This Quaker thing...

I'm sitting in the terminal at the Long Beach airport. My flight is delayed, which seems to be the norm rather than the exception. One good thing about all of the travel I've been doing lately is that it's given me more time to blog. The other thing I like about travel is that I get a lot of reading done. The book that has accompanied me on this trip is "The People Called Quakers" by D. Elton Trueblood, which is a fantastic primer on Quaker history and theology. The thing I hate about travel is being away from my family.

Perhaps I should explain what this whole "Quaker thing" is about.
I am not a Quaker, at least not yet, but I've found tremendous resonance and affinity with Quakerism through the writings of Friends (as Quakers call themselves) like George Fox, William Penn, John Woolman, Rufus Jones, Elton Trueblood, et al.

In the past I knew little about the Quakers other than vague impressions of honest, simple, hard-working, plain dressing people noted for their integrity and peculiar "silent" church meetings.

I came to learn more about them through a circuituous route: A couple of years ago I was reading a lot of M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled, The Different Drum, etc.). I was at a Half Price Books store, in the self-help section, looking for another Peck book when my eye was caught by a book entitled Addiction and Grace by Gerald May (M for May, P for Peck -- get it?). I firmly believe that the Holy Spirit often guides me in my book selections and I felt a "leading" to give this one a closer look. Plus it was cheap (thank you Half Price Books!), so I bought it. Addiction and Grace ended up having a revolutionary effect upon my worldview and theology. Even though I had never thought of myself as an addict, May's book was (and continues to be) one of the most important things I've ever read.

I learned that, prior to his death, May was very involved in contemplative Christian practices, including those of Quakerism. This piqued my interest to learn more about the Quakers. Sometime later I attended a Quaker "meeting for worship" and found it to be a profound experience. Since then, I've been reading and learning more about The Religious Society of Friends.

Let me back up a bit. I believe that I've been on a personal journey of discovery, led by the Holy Spirit, for my entire life (I believe this is true for all of us). The ultimate destination of this journey is home, immersed in the presence of God. A quantum leap in my journey occured when I became a follower of Jesus in my early 20's, but it certainly didn't stop at that point. Rather, the journey gained purpose and focus. At the age of 40 I became a pastor (specifically, an Associate Pastor at a Vineyard). This was supposed to be an accomplishment, but it left me with the uneasy feeling of having more questions than answers. "If I'm a pastor in a church," I reasoned, "I'd better learn what that means." I turned to the Bible and found very little in it that corresponded to the role of pastor as I'd seen it portrayed in my 20 years of being a Christian. This led to a greater question: "Since the pastor's role is within the church, what is church?" I began earnestly digging to try to understand what the true meaning of "church" is. Unfortunately, some of my questions and conclusions were upsetting to the status quo. I left the church I was part of (not entirely of my own volition) and began meeting with other believers in a "house church". This experience was thrilling, transcendant, challenging, heartbreaking and invaluable.

The hardest part of trying to form and lead a house church was that I had no language or model for it, beyond books and blogs that I was reading (including, of course, the New Testament). I knew what church wasn't supposed to look like, but only had inklings about what it was supposed to be. Slowly the picture was coming into focus but, tragically, after a couple of wonderful years, the house church was rocked by a split from which it never recovered (the cause of the split was, of all things, doctrinal differences about eschatology -- I can think of few things more ridiculous than Christians breaking fellowship with one-another over doctrinal differences, yet it happens all the time). I was heartbroken and my confidence was shattered. There are a million ways I could have handled it better, but I didn't know what I was doing.

It was only later, when I read Peck's "The Different Drum" that I began to understand what had happened to our community (and why what happened was almost inevitable).

Anyway, via Peck I came (quite accidently) to May and via May I came upon Quakerism. I say "accidently" but I believe the Holy Spirit has been leading me by a trail of bread crumbs (and books) the whole way.

What amazes me about the Quakers is that the questions I have been asking and the answers I have been coming to about the church, church leadership, discipleship, community, social justice, etc., were the exact things they had worked through 350 years earlier! I've begun to feel like G.K. Chesterton when he wrote in the Introduction to his book, Orthodoxy:

"I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas... There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales."

Chesterton goes on to admit:

"...I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England... I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious."

So too, I seem to have travelled a tortuous and winding route -- more often than not sailing through a fog with only vague shapes and muffled sounds in the distance -- in search of something new that was already discovered 350 years ago! And those adventurers 350 years ago only rediscovered something that had been there since the 1st century. And perhaps, across the generations since the earliest Christians met in homes and shared their food and Spiritual gifts with one-another, there have always been explorers who leave the familiar comforts of inherited forms & traditions & dogmas, and eventually come to rest on these same primitive shores.

So, am I becoming "convinced", as the Quakers say? Will I convert to Quakerism, or remain an independent "Quasi-Quaker"? If I can find a group of Quakers that still has the spiritual dynamism of George Fox, the moral clarity of John Woolman and the theological depth of Elton Trueblood, I'll gladly throw in with them. If, on the other hand, I find only a calcified, sleepy vestige of what once was, then I'll move on and continue to pilot my own yacht through these strangely familiar waters.