Month: July 2014

What is a Quaker? Watch this quick 5 minute video and hear from 6 actual members of the Quaker religion.

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Transcript

Noah Merrill:
A Quaker is someone who is seeking to be faithful to the deepest truth that we can encounter, to be guided to that truth by the guidance of the holy spirit, by the presence of God in our lives, and by the understanding that that’s a real experience that we can encounter.

O:
A Quaker is someone who is willing to be still, enter a silence, and actually be penetrated by that silence.

Paul Buckley:
Penn said, a Quaker is defined by one fundamental principle, and that was that God had placed within each person an infallible guide, that if followed would lead you to righteousness and salvation. Anyone who follows that guide, who attends to it and does what it leads you to, is a true child of God and, by definition, then, is a Quaker.

C. Wess Daniels:
For me, one of the things that means to be Quaker is to be together in a community of people who gather and listen together. We can have spiritual practice outside of meeting, outside of worshipping, but there’s something about coming together and listening together to God as a community that is full of life, and full of conflict and challenge, and to me, that’s what makes Quakerism beautiful.

Faith Kelley:
I think there’s also some Quaker distinctives that come out of that experience of Christ alive and in the world with us, and those are things about, you know, sacraments being inward, and our experience of worship— the understanding that God is there in the worship and is with us. And so those things, I think, make someone a Quaker.

Monica Walters-Field:
So by definition, your communication changes, because you know, if we’re all, then, therefore that of God, we’re therefore all equal, and so by definition our relationships with each other must change, and will be different.

O:
There is a way of trusting the innocence of that power, so that one is not afraid of it—not afraid of the power—but is willing to walk intimately into that power… and be informed by it. Informed. Reformed. Transformed. And in the transformation, of being touched by God, behaviors change. Something different happens.

Noah Merrill:
But it’s more than that, right, because there are many people in many traditions who are seeking to do that. So then what’s a Quaker? I think a Quaker is someone who is part of this living stream, this sense of being a people who’ve been on this journey for more than 350 years, traveling together as a community, supporting one another with these traditions and these practices that we have found. We didn’t create them; we discovered them. That help people along that journey of faithfulness, as we help each other to be set free and to grow more fully alive. And to me, that’s the Way we’re inviting people into.

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This week’s Quaker video: “You’re a Quaker? You mean, like, Amish?” It’s something all Quakers have heard. Max Carter, professor of Quaker religion studies at Guilford College, tells us about the differences between Quakers and the Amish.

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Are Quakers Amish? That’s a question that almost everyone who goes to Guilford College (where we’re filming this today) gets. A number of my students will say when they find out they’re going to a Quaker College, “Will we have to ride a horse? Will we have to give up electricity? Will we have to wear gray?”

What I often tell my students is the main difference between the Quakers and the Amish is that the Amish drive their own buggy; Quakers drive others buggy.

Are Quakers Amish?

The real answer is that there’s a spiritual connection between the Quakers and the Amish. There’s no organic connection between the Quakers and the Amish.

The Amish grew out of the radical reformation, the anabaptist movements of the 1500’s and 1600’s, out of southern Germany, the Alsace area of France and Switzerland in response to the protestant reformation, and a desire to take those reforms further, to create the “true church” of adult, voluntary believers who accept the discipline of the church and associated themselves around the gospels especially and lived out the meaning of the gospels in plainness, in simplicity, in adult baptism, and pacifism, or what they would call “biblical nonresistance.”

The Quakers emerged out of the English Civil War period a century later. Similar desires to restore original Christianity—it was a restorationist movement too—but there’s no organic connection with what was happening on the continent.

How Quaker Used to Dress

The reason so many people make the mistake of equating the Quakers with the Amish is the Amish dress the way that Quakers used to. The Amish came into the American colonies in the early 1700’s on the invitation of William Penn and other Quakers to Pennsylvania for religious freedom. They came as German Peasant stock, dressing like German Bauern would dress, and they looked at their Quaker neighbors and saw them dressing in their broad brim hats and bonnets and plain clothes and said, “works for us.”

The Differences Between Quakers and Amish

But there are very significant differences between the Amish and the Quakers. The Amish, for example, believe in separation from a fallen world. A fundamental theological understanding is to be separate. “Come out from among them and be ye separate.”

Quakers have followed William Penn’s dictate of “loving the world with weaned affections,” to be “in the world but not of it,” so Quakers have not been as separate from the world.

The Amish have a theology that is still fairly Calvinist without the pre-destination. Quakers have a theology that is more open to the possibility of understanding one’s salvation in this life. The Amish will not talk about eternal assurance or the ability to know in this life whether one is in reconciliation with God.

And quite importantly, the Amish do not allow women to speak or have authority in church. Quakers from the very beginning have always seen the spiritual equality of men and women. So if you go to an Amish worship service, which is 3 and a half hours in German, women will not speak a word, unless they’re singing a hymn. There are no women in authority, no women in leadership, and that just isn’t the case among Quakers.

There are also a variety of differences in terms of form. Quakers do not use the outward forms of baptism and communion typically, and those are very central to Anabaptist and Amish understanding. The importance of baptism as a sign of entering into the church as an adult, and the importance twice a year of the Lord’s supper, foot washing as well.

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Marcelle Martin on the Quaker practice of surrendering the self-will and how this practice will be absolutely crucial if we are going to avoid catastrophe.

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Today we live in a time of crisis, and a nearness really to catastrophe on the planet that threatens the survival of the human race and all of the other species on the planet. It’s a time of great crisis — more than we know, I believe. And also a time when God is calling us to great change.

How Will We Respond to the Crises of Our Time?

My name is Marcelle Martin. I’ve got a blog where I’m sharing what I’ve been learning from the first Quakers — the amazing discoveries they made and how people are living out that spiritual journey in our time.

I think that everything we need in order to face the challenges and the crisis in our time are within us, and we need to bring it out because every person on the planet has a piece of that, can do God’s work in helping to restore the planet and to make this a place where love and peace prevail. But we have to change our ways. It’s a time where great, great change is needed and needed quickly, and will draw forth from us potentials that really haven’t been seen except for in extraordinary people in the past, and these are potentials that are part of everyone.

Desire and the the Will of the Self

At the very beginning of the Quaker movement, they had a very strong understanding of God’s will for us and how to live being different from the normal human will, and they discovered — first of all — the amazing presence of the divine within themselves and within everyone and within the world, but then there’s — on the other hand — the will of the small individual self who feels afraid, and because of fear has greed, and of course has natural human desires, some of which become overpowering lusts — desires for comfort, for security, for social status, and when those desires are in control, that’s what they called the “self”. And so they understood that your self-will could not be in control — that this spiritual journey was about surrendering that identity — that will — for God’s will.

It’s a process by which the ego is no longer the master of your actions, or in control. There’s something larger that’s in control.

Quaker Practice: “Give Over Thine Own Willing”

And I think that’s something that we learn every day. Every day we have opportunities to choose between our personal desires, our personal comfort, our personal security, and serving others. Bring love to others, bringing truth to others in ways that might not be comfortable to ourselves personally. Everybody has those opportunities every single day and we get practice in doing that every day.

One way that I get practice is that I’m a very shy person, I’m an introvert. I prefer to spend my time reading and writing. Talking to people is often a challenge to me, and yet what I feel called to do involves teaching and talking and leading workshops and being a public personality, and so every time I do that, in a sense, I’m surrendering to this larger purpose.

“A Different Kind of People”

None of us can actually see how we’re going to solve the big problems. In fact, most people are spending a lot of energy denying the magnitude of the problems that we face in our time. So that’s the first challenge really: to face the crises of our time, and then to learn how to let God direct us in solving the problem and becoming a different kind of people — letting those potentials that are within us become manifest.

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Noah Baker Merrill discusses sacramental living, Quaker Voluntary Service, and how our Quaker prophetic witness can transform the world.

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Prophecy is about seeing the world as it is from a God’s eye perspective. It’s about looking at the world the way it is from the perspective of love and justice and the possibility that all things could be made new.

The Possibility of Every Moment

We live in a world where hope is scarce and fragile and where — as a species, as a whole community of life — there’s this sense deep at the roots that something is wrong, that something about the balance of the world is changing.

There’s this low level anxiety that surrounds us and I think a huge part of that is that we have lost a sense of the sacredness of our journey here on this planet, and I think one of the gifts for me of my journey as a Friend is that I find tools for what has been called “sacramental living” — for recognizing that in every moment there’s the possibility for the in-breaking of something beyond us.

The Heart of the Prophetic Message

Taking the condition of the world and all of the suffering and all of the injustice and all of the joy and all of possibility, and all of the reality of global climate disruption and the massive inequality that we experience as human being, and also says, “but this is not all that’s possible. Something could be different.” Ultimately, I think that’s the heart of the prophetic message: “It could be different.”

A Way of Living that Makes it Real

I think prophetic service is not just a perspective. It’s not just a word we would say, or a vision we would lift up, but its a way of living that incarnates that — that makes that real in our lives, in our families, in our workplaces that says, “how do I live in a way that’s invitational? That invites people into that possibility that something could be different?” That this — that we see every day — is not all that could be possible, and that together in communities, we could be living into that. We could find that place together.

And it sounds grand and it sounds huge and it sounds impossible to achieve, but living in our daily lives in that way, open to the invitation, is something that we hope we’re inviting people into in Quaker Voluntary Service. And I hope that when people come into a Quaker Meeting that once in a while they experience that invitational living, where we’re seeing things as they are and also reaching for what could be together.

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