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Re: Orthodox Quaker...
Hi,
I have been to St. Louis Meeting, but before you go looking up any Quaker
Meetings, you should be aware that there is a pretty dramatic gap between
liberal and so-called "Orthodox" Quakers. (And then there are the Conservative
Quakers, and then the Evangelical Quakers, etc.) The reasons for this are
complex and as long as the Quakers' 300 year history, but the basic gist of it
is this: the first Friends in 17th-century England didn't see themselves as
starting a new sect; they wanted to be reformers. They stripped away
everything in the Church of England that they saw as corrupt, inessential or
distracting. What they had left was a very simple worship service based in the
conviction that Jesus Christ was present and active in an immediate way that
was available to all human beings. This foundation led to a number of cultural
testimonies for which they became famous (or infamous, depending on your point
of view): commitment to peace, equality of all human beings, environmental
concerns, living simply and with integrity, and concern for the community, etc.
They eschewed a hierarchical structure and made decisions corporately. What's
happened since then, particularly in the USA, is that the community has
splintered into at least four major branches. The largest group has
re-instituted structured worship service with paid pastors and is explicitly
Christian in focus. They may or may not still have a committment to the
traditional testimonies.
The second largest group has held on to the simple worship and the traditional
testimonies, but tends not to make any corporate creedal statements; that's up
to the individual. So they tend to welcome just about anybody who wants to
come along on the journey, without demanding adherence to any particular credal
affirmation. You will find Christians, Buddhists, Pagans, and even atheists in
liberal Friends Meetings. They also tend not to evangelize, which is why the
other group is larger. :-)
The two smaller groups are the conservatives, who try to hold on to both the
explicit christianity and the unprogrammed worship (hence, "conservative" is
only meant to refer to within Quakerism; they are on average much more liberal,
politically, than the "orthodox" Friends), and the Evangelicals, about whom I
don't know a whole lot, but they don't seem to me to be very different from
other protestant evangelicals. Some of them even do water baptism, I hear,
which even the orthodox Quakers don't do.
There are still similarities across the dispersion that could, in theory,
become common ground, but there is very little communication across those
divisions. Many people don't even know the other kinds of Quakers exist.
So, that's 300 years in a nutshell. In general, liberal Friends tend to call
their gathering places "Friends Meetings", while the orthodox tend to call
theirs "Friends Churches", so you might want to look at that distinction first
of all, so you can know what to expect. See http://www.quaker.org for a lot
more information.
Or email me off-list, and I'd be happy to answer any further questions...
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Some people dream of fortunes, while other people dream of cookies."
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