Friends Journal

There’s a revealing line in the memoir of Samuel Bownas, a British traveling minister who visited the English colonies in North America in 1702 and 1727, staying a few years each time. On his second journey, he noted that “very few of the elders, that twenty years before were serviceable, zealous men, were now living.” Moreover, “many of the rising youth did come up in the form more than in the power and life that their predecessors were in.” There you have it: the golden age of Quakers was over 300 years ago.

But, of course, it wasn’t. Only a decade or so later, Benjamin Lay stunned Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions by coming in dressed as a soldier and concluding an antislavery diatribe by thrusting a sword into a hollowed-out Bible filled with fake blood. So many of our Quaker heroes, from John Woolman to Lucretia Mott to Bayard Rustin, were to follow. For every lionized Friend, hundreds worked to minister and elder and even do unglamorous work like maintaining the meetinghouses.

It’s my pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn. It’s been a messy process with lots of hurt feelings. Many people have left Friends, and there are a bewildering number of institutional schisms still dividing us. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Samuel Bownas himself recognized the cycle of regrowth. He’s most well-known for his short book, A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister, which has come to be widely recognized as the canonical how-to book of Quaker ministry (a beautiful well-produced volume from 1989 is still available from either of its co-publishers, Pendle Hill and the Tract Association of Friends). Bownas responded to a stultifying Quaker tradition by writing down the unwritten folkways of his predecessors. In so doing, he helped keep our ways alive.

There’s a curious debate over the intentionality of revivals. Some Friends counsel that we should wait and be true to our ways until the Spirit leads people to us. Others believe that with enough money and force of will, we can jump-start a revival among Friends.

I tend to fall in between. I wrote my first manifesto about organizing 20-something Friends back in the late 1990s. Over the years, I’ve served as a national outreach coordinator and also helped to organize various social media movements. I’ve seen many a much-hyped outreach initiative come and go.

Surprisingly, many of the forces bringing people to Friends are outside our control. The most effective outreach tool in the last 30 years has been the Beliefnet “What Religion Are You?” quiz, which must have told tens of thousands of seekers they are compatible with Friends. It’s a random quiz, made without academic rigor simply to make a few bucks on an advertising platform. We Quakers can’t match this kind of free publicity, but we can be ready when visitors seek us out. We can have good websites and social media; we can do the work to know our faith well enough to answer questions when people come in; we can practice hospitality and build meeting cultures that bring first-time visitors back the next week, and the week after that.

Anecdotally it seems like many new visitors have been checking out Friends in the last few years. There’s a growing curiosity about what we’ve found. Let’s greet these seekers, share our ways, and honor their observations and journeys. Let’s revive Quakerism yet again.

In Friendship,

The post Being Ready for the Seekers appeared first on Friends Journal.

Creating Space for Quaker Revival

That’s how I felt when things changed for us as a Quaker meeting . . . but not at first. First, there was just fear.

When I was young, I danced ballet. It’s a beautiful and precise art form, requiring years of strict discipline to form the careful grace of ballerinas. As we danced, we were accompanied by a military-esque bark of orders from the teacher: “Backs straight!” “Feet pointed!” “Arms curved!” “Heads up!” “Heads up, Catriona!!!” My clumsiness and rugby-player legs were never destined for greatness in this area, but there was always a moment during class that I loved: when our teacher had to fiddle about finding the next CD, often needing to pop back to the car to find it. Suddenly, there was all this space: a huge empty floor with no music, no set dance to perform, and no rules. The girls would chat, but I would dance and feel free for the first time. I could dance for the joy of it and make something new, liberated from all the tight restrictions demanded of the craft.

Let me back up a bit.

I come from Bethnal Green Local Meeting (local meetings are known as monthly meetings elsewhere), a small meeting with a lengthy yet fragile history in East London in the United Kingdom. Our lineage can be traced all the way back to 1655, and yet we have not had a meetinghouse since 1935, when our eighteenth-century structure was declared unsafe and demolished. Despite this, we have persisted by renting various community spaces throughout the years. At least twice, our numbers have dwindled down to one: in the 1940s (as shared in section 18.14 of our yearly meeting’s Faith and Practice, during a period in which we were called Ratcliff Meeting) and more recently in the 2010s. No matter how thin it has become at times, our meeting has an unbroken thread spanning centuries.

A couple of years ago, we faced a new fragility in the life of our meeting. Three members of our very small leadership team, who had upheld the meeting for many years, announced they planned to retire to different parts of the country, with no clear replacements to take their place. The team had been senior in age and experience, whilst many of the rest of us were younger or newer to Quakers, or both. There was an empty space, threatening to remain unfilled and take the meeting with it. Fear arose, as well as a sense of loss. The ballet teachers hadn’t just gone for a break, they had left the building! And it was up to us now to find a way to fill it.

We would need a new approach.

There was an empty space, threatening to remain unfilled and take the meeting with it. Fear arose, as well as a sense of loss. The ballet teachers hadn’t just gone for a break, they had left the building! And it was up to us now to find a way to fill it.

Like the slow scattering of the old team, it happened organically. We had one member who was happy to take over one of the pastoral care roles, with transition support and a caveat: she couldn’t take on the email portion of the role, having already committed to doing so with other community organizations. Like many younger people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, life was busy with work and other commitments.

Setting this boundary created an important knock-on effect of sorts: without another successor to share the pastoral care role, the team came up with a new long-term solution. They approached another attender and me, asking us to take over the emails. This was breaking the old rules, as it was neither an official role nor were either of us members (or intending to become members for our own reasons, despite having attended a relatively long time). But, as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

We said yes. Had either of us been approached to take on the role alone, we would have declined it due to too many other pressures in our lives. It works really well. We swap over each week, and when work, illness, or life in general gets in the way, we can manage it together so that the work still gets done without creating undue burden or stress.

With this success under our belts, we suggested that the meeting welcome others to volunteer in pairs. It worked, and soon we had a full roster of people happy to host the meeting together and, more crucially, to handle the tea and biscuits. (We are a British meeting, after all.) This not only filled the roles needed but strengthened the relationships between the pairs, thereby strengthening our meeting as a whole.

Once again, this created an important knock-on effect. By this time, we had a new elder, bringing us almost to the size of the old team, with two elders and one pastoral care person. (As a small meeting that rents, we don’t have a clerk.) However, in practice, our leadership had expanded greatly, to include the emails team and several members and attenders volunteering to open the meetinghouse before worship. Many more of us were involved in running the meeting than before. By asking less of us, there became many more of us. This created more sustainability in our meeting, and by sharing tasks rather than roles, we moved closer towards simplicity. A culture of shared responsibility within the meeting began to take root, a sense that it wasn’t run by a few but owned and upheld by all of us.

Bethnal Green Local Meeting worship space, set up and empty (top), then filled with Friends (bottom). Photos courtesy of the author.

So we had filled the space with people. Now what would we do with it?

This is where my excitement kicked in, that old sense of there being all this glorious space waiting to become something new, to be created or recreated afresh. We had room to play or experiment with how things could be different, not knowing where we were going but excited to find out.

I wasn’t approached to manage the email list at random. I have a background in charity communications, so I was full of ideas about how things could be done differently. I simplified several emails a week into one weekly e-newsletter, which also had key information for newcomers, so no one would be left in the dark. I prioritized friendly, welcoming language, in contrast to a more formal, business-like approach that we had before. I started an Instagram account to help people find us (especially younger people) and a WhatsApp group that helped us to connect outside the weekly meeting. These ideas were based on professional experience, but more importantly, the ideas were based on the needs and wants I had when I was a newcomer to meeting.

That’s the great thing about opening up to more people: our individual strengths can shine much more brightly in service to the meeting. For example, in our past, we arranged spiritual discussions on more traditional Quaker topics such as the testimonies, usually led by the team. However, as the sense of the collective took root, we had people come forward to speak on the relationship between spirituality and subjects of key importance in their own lives. We had an artist who spoke on spirituality and art and a teacher who spoke on spirituality and education. Other topics included language, love, artificial intelligence, and sexuality. These topics felt like a more relatable route for participants to speak deeply on their personal experiences of spirituality.

More people stepped into the space and set up community events. A keen history buff took us on a day trip to a Quaker meetinghouse from the 1600s. A nature lover took us on a forest walk; a book lover set up a book swap; and an activist took us to protests. A community organizer helped set up reading groups with meals that moved between one another’s homes, showing the trust that has grown between our members and attenders.

From our monthly visit to the pub for Sunday roast dinner to our organizing meetings, everyone is always and explicitly welcome. Any one of us is welcome to step into and take up space. And each time someone does, the relationships between members and the meeting as a whole grow stronger.

In this last year or two—through all these changes—our meeting has gone from strength to strength. At a time when most British meetings are aging and declining in numbers, our meeting has not only grown but grown younger, with an average age in the 30s. When I began attending in the mid 2010s, there were around four to five people a week on average. Now we have quadrupled to more than 20 week after week; we keep running out of chairs and have people sitting on the floor! We are now moving to a bigger venue to accommodate us all, literally and figuratively creating even more space for us to grow.

I am so grateful that space opened up for us. Without it, we may have never known what we wereB11E65 capable of or how different things could look. It is a joy to watch our community grow and take shape in ways that I could have never imagined.

This is the story that I wanted to tell about the revival of our meeting. I wondered if there are any lessons that can be learned from it?

For me, I believe that revivals, like revolutions, can be cast as an overthrow or rejection of the old order in favour of a new, oppositional state. But it need not be so violent. So much of change is built in community and care, in a groundswell that brings people together in a process that is mutually created, as we have found. Each one of us has a relationship with the meeting and a relationship with every other member, which is greater than the sum of our parts, making something new that can be gently guided but never mandated. In lieu of a rejection of what has come before, space is needed in order to facilitate this new way of being, of growth.

For us, this space was created by happenstance. There have been other cases where younger people have created their own space, such as a group of Quakers in Portland, Maine, in the United States, who set up a second meeting for Millennials and Gen Z. It would be wonderful to see older generations encourage new spaces led by younger people (and those young in spirit and experience), rather than inviting them to fit into preexisting structures that may no longer fit the shape of us.

Given long enough, even with the best of intentions, all guidance and leadership can become dry and brittle—unyielding. Our intergenerational relationships strengthen the Quaker community, and yet there will always be differences between generations that can become top-heavy, weighted in favour of those who have been long established: unbalanced and inflexible, unknowingly alienating.

No matter how they come into being, creating and filling space in this way takes bravery from all generations. We must maintain faith amidst the uncertainty that the space might or might not be filled. We must have the confidence to fill it and have the belief that what will grow will be of service to the whole of Quakers. Opposition can instill a lack of confidence that younger people need to thrive. Support for and confidence in the new ideas of younger people can be the greatest gift that older people can give to ensure that Quakers blossom long into the future.

I am so grateful that space opened up for us. Without it, we may have never known what we were capable of or how different things could look. It is a joy to watch our community grow and take shape in ways that I could have never imagined.

We are still dancing in this new space, excited to discover who we will become.

The post Breaking the Old Rules appeared first on Friends Journal.

Big Steps for Small Friends in First-Day School

My current Quaker malapropism is referring to the Quaker First-day school book Sparkling Still as “Sparking Still.” I think the mistake is justifiable when you consider the First-day school program I have somehow found myself leading. After surviving COVID and making it through several years of moves, transitions, deaths, and grief, my meeting’s First-day school met on odd weeks for a story, an activity, and a lot of free play. It was the honest best we could muster at the time, and it worked until we had something else.

Something else happened because I was following a rabbit trail from Spirit and ran my mouth during a second-hour program. As we considered the state of our meeting and did a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), I paced along the back of the room, working out an agitated hip and an agitated sense of something inward. The ink was barely dry on my mortgage paperwork, and the boxes were still piled around our new house when I popped off this “grand idea” of being the other adult to help lead our children’s First-day school program. Had I run it past my wife? Absolutely not. Had I run it past my own common sense filters? Again, no. Spirit zipped by with an idea, and I grabbed on for dear life.

But something happened with that wild hare of an idea. Our meeting—which averages 30 worshipers on a given First Day—went from two to ten children (and a teenager) in less than six months. All of them aren’t there every week (whew), but they are all there enough to be known and recognized. We have young Friends as small as 18 months and as big as 12 years. We have one very able and engaged teenager who has been roped into joining our tech team, climbing on the roof, crawling into tiny spaces, and asking the smaller children silly questions. We have shy sisters and boisterous brothers. We have very loud tomboys and very quiet genderqueer kiddos. Of course we have siblings who spill each other’s business, but the same siblings will lean over to whisper compliments to each other just because.

What we’re doing in our little corner of south Texas is the actual textbook definition of a religious revival: “mass movements which are based upon intense religious excitement”. What we do in First Day school at my meeting is messy, flawed, and decidedly human. But it is also a real and living thing for our children and their families.

My own practice of leadership is imperfect, at best, often writing lessons on Thursday night and scrambling to find all the pieces I need. The children’s librarian at my local public library recognizes me, and we hunt for books together. The young Friends and I tell stories of Bayard Rustin’s travels and what simple Christmas is like in Quaker homes. We have dance breaks and put Mentos in Diet Coke. We sit on the rocks outside of the meetinghouse and shake cans of seltzer to think about stress building up inside our hearts. We make candy and get loud, a lot. We have two rules for playing outside: treat others with the care you want to receive, and remember that we share our property with people who are in waiting worship. There may or may not be a badger living in the gully behind our property that we go visit. (I am still unclear about the badger.) There is a vulture who stops by sometimes but has not (yet) eaten any of the “sacrifices” the five-year-old girls have left out for it, which includes piles of berries and fallen leaves. But mostly, we show up together.

Can I tell you with certainty that any of these kids will grow up to be Quakers? No. But I can tell you what I tell myself over and over: no child of the twenty-first century will become a Friend because we browbeat them into it. Those days are long gone. (Looking at you, early-nineteenth-century Friends.) Sharing the joy of Quaker faith and practice is the mission of this little First-day school program. That mission may result in exactly none of these kids growing up to be Quakers, but it has resulted in each of these kids thinking about the world differently. There was the young Friend who spoke during afterthoughts, then confessed to me that her voice was really shaky and her hands were trembling. (Welcome to quaking, kiddo!) There was the mom who passed a story back about one of her kids hesitating before a candy bowl, musing that they’d already enjoyed one and wanted to leave enough for others “because integrity.” There was the spunky younger sister who announced that she’d tripped her brother on purpose but was “probably sorry.” These small humans are excited to show up to meeting and see what nonsense is waiting for them. Big steps for small Friends!

Cover of Sparkling Still, a Quaker Religious Education Collaborative Curriculum for ages 3–8.

This is not an advertisement for any one way of doing First-day school beyond chasing authentic programming. I sit in worship, holding the program in my hands as I consider what we’re doing any given week. I carve out extra time for worship because it’s made a difference for me. I also chase my authentic Quaker self when I’m with the young Friends. I no longer question the wisdom of letting myself—a Friend with a face full of piercings and several half-visible tattoos—teach the kids. I let curse words slip, laugh in the middle of jokes, roll around on the floor like a possum, and read books that the big kids say are “too babyish” (but then secretly listen with rapt attention). I bring my whole flawed self to hang out with Spirit, and I see what happens. It’s usually pretty okay.

What we’re doing in our little corner of south Texas is the actual textbook definition of a religious revival: “mass movements which are based upon intense religious excitement.” Revival is often messy, flawed, and decidedly human. What we do in First-day school at my meeting is messy, flawed, and decidedly human. But it is also a real and living thing for our children and their families. It is ten minutes of waiting worship, even if that waiting is “waiting to leave for religious ed” as one of the kids recently told me. It is 50 minutes of Quaker education a week in a state that has long embraced guns, guts, and gore in the name of godliness. It is trying (and sometimes failing) to use quiet walking feet as we sneak back into worship to watch the clerk close our weekly waiting worship. In the grand scheme of things, this little wedge of time is a tiny spark at best. It is not going to shake the foundations of the heavens, topple capitalism, or cure a major disease. But this tiny spark—the revival of our young Friends—has meaning and power in our meeting. We’re sparking still.

The post Sparking Still appeared first on Friends Journal.

Quietism and Experimentation in Unquiet Times

If you’ve been around Friends long, it has become almost clichéd to comment about our need for revival, renewal, and revitalization. But it is one thing to comment; it’s another to make it happen. Can we even make it happen? Or is it something that happens to us, something to be waited for expectantly? 

Whatever your perspective is on that, revival is certainly in our DNA. Friends began as a movement of revitalization, and we have had our share of them over nearly 400 years. Some Friends revival moments have changed the course of history, while others remained small movements of localized faithfulness. Still others petered out, completely forgotten.

My friend and Quaker scholar C. Wess Daniels wrote a book in 2015 about such processes: A Convergent Model of Renewal: Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture. His perspective has informed my own as we have worked together to launch a new program, Quaker Connect, a project of Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC): Section of the Americas. In Quaker Connect, we walk Quaker meetings and churches through a process that we believe will open them to this kind of movement. We use a model of experimentation to do so. This model is quite different from the way many of our meetings and churches are accustomed to operating, and in that sense, it is challenging. 

However, it is not a replacement of the Friends tradition, and it is not a secular imposition but a model led by the Spirit and deeply rooted in Friends faith and practice, reinterpreted for the twenty-first century.

Renewal is in many ways an ordinary process. Each generation leaves its mark on the faith that it then passes on. Each subsequent generation has to go through a discernment process in deciding what within that faith has life in their present context and what things are holding it back and should be discarded.

This is a regular process of change that is a necessary part of staying healthy as institutions and movements. Just as our ecosystems require a constant process of death and new life to sustain themselves, so do faith communities. We keep the best parts—perhaps doing something new with them—and let the things that are obsolete pass away, nurturing the growth through their passing.

One can watch the cycles of Friends history go through phases of renewal. Through one continuous Spirit, the charismatic early Friends interpretation morphed into the reflective and scrupulous Quietist interpretation. Our tradition was once again energized by nineteenth-century tent revivals and missions. The twentieth century saw the founding of organizations like American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Quaker involvement in internationalism, Civil Rights, and antiwar movements.

While each of these phases contributed to reviving the Friends movement in various ways, today’s Friends have conflicting perspectives on how faithful they were in their approach. Some moments of our history remain powerful, defining and shaping us today, such as the movement for the abolition of slavery; others we would probably be fine with forgetting.

Photo by Paul Esch Laurent on Unsplash

Like revivals of the past, twenty-first-century Friends revivals will find our movements judged by future generations. If we are faithful, future generations will find that much of our work is rooted in the Eternal, in the Kingdom, even while the specifics may be responses to particular conditions. Our work will live on in this way, in communion with future Friends. The early Friends movement retains much of its power in this regard with us today. Its ideas still draw newcomers, and its writings continue to be shared in our meetings for worship, a living example that we are in an ongoing conversation with those first Friends.

On the other hand, if we lack faithfulness, we will leave future generations a mess to clean up. We can probably all think of at least a few examples of that as well, from legacies of shame that require reconciliation efforts centuries later, to the smaller missteps that nonetheless left marks on our meeting culture which we would rather do without. 

Early Friends were led to start our movement as a way to recover a wayward Christianity that they felt had taken too many wrong turns for it to be reformed from within the existing churches. But despite the inspiration of early Friends, it is the Quietist period that I think in many ways has most shaped the beliefs and practices that we cling to in our meetings and churches.

For the unfamiliar, Quietism was the second movement among Friends, arriving in the later seventeenth century, and characterizing the society for approximately the next century. It was a response to the intense state persecution that early Friends encountered as they challenged social norms and sacred religious ideology—persecution that got people killed and that threatened the survival of the Friends movement. Quietism was a turn inward, away from the charismatic speaking, evangelism, and radical social witness of the first generation of Friends. Individually, the focus shifted towards cautious contemplation. Collectively, Friends became insular and separatist. 

While some Quietist practices and beliefs are living, precious, and central to my understanding of Friends, I have also come to believe that many are ill-suited to twenty-first-century Quakerism: relics that keep us from moving in the direction we are called to today.

Among the things I love, Quietists proliferated the term and the practice of “Gospel order.” This is the concept that it is not enough to believe that there is that of God in everyone; we must also structure our relationships in ways that reflect the spiritual reality of our equality, that bring out that of God in one another, and that suppress the domination of one another. Quaker business practices are built on this. Our meetings confront the world with this alternative way of operating. Gospel order is a beautiful Quietist phrase that I think is ripe for revival.

John Woolman was an eighteenth-century Quietist, arguably the most widely known Friend. His teachings continue to minister to us today. The self-examination that characterized his ministry is classically Quietist, but he was exceptional in carrying it into the world. He scrupulously guarded his own heart against ego and hatred. He confronted those who were complicit in enslaving others with plain speech and loving regard and was quite often successful at disarming them and changing lives. He never saw his yearly meeting fully commit to abolition but was one of the Friends who was most influential in bringing it about.

The Quietist period was also marked by a withdrawal from wider society, a narrowing demographic of Friends, and a reduction in the lived experience of the Spirit among Friends. Over the course of a century, Friends went from being an energetic, socially diverse movement to becoming a narrower and more elitist society. As Quaker demographics narrowed, so did the energetic expressions of faith and prophetic challenges to the status quo that defined its early years and still move us today.

During the Quietist period, the focus of Friends moved away from the lived experience of convincement—which any person can experience—and toward the passing on of the faith to birthright Friends. There was a heavy-handed protection of those Friends to keep them within the society and away from intermarriage. The focus of ministry moved away from the building of the kingdom of God on earth and toward more inward and individual experiences. Essentially, the Quietists did everything that contemporary church revitalization wisdom tells you not to do. 

While we can never regain the specific flavor of the early Friends years, it is important to notice how we have been reinvigorated by changing social conditions in the past and can be inspired again. A revival is not a mere return to the comfortable, tested beliefs and practices of the past but a “remix,” part rediscovery and part reinvention. While we can’t totally manufacture these conditions, we can intentionally make space for and develop practices to cultivate them, but to do so may stretch us.

Human memory can be short. Once a practice has been established, it dies hard. Very often we are guilty of saying “but this is how Quakers do it!” sometimes even in regards to practices or beliefs that are only a few decades old. Almost 400 years into our movement, there is a lot of life and power to be found in our history, but there is also a lot of what contemporary Quaker author Jan Wood calls “barnacles” that we have collected and carried into this moment.

What happens when a new leading comes before your meeting? Friends today often dedicate significant time and energy to ensuring that nothing can go wrong; that every person is in agreement; that there is no possible drawback; and that the proposal is worded with grammatical savvy, eloquence, and every person’s concerns included. Established habits and practices often take precedence over new leadings and ideas, without a lot of regard to the Spirit’s guidance. Even approved leadings can feel like life has been sucked out of them through the process. 

I am not arguing for the wholesale adoption of every idea that comes before the meeting. We still need to be able to say no, to say not now, and to say not like that. Yet I think we also need models that will allow Friends to try things and see how they go, a place for the energy for the more restless and unquiet Friends who need the nurture of our meetings, and whose gifts we need.

It is bittersweet to let go of things that we’ve held sacred, even when we recognize they don’t presently serve us. It may be profoundly uncomfortable and tempt us to revert to the familiar, even when detrimental. And it may cause conflict, as we enter the treacherous waters of opening ourselves to Spirit’s leading without the security of our past identities. 

Revival is uncertain. When Spirit-led, it is something deeply truthful—more than traditional, more than trendy. We can be unfaithful when accommodating our wider culture’s norms and trends, and also we can be unfaithful when clinging fearfully and rigidly to the way we have done things before.

In the Quietist period, “experimentation” may not have been a very appealing word. Friends were exhausted from the previous generations’ bold experimentation and worn thin by the violence, prison sentences, and instability that came with it. Some of the earliest Quietists were those that had held children’s meeting for worship when their parents were imprisoned. Mistakes and missteps were dangerous under state persecution. Not only that, but  Friends theology at the time meant that mistakes were morally loaded: to be faithful meant not to make any.

From Quietism we got the model of discernment that is still most commonly used today: an indefinite period of contemplation followed by the possibility of action (maybe). While I think this can be a wonderful tool in some circumstances, I view it as just a tool. It is not the only way to discern nor the best way; it is not the only way Friends have done it. It was developed in a time when action was dangerous to our survival, and contemplation was used to stay safe.

I believe that faithfulness in the twenty-first century resembles a call to action more than a caution against it. We are faced with a world that moves at warp speed, a world actively dehumanizing and confronting us with clearly evident dangers, a world in which slow decision making can lead to a morally intolerable state of inaction.

At this time, a Quaker meeting that is stuck using Quietist practices may feel more like a Quaker bureaucracy. Many folks at the margins of Friends meetings see this and keep their distance from the business part. Many younger Friends are particularly attuned to this reality as their lifespans are predicted to exceed the earth’s capacity on its current course. They ask of us, is it even possible or desirable to discern at such a time? 

I believe that it is, but I also believe that faithfulness in this unquiet age will not often take the Quietist shape of indefinite waiting until we can arrive at certainty of God’s leading. 

For one thing, I think it is very hard in a secularized and technological world to experience that kind of certainty as previous generations did. For another, I think we now live in a time where we sometimes risk more by waiting than we do by taking a step.

I believe that discernment—listening and obeying Divine guidance—is still the core of Quaker practice, but I do think that in our time that might look less like waiting and more like developing a hypothesis of what God is leading us to do and then testing it through action. This needn’t be hurried or forced. It is still the pattern of listening and obedience but in a form that may feel quite unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and even frightening, as it has not been the habit in many of our meetings and churches. 

In the Quietist period, making mistakes or getting it wrong was something dangerous and morally loaded. Now we live in a time when there is much more space for experimentation, especially the kind of experimentation with positive potential. We should think on that potential at least as much as possible risks. In this time, we are called to make more space for leadings to grow and mature, so we use a model in Quaker Connect, which allows for discernment through experimentation in ministry. 

It begins with a hypothesis of what the Spirit is leading us to do, and it does not wait for certainty. The first version of a ministry is limited by time and does not have to be perfect; it is a stage of development that we expect to learn from. Like a scientific process, this method is a cyclical model of short bursts of action followed by contemplation and reflection on the actions taken. 

Our model is not the only way, nor is it the revival we are waiting for—that will come from the same Spirit that has breathed it in the past—but I believe that by incorporating action and experimentation into discernment, we will be making way for that Spirit to move in new ways in these times. I encourage Friends meetings and churches to consider trying models, such as can be found in Quaker Connect or to invent their own ways to allow for more experimentation, holding familiar structures a little more lightly. Experimentation is a proven strategy for bringing life to tired institutions. More and more, I see and believe that God desires our full-hearted engagement with the suffering of our world more than our avoidance of mistakes.

Revival is uncertain. When Spirit-led, it is something deeply truthful—more than traditional, more than trendy. We can be unfaithful when accommodating our wider culture’s norms and trends, and also we can be unfaithful when clinging fearfully and rigidly to the way we have done things before. Faithful experimentation offers a way forward in uncertainty.

I believe that as we make the stumbling missteps towards what we think (maybe) God is guiding us to do, we will find ourselves walking closer to the Spirit than when waiting inactively in the perceived safety of the meetinghouse. We will find that God can meet us there on the road, can correct our course, and offer forgiveness if we need it. We will also get the experience of the living Spirit that we have been longing for. Maybe even a revival.

The post Risking Faithfulness appeared first on Friends Journal.

Becoming Publishers of Truth Again

The word “revival” derives from a Latin word that literally means “to live again.” The Religious Society of Friends is certainly not dead today, but it is hard to argue that there was not far greater life and power in the original Quaker movement than exists in any of our branches today.

The Publishers of Truth or Children of the Light, as Friends first called themselves, developed communal forms of worship, decision making, and testing of each others’ leadings that were revolutionary in their direct reliance on the Inward Teacher and Guide at the heart of creation. Their willingness to follow God’s guidance wherever it took them as a movement led early Quakers to preach truth and to practice ways of living that were in sharp contrast to the wars, patriarchy, class and economic injustice, and religious persecution of their day.

I often find myself longing for the powerful faith of an Elizabeth Hooten (who mentored George Fox in his youth), a Mary Fisher (who walked across Balkan battlefields to have a spiritual conversation with the sultan), a teenage Edward Burrough (whose preaching earned him the name “Son of Thunder”), a James Nayler (who left his farm to harvest souls), or a Mary Dyer (muzzled to keep her from preaching or singing as she was led to the gallows). The great challenges of our world today call for just such prophetic voices. Where will those voices come from: inside or outside the Society of Friends?

The first Friends felt a deep persistent call to share what they had discovered—and were living out together—with non-Friends around them. For 200 years or so, Quaker ministers, both women and men who were traveling under concern, did not preach only to the Quakers they were visiting; they often held public meetings for curious non-Friends in the area and offered Spirit-guided ministry at these meetings.

Even if we firmly believe that the Beloved draws people to Truth along many paths, Quakerism’s unique beliefs and practices could be of enormous value to many who have never heard of them. Many might find our Quaker beliefs and practices of enormous benefit to their spiritual journey and to their capacity to respond to the fear, confusion, and despair of our own time.

Too many modern Friends seem to act as if our Quaker beliefs and practices are of relevance only to a select few that are drawn to them. From our aversion to forcing our beliefs and practices on others, we have become highly skilled at hiding our corporate light under a bushel. If we believe God can provide the words and prayers that we speak during worship in our meetinghouses, would God not also provide us words by the Holy Spirit to speak to non-Friends in settings quite different from the worship in our meetings?

The great challenges facing our world today—war, patriarchy, religious intolerance, economic and racial injustice, and horrifying wounding of our precious earth—all cry out for the kind of faith-rooted prophetic witness that early Friends brought to their own time and place. Could not the life and power lived out daily by early Friends shake the ground “for ten miles round” (as George Fox said) in our world today?

Left: Quaker martyr Mary Dyer was hung in Boston Commons in 1660 after the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned Quakers from the colony. Howard Pyle, MaryDyer Being Led to The Scaffold, ca. 1905. 30.5″ x 21.5″, oil on canvas. Image from the Newport Historical Society on commons.wikimedia.org. Right: James Nayler was charged with blasphemy in 1656 after reenacting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Unknown artist, 1656. 3.62″ x 5.25″, etching.

Loss of the Whole Cloth of Quakerism

Bill Taber, a recorded minister of Ohio Yearly Meeting, taught courses on Quakerism and the prophets at Pendle Hill study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, for 13 years. Bill believed that great schisms among Friends in the nineteenth century did terrible damage to Quakerism, as each branch lost key pieces of Quakerism’s unique vision of humanity’s relationship with God and our ways of following God’s lead as a faith community. As I understood it, Bill felt that Pastoral Friends had lost much of Friends’ unique understanding of Christ and direct reliance on the Inward Voice of God; that Conservative Friends had become too attached to forms and cut off from the world today; and that Liberal Friends had often become cut off from our Chrisian and biblical roots, and in some cases also lost an experiential relationship with the Living God at the heart of our social witness, worship, and other communal practices.

I can speak best of my own experience of this fracturing of the Quaker vision. I was raised in the 1950s in a large meeting in a college town, one of many new Liberal Friends meetings that sprang up in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. The meeting was a warm community of families that believed in many good things about peace and equality. When I began to experience deeply gathered worship, powerful Spirit-led vocal ministry and Spirit-guided meetings for business as a young adult, however, I felt like I had been cheated and fed a watered-down version of Quakerism in my childhood meeting.

Many Liberal Friends then and now assume that the biblical, Christian, and theist language and theology of earlyl Friends are the same as forms of Christianity that they rejected before coming to Friends or find deeply troubling when they encounter it now. (This is only likely to become more challenging with the rise of Christian nationalism today.)

In 2013 protesters Ken Ward and Jay O’Hara used a lobster boat to blockade a 40,000-ton shipment of Appalachian coal for six hours. Photos from QuakerSpeak.com.

The Revival Has Begun

I long for powerful Quaker gospel ministers to spring up among us: the kind that shook England and her American colonies in the seventeenth century. I believe, however, that a quiet but deep revival has already been taking place among Friends over the past half century. There are many signs of God at work among us, which have taken many different forms, often beneath the radar. Deepening awareness and experiential practice of God-led Quakerism has sprung up in many places across all branches of Friends.

In my travels and experience with Quakers today, I encounter Friends who are going deeper, learning more about the radical faith roots of our faith community, and are willing and able to hear others’ voices and experiences with “listening in tongues” (learning to translate others’ words about the Holy into language that speaks to their own condition). I believe this under-the-radar Quaker revival will continue to deepen and grow in many ways and many places. However, to my mind a great and lasting Quaker revival will require us to do the following:

1. Come together as listeners and followers to the Living Teacher at the heart of all
2. Recognize that there is ultimate Truth that springs from God/Spirit and is inconsistent with the lies, greed, violence, and fear that are at the core of the world (empire) around us
3. Recognize spiritual authority that springs from the power of God and is utterly different from an empire’s form of authority, which is based on power over others
4. Enter into covenantal relationships with each other, letting us see each others’ wounds and blindspots, willing to be lovingly accountable to each other in our search for faithfulness, and ready to ask for and receive loving assistance from others as a gift rather than judgment
5. Break out of the walls we have built around ourselves as Friends to become Publishers of Truth once again

As we seek today’s truths as Friends, what do we see? What do we hear?

Friends from the very beginning have carried wounds from the domination-based systems of this world that caused great harm in the name of truth. What will help us move forward together as a community to own our broken places, help each other to right past wrongs, and do better together? I pray that we allow God to lead us into a deepening revival of our faith community that includes acknowledging our broken places and cultural blindspots. Can we take responsibility for the harms we have done and continue to do to others, working on ourselves and the parts we may have played in such harm? Can we find ways to support each other with compassion and love as we move forward?

Over 50 people worship outside the gates of a coal plant in Bow, N.H., at the end of a 2017 climate pilgrimage that had begun in Dover, N.H. Following worship, a smaller group set up an encampment to block the train tracks to the plant. Photos courtesy of the author.

A Prayer for Quaker Revival

Psalm 132 is about the covenant that God made with David and the Hebrew people—because of the hardships David faced for his faithfulness and because he would not sleep until he found a dwelling or resting place for God. I have re-imaged this psalm as the covenant that God made with early Friends—and that God will keep with us forever, if we keep to that covenant relationship with God and are faithful to what God is calling us into as a faith community.

1 O Living God at the heart of all, recall to us the hardships our founding parents endured for Truth’s sake,

2 How those women and men vowed to the God they encountered speaking in their hearts, saying:

3 “We will not enter our houses or get into bed,

4 We will not give sleep to our eyes or slumber to our eyelids

5 Until we find a place for the Beloved, a dwelling place for the Heart of our Hearts amongst us.”

6 We first learned this way to have God speak to us and guide our community centuries ago. Our founders found God in their hearts, in their worship, in their life together!

7 They said “Let us go together to this new place, this new way of worshiping, this new way of living—where we found that God had come to teach us directly and experimentally!

8 We know you are still here among us as you ever were. We will make space once again in our hearts, our lives, our meetings— a resting place for you in the building, the body that is your people.

9 Let your people be clothed with justice. Let your faithful shout for joy!

10 As your partners in new creation, help us keep our faces turned toward you. Anoint us with your love and with your prophetic vision and power.

11 God swore to First Friends an oath from which She will never turn back:

12 “If you keep the covenant I have made with you and the living teachings that I give you, I will dwell with you forever.

13 I have chosen the Children of Light, the Publishers of Truth as my resting place and my habitation

14 — Chosen not you alone, but all people who are attending to the Inward Light of Truth.

15 I will abundantly bless your times of worship and witness to the world. I will fill your hearts with hope and strength when you are brought low or feel dismayed.

16 Your grownups and children will be clothed with vision. Your faithful will shout for joy!

17 I will cause a horn to sprout up among you to the nations. I have prepared a lamp to lead you.

18 Your fears and timidity will vanish. You will find your voice once again.”

May it be so.

The post Coming Out from Under Our Bushel appeared first on Friends Journal.

A Prophetic Challenge for Quakers

Have Quakers been badass challengers of the status quo or conformist colonizers? Or some of both? This question of our participation in an unjust status quo is at the heart of some of the most destructively conducted conflicts about identity and ministry that we participate in as modern Quakers (and is also true for the authors of this essay who are Quaker public ministers and insider critics). What does it mean to revive any aspect of Quakerism, given our complicated history? Do we even know our complicated history?

So much of our common understanding of Quaker tradition—and ourselves as Friends—is through the lens of prophetic defiance, evident in our public ministers like George Fox, Margaret Fell, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Bayard Rustin. But when critical insiders and prophetic messengers defy our Quaker status quo, it is as if prophets invited into the home of Quakers are tied to the bed of the Greek villain Procrustes and then stretched or cut to fit that bed. Wounded, these modern public ministers often turn to panic and rage, a kind of despair that is not a mature lament with trust that our Friends love us as we love them. Procrustes was eventually tied to his own bed by the enraged hero Theseus, so says the myth, and destroyed in much the same way that he destroyed his guests.

We two have felt this pain directly in our own lives and ministry work amongst Friends. More frustrating and destructive, however, is the indirect pain we have encountered through the experiences of many of our closest friends and the stories we have heard from others who have been labelled “difficult,” “challenging,” or even “unquakerly” due to their vital and necessary work as prophets seeking to guide our faith tradition back to its roots: to the cauldron of defiant, prophetic fire within which our community was initially forged and to which our own tradition has continually called upon all of us Friends to reclaim. It is admittedly understandable why prophets are not accepted within their own community, yet what happens when an entire community claims to be prophetic and then fails the prophets in its midst?

The people who love Quakers enough to expose our injustice become—using paradoxical demands that we conform to the idealized myth of Quaker defiance—estranged from our meetings, as these meetings demand that the inherent diversity within them conform to a specific narrative and vision of defiance. These same meetings then become a pale imitation of the idealized Quakerism we praise in our most precious communal stories. Like a hospitable bed, a meeting is a place of Divine dreams. Nevertheless, it becomes a place of unrealized, unhealed despair unto destruction as we cling to unhealthy and uncomplicated versions of what it means to be whole and together.

Defiance, at its core, is a matter of perspective. Whether an action is seen as rebellion or righteousness depends greatly on one’s access to power. When a child refuses to clean their room, is it insubordination or a healthy assertion of autonomy? When an employee questions a directive from their boss, are they undermining authority or trying to prevent a costly mistake? When a member of a faith community resists a group decision they believe violates core values, are they being divisive or prophetic?

This tension between perceived disobedience and moral clarity sits at the heart of both Quaker history and Quaker myth. Early Friends were renowned for their bold defiance of church and state. Figures like Benjamin Lay did not just speak truth to power, they embodied it, often in unsettling ways. Lay’s dramatic protest against slavery—stabbing a bladder of pokeberry juice to symbolize blood on the hands of slaveholders—earned him the condemnation of his fellow Friends. He was disowned by four meetings and dismissed as a disruptive presence.

Yet today, he is embraced as a prophet.

If we strip away the romanticized sepia tones of Quaker hagiography and place such actions in a contemporary context—someone dumping oil on the meeting benches to protest climate destruction, for instance—would we respond with admiration or outrage? Would we listen, or would we seek to silence and contain? It is worth asking honestly: Do we embrace the prophetic voice in our midst or dismiss it for its inconvenience?

Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry in London’s Newgate Prison in 1816. Thomas Oldham Barlow after Jerry Barrett, Mrs. Fry reading to the Prisoners in Newgate, 1863. 26.25” x 37”, engraving. Image from commons.wikimedia.org.

Public ministry in the Quaker tradition sits in an uncomfortable space. It is pastoral and prophetic, communal and disruptive, all simultaneously. It is liminal, a space where time folds upon itself: the roots of our tradition, the immediacy of our current moment, and the hope of a future closer to the divine vision of justice for all, all present at the same time. It seeks to nurture the spiritual health of the body while also calling it to account. The public minister serves as a bridge between memory and vision: helping communities reconnect with their most cherished myths and beliefs, while also imagining new futures.

One of the central tools in this ministry is and must be defiance.

When grounded in core values and ethical commitment, defiance becomes not simply rejection and despair but provocation toward love. It disrupts complacency, awakens conscience, and stirs transformation. It is deeply relational, not antagonistic for its own sake. As Margaret Fell once wrote, the call is to “provoke unto love,” a phrase that comes from Hebrews 10:24 (KJV) and encapsulates a vision of communal engagement rooted in truth-telling and moral courage.

Prophetic ministry is designed to be confrontational and uncomfortable and is thus inherently defiant: an intentional tension whose purpose is to complicate and confound comfort, regardless of whose convenience is compromised. Bayard Rustin envisioned this in mechanical terms: a group of “angelic troublemakers” willing and able to shove themselves into the wheels of society’s structures, disrupting the smooth oppression and easy compliance upon which our society (and its government) so often depend.

As Rustin insists, this demand to shove our bodies into the gears of injustice is both literal and metaphorical: whether it be our actual bodies or the power our presence and privilege possesses, our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. Elizabeth Fry is an instructive example for Friends in her holding this tension: she used every tool at her disposal—her position in society; her femininity; the Christian story; Quaker witness; and her own unceasing, defiant insistence on the Divine Presence within all—to demand justice for women crushed under the weight of intolerable conditions, unconscionable for a supposedly Christian society. Yet defiance is not easy to hold in a community. Prophetic voices are notoriously difficult to live with. They resist control and often expose wounds the community would rather keep hidden. The challenge of hosting defiant voices is real in the small, intimate world of Quaker meetings, where identity and belonging are tightly bound. The spectre of James Nayler haunts our community still: the fear of outrunning our Guide that tempers our exuberance with the cold shower of compromising caution. A more recent example of Quaker discomfort towards the prophetic is Norman Morrison, a Friend so committed to the Quaker peace testimony that he willingly set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon on November 2, 1965, in a powerful and disturbing echo of the self-immolations of Buddhist monks in Vietnam a few years earlier. These stories still divide Friends who hold firm to the same principles held by Nayler and Morrison, while feeling shocked and disturbed at the form these prophets chose to express their witness. The sometimes fiery words of Quaker public ministers calling their meetings to remember their prophetic roots seem tame in comparison. Yet, it is precisely in these spaces that the work of repair can begin, if we are all willing to engage with the discomfort that defiance brings.

Prophetic ministry is designed to be confrontational and uncomfortable and is thus inherently defiant: an intentional tension whose purpose is to complicate and confront comfort, regardless of whose convenience is compromised. 

Jonah and Nineveh: A Mirror for Quaker Ministry

The biblical story of Jonah offers a rich metaphor for Quaker public ministers. Jonah, a prophet of considerable privilege and spiritual authority, refuses God’s call to speak to the people of Nineveh. He runs not because he doubts God’s power but because he does not want the Ninevites to be offered redemption. He would rather die than see them transformed. While on his way to Nineveh, Jonah is thrown overboard in a storm of his own making and is swallowed by a great fish. In its belly, he has a change of heart. Thrown overboard in a storm of his own making, Jonah is swallowed by a great fish and, in its belly, has a change of heart. When he finally arrives in Nineveh and delivers God’s message, the people repent, astonishingly en masse and stupefyingly absolute —even the all-powerful king begs God for forgiveness!— and Jonah is furious. His exclusive vision of holiness is undone by grace. How dare these oppressors, these evildoers, escape their much-deserved divine punishment through the actions of divine forgiveness? How dare the Divine welcome these people with open arms?

Public ministers often feel like Jonah: wrestling with our call, trying to escape its cost, wishing and praying for solitude instead of confrontation. But in many ways, we are also Nineveh: the ones who are willing to repent, to turn toward the Divine, to receive hard truth.

After all, we were formed through the truth of Quaker defiance and the nurturance and hospitality of our meeting communities. We heard from Jonah, and we believe him. In contrast, our meetings, like Jonah, may resist the Divine Guide, even when it is accompanied by transformation and healing. We sulk under withering trees, questioning why justice should come at the cost of our comfort in conformity.

Still, in the silence of waiting worship—the belly of the fish, perhaps—there is space for convincement. It is there that we might remember our calling: to be a people formed by defiance, not for its own sake but in service to the Spirit’s leading toward love and liberation. This love and liberation come from lament married to defiance.

The Cost of Conformity

Quakerism was born in spiritual rebellion against both state and church, but in recent generations, we have become increasingly integrated into the very systems we once opposed. Indeed, in Friend Ben Pink Dandelion’s recent The Cultivation of Conformity, he argues that “as the state began to tolerate Quakers, Quakers began to tolerate the state.” We traded prophetic disruption for institutional stability, often without noticing the cost. We preserved the appearance of a radical faith while slowly absorbing the values of the middle class: order, harmony, and reputation. These are the values of colonizers, empire, or what many critical insiders call “White supremacy” culture. These are the realities and values that stretch and cut in the hospitality of meeting, like Procrustes.

But, you may think, Quakers are on the forefront of confrontations with the world as it is, through our individual and sometimes collective civil disobedience, our belabored minutes, our recent brave lawsuits against the government. Non-Quaker Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke pushes this prophetic critique further, however, warning that many social justice movements have been co-opted and colonized by the professional class. For those of us in privileged positions, activism is often conditional: it serves our interests, boosts our social capital, and then fades once our needs have been met. This dynamic, al-Gharbi suggests, depletes movements of their momentum and leaves them weaker in our wake. U.S. Quakers (amongst whom we both belong; we come from a place of deep and abiding love for the Quaker way), so often well-educated and economically secure, must ask themselves whether our engagement in justice work truly challenges the status quo or subtly reinforces it. Do we welcome a critique of ourselves, especially if it comes from others and not ourselves?

Jonah being swallowed by the fish. Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, 1566. 8″ x 9.5″, engraving. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.The Discomfort of Truth-telling

Institutional Quakerism in many places now struggles to host the very same defiant spirits that once defined it. Prophetic voices are often met with polite dismissal, subtle gatekeeping, or open hostility. We misinterpret the testimony of equality to mean that no one should speak too loudly, lead too visibly, claim expertise too willingly, or challenge too forcefully. We fear rupture—believing that it threatens community—when in fact, rupture may be the only path to deeper connection and genuine healing.

Public ministry that includes defiance as well as lament and vulnerability invites the whole community into a more mature spiritual life. It insists that we cannot bypass grief to rush to hope; that we cannot remain silent about injustice while claiming to be peacemakers; that we cannot avoid apology, repair, and accountability while professing integrity. This observation convicts everyone equally: Jonah and the Ninevites, Procrustes and Theseus, public ministers and the meetings with which we have become enraged and from whom we have often received the deepest wounds.

From Defiance to Repair

For Quaker communities to thrive into the future, we must learn to hold defiance and repair together. We must do the following:

1. Acknowledge our fear of rupture and recognize that healing comes not by avoiding conflict but by entering into it with courage and care
2. Cultivate the skills of conflict transformation, not only through theory but through embodied practice, as part of our shared spiritual formation
3. Learn how to apologize, recognizing that apology is essential not only for the harmed but also for the one who harms (It is a spiritual practice of grief, accountability, and love.)
4. Break the cycle of urgency and despair, creating space for true discernment instead of reactive decision making
5. Become trauma-informed communities, understanding that trauma lives not only in moments of rupture but also in the absence of repair
6. Provide spaces for patient understanding and co-regulation, where nervous systems and spiritual wounds can be tended in community
7. Reclaim structures of accountability and support for public ministry, honoring both the slowness of institutions and the urgency of Spirit-led work
8. Resist the “tall poppy syndrome” that cuts down those who stand out, recognizing that the prophetic often appears as disruption
9. Learn from past failures, including historical complicity in injustice and contemporary patterns of silence, and allow those lessons to guide our renewal

To move from defiance and despair to loving lament is not to abandon the fire of the prophet. It is to recognize the pain beneath the urgency, that it is the deep longing for right relationship that fuels our anger, our disappointment, and our love. When public ministers speak with sadness and amazement, when they risk vulnerability and share their wounds, they offer a pathway into collective grief and through it to hope.

Defiance rooted in love, grounded in truth, and carried forward with humility can still shake the foundations, but it must be met with a community willing to listen, to be changed, and to participate in the holy work of repair. The ghosts of Lay, Nayler, Fell, Fry, Morrison, and Rustin are looking on, lovingly provoking us to love the entire and complete creation with our entire and complete selves. Will we accede to comfort and compliance, or will we repent and return to our roots, defiantly proclaiming the prophetic power of our Quaker witness? We know where we stand, faithful to the divine call to proclaim justice for the oppressed and to dissipate the fearful fog of comfort, standing on the shoulders of Quaker giants. What canst you say?

The post The Revival of Defiance and the Call to Repair appeared first on Friends Journal.

An Interview with Paul Buckley, Author of Primitive Quakerism Revived

Friends Journal discussed revival with Quaker historian Paul Buckley, author of Primitive Quakerism Revived: Living as Friends in the Twenty-First Century. Buckley worships with Clear Creek Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, and travels in the ministry urging spiritual renewal among Friends.

Sharlee DiMenichi: Please give an overview of what convinces Friends in the United States that a Quaker revival is needed.

Paul Buckley: I’m sorry to say I don’t think that Friends in the United States, by and large, are convinced. I can tell you why I’m convinced. I think we’ve lost track of where we came from. We have reached a point where many people seem to believe that being a Quaker is whatever they say it is, and “whatever I say it is” has no generalizability. I find this very, very unfortunate. We have a history. We have a set of beliefs laid out in the seventeenth century by people like George Fox, Isaac Penington, William Penn, and Robert Barclay that form a coherent whole. There has been change over time, and some of it may be inspired and appropriate. But often it seems that it’s more, “Well, this is what I think.”

So why do we need a revival? We need a revival because we need to know who we are, and we don’t know who we are unless we know where we started and which of the many alternative ideas that have been introduced over the last 350 years are consistent with that tradition and which of them are, frankly, just not. They may be important to an individual, but if we’re a society, we have common beliefs that underlie who we are as a people, and we owe it to ourselves to know what they are.

So, when you ask for my reasons for thinking that we need a revival, I should refer you to the section titled “Ten Signs We Need a Revival” in Primitive Quakerism Revived. The subheadings are:

1. God Is Not the Center of Our Lives and Our Meetings
2. Being Quaker Is Not Our Primary Identification
3. The Individualism among Friends
4. The Redefinition of Community
5. Being Unwilling to Say What We Believe
6. Ritualizing Meeting for Worship
7. Encrusting Outward Characteristics
8. Treating Outreach as an Activity
9. Accommodating to the Surrounding Culture
10. Being Admired

SD: How have the pandemic and virtual meetings impacted efforts to renew Quakerism?

PB: Honestly, I don’t know. I know that the use of Zoom made it possible for people to participate in various meetings near and far. During lockdown, that was invaluable. I’m not sure that it still is as valuable, but if you are looking for a different way to worship from what you can get locally, it may be. Just in the last week, I tripped over a quote from the seventeenth century from Isaac Penington:

And oh, how sweet and pleasant is it to the truly spiritual eye to see several sorts of believers, several forms of Christians in the school of Christ, every one learning their own lesson, performing their own peculiar service, and knowing, owning, and loving one another in their several places and different performances to their Master, to whom they are to give an account, and not to quarrel one with another about their different practices! [Rom 14:4] For this is the true ground of love and unity, not that such a man walks and does just as I do, but because I feel the same Spirit and life in him, and in that he walks in his rank, in his own order, in his proper way and place of subjection to that; and this is far more pleasing to me than if he walked just in that rank wherein I walk; nay, so far as I am spiritual, I cannot so much as desire that he should do so, until he be particularly led thereto, by the same Spirit which led me.

In other words, we don’t all have to do exactly the same thing and say the same thing. Recognizing that different people are called in different ways is part of being a Friend. But Penington is not saying everybody should be a Quaker and then do whatever they want. He’s saying, those of you who are Quakers, be Quakers. And be glad that other people are called to be Congregationalists, Puritans, or Presbyterians, and that they are faithful in doing so.

That’s part of why I feel we need a revival. We have taken the essence of what Penington said, and instead of seeing it as being loving to people who are called to different things, we have tried to make the Society of Friends into “everybody can be a Friend. You can believe whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, and you can call yourself a Quaker.” We lose a sense of who we are. We cannot support each other as a community if we don’t have some sense of what’s anchoring that community.

So the book I wrote, Primitive Quakerism Revived, is not saying, “Go back, read what they said in the seventeenth century, and do that,” but, “Go back and see what they said, and then see how that relates to where we are today. And if there’s no line connecting the two, maybe we’re in the wrong place.”

It is a disservice when people come to our meetings who are contemporary Seekers, and our response to them is, “Oh, yeah, you can join us. You can be part of our meeting.” Instead of asking, “What’s the best place for you? What would serve your spiritual needs?” If our meeting is the right place, oh wonderful! But if it’s not, we need to help them find that other place where they belong, where they can spiritually shine and where they can live their lives faithfully. Instead of trying to squeeze them in and changing this community in order to make it fit them.

SD: What are some examples of historic Quaker revival movements in the United States that still influence Friends today?

PB: Well, I wanted to stay out of the nineteenth century, but I think that the separations that we suffered in the nineteenth century were, in fact, rooted in attempts to revive Quakerism, just doing it from very different starting points.

Quakers have been around for a century and a half or two centuries since then, and we know that God has been active in our lives, in our communities, in our Society, and that we have been guided. Although I disagree with some of the places people got to, I think that the Gurneyites, the Wilburites, and the Hicksites all go back to the same starting point. Each branch in its own way had been called, and each in its own way revived the Society of Friends. They recognized that it had grown spiritually flabby. They had different prescriptions and different solutions. They had a sense that God had called us to grow as a people, but they fought over which way to grow, and so they separated. But perhaps it was several successful revivals that really underlie those separations, and we should be celebrating them.

SD: Please give me an overview of how yearly meetings and monthly meetings play a role in revival movements, and talk about how that happens today.

PB: I don’t think it’s so much the meetings, as individuals within the meetings. I think what happens is that we have individuals who spiritually catch fire, who become spiritually charged, and who feel called to follow in our old tradition of traveling in the ministry and sharing that message. To a degree, I have done that, but other Friends have done a lot more traveling and have invested a lot more effort in helping Friends to think about what it means to be a Friend and to change their lives and to change their meetings.

When such an individual comes and sparks a fire in the monthly meeting, that’s when the monthly meeting plays a role. I think it’s only when you’ve got a number of monthly meetings that have caught fire in the same way that the yearly meeting plays a role in revival. Yearly meetings are not very effective in this matter: they provide forums rather than direction.

SD: How would you describe the long-term impacts of the separations you were describing on people’s views of revival?

PB: Well, certainly we have very different views of the externalities, such as how we are to worship: not just the form of worship but the content of worship. Starting in the ’40s, then in the ’50s, and a little later, there were attempts to form united yearly meetings. A united yearly meeting might accept some unprogrammed meetings as well as some meetings having an order of worship on Sunday morning: some being more Christocentric and others being more Liberal. I think that experiment failed. I regret that. I deeply regret that we put the externalities above the commonalities of spiritual belief: of a relationship to God and to each other.

SD: How do Quaker revival movements fit in with the larger history of religious revivals in the United States?

PB: A lot of the important things that happened in the United States had to do with slavery. They’re not called Southern Baptists because it sounded nice; it’s because there were Baptists in the South who had no problem with slavery. Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists separated on that basis. A lot of American religious separations were over the issue of slavery in one way or another. We Friends mostly avoided that.

Wesleyan theology was another important theological argument that powered the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. That one we shared in. Friends had a spiritual void in the late-eighteenth century that was filled with ideas that we took in from the wider society. Wesleyan theology was one; revolutionary thought, the American Revolution and the French Revolution; Enlightenment thought; and a variety of other ideas were drawn on to fill that void. These redefined for some people what it meant to be a Friend, and it led to separations.

This is what I fear we’re doing today: we’re taking in things from the wider society and saying, “These are the things that are important to being a Friend.” At least since the 1960s, politics has had an enormous effect on some Friends. Politics has been behind a number of the separations that have taken place recently in the Society of Friends. For example, for too many people, being a good Democrat is by definition what it means to be a Quaker. The two can go together, but it used to be that a majority of Friends were Republicans, and that fit very nicely then, too.

SD: What would you like to add?

PB: We need to remember the early Friends felt they were reviving Christianity, not inventing Quakerism. In the seventeenth century, we rightfully described ourselves as “primitive Christianity revived” or “primitive Christianity restored.”

They had a view of God’s interactions with humanity that you can see in the Bible, and you can see in Christian history. In the Bible, God doesn’t just send one prophet; God sends multiple prophets: one after the other after the other. Why? Because God sends prophets who preach a message of fidelity: faithfulness. And the people say, “Oh yeah! Wow! That’s our God! We’re God’s people!” And then, well, they get a little lazy, and they fall into what would be called “apostasy.” They start going to the sacred grove of oaks to pray when the rains don’t come, instead of being faithful, or they have a queen who comes in and brings all her priests for the worship of Baal.

You have this cycle: God calls the people; the people say, “Yes, this is what we want!” and then they fall away. And God says, “Alright, I’ll give you a new prophet,” and this goes on and on, and on and on. The cycle from revival to apostasy to new revival is not a flat curve where each turn returns to the same baseline. It is an upward spiral with each turn ascending, as God reveals a bit more of God’s self, and humanity is beckoned a little closer to the Divine. And you can see Jesus as one more cycle, a very radical one but the same thing. The people have lost that essential connection with God, and Jesus comes to show them how to do it.

You can also read church history in the same way. You’ve got the initial church planting by Paul, Peter, James, and others in different places, and they start drifting in different directions, and so the Protestant Reformation (which might better be called the Protestant revival) happens. But what happened? You have a revival with Martin Luther, and then the next generation or the generation after that becomes comfortable. Even worse, they become politically powerful, and when they do, they figure out that they can persecute other people. They can try and drive others into their churches.

So then God intervenes again. How? One example is George Fox. Think of Fox as an Old Testament prophet sent to call back to faithfulness the Protestants in England. That’s how early Friends saw what they were doing. They were restoring and reviving true Christianity. You have to start with that basis, that understanding, to know who we were originally as a people.

It’s not that Fox has a new idea: “Hey! Christ Jesus has come to teach his people himself!” This is not a new idea. He didn’t preach, “George Fox has come to teach you,” but, “Christ Jesus has come to teach.” Their expectation was “We’re going to revive! We’re going to restore what it means to be a Christian!”

It is important to remember that revivals are initiated by God sending a prophet (e.g., Isaiah, Martin Luther, George Fox, or Mary Baker Eddy). When people attempt to undertake this work on their own, they are false prophets and doomed to fail.

Finally, while early Friends were (and we today are) most familiar with revivals in Judeo-Christian history, God sends prophets to many peoples: the Buddha and Mohammed come immediately to mind, but there are many more. God has many chosen peoples, each with its own divine calling.

The post God Keeps Calling Us to Grow appeared first on Friends Journal.

The history tour ends
in the cemetery filled with headstones,
dandelions, and fourth graders gabbling.
A slight boy runs to his teacher,
long-stemmed dandelion in hand.
Looking up into her face,
he silently presents his gift.
Harried, heedless, she blurts,
“That’s a weed!” and calls
the class to assemble themselves.
The boy begins to wilt
until a nearby Friend calls out,
“I love dandelions!
Can you pick one for me?”

The post Dandelion Boy appeared first on Friends Journal.

Lands, oceans of light open
the night where I learn to swim
up the estuary in the dark
with eyes closed and leave
my layers of shirts onshore
so they won’t weigh me down
wearing only a secondary name
wasted all these years waiting
for someone to say it’s time,
I can come on in. The water’s fine.

The post First Meditation  appeared first on Friends Journal.

A desire to kneel sometimes pulses through my body . . .
Etty Hillesum

As children, we knelt to pray. Joints, cartilage,
bones, though new, though barely tested,
complained, impatient on linoleum.

Later I uttered my thanks, questions, panic
while sitting, standing, on the run. If I knelt
it was to weed, wash floors, play with my
young. But now I know what Etty means,
a pulse will quicken in me too, unable
to contain, say, the glorious soar of a kite
on blue, or the scar of a long-ago wound,
without commensurate collapse, without
this awkward immobility. Nevertheless

such posture startles, my mind a taunt:
before whom are you growing small, is there
even someone who listens?

Desire pulses, perseveres, finds the holy
mystery in the kneeling (the devil who
appeared to that Desert Father was simply
a grotesquerie who had no knees), prayer un-
furled like a calla lily spathe, its tip
bending downward.

The post Knees appeared first on Friends Journal.

Update, May 28:

When walkers arrived in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, May 22, to deliver the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance as well as their newly penned 2025 Remonstrance, legislators were out of their offices discussing budget reconciliation, according to organizer Ross Brubeck. The participants had scheduled visits with Representatives Dan Goldman (D-N.Y. District 10) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md. District 8), as well as Senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). Walkers dropped into the offices of Representatives Ed Case (D-Hawaii District 1) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J. District 12), and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

Staff members at Gillibrand’s and Schumer’s offices were receptive to the idea of having the original and contemporary remonstrances read into the Congressional record, according to Brubeck.

“Schumer’s staff seemed amenable to the idea of the Leader making mention on the floor of the two remonstrances and the walk itself,” said Brubeck. Schumer is the Minority Leader of the Senate.

Brubeck noted that a parallel walk on the Hudson River Valley segment of the Empire State Trail in New York took place on the same day, May 22. Walkers met with their Congressional representatives, including Mike Lawler (R-N.Y. District 17) and George Latimer (D-N.Y. District 16). The parallel walk was organized by Peter Close, Avis Sri-Janthaya, Gayle Simon, Patricia S. Rallis, Don Wildman, and Elizabeth Estony of Purchase Quarterly Meeting.

The 2025 Remonstrance, addressed “To our representatives,” states in part:

Through your action or inaction, you have permitted the intrusion of federal officers into our houses of worship to abduct our friends and neighbors. We cannot accept this transgression of the sacred; both the sacred stillness of our worship, and the divine human rights of our persecuted friends. While the voice of power slanders them, calling non-citizens criminals, stirring fears of displacement and hatred of the newcomer, we know the truth: that we are all children of God, deserving of equal opportunity and safe harbor. We know that our rights are endowed freely by Heaven, not conferred by the paperwork of citizenship.

Original story, May 9, 2025:

From May 4 through May 22, Friends are walking more than 276 miles from New York City to Washington, D.C., to deliver a copy of the original Flushing Remonstrance to members of the U.S. Congress. Freeholders in what is now New York State wrote the document in 1657. The Remonstrance opposed a directive by then Governor Peter Stuyvesant who said residents should not welcome Quakers in the Dutch colony.

The petition argued that God is the ultimate judge of human actions and that people are morally bound to do good to others. It noted that some people feel jealous and suspicious of Quakers because they do not submit to earthly authorities. The writers of the proclamation expressed their desire to follow the Golden Rule, telling Stuyvesant that they desired to “doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us.”

Participants in the pilgrimage demand that members of Congress acknowledge and safeguard freedom of speech, due process, and the constitutional rights of everyone in the United States, according to the walk’s website.

The group passes under train tracks in Queens, N.Y. on Sunday, May 4, 2025. Photo by Corrie Aune.

Organizer Jess Hobbs Pifer believes Quakers have a responsibility to be stewards of democracy.

“Stewardship is such a core part of Quakerism,” said Hobbs Pifer. She is a member of Germantown Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa., and an attender of Brooklyn (N.Y.) Meeting.

Seventy-four participants had registered for the walk by May 1, according to organizers. They said they expect that number to grow as the walk progresses.

In addition to delivering a copy of the original Flushing Remonstrance, participants will use group discernment to draft a document that seeks to highlight the voices of people directly targeted by the Trump administration. Organizers will ask for input from members of Friends meetings along the walking route, according to Max Goodman, an organizer of the walk. Goodman is a member of Sandy Spring (Md.) Meeting who is sojourning at Brooklyn Meeting.

The idea of religious tolerance articulated in the Flushing Remonstrance became a norm by the time of the U.S. Constitution 132 years later, according to Goodman.

The Constitution was drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788, and went into effect in 1789. The first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, were drafted in 1789 and ratified in 1791.

The Remonstrance “anticipated First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom,” said Thomas Hamm, emeritus professor of history and Quaker scholar in residence at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. One of Hamm’s ancestors, Henry Townsend, was a signer of the Remonstrance.

The walk is initiated by Quakers, but organizers hope people with similar values join the journey.

The walk is symbolic and full of implicit meaning, according to organizer Ross Brubeck. The walkers will cross several state borders without any legal impediments, which contrasts with the experience of many immigrants who enter the United States without documentation. Brubeck attends Brooklyn Meeting and considers Sandy Spring Meeting their home meeting.

Goodman would like the walk to highlight values such as hospitality and relief of suffering. He considers it a Christian calling to offer food, shelter, and legal aid to immigrants and others targeted by the Trump administration.

“I really hope we can walk our talk more,” said Goodman.

Quaker meetings along the walking route are letting walkers sleep in their meetinghouses and are hosting potluck dinners for participants. Arranging for accommodations for the walk has required organizers to make many phone calls and send numerous emails.

“The bulk of the organizing has been around connecting people with Quaker communities,” Hobbs Pifer said.

Goodman arranged for participants to use canoes from Baltimore Yearly Meeting for a five-mile segment of the pilgrimage that involves crossing the Susquehanna River from Pennsylvania to Maryland.

On the Sundays of the walk, participants will have the opportunity to worship with meetings in Philadelphia, Pa., and Baltimore, Md.

Stephen Kelly, a lawyer who worships with Brooklyn Meeting, introduced the idea of walking the Flushing Remonstrance from New York to Washington, D.C., at a February meeting for business, according to Brubeck.

The post Quakers Walk from New York City to Washington, D.C., to Share Flushing Remonstrance with Congress [Updated] appeared first on Friends Journal.

A coalition of six Quaker organizations offers a new set of “Anti-racist Clerking Advices for Friends” to help clerks center Friends who are typically marginalized in North American Quaker spaces. The Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism (QCUR) is a coalition of six organizations, including American Friends Service Committee, Friends Council on Education, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Friends General Conference (FGC), Pendle Hill, and Quaker Voluntary Service, as well as other Friends. Developed over several years by Friends of Color and White Friends, the advices, released in January, seek to make meetings, as well as meetings for worship with attention to business, more inclusive and welcoming to Friends of Color.

Compiled into a 65-page document and published on a QCUR website hosted by FGC, the advices recommend designating certain individuals to serve as “noticers” who observe interactions and procedures to evaluate how they help or hinder the goal of becoming an antiracist meeting.

Friends can examine assumptions about equality in meetings and explore structural inequalities, explained Barry Scott, a Friend who worked on developing the advices. Scott worships with Kea’au Worship Group on the Big Island of Hawaii. He is a member of Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting and Ujima Meeting, a meeting of Friends of African descent, which gathers online.

Friends can recognize where power is inherent and where Quakers can fall into the patterns of the larger society, according to Scott. For instance, nominating committees generate names of people who could serve as clerks and committee members.

“There’s an incredible amount of power there,” Scott said.

In addition to inviting Friends to examine the structure and culture of business meetings, the advices contain suggestions for responding when racial wounding and harm occurs, including the following:

• For larger offenses and racial woundings, have systems and people in place to offer support/guidance so that problems can be dealt with sensitively, firmly, and soon.
• For those who have been wounded/harmed: Reach out to them after the meeting, ask what they need, and have a support structure in place to meet their needs.
• Make sure that the person who committed a racial offense knows what they did wrong, and that they have support and someone to talk to.

One example of racial wounding is when White Quakers assume that Friends of Color have less experience with Quakerism than White Friends do. Friends of Color who come to a meeting might be told, for instance, “Oh, you understand that we don’t have music here,” said Regina Renee Nyégbeh, who worked on developing the advices. Nyégbeh previously used the last name Ward, which appears in the document.

At one meeting where Nyégbeh worshiped, a person used a racist slur to refer to a person of African descent, causing racial wounding. She notes that just because racist epithets are not used in a meeting, does not mean that members and attenders do not benefit from White privilege or that they are actively antiracist.

Nyégbeh is a member of Ujima Meeting and FGC’s Friends of Color virtual worship. Nyégbeh served FGC as clerk of the Committee for Nurturing Ministries, as well as clerk of the Racial Wounding Committee, which supports Friends who have experienced racial wounding at an FGC event. She was also co-clerk of FGC’s Institutional Assessment and Implementation Committee.

Friends intending to support people who have experienced racial wounding should be attentive listeners, according to Lauren Brownlee, who worked on developing the advices.

“I think there is harm done when people are too eager to help,” Brownlee said. “People who are the best allies often listen before they offer solutions.” Brownlee is a member of Bethesda (Md.) Meeting and co-clerk of the Steering Committee of QCUR.

Friends supporting Quakers of Color who have experienced racial wounding should possess compassion and deep listening skills, according to Barry Scott. Supporters can reflect on how God would care for a person and uplift that person.

“Allyship, I would argue, centers the Divine,” Scott said.

When White people commit an act of racial wounding, they should talk about their actions and emotions with caring and trusted White people, according to Brownlee.

“Connection is the antidote to shame,” Brownlee said.

Sometimes White people who feel ashamed of committing racial woundings want to be comforted by People of Color, Brownlee noted. People of Color have themselves been wounded by racism and are not in a position to accompany White people as they work through their shame, she explained.

Clerks who attempt to tamp down passionate or emotionally warm expressions in business meeting could be practicing inappropriate conflict avoidance and silencing of Friends of Color, according to Kat Griffith, who worked on the advices. Griffith observed that passion can be a sign that someone is experiencing a spiritual leading. Clerks can avoid inappropriate silencing of Friends of Color by understanding their own motivations in calling for silence, she explained.

Clerks can ask themselves, “Is it me who needs silence?” and, if so, they can explain their need to members and attenders at the business meeting, Griffith explained. Griffith is a member of the Winnebago Worship Group, which is under the care of Madison (Wis.) Meeting.

When a clerk responds to a Friend expressing their views in a passionate way by calling for settling silence, this has a disparate impact on White Friends and Friends of Color, according to Brownlee. Clerks can explain the purpose of calling for silence, Brownlee noted.

“I think it makes it feel less silencing and more like a spiritual practice,” Brownlee said.

Before the 2019 FGC Gathering, a Friend with a long history of antiracist activism inside and outside of Quaker spaces asked Griffith, “What are you going to do to be an antiracist clerk?” Griffith had just become co-clerk of Northern Yearly Meeting.

Griffith considered the question and realized she could not find published resources to help with it. Friends in Arthur Larrabee’s clerking workshop at that year’s FGC Gathering said they would appreciate guidance on antiracist clerking.

Eleven authors, six individual reviewers, and the whole QCUR Steering Committee collaborated to create the advices.

Correction: An earlier version of this news story attributed the clerking advices to Friends General Conference (FGC) as the sole author. We have clarified that the document was authored by a coalition that includes FGC and noted that it was published on a QCUR website hosted by FGC.

The post Quaker Coalition Offers Antiracist Clerking Advices appeared first on Friends Journal.

The post Quakers and Home appeared first on Friends Journal.

In a world as profoundly abundant as ours, it is a societal failure of monumental proportions that anyone go without safe and comfortable housing. Yet here we are. Quakers everywhere, in the communities where we live, work, and travel, encounter people who are housing insecure. Some Friends, themselves, lack stable housing. In this issue of Friends Journal, we share the stories of Friends who are not content to look away from this distressing reality, but rather follow Spirit’s leadings to care for our neighbors—and in so doing set out upon a generative cycle of kindness.

Jesus’s words in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, are cited by multiple authors as part of what drove them to act to combat homelessness and provide care in the many ways they have.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Reading the stories gathered here, I am struck by a few things. First, it’s remarkable how much housing is interconnected with our other needs. Talking openly about it and seeking solutions within our reach as individuals, families, communities, and societies: these steps may be keys that unlock greater human happiness and fulfillment, keys that allow for a fuller expression of God’s light through the lives of all our neighbors. The second realization I have is this: no matter where we are, be it in a small rural community or a big city, there are ways to use what we have to aid others. The needs of unhoused people in an urban center and those in a Walmart parking lot may look different, but wherever we are, there are neighbors and therefore an obligation of care.

We are fortunate to have some excellent Quaker models of urgency and clarity in the exhortation to do something to help. Sitting with these stories prompted me to page through John Woolman’s Journal. In an entry from 1759, recalling the proceedings of a yearly meeting “under the weight” of Friends’ deliberations regarding slaveholding, Woolman quotes from the epistle born out of their fruitful discernment:

To keep a watchful eye towards real objects of charity, to visit the poor in their lonesome dwelling places, to comfort them who through the dispensations of divine providence are in strait and painful circumstances in this life, and steadily to endeavour to honour God with our substance from a real sense of the love of Christ influencing our minds thereto, is more likely to bring a blessing to our children and will afford more satisfaction to a Christian favoured with plenty than an earnest desire to collect much wealth to leave behind us. . . .

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true . . . whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things . . . and do them, and the God of peace shall be with you.

“Think on these things and do them.” I look forward to hearing what Friends today are led to do—and to sharing their stories with you, reader.

The post Honoring God with Our Substance appeared first on Friends Journal.

This has been a winter to remember. The text message came about 3 p.m. A man who signed up for work at a nearby church that was taking in homeless people couldn’t make it. “Can you come in?”

A week ago, I had signed up as a backup in case a volunteer had a problem. This night, indeed, was a big problem: it had warmed up to only ten degrees on this February afternoon.

It had snowed all day and stayed so cold that I hadn’t bothered to get dressed: just read and did some writing in my jammies because our apartment warmed-up so slowly. It had been a long time since I’d seen a storm in the Ozarks like the one we had this frigid President’s Day.

“Sure, I’m still good with coming in, if I’m needed.”

It was only the second time I’d worked the all-night shift at the Unitarian church. I was definitely needed. Lots of different people were helping out. Other churches in Springfield, Missouri, had also been taking in people who had no place to shelter for the night. How many would die on the streets without these volunteers and churches?

I caught some sleep on and off. Mainly, I stayed awake, as it’s required that one of the two shelter volunteers is awake all night. Ted was watching movies on his laptop. We had 17 men initially.

Left: Photo by Stuart Miles. Right: Photo by whatamiii.

A volunteer named Jorge served coffee and snacks for two hours as people settled in. He’s an engineer and will be driving to Texas County—the largest jurisdiction in Missouri but one of the least populated—to oversee the work in a factory that manufactures electric parts. It’s 90 miles each way, four days a week. Today, there are dangerous highways.

Near the basement door was a table with coffee, hot chocolate, and donated snacks. On the large plastic “sneeze protector” of plexiglass someone has taped a photocopied sign, which read “In case no one told you today: You are beautiful.”

You are loved.

Two guys across the room seem to be having trouble sleeping. Ted and I talk about all kinds of things and especially about Herman Melville because I’m auditing a class at Missouri State on early American literature. I’m reading Melville’s first book, Typee, about his jumping ship on a South Sea island, the hard life of sailors, and related adventures. Somehow escaping to a South Sea island, even one that possibly has cannibals, seems desirable this evening.

You are needed.

One of the old guys comes up to tell me that he’s ready to work but is having trouble getting his paperwork together: “They want proof of address for me to get food stamps, but I don’t have an address, and my birth certificate isn’t enough for them.”

You are alive for a reason.

Shortly after midnight, a guy comes into the shelter with all his stuff in three thin plastic shopping bags. “I just got off from working at Denny’s,” he explains.

You are stronger than you think.

Photo by Getty Images

At 2 a.m., I look up from the book I am reading. There is a woman rapping on the window by the door.

“Eden Village said I should come by here,” she explains. She’s wearing a blanket over her head and coat to keep out the cold. I show her to a cot.

You are going to get through this.

Another guy comes to the snack table in the middle of the night. His neighbor was hassling him. I go over and talk with the neighbor, who has lots of issues, a lot of anger. But he listens. He mainly needs some extra clothes that have been donated to the church for homeless people. I bring out different sweatshirts. Finally, he agrees one is right for him: nice and heavy with a cool logo.

I’m glad you are alive.

Lots of coughing echoes across the big basement room that is filled with sleep and occasional snoring. They put on their COVID-19 masks when they come out for snacks. Mainly they sleep, mostly still in their clothes and wrapped in blankets. Ted or I check the room each hour. No one wants to talk in the earliest, coldest time before dawn.

Don’t give up.

Photo by vita  

Ted turns on the lights at 6:30 a.m. Most everyone’s up. Some are going outside for a smoke. “It’s -12 degrees out there,” Ted says in amazement.

A big guy comes in, smiling, with only a few teeth. “I see you got those big, brown shoes in there. I think they might fit me.” They do; he’s happy and says, “Always good to have a little extra room for more socks in cold weather.”

A little after 7 a.m., the bus arrives. In less than ten minutes, everyone’s gone. Ted and I do the initial clean up, spraying a bleach mix on the cots and pillows. It’s all fixed for other volunteers to come in right on schedule to sweep and get everything ready for the next evening.

Yes, you are loved by a huge community.

The post The Coldest Night at the Overflow Shelter appeared first on Friends Journal.

A Small Meeting’s Experiment in Radical Welcoming

Having always been mission-focused Friends, we had been working for years at the list found in Matthew 25:35–36 (NIV):

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Upon finding Friends a decade ago, a strong conviction struck us: a realization of the time we had invested during the prior decade to find that perfect doctrine. Year after year had been spent trying to figure out who “had it right.” We found Friends along this journey, and, after hearing the general understanding that no one has it exactly right and that’s okay, it all changed for us.

After having many conversations with a variety of Friends, we developed a practice in our meeting’s first year to not rack up more time on our own path than we spent helping others on theirs.

Not knowing where to start, we found the list in Matthew to be direct. This passage says our lives will be judged according to our actions: what we did or didn’t do for our fellow man. Following this list has led us on many great journeys over the last decade. From street outreach to jail ministry, we continued to mature spiritually, yet fears always held fast regarding one item.

For a few years, we had been thinking how we would ever act upon “I was a stranger and you let me in.” What does this mean? Did it mean inviting a stranger into our own home? This is the way we interpreted it. Many fears were raised, and these fears held us at bay for many years as we applied ourselves to other works.

As our meetings are outdoors, we always balance out our “path vs. mission” time over the months of the year, with March being the start of a new year. When fall 2023 came we calculated our mission hours due against our path’s time, to find we would need 13 eight-hour runs to be balanced by March! We got underway on how we could work out these hours, but it was going to have to be something big.

Interior of the Camper.The Camper

In early December, our meeting received a thousand dollar check to be done with as we wished. Having a camper hookup on our homestead, we decided to push past our fears of letting in the stranger. As winter was near, we quickly found a fixer-upper camper, and we agreed it would be close enough to “home” to count. We spent a few weeks of spare time getting it ready, and after the new year, it was ready for hosting.

We decided on a barter agreement, wherein a woman being hosted could assist the other women with duties around the multi-generation homestead. We figured the barter at $12 per hour, 15 hours a week. This would cover her expenses and give her an additional $60 per week. We offered an agreement that listed our expectations and general rules for living on our quiet hilltop.

Our true test of faith came in locating the right person. One wishes not to judge, but when you are fearful of “what could be,” it is paralyzing. We found ourselves looking to God in hope that the right person would be sent. Sadly, just about everyone in the online world thought this was a scam, and there was much blocking of posts and expressions of hate. Oddly enough, this prayer was answered on Craigslist, and in early January, we had finally crossed our greatest fear: moving in our first guest.

It was quite awkward for everyone the first few weeks. We just tried to be good hosts and let our guest settle in. Soon enough, everyday life seemed more everyday again. Months passed by, and one spring day, our guest was quite shocked to find the camper had masses of carpenter ants waking up from winter: thousands of them. We did what we could, but one by one different parts of this camper failed. This was right out of an old movie, a great tragedy.

What was once blissful had become a nightmare in a dozen ways. It was amazing to us that the seller knew of our plans for the camper yet never disclosed its true condition.

The OfficeThe Office

It was in May that we decided enough is enough with the camper; it had become a dangerous liability. We did not have the funds for another camper, especially in peak season. Yet the homestead assistant position was working out great for all. Her health had failed her drastically, and we couldn’t help but assume some responsibility due to the camper’s condition. She had become family and someone that we all truly cared for. Now being quite fearful of losing our guest and her having nowhere nor any means to go, we decided to look into a storage building conversion. Tiny homes may be nice to watch on YouTube videos, but in reality, they have as many issues as the camper and take a lot to make them legally suitable. Being a handy-enough family, we decided to take on a hefty project and build a micro-apartment into a pole barn. It is nothing fancy, just a 25- by 10-foot apartment with a bathroom. We added a small loft for her son’s visits. It is small but quaint, and it has everything one needs to live and find peace.

Almost immediately after moving our guest into the apartment and ridding ourselves of the camper, six months of chaos subsided, and life became calm once again.

The “Wambulance”The “Wambulance”

Late summer came, and seeing the impact of providing someone with housing and witnessing the joy that it brought to all involved, we decided there was enough time for another mission. Sadly we were lacking any funds after the failed camper and the micro-apartment build, which totalled fifteen thousand dollars. In meeting, it was decided that if we could source the funds, we would build out a van-life vehicle and gift it to a homeless woman.

We started a crowdsource campaign and quickly raised $2,700. We found a younger man with an old-but-running ambulance for sale, and he knocked the price down for the cause. Over six weeks and after receiving many, many favors, we managed to turn this old ambulance into a very functional camper van with solar and much more. Selection requirements for the recipient had been discussed during the build. The women took on the task of deciding who would receive the van, and God again brought us the exact right person for it.

There were fears that the van might be sold for drugs or other things, but the recipient was a perfect fit. To our surprise, she held a masters degree. Life had just continued to knock her down to the point of her living for months in a tent in the woods. She was dealing with illness, and the world had tossed her aside, much like our guest. It is saddening but life-changing for her to receive the ambulance.

New CamperThe “Sister Haus and the Tax Man”

For a long time, we have been fearing what will become of our homestead as the years pass. The West Coast tech giants are gobbling up our county, and the tax man is at the forefront. Our taxes for 2018 were $2,400; last year, they were $6,000. Two people smarter than us have stated that by the year 2028–2030, when these giants have settled in, we will be looking at around $16,000–$20,000 per year!

In 2023, we visited a Bruderhof community, and we studied remotely with them for a season. It was interesting that 25 percent of them were Friends, and we thought we might join them when the time comes. It would be sad, though, to leave this homestead that we’ve sweated so much for!

This year’s missions have changed that thought and removed the unnerving fear of not being able to afford our homestead. We now plan to slowly convert it over time to a Quaker sister boarding house where we will be able to offer small, reduced-rent rooms and to use the rent money to cover the dreaded tax. What larger blessing could God offer us than a workable plan to forever keep the homestead; to use it in His name; to help those tossed aside by the world; and, hopefully, to have this continue on long after we pass.

Looking back over the year, we hope our guest never leaves. It is odd to know that we will always be hosting someone in this apartment and that we now have a plan for the future. It is amazing how one’s spirit can change over just a few seasons.

This was intended to be a seasonal mission. Though it has certainly been life-changing for the guest in many ways, we all truly profit from this greatly. With our guest, we have help; we have fellowship; and we have another viewpoint in meetings. As a home for three families and as a fifth-generation homestead, it is great to share what the Lord has blessed us with.

This is not to say everyone should do this. Near Youngstown, Ohio, other “Prairie Quakers” (homesteading Friends who generally stay to themselves and practice plain living) were unknowingly doing the exact same mission. We connected remotely early on, and side by side, we went into our work. The mission ended early for that family, and to this day, we do not know the reason. There are many aspects such as liability, noise pollution, privacy, conflicting beliefs, conflicting lifestyles, and more to meditate on. We spent years with ideas for this mission running in the back of our minds, and we were also able to start in a very controlled fashion with many safeguards in place.

God also greatly blessed us with our guest, and like us, she is certainly a lost Friend, i.e., one of those who find Quakerism and then realize they were Quakers all along. Sadly, the mission that we undertook is not always possible; your home is your home. Follow the Spirit; follow your path, but always test the water before crossing the stream.

In 2025, we’ve been blessed in securing another van build, and it just rolled off the tow truck on March 16th. This is being scheduled for June completion. You can see how far we’ve come with this next home at our website.

The post I Was a Stranger and You Invited Me In appeared first on Friends Journal.

The San Francisco Quaker Meetinghouse sits at the crossroads of technology and outdated infrastructure, development and disinvestment, and abundance and famine. Our building is only one short block from the main thoroughfare of the city, Market Street, and in an area that triangulates with many of the survival resources needed by the poorest people in our community. 

Yet for the constant attention given to the issue of “homelessness,” the city’s methods of onboarding and outreach are remarkably outdated and lacking in cultural competency: the training manual for city-wide “standards of care” for all city-contracted shelters were last updated in 2004, over 20 years ago. These standards cover everything from training for staff to necessary materials and basic expectations of the agencies that provide direct services to the unhoused.

More than a decade ago, when I moved to San Francisco from Chicago, I lived at one of the largest shelters in the city. This first required spending many nights trying to sleep while sitting upright in a chair (not everyone in shelter necessarily receives a bed). Every day we had to queue in order to check in, praying that not too many people in front of us signed up for laundry services, since there were only so many total washes available per day. I keenly recall feeling exposed while in my bunk bed, sleeping next to people who were sometimes in the midst of mental episodes. Yet, for all the challenges, I recall some staff who were clearly gifted in managing conflict and creating rapport with shelter guests; their ability to exert influence and speak with the culture—not at the culture—was fascinating to me. I also recall the conversations with George, an elderly African American, with whom I’d often eat dinner at the common dining room. He is an ancestor, an angel whispering a Word for me to carry on in this sometimes spiritually perilous work.

I began sitting outside the San Francisco Meetinghouse—on Sundays during meeting for worship—to extend spiritual care in the form of laundry. Every other Sunday during worship, a table and chairs are set up near the meetinghouse with a sign reading “Holy Wtr We Wash Laundry.” 

For nearly two years (2022–2024), I was a live–work employee at a tiny-house shelter run by Youth Spirit Artworks (founded by a Quaker) in Oakland, California. I finished my last year of seminary at Earlham School of Religion while breathing this air. My tiny house lacked running water, private showers or bathrooms, and was only 60 square feet of living space. Contrary to most homeless shelters (which are congregate or bunk bed in style), each person occupies a tiny house with its own key. This design was in stark contrast to my earlier experience; what’s more, laundry could be washed any time that the community space was open. This experiment in simplicity significantly refined my expectations of housing. It turned out that I didn’t need many of the amenities that I might have assumed were a red line, an essential without which my world would collapse. Without realizing it, my concept of housing had been shaped by social forces. In many ways, homelessness is the concrete analogy to hell: a warning on this side of creation to adjust our internal world to fear the omnipresent punishment of “the Market” should we stop paying necessary oblation (vis-à-vis the accumulation of money) to the demigod of capitalism.

A sign for the ministry. 

Living in a tiny house was a unique, sunrise-to-sundown perspective of the massive scaffolding of programs, support systems, and staff resiliency required to obtain any hoped-for outcomes. Housing is not a magic wand and does not reverse the hypervigilance, dissolved social networks, or embodied pain carried in our unsheltered neighbors. Intense case management, clinical services, and therapeutic interventions (whether talk therapy, medication, or a psychiatric service animal) all cost money. City governments need more state and federal investment to accelerate access to all of the above. It may come as a surprise to learn that most of the unhoused are keenly aware that they haven’t been able to bathe and so therefore have a bit of an odor: the shirking away by other people, the getting up and moving to the other end of the bus or the city train that repeats itself on a loop is a fairly obvious form of public shaming. Sadly, the same is true on Sundays; most church services are middle-class affairs with little room for the unhoused. Among Baptists, Mennonites, Quakers, and Pentecostals, I’ve yet to enter a Sunday service and see a large number of the poor. Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco is an exception; this was the first faith space where people who slept outside on the street the night before came to Bible study. It never dawned on me that the poor might be interested in—let alone attend—a Bible study.

The churning of the nuclear Light of God in my soul challenged my self-righteous attitude about having found an outward form I enjoyed. On Sundays when I would attend Quaker worship, my conscience would be greatly disturbed at the people taking shelter in front of the meetinghouse. As is generally the case, these folks were overwhelmingly African American/Colored persons; getting to meeting for worship literally required passing them by, much as people did the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37). When I would sit down in worship, my spirit would try to settle, but time and time again, Spirit spoke the same message, “The Light is needed there.” Sitting inside and waiting for a reversal of this message was first an act of folly—then of disobedience.

The laundry ministry table outside of San Francisco (Calif.) Meetinghouse.

Faith and Practice of Pacific Yearly Meeting describes meeting for worship as follows:

Thus conducting worship under the leading of Divine Will, Friends assemble in the silence without prearranged program. Each tries to still the inward clamor of personal anxieties and ambitions, listening for the voice of the Inner Guide, endeavoring to be faithful to its instruction. Such faithfulness may require an outward silence. It may require one to rise and speak words that do not come easily, which may not be fully understood, or which may be uncomfortable. It may require action, or restraint of action, by some individual or the whole Meeting, outside the Meeting for Worship [emphasis added].

During my time at seminary, I’d discerned a “social laundromat”’ministry as my focal project; the seed remained planted and ripening for some time. On January 28, 2024, I began sitting outside the San Francisco Meetinghouse—on Sundays during meeting for worship—to extend spiritual care in the form of laundry. Every other Sunday during worship, a table and chairs are set up near the meetinghouse with a sign reading “Holy Wtr We Wash Laundry.” Our neighbors can rest, talk, or wash laundry. For laundry, we walk to a nearby laundromat, provide detergent and pay for both wash and dry cycles. Laundry is the practical incentive while listening is the deeper chaplaincy work.  I am not always alone, as volunteers have been joining the ministry.  

Still, we are reminded that neither understanding nor being comfortable are baselines for good order: the central question is whether we are being faithful.

The laundry is just the outer shell, the spiritual tortilla as it were, that hides what’s really the center of the experience: active listening and spiritual care to persons usually excluded (absent) from worship. It was critical to heed Spirit: this was not to be held under the care of any committee because it would be too controversial. Sometimes, the defense of the dominant monthly meeting culture (White and middle class) takes precedence over discernment. At first, this was an odd stop because I imagined the concern should be held under the Ministry and Care Committee, but with the passage of time, it has become painfully clear why Spirit led me in this puzzling direction.

During the course of my more than ten years as a member, San Francisco Friends have also grappled with the (disturbing) fire of what the peace testimony means in an urban context: not discussion groups but active praxis. Liberation theology is, after all, about putting practice before theory: acting in the world before musing. Over the years, we have been made uncomfortable because an unhoused person was falling asleep in their plate of food; made anxious about whether a bottle of liquor can be stored in a hallway closet so someone can come inside (e.g., spiritual harm reduction); and torn in conscience by the sight of a tent erected right under the Black Lives Matter banner painted across the front face of our meetinghouse.

Still, we are reminded that neither understanding nor being comfortable are baselines for good order: the central question is whether we are being faithful.

From March 3 through March 30, 2025, the San Francisco Meetinghouse served as the interfaith winter shelter location for the city and county of San Francisco. It was run by Episcopal Community Services, but the discernment about this form of spiritual care (and civic responsibility) took many years to unfold. There have been many discussions over the years about discomfort about “those people” inside the building (yes, that’s a direct quote and one that’s often heard).

Taking the clothes to a nearby laundromat.

My work with Youth Spirit Artworks and Glide Memorial Church has been apocalyptic: work that through the unhoused has boldly unveiled something new about God. The soul care of the unhoused often leaves me heavy in heart, burdened with worry, and filled with doubt. Clearness can sometimes intensify rather than erase contradictions. Even now, I grapple with the line between the sacred and profane. It is not the building, after all, but the people that are the church. The work is not without conflict; the laundry ministry heckles some in the meeting and exposes deeply ingrained class- and race-based bias among Friends. Yet, the still, small voice of the ancestors whisper: “Hold on, hold on! Keep your hand on the plow; hold on!”

The post Laundry Chaplaincy for Unsheltered Souls appeared first on Friends Journal.

Reflections on Housing Justice

The housing system in America is broken. Over 770,000 people in the United States are currently unhoused, 18 percent more than in 2023. In 2022, over half of all renters spent a third or more of their income on rent and utilities. Eviction rates continue to climb (over 10 percent from 2022 to 2023 alone), disproportionately affecting low-income renters, People of Color, single mothers and families with children, and other vulnerable people. Where the cost of housing has increased faster than incomes or the availability of affordable housing for lower income ranges has diminished, homelessness has increased.

Those are some of the numbers. What our caches of data, think-tank position papers, and government studies and reports don’t convey is the massive human toll that roils behind the numbers. Many unhoused persons are dehumanized by desperate living conditions and constant encampment sweeps. Personal accounts by unhoused persons and service providers alike are searing in their expressions of despair and futility as more and more resources are drawn to the crisis with less and less apparent effectiveness. In some regions, as one service provider laments, a “homeless industrial complex” has arisen to add intractable service delivery structures to the challenge. Quaker moral compasses should be spinning.

These conditions are not simply a post-pandemic hangover that will soon go away. They have been developing in earnest since the 2008 financial meltdown that affected millions of homeowners, especially in the lower income ranges. And they are here to stay until we take sufficient action as individuals, as meetings, and as a nation. As people of faith sharing deep concern for those who suffer injustice—in this case, housing injustice—Quakers are called to discern both our individual and corporate responses to homelessness, unaffordability of housing for large swaths of the population, and racial injustice in the housing system. We are called to bring housing justice where housing injustice prevails in our communities.

Our first step in doing so should be to understand the nature and some of the dynamics of the housing crisis to discern more clearly our leadings in response to them. Then we should seek moral and spiritual perspectives on the issues to equip ourselves for sustained focus on the areas of concern that arise. Let us begin with a deeper understanding of the problems we seek to address.

Our first step in doing so should be to understand the nature and some of the dynamics of the housing crisis to discern more clearly our leadings in response to them. Then we should seek moral and spiritual perspectives on the issues to equip ourselves for sustained focus on the areas of concern that arise. 

When we encounter unhoused persons, individually on the street or in camps, many of us are inclined to wonder what situations, behavioral health issues, addictions, traumas, or failure to keep a job or pay the rent led to this condition. As a nation, we tend to blame the unhoused for their condition, though the primary cause of homelessness is a lack of adequate and affordable housing, a simple truth made starkly evident by Gregg Colburn in Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (2022). The United States simply does not have enough housing for middle and lower incomes—so-called working-class housing—to sustain rents at affordable rates; to house those struggling with behavioral or addiction issues while they are addressing such challenges; or to provide safe landings for those whose precarious financial situation is decimated by the loss of a job or transportation, a serious injury, or an expensive medical diagnosis.

Housing that is affordable to own or to rent is essential for stable households, vibrant neighborhoods, and flourishing communities. Affordable housing at all income levels is a social good on par with education, water, electricity, and healthcare. Indeed, a resilient and broadly accessible housing system is essential for realizing such other social goods as education and healthcare. The current systemic shortage of affordable housing in the United States, accompanied by alarming rates of eviction and numbers of unhoused persons, is indicative of an unjust scarcity of a vital social good: adequate and affordable housing. 

When coming to understand housing as a social good, we must recognize that affordable housing historically has also been distributed unevenly across races in America. Home ownership since World War II has been the leading factor in the determination of household wealth. The current racial disparity in household wealth is ten-to-one, White to Black (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021), so it should be no surprise that the homeownership rate is much higher for White households than for Black households, a greater disparity even than prior to the fair-housing legislation of the early 1970s. With the replication of these disparities in home ownership and household wealth in other communities of Color, it should be equally unsurprising that those who rent, those who are evicted from rentals, and those who are unhoused are disproportionately People of Color. 

These disparities in housing and household wealth, moreover, were created quite intentionally through government policies at all levels, including residential zoning codes to preclude home ownership by People of Color in affluent White neighborhoods beginning in the 1920s, redlining to undermine Black home ownership by limiting access to home loans beginning in the 1930s, exclusion of over a million Black veterans from participation in the G.I. Bill’s home loan guarantee programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and literally hundreds of thousands of racial covenants across the country that prohibited Black and other People of Color from living in select White neighborhoods and accruing property value equity since the concept of neighborhood began. As we ponder and respond to injustices in our housing policies, practices, and systems, we must also be keenly aware that race and racial injustice are tightly bound up in the U.S. housing system.

Justice is vitally important to Quakers. We want all to have housing they can comfortably afford, housing that enables stable households, healthy neighborhoods, and vibrant communities. Even as we prop up major portions of our housing system with inadequate and underfunded programs and services, we ask why there must always be a shortage of affordable homes. Why, too, must we accept an economy that seemingly requires an underclass of poverty, generates large profits from competition for an insufficient supply of housing, and commodifies essential social goods like housing for the financial gain of a few at great cost to a very large share of those who are most in need?

Looking at the U.S. housing crisis with eyes wide open is one thing. Making meaning of what one sees and discerning how to respond, first spiritually and then through action, is quite another. When we look unflinchingly within ourselves and our communities of faith to understand better the pathways by which we approach housing justice, it becomes apparent that there are some underlying spiritual values that take us deep into our moral perspectives on housing justice.

Photo by JHVEPhoto 

A good place to begin exploring the moral dimensions of housing justice is to consider affordable housing as a human right. From antiquity to the present, moral philosophers have sought to ascertain the fundamental rights that humans derive from the nature of their existence within society, quite apart from rights granted by civil society. A major turn in this centuries-long dialogue occurred immediately after World War II when, in direct response to the horrors of that worldwide experience, the United Nations (UN) forged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by the UN in 1948, the UDHR has since served as a frequent and invaluable moral measure for the status of human rights (perhaps also understood as applied social justice) in various ways at various times. 

Adequate housing is specifically identified in UDHR Article 25 as a basic human right in association with several other material needs that directly affect the quality of human life: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care…” The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), in its Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1998), later defines adequate housing as having legal security of tenure, availability of services (including materials, facilities, and infrastructure), affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. 

From a secular foundation of universal human rights, we then rise to understand housing justice through our distinctive Quaker lens. For this we go beneath conventional Quaker testimonies to excavate the spirituality from which they arise even as we go behind “that of God in every one” by checking still deeper values. Paula Palmer, for example, notes in her 2023 QuakerSpeak.com video, “The Lasting Trauma of Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools,” that, yes, Quakers who ran Indian boarding schools in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries likely did see that of God in Native children, but White supremacy blinded them from also seeing the value of Native culture and way of life. Likewise, seeing that of God in an unhoused person, and then ministering to that person with the expectation of their becoming like those who are ministering, can lead to outcomes that present lasting benefit for neither the server nor the served.

Justice in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the faith tradition most broadly understood and experienced by Quakers, is most richly expressed as shalom in the fullest biblical sense of the ancient Hebrew concept. (Consider, too, the Islamic equivalent salaam.) Walter Brueggemann speaks to our concern in Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom (1976) when he traces the enduring theme of shalom throughout the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, stressing the consistent representation of justice as equality, wholeness, and reconciliation of rich and poor within a covenant of shalom. Far more than its conventional translation into English as “peace,” shalom represents alignment of human and divine interests within the harmonious household, community, and nation. Shalom thus deepens and expands our notion of justice as fairness and equality. The “haves” within the biblical concept of shalom, for instance, hold special responsibility to the “have-nots.” In contemporary context, the justice values of fairness and equality can perhaps best be understood as wholeness, inclusion, and right relationship among individuals and communities within housing, healthcare, and other social systems. 

The concept of right relationship is a corresponding moral imperative for Quakers that deepens and enriches our understanding of shalom. Found in multiple ethical and moral systems from Indigenous cultures to such major faith traditions as Buddhism and Christianity, the natural state of cooperation, respect, and mutual benefit is a powerful impetus for understanding right relationship in great measure as loving one’s neighbor, serving the best interests of the community, and spiritually aligning one’s behavior and beliefs with the Divine. These sensibilities are manifest in Quaker morality, derived appreciably from Christian values and ethics, in ways that enable us to readily respond to contemporary moral challenges.

Shalom, a desire for wholeness and inclusion of all in community, is the spiritual essence of a Quaker understanding of justice, social justice, and by extension housing justice. 

Two contemporary uses of the concept of right relationship by Quakers reinforce both this meaning of right relationship and its importance for Quaker moral understanding of social justice:

Deep engagement with Indigenous history and justice issues by Paula Palmer and Jerilyn DeCoteau explores what right relationship among Native and non-Native peoples of North America entails. As one of several Friends Peace Teams, their “Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples” program has developed a range of publications, workshops, and other learning opportunities in their quest for understanding, reconciliation, and realization of right relationship among Indigenous peoples and descendants of European colonizers. 

In 2003, the Quaker Institute for the Future launched its Moral Economy Initiative, an undertaking to explore possibilities for a more human-centered alternative to our current profit-centered economic system. An early product of the initiative was Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver’s Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (2009), which seeks “an ethical guidance system based on ‘right relationship’” that can lead the gradual transformation of our profit-oriented economic system to a more human-centered one. 

While these expressions of right relationship are not articulated as social justice per se, they do indicate how right relationship informs the inclusionary quest for wholeness of individual and community that rests at the core of Quaker morality and sense of justice.

Shalom and right relationship thus unite in the clarion call of social justice that echoes throughout both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and takes residence in our Quaker heritage. Shalom, a desire for wholeness and inclusion of all in community, is the spiritual essence of a Quaker understanding of justice, social justice, and by extension housing justice. Right relationship imbues communities; systems; and, indeed, all of creation with harmony, integrity, and mutual benefit: a moral perspective that fuels much of Quaker activism in the world today. Combined with our understanding of a basic human right to adequate and affordable housing, we are inspired to engage our concern for adequate and affordable housing as a social good that speaks to the inherent dignity and worth of every person, to make individuals and communities whole, and to enable additional social goods like education and healthcare for households, neighborhoods, and communities alike to prosper.

Photo by jdoms 

Invested with this vision of wholeness and inclusion rooted in a Quaker yearning for justice, we pursue housing justice on many fronts: housing that is adequate and affordable, rental rate fairness, direct service to and in support of the unhoused, equitable balance in the tenant-landlord relationship, fair housing laws, and more. Individual Quakers and Quaker meetings have long been involved in service to the unhoused, working against the racism we see deeply embedded in our housing system and in the operation of food kitchens, street ministries, and shelters. Yet our moral foundation of human rights, shalom, and right relationship call us to do more. 

We recognize there is no magic elixir to cure this disease of housing injustice, and there will be no sudden turnabout in a predatory economy that seemingly must always exploit an impoverished underclass. We must now do more of what our conscience and our faith call us to do: what our means, our opportunities, and our discernment allow us to do. Perhaps we are called to contribute time and skills for standing up a service program when previously we simply gave money to the parent organization. Perhaps our meetinghouse is near an encampment or can serve as an emergency shelter overflow for a larger facility. As we await the large-scale social and economic changes that will remedy the ills we see, we seek to be of greater service still. 

As has famously been attributed to the prophet Micah, we seek “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with [y]our God” (Mic. 6:8).

Resources on Housing Justice

Data on affordable housing and homelessness is plentiful yet frequently difficult to isolate for particular needs. For national data that can also be narrowed to regional and local views, begin with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Annual Homeless Assessment Report” and the U.S. Census Bureau’s “American Housing Survey.” Also consider Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

Secondary sources that informed parts of this essay, and which point to additional interpretations and information sources, include:

• Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 1978) and Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom (United Church Press, 1976);
• Gianpaolo Baiocchi & H. Jacob Carlson’s “Housing is a Social Good,” Boston Review (June 2, 2021);
• Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright Publishing, 2017); and 
• Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Broadway Books, 2017). 

An excellent national nonprofit for both conceptual and data-driven approaches to housing issues is Alliance for Housing Justice (allianceforhousingjustice.org). And for those who care to work with other Quakers on a national approach to housing and homelessness issues, consider Quaker Institute for the Future’s Circle of Discernment on Unhoused Persons and Housing Justice (quakerinstitute.org/cod-on-homeless-people-and-housing-justice).

The post Shalom and Right Relationship appeared first on Friends Journal.

Quaker Ministries for the Homeless

Friends from a range of theological perspectives have a common interest in assisting people facing homelessness in the United States. Quakers involved in service, solidarity, and advocacy cite various sources of their motivation, such as New Testament teachings, Quaker testimonies of community and equality, or agnostic commitments to care for other people.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that 770,000 people in the United States experienced homelessness on at least one night in January 2024. Those who were counted included people staying in shelters, those occupying temporary housing, and people sleeping outdoors. The point-in-time count represented an 18 percent increase over the estimate of people lacking housing on a single night in January 2023. Some advocates say the estimate doesn’t take into account all those who are facing homelessness.

The impact of state and local laws that ban public camping has varied for those facing homelessness in the United States. Friends who advocate for and assist unhoused people report that in some cases, officials have not aggressively enforced the anti-camping ordinances. In other instances, authorities have caused significant disruption to the lives of unhoused people camping in public places. Friends who assist people facing homelessness discussed how camping bans affect those they serve, as well as the Quaker values that motivate them and the spiritual practices that sustain their work.

In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that municipalities can criminalize camping in public places. The ruling immediately applied to cities in Alaska, Arizona, California, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, and the state of Washington. The states and territories the ruling covers are part of the Ninth Circuit. Ninth Circuit judges had determined in 2018 that punishing people without access to shelter for sleeping outdoors violated the Eighth Amendment because it was cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling excluded those who had money for shelter or access to free housing but chose not to use those options. It also allowed municipalities to criminalize sleeping outdoors at particular times and in specific places.

California’s ban on public camping promotes hiding and isolation, explained Ludmilla Bade, an attender at Redwood Forest Meeting in Santa Rosa, California, and the meeting’s American Friends Service Committee liaison. Bade is on the Lived Experience Advisory Board of the University of California San Francisco Benioff Study of Homelessness in California. She experienced homelessness for about three years because she could not find affordable housing: she lived in a tiny trailer and parked on streets and country roads. For nearly six months, she parked in a trailer community called “Little Town Monte Rio,” which was dispersed by local code enforcement authorities after neighbors organized opposition on Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking site.

Asked to respond to the argument that camping bans increase the likelihood of unhoused people entering shelters, Bade said, “Being separated from one’s possessions, one’s companions, one’s vehicle, [and] one’s pet is not the same as finding a home.”

Enforcement officials usually target groups of five or more campers, according to Bade. She noted that when authorities disperse camps, unhoused people lose community and opportunities for collective self-advocacy. For example, Bade and her unhoused friend were advocating for the needs of an organized camp of more than 60 people and had contacted charities about providing portable toilets for the community. Bade had begun to help campers enroll in adult education programs offered by nearby Santa Rosa Junior College. Police “swept” the camp, scattering the residents. Officers swept residents from separate camp sites more than 20 times. Bade’s friend tried to enroll in classes at Santa Rosa Junior College but found the sweeps too traumatizing and disruptive to continue her education.

Carmen Lopez, volunteer at the shelter in the school gym. Photo by Gail Cornwall-Feeley.

In 1997, Tempe, Arizona, passed an urban camping ban, noted Dave Wells. Wells is a member of Tempe Meeting. He hosts a weekly private food-sharing event in a city park that assists people who face homelessness. According to Wells, Proposition 312 is a statewide provision that states if private property owners have to remediate such things as litter or urination on their properties, due to lack of camping ban enforcement, they can deduct the cost of doing so from their property taxes. Proposition 312 went into effect in January 2025.

Most unhoused people in Tempe are not arrested for urban camping, Wells explained. The first time police officers contact people camping in the city, they are given an official warning. A couple of people have been charged with violating the ban on urban camping, but in one case, the charges were dropped.

Officers in San Francisco also do not aggressively enforce public camping bans at all times, according to Bruce Folsom. Folsom is a member of San Francisco Meeting who stands outside the meetinghouse twice a week to converse with unhoused people and offer them clothing and first-aid supplies. In one instance, the police cleared an encampment because it was part of the scene of a crime that was unrelated to the people camping there, Folsom explained. After they investigated the crime scene, officers escorted the unhoused people back to the encampment, according to Folsom.

Sometimes San Francisco does neighborhood sweeps in which they remove unhoused people from particular areas, Folsom explained. Sweeps occur when the mayor wants to address the concerns of merchants who do not want unhoused people outside their businesses or to respond to drug sales. Sweeps can lead to some people entering shelters, but many simply move to a different area if their campsites are dismantled. More people come to the meetinghouse after sweeps.

One business near the San Francisco Meetinghouse asked homeless people not to camp in front of their building, and cacti were planted in front of the business. As a result of the request not to camp in front of the business, the unhoused campers moved a couple of doors down, according to Folsom. Having unhoused people move from one place to another does not solve the problem of people lacking shelter, Folsom observed.

Quakers have always been on the margins of what is socially acceptable and have answered a higher call to meet human needs.

Redwood Forest Meeting in Santa Rosa previously hosted a safe parking area for unhoused people who sleep in their cars. From 2020 to 2024, up to a dozen people facing homelessness parked in the meetinghouse parking lot overnight, according to Gary Melrose, an attender at Redwood Forest Meeting and member of its Property Committee. The parking lot is on private property, so it was not impacted by Santa Rosa’s camping ban, noted the meeting’s resident Friend Melanie Cantu.

Melrose has been involved in helping unsheltered people for many years, and he was the one to suggest the idea that the meeting offer a safe parking lot for those facing homelessness. It took eight or nine months for meeting members and attenders to agree to a minute supporting the project. The meeting’s insurance company said they would discontinue coverage if the meeting continued to allow unhoused people to park overnight in the parking lot. A dozen other insurance agencies denied requests for coverage without offering a rationale, according to Melrose. The insurance company’s refusal to cover the parking lot led to the project ending in 2024.

A few members and attenders at Redwood Forest Meeting thought of the people who parked in the lot as members of the community, according to Cantu. Friends acting on the equality testimony sought to offer solidarity rather than charity, Cantu explained. They wanted to avoid “othering” the people facing homelessness.

“The value of the community was the most important to us,” Cantu said.

Gail Cornwall-Feeley’s daughter Vivienne, volunteering with children at the stay-over program in the school gym. Photo by Gail Cornwall-Feeley.

Quakers have always been on the margins of what is socially acceptable and have answered a higher call to meet human needs, according to Tempe Meeting member Wells. Quakers visibly involving themselves in social justice struggles can attract people wishing to oppose injustice and inequality, according to Ruth Kearns, a member of Tempe Meeting who got arrested for opposing the Iraq War. Kearns organizes the meeting’s monthly dinner that serves unhoused people. The meeting also works at a local church, in partnership with the Interfaith Homeless Emergency Lodging Program (I-HELP), to host overnight guests who are homeless.

San Francisco Meeting member Folsom’s motive for assisting homeless people is the New Testament passage Matthew 25:35–36, in which Jesus said that followers are feeding him when they feed hungry people, quenching his thirst when they give thirsty people water, and clothing him when they provide clothes to those who need something to wear.

Zae Illo, another member of the meeting, encouraged members and attenders of San Francisco Meeting to pay attention to people enduring injustice and to act in solidarity with them. Folsom found Illo’s words inspiring and realized that he had long been missing opportunities to connect with people facing homelessness.

“For 25 years, I’ve been walking to the meetinghouse; I had been walking to the meetinghouse without noticing the people on the street,” Folsom said.

For the first time in March, San Francisco Meeting participated in an interfaith shelter program in which faith communities host unhoused people overnight in their houses of worship.

Folsom is a retired social worker who previously worked in a mental health clinic. As a social worker, he was ethically and legally prohibited from touching clients. As an informal assistant to people facing homelessness, he appreciates the opportunity to provide that kind of supportive touch if a person requests it. Folsom drew on first-aid training that he had acquired as a Boy Scout. One time a man who was homeless scraped his knuckles, and Folsom took the man’s hands in both of his own hands and offered first aid.

“It was moving for us both,” Folsom said of the gesture. The gesture of holding the man’s scraped hands deepened their relationship.

When he started the project, he had no supplies or resources and had to scramble for items every time an unhoused person asked for help with practical needs. Now he stores first-aid supplies and clothing in the meetinghouse basement and distributes the items when unhoused people request them.

Yolanda, an unhoused woman, was the first person facing homelessness to speak in a conversational manner with Folsom. Yolanda introduced Folsom to other people who lived on the street, and that enabled them to trust him. Yolanda and her partner lived in a tent on the street. They both died of a fentanyl overdose on December 27, 2023.

“Yolanda was very important to me. I learned lots of things from her,” Folsom said.

The meeting had a memorial meeting for Yolanda. The memorial gathering was the first one the meeting had held for someone who was not a member or an attender. Yolanda’s mother and sister came to the memorial meeting.

“To do this work, you have to let your heart be broken over and over again,” said Folsom, who relies on deep prayer and daily plainchant to sustain his efforts.

Yolanda. Published with permission from Yolanda’s mother after Yolanda passed away. Photo courtesy of Bruce Folsom.

San Francisco Meeting member Gail Cornwall-Feeley volunteers with her children and other Friends at an overnight shelter in the gym of Buena Vista Horace Mann K–8 Community School in the city. Friends helped the shelter operators extend the hours of the program to welcome guests during the day on Saturdays during the school year. The volunteers approach shelter guests with curiosity and seek to learn from them. Volunteers engage with the children using crafts, games, Legos, clay, and more. The activities offer parents sleeping at the shelter time to relax and converse with other adults. Some shelter guests use the time to practice English.

Cornwall-Feeley also occasionally volunteers at a food sharing event on Fridays in which participants make sandwiches and then distribute them, along with whatever else the team has on hand, such as bottles of water, socks, hand sanitizer, and masks.

Spiritual practices that sustain Cornwall-Feeley’s work with unhoused people include attending meeting for worship and fostering relationships with Quaker elders. Retired people can help prevent burnout in younger Friends. Many people of her generation have gotten caught up in productivity culture and the demands of raising young children, so it can be challenging for them to breathe and reflect often enough, Cornwall-Feeley noted. Cornwall-Feeley’s children, who now range in age from 10 to 21, also take part in the food share.

When she was asked what motivates her to participate, Cornwall-Feeley said, “Inculcating Quaker values and living them and letting my life speak and encouraging my children to let their lives speak.”

Correction: The extension of the shelter program hours in San Francisco has been clarified.

The post Solidarity with Our Unhoused Neighbors appeared first on Friends Journal.

frayed edges
of your bulging backpack
remind me that the perimeter
of my world is larger than yours
on the street

we sit together
share a meal
a roof above

tell me the story
of your dead daughter
absent sons and eviction

read me your memoir
of life without work
or shelter, or meds

smudge the pencil-mark borders
erase the margins of difference
excise the space between us:
light-years of travel from
your birth home to mine

white-out my privilege
erase my margins of indifference.

The post Monday Night in the Church Basement appeared first on Friends Journal.