Quaker 2.0

My name is Chris Frazier and I’m a bit of a worrier. Not gut-wrenching worry, but enough that I look at my baby daughter and wonder about the world she’s going to grow up in. This is probably the most normal response any parent can have. The usual response to this worry is to get your kids into the nearest church with good childcare and hope that in the process of their growing up, they won’t become another statistic.

So, being fairly normal, my parents did just that with me and I really bought into that idea myself. I bought into it so completely that I graduated from a Christian university and then went on to seminary (only 60 units to go…). Just to get everything perfect, I then became full-time pastor at a church with excellent childcare. Problem solved.

I could have been quite happy going along like this, but somewhere along the lines I read something that haunted me. It was something Jesus said (he was actually quoting someone else) about what his mission was:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has appointed me to preach Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the downtrodden will be freed from their oppressors, and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.
Luke 4:18-19

There was nothing about childcare in there! For heaven’s sake, he didn’t even say anything about whether he preferred hymns or praise choruses. It was like what he was saying had nothing to do with my idea of the church and had everything to do with some sort of radical manifesto!

I didn’t bother to mention that I grew up a Quaker in Southern California. Quakers have historically been a radical group that was really good at publishing manifestos (not that these tracts were good - there were just a lot of them) and getting in trouble for bucking the system through peaceful resistance. I once did a paper on some of the early Quakers and while going through their histories I noticed that quite a few spent more than 10% of their adult lives in jail because of their actions associated with following their faith. They weren’t messing around.

On the flip-side, Southern Californians, while being notoriously liberal, are even more notorious for not doing anything of much importance. Add to that the fact that most Quakers in Southern California live in Orange County and you have an even stranger paradox.

You might have put together, at this point, why I ended up with a sort of dissonance when it came to my understanding of Jesus and the Church. I had grown up in a place where people could actively claim historic acts of social justice and Christian service as their own while doing pretty much nothing in their own lifetime outside of attending a church that had great childcare. Quakerism by proxy had been born!

But see, the world is a broken place. It’s so utterly broken that I’ve become something of a worrier. (See - we’re back to the beginning of this post.) The church that I thought could do something to assuage my worry isn’t much of a help, what with it’s focus on childcare instead of bringing Jesus’ message to people in tangible ways. The group of people that should be setting the world on fire is getting really good at not doing much at all, so they’re not much help either. So what do we do?

Maybe it’s time for something else. Maybe it’s time to rediscover an identity lost years ago. Maybe we need a Quaker 2.0.