly, most scholars think that Delilah was a priestess of Astarte, so Abram could marry such a priestess, but not Samson.
• Marrying out of the covenant. The book of Ezra recounts how the priest Ezra joined the small community of Jews who had returned to Israel from Babylon after they had been encouraged to do so by Cyrus of Persia and he found that they had been marrying the locals. Ezra made all the men who had done so divorce their wives. This is when it first became against Jewish law to marry outside the covenant.
• Divorce. Divorce was allowed under the instructions of Torah, but, at least by the time of Jesus, Jews disagreed over who could “sue” for divorce and why. Jesus himself gives perhaps contradictory answers virtually back-to-back, saying first, “What God has joined together, let not man (sic) separate” (Matthew 19:6); then allowing a man to divorce his wife for adultery (Matthew 19:9).
• Jesus and women. Jesus was unusually egalitarian toward women under the law in general, and the early tradition followed him—for a while. All the gospels give women the credit for understanding the resurrection first, even though women were not allowed to be witnesses under the law. A small group of female supporters traveled with him throughout his career. And women consistently outperform men when it comes to confessing his status. But the later tradition abandoned Jesus’ embrace of women.
• Paul’s accommodation with Hellenistic culture. Paul starts out agreeing with Jesus, declaring in an early letter that, in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, no master or slave, no male or female—in other words, that in the new covenant, women and men are equal. But then he begins to backpedal. The feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza tracks this drift in her groundbreaking book In Memory of Her. Paul and whoever wrote some of the later letters attributed to him (Colossians and Ephesians) and 1 Peter end up declaring instead that the husband is the ruler of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church. The pressures of Hellenistic culture on his formerly-pagan converts combined with his jettison of Torah evidently forced him to accommodate existing patriarchal patterns in family life.
• Polygamy in the later tradition. At no point in the scriptural tradition does God forbid polygamy or declare that marriage is between ONE man and ONE woman. Jewish culture evolved to espouse this arrangement as a matter of cultural tradition (though the Rabbinical tradition may have developed biblical arguments against polygamy—I don’t know it well enough to say). In other words, the religious tradition has come to take monogamy for granted without a clear biblical foundation.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with same-sex marriage. I am not arguing that the Bible supports or even allows same-sex marriage. I personally think that such a thing is essentially inconceivable. The real question is not what the Bible says about same-sex marriage, but what authority we give to the Bible on such matters in the first place.

My point is that, if God inspired all of Holy Scripture as conservative Christians claim, then he (sic) changed his mind a lot when it came to whom you could marry. Faithful religionists in the Bible are more or less constantly struggling with the question of whom you are allowed to marry. Furthermore, this conflict has come with a lot of pain and even sometimes blood. Both Jesus and Paul suggest, in f act, that it would really be better not to marry at all, Jesus because of the coming trials of the endtimes, and Paul for the same reason, plus the problems of being “yoked to unbelievers”.

There is no coherent testimony on who you can marry in the Bible and I think this makes the Bible an unreliable foundation for religious testimony on marriage today. If you insist on a God-inspired biblical foundation for a definition of marriage, you have to pick and choose which passages you’re using to back yourself up, and you have to gloss over the implications of an evident evolution in God’s own thinking on the matter.

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement & Ministry

When a meeting recognizes the gifts of its members and helps its members mature into their spiritual lives, the meeting matures in its collective religious life. This manifests in deep meetings for worship, spirit-led discernment in meetings for business in worship, effective pastoral care, a loving and resilient fellowship, grounded and focused social witness, and well-managed property and finances.

Newcomers can sense this vitality, even though the sources of it may not be very visible. Even less visible, oftentimes, are the ministries that flourish in a meeting. But they, too, give a meeting a vitality that true seekers after the divine will recognize: here, they will say to themselves, God truly is at work.

Gifts of the spirit and gifts in ministry—almost the same thing. Ministries often arise from one’s gifts—but not always. Both are given by the Holy Spirit. Both are given to the community and to the world but entrusted to individuals.

Because the gifts of ministry are given to the community, the community has a responsibility for them. If meetings do not recognize emerging ministries, they throw the gift away. If meetings do not give ministers help with discerning their leadings, they may lose the gift. And if meetings do not give ministers the support and oversight they need to be faithful to their call, meetings trample on the gifts. These are sins against the spirit.

Because the gifts of ministry are entrusted to individual Friends, the ministers also have responsibilities. If Friends do not bring their gifts in ministry and their leadings to their meeting, they deny their meeting the grace of the spirit. If Friends do not seek help with discernment, they may misunderstand their call. And if Friends do not seek support for their ministry if they need it, the gift may be squandered, or lost, or tangled in the obstacles that arise.

Do our meetings welcome the gifts of ministry that are given to us in the Spirit? And do our meetings and members live the faith and practice of Quaker ministry as an essential aspect of our corporate and individual religious lives?

Queries for our meetings

Recognizing ministry. Does your meeting know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry? Do you teach it often enough so that all members and attenders, and especially newcomers, have a chance to learn it, as well? Does your meeting encourage members to share their leadings and ministries with the meeting, providing both opportunities to share, and an open and visible structure for welcoming leadings? Are your members thinking about the gifts they have as spirit-led? Would a member of your meeting who has a leading recognize it as such? Are they in the habit of thinking about the interests they have in witness or service activities or whatever, within the meeting or in their everyday lives, as possible leadings from the Spirit into Quaker ministry?

Discerning leadings. Does your meeting know how to conduct a clearness committee for discernment of leadings? Does your meeting understand the difference between a clearness committee for discernment and clearness committees for membership, marriage, and making personal decisions, in terms of how the people are chosen and how the committees are conducted? Or does your meeting have some other process for helping ministers with the discernment of their leadings?

Supporting ministry. Does your meeting have a structure and processes in place for supporting the leadings of your members? Would a Friend with a leading know where to go with their leading? Does your meeting know how to form a care committee for its ministers? Is your meeting prepared to provide oversight as well as support, ready, for instance, to help a Friend discover when they have run past their guide, or have stepped through the traces  * , or when they have been released from their call? Does your meeting know how to write a minute for travel or service in ministry?

Releasing ministry. In the elder days, when a Friend traveled in the ministry, members of their meeting helped run their farm or their store in their absence. This was called releasing ministry.  When your meeting writes a minute for travel or service, do you also inquire into what obstacles may hinder the minister’s ability answer the call and then see what you can do to remove these obstacles? Are you familiar with ReleasingMinistry.org, a new independent Quaker initiative to support Quaker ministry?

*  “Step through the traces.” This is a phrase from the elder days of Quaker ministry and refers to a draught horse getting its legs tangled in the tackle—the traces—by which it pulls a wagon. Thus it means to get tangled up in the pursuit of your ministry, making mistakes, failing to walk in the paths of Christ’s leading.

What are Spiritual Gifts?

When I started writing the queries for a previous post that meetings might use to examine and deepen their understanding of spiritual gifts and of their nurture, I realized that some meetings might not be very clear about what spiritual gifts are, or at least, about what I mean by spiritual gifts. Then I realized that I needed to be more clear myself. So I revisited some of the thinking I’ve done on gifts of the spirit for workshops I’ve done that apply Paul’s discussions of gifts of the spirit to Quaker needs.

I think we have two ways to categorize spiritual gifts. The first is according to the character of the giving. The second, adapted from the writings of Paul, is according to how they manifest.

What are spiritual gifts—in terms of how they are given?

Innate gifts. Some spiritual gifts seem to be innate and personal. Such spiritual gifts are talents, inclinations, and experience that give shape and direction to one’s spiritual life and/or that are useful in service to the religious community and in the wider world. An example is the gift of studiousness, or the love of learning, which often is paired with the gift of teaching; another is the gifts of money management, another—being good with your hands. Of course, we can think of even innate gifts as Spirit-given.

Gifts of the Spirit. Subtly different are “gifts of the Spirit”, as Paul calls them, manifestations of the Spirit that arise in a person independently of the person’s more innate gifts. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,” writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:7. The signature example of a Spirit-given gift is the opening that prompts vocal ministry in meeting for worship.

Spirit-nurtured gifts. Somewhere in between lie the majority of gifts, I think, gifts that arise from some apparently innate attribute but that have clearly been nurtured into maturity by the Holy Spirit and by the person holding the gift. In this group, I would include the gift of hospitality, of making people feel welcome and at home, the gift of teaching, which might arise from the more innate gift of studiousness, and the gift of healing, which in many healers starts as an innate inclination toward and gift for caring for others, but which the person holding the gift has developed by learning the healing arts.

What are gifts of the spirit—in terms of how they manifest?

Paul offers us two categories of spiritual gifts, according to how they manifest: gifts of speaking, and gifts of serving. And I would add a third as I see them described in Paul’s letters—gifts as signs.

I’m not sure how useful these categories are, especially since Paul does not mention a lot of the gifts that we find at work among us today. But I do think it’s useful to list and describe gifts of the spirit, so that Friends recognize them in their members and attenders. Below is my list and descriptions, as I see them manifesting among Friends. Where I have found them in the letters of Paul, I have indicated this. The letters I am referring to are 1 Corinthians 12–14, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4 *.

Naming spiritual gifts.

A tentative list of spiritual gifts and their descriptions:

Vocal ministry	Someone who feels called to vocal ministry, whose ministry consistently lifts up the meeting and speaks often to the inner needs and lives of the members, not necessarily just someone who speaks often in meeting. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who brings us spirit-led ministry.     In Paul’s letter, the gift of prophecy.
Preaching	Someone whose gift of vocal ministry manifests at times in sustained spirit-led ministry that draws the meeting into a deeper understanding of and feeling for the life of the spirit; whose ministry would seem to violate the frequent recommendation to make your message brief, except that the sermon does speak to someone’s condition, or to the meeting’s condition. Among liberal Friends, “preach” is often considered a four letter word, though, of course, programmed meetings know full well that preaching is a spiritual gift. I think it depends entirely on whether a sermon is Spirit-led, and I am certain that the Holy Spirit does sometimes take longer than “brief” to say what needs saying—and that Friends should not quench that Spirit by invoking a convention found in books or out of some fear that “preaching” necessarily means some form of preachiness.     Paul: evangelism, exhortation
Prayer	Someone who through vocal prayer (praying out loud in meeting for worship) can often draw others into true communion with the Divine. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend moved by the Holy Spirit into prayer. It is worth noting that William Penn said in his introduction to George Fox’s Journal that Fox’s greatest gift was the gift of prayer. This gift is almost completely extinct among liberal Friends.     The gift of prayer is not in Paul.
Discernment	Someone who often sees to the heart of matters, understands what a person or the meeting needs in a given situation, or finds solutions to problems. Someone with a gift for clerking and/or recording. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who leads us to the Truth.     Paul: discerning spirits.
Eldership	Someone who recognizes spiritual gifts in others and seeks ways to nurture these gifts into maturity and support them when they blossom into active ministry; who recommends books or conferences to Friends who show an interest in the Quaker way; who recognizes newly emerging ministry and ministers and encourages it or them; someone who finds themselves holding the meeting in prayer, or who finds fulfillment in serving as a companion to a minister in their service or their travels in the ministry; someone who recognizes walking that disturbs the spiritual welfare of someone’s own self, or that of others, or of the meeting as a community, and who seeks ways to restore gospel order, to bring affairs back into the Light. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend as the divinely inspired ability to teach, lead, and correct the members of the meeting out of one’s own experience of Christ’s inward transformation.     Paul: exhortation, direction.
Pastoral care	Someone who by nature keeps track of people who need care and often sees that they get the care they need. These Friends often are employed in the secular church, as social workers, therapists, doctors, etc. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who finds herself or himself knowing just what to say or do to meet someone’s needs.     Paul: pastors, helping, showing mercy.
Teaching	Someone whose knowledge and passion for a subject manifest as a desire, even a need, to share it. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who finds herself or himself sharing what they know in response to someone else’s desire to know.     Paul: teaching.
Hospitality	Someone who has a way of making people feel welcome and at home in the meeting, or who consistently feels led to organize fellowship gatherings, who brings food to the meeting, and/or who likes to greet newcomers.     Not found in Paul.
Prophecy	Someone who brings to an individual, or to the meeting, or to the Religious Society of Friends, or to the wider society a message of correction, and/or the inspiration to take a new direction, manifesting at any time in any Friend.     Paul: prophecy.
Witness	Someone who carries a concern for bettering the world, for building the kingdom of the Spirit on earth, often with a focus on some specific concern, manifesting at any time in any Friend as a leading into witness ministry.     Not found in Paul. (One of Paul’s great failures was his spiritualization of the gospel of Jesus and his abandonment of the world to its suffering, turning instead to evangelizing the world to his gospel as its cure.)
Serving	Someone who finds spiritual fulfillment in service to the meeting community, or to the wider community. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend who takes up a task of service. Often manifesting in combination with the gifts of leadership, administration, hospitality, and financial or property management.     Paul: serving.
Leadership	Someone who, out of the gift of serving, also gets things done, who knows how to organize things effectively and leads by serving example.     Paul: leadership.
Financial management	Someone who, by natural inclination and through life experience, knows how to manage money matters and, through the gift of serving, brings this gift to the meeting.     Paul: leadership.
Contribution	Anyone who supports the meeting financially out of the promptings of the Holy Spirit, or who responds with generosity of treasure and spirit to someone’s financial or other material need.     Paul: contributing.
Property management	Someone who, by natural inclination and through life experience, knows how to manage and take care of property and, through the gift of serving, brings this gift to the meeting.     Not in Paul.
Healing	Someone who, through natural inclination and acquired life experience, brings the healing arts to the meeting and to the world, often but not necessarily manifesting in a healing vocation. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend as spirit-led ministry that alleviates suffering.     Paul: Healing.
Faith	Someone whose faith is so deep and so manifest in their lives that it lifts others up into a stronger sense of God’s presence in their lives. Also manifesting any time in any Friend whose faith, in the moment, turns others toward the Light, or the Presence in our midst, or toward the divine wish for the community’s direction.     Paul: faith.
Miracles	Manifesting at any time through any Friend as the Holy Spirit bringing about the utterly unexpected and seemingly impossible outcome.     Paul: miracles.

 

*  Once, when I was leading an exercise in naming spiritual gifts and started discussing Paul, a woman asked why we should bother with Paul—and I had to agree that we didn’t have to look to Paul as an authority. Taken aback in the moment, I could only answer that I did not feel responsible to the tradition, but that I did feel responsible for it, that, even when we decide to lay down some aspect of our tradition, we should know what that tradition is and we should leave part of our tradition behind only in spirit-led discernment, not through ignorance or unconsidered drift of purpose and identity.

In the instance of gifts of the spirit, I actually find Paul useful, maybe even spirit-led. In general, I don’t like Paul. I think he hijacked the gospel of Jesus. In abandoning all aspects of Torah, he gutted Jesus’ teachings, especially those about the kingdom of God. And, of course, he drifted away from Jesus’ egalitarian treatment and respect for women, especially as he got older.

But Paul was a religious genius and he was not always wrong about everything. And his treatment of the gifts of the spirit are brilliant. His famous passage about love in 1 Corinthians 13 is sandwiched in between two discourses on the gifts of the spirit in chapters 12 and 14, and this hymn to love is an integral part of his understanding of the place of spiritual gifts in the life of the community. His metaphor of the body for the relative importance of the various spiritual gifts is also a profound opening.

Finally, he did, after all, give us a pretty good list of spiritual gifts as a starting point. It’s hard to figure out what some of them mean, and some come clear only after some study, not just of Paul’s letters but also importantly, of the structure and practices of the early Christian church. His gifts of serving, for instance (leadership, helping, contributing, having mercy), mostly define roles in the church’s social welfare system, its mechanisms for taking care of the poor.

Therefore, because I feel responsible for our tradition, I indicate when one of the gifts I name here appears in Paul’s discussions of gifts. But I’m not going to go any farther than that with Paul’s list in this post. One of these days, I will write the monograph for which I have extensive notes on Paul’s gifts of the spirit.