03.08.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:57 pm by Max Hansen
Well, it happened. And it was good. An audience of 50 (plus kids, childcare workers, and cooks) filled the building for QHD 2007 last Saturday (3/3/07).
Our guest speaker, Brian Drayton, talked about Gospel Ministry in three very interactive sessions. Robin has posted about it on her own blog. Just now I have little to add, but here are the promised pictures. Not the best shots I’ve ever taken, but at least they came safe out of the camera.
Click any picture for a larger version.
Brian Drayton
Giuseppe and Rachel
John Gage, Camera Pro
Brian and Jack
Wess and Darcy
Not related to Brian, but heir to his studiousness
Robin and Lisa
Red-Eyed Toe-Munching Monster
A quiet moment
Robin
Lisa, Mary, Andrew
Emily
Cubby
Dour Old Sobersides Quaker and somebody else
Chris, Wess, and Darcy
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02.09.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:03 pm by Max Hansen
I’m reading Brian Drayton’s On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry. A very good book indeed. Just now I’m looking at a place which suggests, at first glance, that Brian has missed something. I actually don’t believe, based on the rest of the book as well as on personal acquaintance with Brian, that he misses much, so it’s more likely that he has intentionally passed by an important aspect of a passage he quotes.
Here’s what Brian, on page 89, quotes from Job Scott’s Journal:
I have found it my business, sometimes of late, to be more inward in travail, and less active in the exercise of the wholesome rules of society [i.e. the Religious Society of Friends] than I once was; and I believe, when I have obeyed the call into this inward, still abode, and there felt my loins rightly girded, it has contributed much more to the right exercise of the discipline, than when, through a desire for its proper administration, I have, by overreacting, seemed to do a good deal for its execution.
In introducing this passage, Brian says that Scott is writing about a “kind of cumber, arising from over activity in Quaker affairs.” And following the insertion of the passage, Brian elaborates:
“Meeting work” can take up rather more time than is appropriate, and I find myself every year, dring “nominating season,” asking myself what might be my limits and freedom in this connection.
In interpreting Scott’s passage in this way, Brian is reading in Scott both more and less than is there, and doing both in the very same aspect of the reading.
Simply put, Scott is not talking about the entire gamut of “Quaker affairs” or “meeting work.” He is talking about the exercise of discipline, a rather strictly defined subset of Quaker affairs. In this sense Brian is reading more than Scott is writing; that is, he is seeing a whole of which Scott is only talking about a part.
In another sense, Brian is seeing less than is there, in that Scott is talking about an aspect of Quaker work that is scarcely even done any more, and which many Friends wish had never been part of Quakerism: the execution of discipline. Only in the context of modern Friends’ denial of the historical role of discipline can I say that Brian is missing anything. Put another way, only because Brian is glossing over something that modern Quakerism loves to gloss over do I think his interpretation is noteworthy. While I have no disagreement with Brian’s aim, I think it’s a bit sad to lay before modern Friends such a meaningful passage, without helping them understand its meaning.
I believe there are many lessons to be learned by asking how Quakerism gave up slavekeeping. A part of the answer will be “discipline,” this very thing we are now so uncomfortable with. Unless the Society of Friends had been willing effectively to say, “this is our standard of conduct, and those who do not abide by it are not Friends,” it would have been impossible to corporately give up slaveholding.
Does is matter to us today? Only if we ever want to do make a truly prophetic corporate witness again.
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02.01.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:57 pm by maxhansen
My other blog, The Alpha Mind, has moved.
Actually, it didn’t move. I created a new blog of the same title, in a new domain. I didn’t move all the old posts.
Click the link to find the new blog.
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04.22.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:23 pm by Max Hansen
Kwakersaur: …it is not the form of waiting worship but the attitude we bring to it.
True, true (and Kwakersaur’s whole post is excellent.)
I like to see the phrase “waiting worship.” It’s the preferred phrase among some of the renewal activists in OYM(C). I like it mostly because I’ve seen it used by people who are denoting by it a different attitude from that of many people who prefer to say “unprogrammed” or “silent.” The “waiting” attitude is certainly humbler, perhaps more reverent. Among those who use it, the focus is not on the form, but on-and-for whom it is we wait.
But if that attitude changes, the phrase will (and already may, in circles in which I don’t travel) be no more meaningful than any other, and the form will be as hollow as the hollowest mass, or puritan lecture, or silent worship, or political potluck.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 8:56 am by Max Hansen
I’m also working on the program (if indeed there will be one) for the Christian Friends Conference annual west coast gathering.
On Thursday our Program Committee of three had a meeting in San Francisco (thanks, AFSC, for letting us use the space), and we had a couple of ideas we liked well enough to explore further. One of them was to have a series of three speakers who’d be likely to give rather different answers to the question
What must take place in order for there to be a renewal of Christian Quakerism?
So, as I order and read Brian Drayton’s book, I’m also thinking about possibilities for CFC for this August.
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04.21.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:51 pm by Max Hansen
This year’s Quaker Heritage Day was a smashing success. We’re so excited we’re thinking about next year’s event already. I’ve gotten one recommendation: Brian Drayton. A member of Berkeley Friends Church is reading his new book On Living With a Concern for Gospel Ministry, and says it’s excellent.
I also find that Martin Kelley quoted it the other day, in a very helpful manner.
And then there’s the fact that I’ve taken a mini-course with Brian and appreciated it a lot.
So, we have a start on next year’s event.
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04.10.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:36 pm by Max Hansen
I have put some Quaker-themed posts on my main weblog “The Alpha Mind.” However, I’ve started to think that, as I get more serious about posting, there will be very different audiences for my Quaker posts and my AlphaMind posts. So I’m separating them.
This new blog will be the Quaker blog. Just about everything else I think about will go on the other blog. I think life will be cleaner and easier this way.
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