Why Quaker 2.0?
It was about 5 months ago when I stumbled onto Quaker 2.0, the first thing that drew me to it was the wonderful layout of the page: I love a good looking website. But as I dug into what was written here, I began to really appreciate Chris’s ideas about Quakerism in the new world. In his very first post he said,
“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.”
If I interpret Chris’s motivations properly, its not to completely start over with Quakerism but it is to drastically change parts of it that are of little or no use in the postmodern world (thus a 2.0).
1. New Yearnings In a New Age
When I came to Quakerism, it was as an Evangelical Christian attending an Evangelical Friends undergraduate. I was one of a few who, at least when I was there, saw the richness of the Quaker story and longed for those missing parts of Quakerism in the Evangelical Church. The reason I initially had interest was because of a couple of professors who took Quaker ideas about non-violence, and the equality of men and women in ministry seriously. These two issues were important for me, not because I accepted them right away but because they spoke “to my condition.” When I read Walter Williams’s “The Rich Heritage of Quakerism” I found myself saying, these are things I have always believed but didn’t know I believed them.
I ended up finding a youth ministry position at a Friends Church in Northeastern Ohio while my wife, Emily, and I were both still in college. It was there that we spent more time learning and absorbing the Quaker narrative, learning how to embody this version of Christianity. The problem then was, not so much that people on the Evangelical side of the tradition were adverse to us taking seriously notions like pacifism, simplicity, women in ministry, and sacramental living, but we realized our views were marginal in the larger body. We certainly are not the only ones within the Evangelical Friends Church to believe this stuff, but as a whole the tradition has moved away from discipling its people into the kinds of practices that cultivate Christians that look like our earlier counterparts (see my posts on Evangelicalism for more on this subject).
As I began to look into this further (mainly at Fuller), I found that not only is the Evangelical church struggling to find an identity that meets up to our history, but so are all Friends. My interest from that point on has been, why has so much of the church moved away from the kind of Christianity espoused by Fox and those who came after him? What do we do about this (something I will be doing my dissertation on), and what will it look like in our day and age?
2. Beyond Old Categories
I recently commented on a blog post that seemed to me to be a bit too “anachronistic” in the way it interpreted our earlier history. I have too been guilty of this, as its easy to do, but we need try and avoid these kinds of interpretations on both sides. We need to begin to push beyond the old categories of liberalism, conservativism, moderatism, Evangelicalism and universalism (and all the more quirky designations we’ve come up with along the way) as they do not help us get beyond our old struggles. Arguing over who is and who isn’t a Quaker, whether Fox was an Evangelical, Liberal, Universalist, or even Buddhist is getting our tradition nowhere. These were not questions Fox dealt with, because they were not questions the world dealt with for at least another one hundred years. We need people who are willing to exegete Fox’s theology and culture in a way that can provide us with translatable ideas and practices for the postmodern world, in the same breath we need those people to help us exegete our own culture and tell us what parts of the old is no longer of use.
3. Tradition In Crisis
Our tradition is in crisis! When a large part of the church doesn’t identify with silence, peace and simplicity that is touble, and when an equally large part of this movement no longer identifies itself as Christian or having anything to do with Christ its also trouble. This is all ‘trouble’ if we are trying to maintain a sustainable history that looks similar at point B as it did at point A. The talk on this website, and others is what are the essentials of Quakerism? What needs to be kept and what needs to go. I think there are some things that we need to keep, and I think there are some things we need to get rid of.
This of course is where many will break from my own viewpoints: in moving forward we will retain the most important parts of our church movement while letting go of those parts that hinder and keep us from making a difference for the kingdom of God (this seems to me to be the main point of any Church movement). Its not an all or nothing for me, in fact I think there is a lot about our history that cannot be salvaged, simply because the world is so different now. Before I am cast from the Quaker blogosphere, I think there is a lot that can be salvaged, and I think what can be saved is the most important of all the things the Friends have done and cared about.
Alasdair MacIntrye says that when there are competing traditions, the tradition that is able to overcome the crisis is the better tradition. The problem I see is that each branch within Quakerism holds important ‘tools’ for the whole movement and it doesn’t seem like any one of the three main groups are doing a real good job of working with the others (especially the Evangelicals). I think that this is in fact why talks about “convergent Quakerism,” the connection between emerging church and Quakerism and Quaker 2.0 get me most excited. People thinking creatively about where to go is what we need now, people drawing lines and creating more boundaries about who is in and out will no longer do any good.
4. Fox and the Future
Are Quakers ready to re-image their future? Are we ready to be prophetic Christian radicals again, the way Fox, Fell and Barclay (and so many more) were? Fox believed that the Holy Spirit was to lead the church, not any one person, committee or denomination. This means the church will never be a static place, its always on the move. We need a people of faith willing to listen beyond the categories, and hear the Spirit of Jesus speak; denominations are okay when they seek to embody this. We need a group of people who are willing to throw everything away, and start all over again if the Spirit so leads. We also need this people to be absolutely committed to the “Rich Heritage” we have been granted. Fox was a radical thinker when it came to Christianity, he thought outside the traditional categories and was willing to start afresh with how to follow Christ and share the good news in his world. Will we be able to follow in his footsteps and do this, or can we expect Fox to show up to our steeple-houses saying that the light has died in our communities as well? Fox’s message is still useful today, not because he himself had something special or unique to say, but because he translated the timeless Gospel into a way that struck at the heart of people longing for a real experience with God. We are standing at a crossroads, will we again translate the Gospel anew and live it out in God’s great drama or will we draw our boundaries, say our thees and thous and die a staid people?
“Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me (Rev. 3:20).”
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I certainly overstated the case, when I say Higher Criticism has failed because there are many things its helped us with (and I have good friends who are respectable “higher critics”). What I mean that its failed in at least one of its original goals, to clarify through modern scientific means the parts of Scripture that are “true” and debunk those parts that are “myth.” Modernity doesn’t like myth, because in the modern mindset what matters most is scientific inquiry (and a certain rigid kind of scientific inquiry), things that can be proven in a petry dish are the only things that can be trusted. Higher Criticism was set up to do “science” on the BIble, I don’t mean whether the bible tells us things about science or not, I just mean treating the document itself as a specimen. 
Amen Brother! Preach it. I am getting way excited because the Spirit seems to be moving in the direction you describe on many fronts.
I have suggested to Friend Martin Kelly that we might gather a convergent Friends conference some time.
We have lots of meeting space here in Greensboro (Guilford College plus quite a few Meeting Houses around). Let’s DO IT!