All posts by Chuck Fager

Max Carter Speaks Out for Expelled New Garden Meeting

Image August 26, 2015 Chuck Fager 9 Comments

Max Carter Speaks Out for Expelled New Garden Meeting

We just interviewed Max Carter, a newly retired former faculty member and Director of the Friends Center at Guilford College. Max is also a member of New Garden Friends Meeting (NGFM), recently pronounced “released” [i.e., expelled] by the North Carolina Yearly Meeting (NCYM) Executive Committee.

Max-Carter-for-NGFM (We have also offered to let an informed member of the other two “released” NCYM Meetings, Holly Spring & Poplar Ridge, make their case against the Executive Committee action here. No takers yet.)

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Northwest Appeal Drama: Why Did Spokane Meeting’s Letter Vanish?

[I]t’s too bad that a document which challenges so well a process that is shrouded and “self-sequestered,” lacking transparency and “openheartedness,” doesn’t stay open to those interested, inside and outside the yearly meeting.

Challenging the secretive and arbitrary “leadership culture” in NWYM is a recurrent theme of the appeals. From outside at least, it looks much better when the challengers to that culture walk the talk.

Eight-Plus Appeals of Northwest Welcoming Meeting’s Expulsion

Procedurally, the course is straightforward: the appeals will be considered and acted on by the NWYm Administrative Council.

But on what timetable? Here the response of YM officials has also been straightforward: No Comment. No timetable has been acknowledged. So it could take a month — it could take a year.

This stonewalling reinforces a complaint heard in most of the appeals, about a lack of transparency and accountability by NWYM’s top councils. For those below, a strict deadline was imposed and requests for flexibility denied.

But for those above? They will act when they are good and ready, and those subject to it will take the decision, when it comes, and that will be that.

This corporate attitude also echoes the way the expulsion of West Hills was handled: announced just after the end of its annual sessions, when Friends were scattered and enroute home.

Most of the internal appeals couched their complaints about this “lack of transparency” and accountability at the top in very euphemized terms.

But this outsider can be more blunt: as Quaker process, it stinks.

“He’s Got The Whole World In His [VERY WHITE] Hands”

I went to the website of a Friends church out west today, seeking information about a dispute of which readers have heard a good deal here.

Didn’t find any, but while browsing, saw an image that seemed very striking, for the church’s Vacation Bible School:

The caption for it was — as thee might expect, “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands.”

Some of us might know that the song which gave rise to this meme is one of the classic black spirituals.

But maybe many of us don’t.

Wikipedia says it was first published a 1927 collection, Spirituals Triumphant. And while the song has been recorded by numerous artists of various backgrounds, I’m old enough to remember 1958, when a British teenager, Laurie London, became a one-hit wonder when his version, a smash in the UK, managed the then-unthinkable and crossed the Atlantic to hit #2 on the U.S. pop charts.

Laurie London, whose popstar career was very short; he was last spotted running a pub near London.
I say this because after pondering the image above, I couldn’t help but notice that the hands in it (or at lest the wrists), are quite noticeably caucasian — er, white.

It made me wonder: The hands for the whole world are like that? Hmmmm.

How widespread, I wondered was this probably unconscious, or at least unthinking, notion?

“We Expelled Nobody!” Says Carolina Executive Committee. Really?

“Under our Faith and Practice, the Executive Committee has the ability to make any decision not inconsistent with its described authority. Although its described authority is vague, my years of service on the Executive Committee have, if anything, taught me that the widely accepted exercise of the Executive Committee’s authority is much broader. A decision of the Executive Committee, though, is “subordinate to” the Representative Body.”

To which I say, Whoa, Nelly!

This “vaguely described” authority is too “vague” and sweeping for me. And letting the committee take unto itself the prerogative of deciding that this or that meeting has forfeited its membership in the yearly meeting, with no warrant, no notice, no standards and no procedural guides, is a recipe for big trouble.