Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

Why is NC Quakerism Vanishing While Baltimore YM Flourishes?

What, Carolina Friends might be asking, do they know “up there” in Baltimore YM that NCYM doesn’t?

I’ve attended many BYM annual sessions, been on its committees; I’ve also attended several NCYM sessions.
And my expert explanation comes down to this:

I don’t know.

But I have a few suspicions.

Here’s the top one: in BYM, they haven’t had any doctrinal purges.

Well– that’s not completely accurate. There was this one big one, back in 1827; Hicksites and all that. Pretty ugly it was, too.

But after pondering the impact for about 110 years, they decided maybe it hadn’t really been such a good idea, and started a process of reconciliation that culminated in the late 1960s.

Then, while coming back together, they settled on a form of YM governance that’s strongly congregational. . . .

A third was that, even in strongly “Christ-centered” meetings, most skipped the pastoral system. Yes, several meetings did hire “secretaries” who (being men at first), were somewhat pastor-ish. A couple of larger BYM meetings still have them, but the pastoral features have devolved to committees.

This mainly non-pastoral culture is hardly perfect. But viewed from the Carolina side of the border, it has seemed to help avoid some major pitfalls, two in particular:

For one, it did see the pastorate fill up with non-Quakers (or what I call “Quakers by employment”), too many of whom decide their meetings should become just like the church back home.

And second, it did not nurture a network of mainly males with too much free time, some of whom are almost fated to start plotting to overthrow the established YM order. This is always explained as the way to become more Godly & Christian (tho I think it’s more about testosterone), and is guaranteed to pack the benches with eager converts, donating profusely for bigger buildings and, not incidentally, salaries.

Then too, without pastor’s pay and benefits to bedevil treasurers, BYM meetings are much more economical to maintain.

Carolina Quakers: Is The Potboiler Season Over Yet?

A few weeks ago, NCYM was boiling over with the ruckus over proposals to break up (or chop up) the body; then steaming with fury at annual sessions after three meetings were unexpectedly expelled. Followed by worry over what to do about “The Way Forward,” the plan being developed to placate the urge to purge all meetings deemed “liberal.”

But that was then. News came today that two more meetings, pillars of the militant purge-faction, have left. And it felt like no big deal. There may be more exits. That’s too bad; but something has changed: the steam is dissipating. The smoke alarm is quiet.

Part of it was how one meeting, Plainfield, did it. Long gone is the bluster of their letter of a year ago, unfurling the battle flag of the purge-the-liberals crusade: they decried “severe Theological differences, integrity, stewardship, and the lack of Christ centeredness, among some of our Meetings and among some of the leadership within NCYM.”

They vowed to withhold their Askings after April 1 of this year (tho in fact they didn’t), unless by then their demands for a purge were not “dealt with”; except they said it DEALT with, using bigger type, bold and italicized, all caps and underlined, to give it fivefold emphasis and urgency. Boiling over.

Yet their good-bye letter sounds almost like a thank you card from a polite house guest who has had a great time; not a peep about grievances. Not with a bang but a goodbye kiss.

Carolina Quakers’ “Grand Plan” II: Gotta Do Better, Friends

this “Grand Plan” ought to be an opportunity to take “steps” that put NCYM on the path of learning to live with each other, in the spirit of Galatians 6:2 (“Bear one another’s burdens, for in this you fulfill the law of Christ”) and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, growing together until the harvest, when the true Judge (which is NOT one of us) will make the needed reckoning (Matthew 13:24-30), instead of some narrow and divisive notions of “unity-by-exclusion and division.”

But “The Plan” is not anything like that. Not yet. So let’s send it back to the drawing board and come up with some new “steps” that will begin to really take us “forward”, rather than backward into another round of fruitless wrangling over tired and pointless disputes.

Otherwise, we’ll just be fulfilling (again) Paul’s prediction in Galatians 5:15: “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

Friends can do better in North Carolina. It’s time.

Carolina Quakers & “The Way Forward” — Or Is It The Way Backward?

And here’s a suggestion to meetings: when this Plan comes up, how about you start by asking thyselves: do we really want to do this? Or are there more urgent and constructive priorities for our meeting and NCYM?

Because if many others are as tired of this kind of thing as I am, maybe that’s feedback the Task Force needs to hear, and soon. As my early Clearness Committee, The Supremes, put it so well in 1965: “STOP! In The Name Of Love!”

My own uneasiness deepens when moving from the first four “Steps” in “The Plan” (we’ll come back to them) to the “Recommended Way Forward” section. That’s the “action part,” and the more times I read it, the more uneasy I get.

The fact is, Friends, it doesn’t sound like a “request” for input into a collective, transparent, open-to-the-spirit discernment process.

Not at all. Which sets off the alarms and raises the warning flags.

For one thing, look at this instruction:

“This request shall be considered by all monthly meetings and a copy of the approved minute related to this request submitted to the Yearly Meeting office by December 1, 2015 for review by the Task Force.”

The paper says “request,” but I grew up in a military family. I know an order when I read it. I also did pretty well in English class. And I know that “Shall” used in the third person connotes an order, a requirement or an obligation. I got it.

Another North Carolina Meeting Bails Out. Who’s Next?

A year ago, on August 30, 2014, Friends from Pine Hill Meeting of Ararat, NC, were at North Carolina Yearly Meeting-FUM’s annual session, demanding a purifying division in NCYM, to banish the iniquity of “dual affiliation.”

The “dual affiliation” which was so repugnant was membership by a handful of NCYM meetings in Piedmont Friends Fellowship (PFF), a loose regional network of meetings from various YMs (and none), founded in the 1960s, and connected to the liberal association, Friends General Conference (FGC).
Now fast-forward to September 13, 2015: last First Day (Sunday) evening.

In a lightly-attended business meeting, Pine Hills Meeting achieved its goal of a separation from these tainted groups.

But it didn’t happen quite the way they were expecting it to in 2014. Instead, it was Pine Hills that quit NCYM, “effective immediately.”