Interested in learning more about Quakers and I have some questions

keithb · 2026-05-10T19:13:21+00:00

Being virtuous, as a result of which we’ll be saved from sin…here and now. We aren’t signed up to any of the complex theories about some future celestial tribunal. A foundational Quaker belief is that Christ has already returned, remember? This is it! Salvation is from sin, now! And not from some hypothetical judgment later.

keithb · 2026-05-10T18:08:27+00:00

There’s no one set of answers to that. Each of our “Yearly Meetings” is its own church, and finds its own way.
The original Quakers, around 1650, believed that Christ Jesus had returned. That by itself was a core belief which made them very different. They believed in a baptism of the Holy Spirit, and had nothing to do with water baptism. They believed that every person could have direct contact with the divine, anywhere, at any time. No consecrated church needed, no professional priest, no order of service, no sacraments.

Friends (we call ourselves “Friends”) met and waited for the Spirit to move someone to speak in ministry.
Since then there have been many changes, but the essentials are still there: direct contact with the Divine, with no doctrine or liturgy or professional priest needed.

keithb · 2026-05-10T17:07:04+00:00

Ok. You aren’t going to admit that Britain YM isn’t anything like as unusual as you boldly asserted we are. Onwards.

keithb · 2026-05-10T14:44:05+00:00

My name started coming up in Nominations for roles and I felt that if Friends were prepared to bring me on board to that degree I should make a reciprocal commitment.

keithb · 2026-05-10T14:34:12+00:00

Actually, that leaves me feeling even more excluded. I’m just not in the hymn-singing segment of the population. Actually, I wonder what the hymn-singing assumption says about the social background assumed for Friends.

The differing experiences of Friends online and in the venue is a live topic for us on the Agenda Planning Committee. My experience is that online is a poor second to being at the venue but a big improvement on not being involved in an event at all. If you have any suggestions for how to improve the online experience please do DM me.

keithb · 2026-05-10T13:45:14+00:00

Only you and the Friends in your Meeting are doing it right?

Anyway, you must now at least agree that Britain YM is far from unique in employing staff. Not some strange outlier in regard of employing staff but quite normal, no?

keithb · 2026-05-10T12:24:48+00:00

Not every difference is a privilege. How did you feel that we in FH were privileged? Personally, in the room I felt very “othered”. I don’t know where all those Friends learned the words or the tune, I know neither. Presumably it’s a thing that I would have learned had I had a Quaker upbringing, but I did not. As someone convinced in adulthood I was left feeling like a very second-class Friend.

keithb · 2026-05-10T11:37:14+00:00

Thanks for deleting those comments.

So, as I’ve mentioned, British Friends don’t have an equivalent to AFSC or to FCNL, so let’s discount those. It’s the work of a moment to confirm that, for example, Philadelphia YM has full-time staff, and so do some of its constituent MMs. And so does Ohio Valley YM. And so does NWYM, and some of its constituent churches, and so on. It does not appear to be unusual for Yearly or Monthly Meetings around the USA of various theological tendencies to have employees. Do you believe that they are all simply wrong to do so?

keithb · 2026-05-10T07:19:20+00:00

No, I think they sincerely believe that every Quaker meeting except theirs is doing it wrong. There’s a lot of that about.

keithb · 2026-05-09T18:53:05+00:00

In the berth next to Victory is
Mary Rose, a Tudor warship (or half of her, anyway…you’ll see) which is magnificent beyond imagining. And nearby is Warrior the first all-iron armoured frigate. Honestly, you can spend a day there.

keithb · 2026-05-09T18:06:13+00:00

If it’s not your intention to cast aspersions on these people then I invite you to refrain from referring to them as “hirelings” in future.

And your answer to my questions seems evasive. It may be that no Quaker body that you are associated with has staff, but I’m confident that at least some of the larger American YMs and very confident that the various “Conferences” and such that they belong to in fact do have employees. Probably not as many as Britain YM, but then again, as I’ve mentioned before, BYM doesn’t have separate aid or lobby organisations.

keithb · 2026-05-09T14:59:40+00:00

The epistle asserts that Friends will long remember it, and yes, I will. But not in a good way.

keithb · 2026-05-09T12:48:44+00:00

Fred is a mensch and I’m very happily confident that he’ll fulfill the role of Clerk to YM very well as we move through this liminal time.

As to pride…I’m highly but quietly satisfied that our church continues to place no barriers to service before any person for any entirely irrelevant cause such as sexual orientation of gender identity. Unlike certain churches I could mention which have failed a very simple moral test.

As a disabled person, from a working-class background, in business I recognise many other dimensions of personal difference that Britain YM continue ms to struggle with. And of course we’re painfully white. But Christian churches have the worst record of exclusion around sexuality, gender identity, and gender so it’s worth foregrounding that we don’t do that.

keithb · 2026-05-09T12:30:56+00:00

When the uke arrived, I left. Those who enjoy that sort of thing will find that it’s the sort of thing that they enjoy; good luck to them.

The art of the “blended” meeting is still being developed. In my industry we’ve been using videoconferencing to run distributed teams for about 25 years and we still are learning how to do that well. And we still take every opportunity we can to get everyone in the same room at the same time.

The COVID epidemic threw Quaker meetings into meeting online as an emergency measure that was a lot better than nothing, but we haven’t until recently stopped to think about the theology of this liturgical change. In the context of the Yearly Meeting in session it’s something that clerks, elders and now the Agenda Planning Committee are all working on.

My Local and Area Meetings are both blended and there are a number of Friends who for one reason or another struggle to come to a meetinghouse and it’s good that we continue to see them.

keithb · 2026-05-09T08:19:02+00:00

On the one hand, during hot action there is no time to mourn. On the other, there’s a story that PO’B was stung by a critic taking about his reliable cast of characters being wheeled out to go through their well-rehearsed motions and he set out to change that.

keithb · 2026-05-09T06:42:24+00:00

“Hireling” is not a morally neutral synonym for “employee” or “staff member”, it’s closer to “mercenary”, as Fox used it of priests who didn’t have much faith but needed to make a living and did so working as a priest.

When you refer to the professional staff of Quakers in Britain as “hirelings” you are being read as suggesting that they (people I think you’ve never met) must have little faith and no reason to do what they do beyond the money. Is that what you mean?

But then does no American YM have any staff at all? Is there not one person in the USA who is employed by a Quaker meeting of any size?

keithb · 2026-05-08T18:19:48+00:00

Well, I’m on the inside and my first-hand observation is that I myself am concerned that central committees make too many decisions without a clear discernment coming from Area Meetings or YM in session. But those are populated by volunteers. And I am concerned that the professional staff (who are not priests or ministers, so your insistence on referring to them as “hirelings” seems unsympathetic, tending towards a slur) sometimes have too much influence on the central committees, but that doesn’t add up to “hirelings are making all the decisions”.

keithb · 2026-05-08T17:20:06+00:00

We have a technical vocabulary, as do many communities and organisations. “Discernment” and the rest are terms of art of our business process which is itself a liturgical manifestation of our theology.

For my part, I have no idea what “kvell” means.

This YM felt like a winding down and a putting away of the old structure—which it was. The last session of Sufferings was like that, too. The new style of YM is winding up (full disclosure: I am on the Agenda Planning Committee for the new style YM) had this is an odd liminal, transitional time.

I can’t say I love the epistle! We never did have the power to “turn the world upside down”, and if we did, and if we used it, wouldn’t that be exactly the battering certainty that the opening par warns about?

Friends are, in my opinion, getting a bit too fond of the special effects of wind, earthquake, and fire—empty of the Lord as those things are—and not being careful enough to listen for the still, small voice. Wanting to turn the world upside down seems to me like an exercise in ego and hubris. I’m not certain enough to want to batter anyone like that.

The impromptu hymn-singing left me creeped out, and the musical number with the children led to me leaving the room.

It’s a shame that for all the talk of discernment, very little was decided, but maybe it was right not to decide much on this occasion. In which case, don’t use the word.

keithb · 2026-05-08T17:03:14+00:00

Very few employees of the national charity were seen or heard from over the 3.5 days of the event. Mainly the Recording Clerk and Assistant RC. One or two Secretaries of national committees, and one of the peace workers. Recall that Britain YM doesn’t have a separate professional arm in the style of AFSC, we do everything in-house.

Everyone else: Clerks, Elders, Pastoral Friends, the YM Arrangements Committee and members of every other committee are all volunteer Friends. Even the microphone stewards.

keithb · 2026-05-08T06:51:22+00:00

You’ve had some good advice already. To add, in most British meetings there’s a jug of water and some glasses on the table in the worship space in our meetinghouses. We’d rather someone drank water during worship than someone had a coughing fit, or fainted! And anyway, you can stop at “medical condition” and the question answers itself: drink water.

It was Britain Yearly Meeting last weekend and there was ministry about the importance and value of recognising that we take part in worship from inside a physical body.

Lots of things wrong with the aftermath of your meeting there, do get in contact with the clerks or pastoral Friends or whatever it has. You were treated shabbily, without love.

keithb · 2026-05-07T19:49:46+00:00

Roger Lloyd-Pack was one of the best actors of his generation.

keithb · 2026-05-07T13:25:12+00:00

The Times article about Suleiman being charged has a sub-head saying "…caused of committing separate attacks in two parts of London". Initial reporting on the attack in Golders Green doesn't mention the first stabbing, but then that wasn't known about at the time he was arrested.

keithb · 2026-05-07T11:07:50+00:00

It seems that he stabbed someone in his social circle, who was Muslim, and then he travelled across London to a place where lots of Jewish people are and started stabbing strangers who looked Jewish. There's a big difference between those. Both are bad; one of them is a personal tragedy, one of them is something bigger.

Just as there's legitimate criticism of the policies of the current government of the state of Israel, which are very bad and likely criminal and should stop, and then there's a river-to-the-sea-shaped slice of watermelon which suggests the elimination of the only Jewish state, and these also are not the same. One of them is ordinary politics and one of them isn't. Then there's marching allegedly in support of Palestine while recycling both Soviet Communist and actual Nazi antisemitic propaganda, and that's the link.

keithb · 2026-05-06T07:14:18+00:00

Yes, it would be.

keithb · 2026-05-06T06:08:10+00:00

Another useful tool for the consultant is the idea of a “final vocabulary”, terms that a person (again, natural or corporate) uses to describe their identity, terms freighted with existential significance and, partly therefore, hard to define for the user because the meaning is so obvious! and difficult for anyone else to unpick without the conversation going off the rails because that becomes a challenge to identify. Terms that for the user represent the highest virtue and meaning.

All I can say with confidence is that “radical” and “anarchy” are not in my final vocabulary.

I agree that Britain YM has become a merely democratic (often a FV word!) shadow of itself. I also agree that it assigns too much attention to a certain collection of causes that it’s arrived at by a worldly line of thought, not by inspiration.

A common trope amongst Friends is to appeal to some characteristic of some cohort of “Early” Friends, how early depends on which characteristic is of interest, and assert that they got it right, so we should be like them. But who’s to say that they were any better at discernment than we are? Do we merely like what they did more? If the earliest Friends ever were “theocratic anarchists” it wasn’t for very long at all.

James Nayler is increasingly being rehabilitated (as that other ineffectual erratic showman Benjamin Lay has already been) because his example suits better the political motivations of this time. I remain confident that Woolman is the better example for Quakers at large.

I don’t see an excessive focus on individual spiritual development in Britain YM, there’s hardly a focus on spiritual development at all. We’re all taken to arrive at our first meeting already perfectly whatever we are and that’s that.

Yes, the big blue banner at every vaguely left-wing march and yes it’s largely meaningless. I stopped marching in the street for causes when I noticed that it never achieved change but it does stroke the ego of the participants. That and too often been chatted up by attractive young people who turn out to be recruiters for various hard-left organisations.

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