Falling behind in (Sunday) school

OK, before 100 Quakers jump on me – some call it “Sunday School”, some call it “First Day School”, some call it “Christian Education”. I can live with any of these.

A lot of people think it’s just for kids – not surprising, since organizing an educational program for children takes a LOT of time, energy, resources (sometimes including money for materials) and especially people to make it happen.

Sunday School, as it was originally created in the late 1700’s, had a much more ambitious goal: literacy, and the formation of Christian character. In that era, very few families could afford to send their children to any kind of school. In rural areas, children were needed on the farm as soon as possible. In cities, the majority of working-class children grew up unable to read, and many never attended any kind of church.

Sunday School was just that – school on Sunday, for whoever wanted to learn. Most Sunday schools taught basic literacy, supplemented by lending libraries on a variety of subjects (books were scarce). In many places, attendance at Sunday School was considerably larger than the number of people who showed up for worship. (Most Sunday schools today draw less than 25% of the attendance at regular worship.)

The American Sunday School Union was an ecumenical, parachurch organization which distributed lesson plans, teacher training outlines, Bibles and other supplies. There was a heavy emphasis on memorizing Bible verses – as readers of Tom Sawyer will remember, students earned a small blue paper ticket for every 2 Bible verses they memorized. 10 blue tickets could be
exchanged for 1 red ticket; 10 red tickets equaled 1 yellow ticket; and as a reward for earning 10 yellow
tickets, students were given a Bible. If you do a little math, you’ll see that to get a Bible, students had to
memorize 2x10x10x10, or 2,000 verses of Scripture!

[Full disclosure: Springfield Friends Meeting, where I serve as pastor, organized the first Sunday School in the state of North Carolina in 1818, when Abigail Alberston began teaching children in her home. It grew quickly and was soon taken over as a ministry of the meeting. Hundreds of children – not all of them Quakers – learned to read here at Springfield, and Sunday School was often the only formal education they had in their lives.]

Sunday School also often taught social skills – cooperating with others, listening, politeness and grooming. It was the one place where kids were expected to show up scrubbed and clean once a week, with shoes if possible, and behave themselves. In the 1800’s, older kids in Sunday School were often encouraged to “take the pledge” against using alcohol and tobacco.

Today, Quaker kids are less likely to show up at Sunday/First Day school every week – especially during the COVID epidemic, which has caused havoc in Christian Education programs all over the country. Quaker kids are much less likely to get a solid grounding in the Bible, and are more likely to hear lessons on “Quaker SPICE” (the testimonies of Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality).

Rather than offering serious spiritual or character formation, many Sunday School programs are a combination of child care plus a basic and inadequate religious teaching, in the vague hope that the kids will somehow absorb a smattering of ideas. (I still remember a parent at one meeting telling me frankly that they would drop their children off at Sunday School, and then drive home quickly and make love – it was the only private time they had all week!)

Most Sunday School programs suffer from a perennial shortage of teachers – very few adults are willing to commit to being here every week, with a prepared lesson, or to put up with little or not training, support or encouragement. I’ve known a very few meetings where adults were expected to take turns teaching Sunday School on a regular basis, either week by week or for a month or a semester at a time.

To be fair, I have also known number of loving and dedicated Sunday School teachers who were willing to do anything for the children under their care, for years and even decades on end. They are often retired teachers or other professionals who have spent a lifetime looking out for other people, and without them, most programs would fall apart in very short order.

An even deeper and more serious weakness is that most Friends meetings today are short on adults who are knowledgeable about the subjects we expect them to teach – Bible, Quaker history, spirituality and social issues. As an old saying goes, “no spring can rise higher than its own source” – you can’t teach what you don’t know yourself. Problems with children’s education often reflect serious failings in adult education. Very few people have taken the time to really know enough about the Bible, about prayer and the inner life, about the great and wonderful tapestry of Quaker saints, or other subjects, in order to create their own lessons and teach them to different ages.

Instead, most congregations rely on a mix of craft activities, pre-printed puzzles and coloring pages, and curriculum supplied by various Christian publishers. Kids may (or may not) wind up learning anything useful or enduring from these materials, which is very discouraging both for the parents and for the teachers.

It’s not all bad or wrong – some of the most essential lessons children can ever learn are that God loves them, that church or meeting is a safe place, that different adults outside their families care about them very much, and that the Bible can be a source of varied and interesting stories. That’s all very, very good – but it could be so much more!

In my next post, I want to talk about the challenges and serious failings of adult education in Friends meetings today.

As always, these posts are meant to encourage discussion and questions. Comments are welcome!

COVID Reflections 1 – Keeping people safe and connected

Hey there, Friends!

It’s been a long time since I posted to this blog. Frankly, things were just too busy, and way too crazy, for me to stop and think very hard about the future of the Quaker movement in the 21st century.

I can clearly remember the day back in March of 2020 when things finally shut down. The news about the new COVID-19 epidemic had been getting worse and worse every day. Our family had filled our freezer, stockpiled pet food and toilet paper. We canceled travel plans, bought a box of face masks, and checked our shelf full of favorite DVD’s, and thought we were ready to face what we thought might be a 2 or 3-week quarantine.

I grew up with family stories about epidemics – the polio epidemic that I just missed as a child (I was one of the first to get the new Salk vaccine), the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 which killed more people than WWI did, the endemic typhoid in New Orleans which killed members of my family. My dad, who was a history teacher, told us about how the Black Death killed a third of the population of Europe in the 1300’s.

I knew that COVID was going to be rough. I just didn’t know how rough or how scary and depressing it was going to be. On the Friday when the quarantine started, I remember a line from Shakespeare which kept running through my head – “The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.”

That first week, our meeting set up a phone tree to help everyone stay in touch with each other. I immediately started recording my Sunday worship messages and weekly Bible studies to post on Facebook. 22 months later, I’m still doing two recordings every week! (True confession: I’ve been doing it all this time in my office using my iPhone, an old camera tripod, and a music stand from the choir room to hold my notes.)

Almost all of our meeting’s special events, fellowship meals and other social activities got canceled. For four months, we didn’t even try to hold meeting for worship in person. During the summer of 2020, we started holding worship outdoors in front of the meetinghouse – people either sat in their cars, or in widely-spaced groups of chairs in the shade under the trees. When the weather got cold in October, we cautiously moved back inside.

In-person, indoor worship during COVID has been a big challenge. We wear masks. We encouraged safe social distancing by simply removing the cushions from every row of pews. Because singing was shown to be a highly efficient way of spreading the virus, we gave up singing hymns – that one really hurt!

Attendance slowly built back up, but we’re still only at about 50% of the number of people who came regularly every Sunday before COVID. (More true confession: we’re actually getting more people watching the videos than we were getting here at worship or in person for Bible study before COVID!)

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because the same stuff played out in congregations all over the place.

Pastoral care was a really difficult challenge. Normally I spend 4-8 hours a week visiting folks in the hospital, at retirement facilities, or in homes or their places of work. It’s an important part of the “glue” that holds our meeting together, and the presence and prayers bring a lot of comfort and encouragement to people and to their families.

All of a sudden, visitors were banned and health care facilities of all kinds were locked down. Many of our old members became virtual prisoners in solitary confinement for weeks and months on end. That kind of isolation can and does trigger major depression and mental illness, and a lot of people really went off the rails in nursing homes during the lockdown.

The meeting newsletter and weekly e-mails took on a lot of extra importance. We share news about each other, resources for reading and family activities, as well as the latest updates and practical guidance from the health department. Most people in the meeting welcomed the latter, but a few people were irritated by what they felt was an overreaction which was hurting schools, churches and businesses.

Our primary goal from the beginning was to keep people safe. We tried new things and adapted old ones, or put them on hold for the time being. In my next catch-up blog post, I want to share some of the things we learned and tried during the ordeal – 22 months and counting! – which has been COVID.

Quakers and applause

A couple of years ago our meeting hired a new choir director, a recent college graduate who did his best with our oddly-assorted group of Quaker singers (3 sopranos, 4 altos, 1 tenor and 1 bass). He also agreed to sing a solo once a month to liven up our music at worship.

The first time he sang, at the end of the piece he bowed very slightly and then waited, expecting some kind of response from the meeting. Being traditional Quakers, they bowed their heads in silence, which led into the unprogrammed or open worship time we have every week.

The choir director came to me afterward and asked if there was something wrong with what he did – why didn’t anyone applaud or say something? He was clearly hurt and anxious about whether he was about to be fired. People had come up to him and thanked him after meeting, but for him, the lack of response in the moment was very discombobulating.

I tried to explain the difference between performance and worship, but he was still very upset. We talked it over at the next choir practice and at Ministry and Counsel, and several people said that they had always been puzzled about our not applauding. We decided that it would be all right if people wanted to clap for musical solos or for the choir – we already clap for announcements about birthdays or happy events like a wedding announcement or the return of someone who has recovered from a serious illness.

It made me reflect that there is some part of the Quaker ethos which makes us reluctant to thank or congratulate each other openly, to acknowledge achievements or mark the milestones in each others’ lives. In Quaker communities, there seems to be a feeling that applauding will make the applaudee feel stuck-up, or that we’re honoring the individual rather than honoring God.

I have come across several accounts of prayer in meetings in the 1700’s and early 1800’s. Allen Jay describes the scene: “The stillness was sometimes broken by vocal prayer, during which the congregation rose, pulled off their hats, and turned their backs to the one who was engaged in vocal prayer. We were also expected to bow our heads, and, when he was through, to sit down with as little noise as possible.” (Autobiography of Allen Jay, 2010 edition, pp. 8-9) As a Quaker pastor, I’m certainly glad we have given up that practice! I’m not sure I could handle that every week.

I’ve been in several Quaker gatherings where someone has started to applaud, only to be severely eldered along the lines of “Quakers don’t do that!” In some settings, particularly at FGC, Friends have created an alternative “silent applause” (waving hands at shoulder height) which has always seemed a little contrived and cute to me.

Over the years I’ve picked up a similar reluctance by Quakers to highlight peoples’ achievements or recognize milestones in their lives or careers, to thank leaders for their service, or even to thank them for their hard work. I doubt that most Friends could identify Luke 17:10, but we seem to have taken it into practice – “When you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless servants; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”

Or there may be a sort of understated snobbery in our lack of response – “We knew you would do the right thing, because that’s the sort of people we are.”

We sometimes unbend so far as to ask for a minute of thanks to be added to the minutes of a meeting – usually it’s done at the last minute and is worded as briefly as possible. The only time we really cut loose with our appreciation is in the memorial minutes which are published in Friends Journal and Quaker Life, when a eulogy can go on for pages.

By contrast, when I’ve been a part of African-American congregations, they’ve bent over backwards to acknowledge and applaud the smallest achievements, the littlest steps forward. It’s as though they know how difficult life is, how many barriers people face, that it’s the church’s responsibility to shelter and encourage every flicker of light and faith. The same kind of atmosphere is often found in 12-step meetings, where every achievement gets applauded.

I understand the risks of adulation, and I’ve been in groups where leaders bask in appreciation and people who do the scut work go unthanked. Quakers have instinctively shied away from showing our appreciation in public – but I think we take it too far. A little spontaneous applause now and then doesn’t hurt, and we could learn from the culture of appreciation which African-American churches and 12-step groups have built.

Say amen, somebody?

Leadership – perils and potholes

For years I’ve heard Quaker pastors, yearly meeting superintendents and organization leaders moaning that “Quakers don’t respect leaders – they don’t want to be led.” That hasn’t been my experience, but I’ve picked up a few thoughts about this subject along the way.

When I ask these folks what they mean – “give me some actual examples!” – it often boils down to complaints like these:

• They wouldn’t approve the funding for a project I want
• They won’t agree to a suggestion, plan or recommendation I made
• They always move me to the last place on the agenda, when half the people have left
• They complain all the time but won’t make changes to address the complaints
• They spend more time talking about their favorite sports team than they spend praying
• They won’t show up for activities I’ve planned, publicized and prepared for
• They don’t read the report/newsletter/bulletin/web site I spent so much time on

These complaints can be valid – there are frequently serious consequences for failing to pay attention to our leaders. Quaker leaders are also prone to frustration, discouragement and burnout. Very few Quaker leaders have much in the way of active support; many feel they spend a lot of time shouting down a barrel.

On the other hand, it’s easy for those of us in leadership positions to forget some very basic things. Here are a few, in no particular order. You may have your own thoughts to add!

1. It’s not “my” meeting to control. The people of the meeting were here a long time before I got here. They will be here long after I leave.
2. If I get what I wish for 25% of the time, I figure I’m ahead of the game
3. A lot of people are following God in their own way. Maybe I need to ask people how they want to follow God.
4. One of the key missing skills in many leaders is the ability to make prayer deeply inviting to others.
5. Another key missing skill is the ability to thank people sincerely and spontaneously for what they’ve done or tried, without even hinting that I wish they’d done what I wanted.
6. It’s a very old truth, but worth repeating – it’s much more important that I follow Jesus myself, that I share his words and not my own, that I bring his love alive in people’s hearts, that I look for ways to be faithful myself, instead of scolding people about not doing all these things.
7. Another aching truth is that Quakers overwhelmingly are volunteers and amateurs. We’re not dealing with professionals most of the time – these are folks who haven’t read the books, haven’t taken the courses or workshops and who rely for 99% of the time on their own experience and their fuzzy desire to feel good about themselves. It doesn’t help to judge people for what they’re not; it’s better to help them take small, memorable steps toward what they want to be.
8. Sometimes money is the problem. But sometimes it’s not. Poor communication, conflict, and disengagement from the basic purpose of the organization, are often much more important problems.
9. Quaker organizations habitually budget on inertia – “this is what we approved last year, let’s just do it again.” Or they budget on optimism – “let’s go ahead with this figure and hope the money comes in”. Or they budget on guilt – “if everyone would just give $1 a week more, we would reach our goal.” They very seldom have the patience or courage to take an entire budget back to zero and start over, and almost never remember that paid staff need cost-of-living increases, too.

In most congregations, there will only be a handful of people who care deeply and passionately about:

a) the peace testimony
b) what early Quakers believed
c) actually changing the world
d) properly caring for old books and papers
e) taking care of the children
f) inviting new people to come and worship
g) dealing with climate change
h) helping to make the meeting more welcoming to LGBT people or diverse ethnic groups
i) making urgently needed repairs to the meetinghouse
j) helping to create the very best possible website and outreach materials
k) correcting the minutes (let alone reading the minutes)
l) doing a labyrinth walk
m) planning a meeting-wide retreat
n) other (fill in the blanks)

Sometimes there will be overlap in groups A-M. Other times each of these groups will be isolated from each other, but tolerated by the meeting as a whole even though not everyone gets involved. As a leader, you will almost never get everyone involved in any one of these for a sustained period of time.

I would rather work with a few highly motivated people, than a whole meeting full of only somewhat motivated people.

And as a leader, these people have to put up with my passion for A-M and beyond, when they have their own legitimate concerns to work on. Quaker leaders aren’t always the easiest people to get along with!

Real diversity

In my work as a Quaker pastor, I see many different kinds of people.

This weekend, I spent Saturday morning working beside a guy who is making some repairs to our historic meetinghouse. He is highly skilled at what he does, and he volunteers one weekend every month on projects which most of us would have no idea how to accomplish. He’s one of the hardest-working guys I know. Most of my so-called “help” on these projects involves fetching things, holding things, cleaning up and mostly staying out of his way while he does the work of 5 or 6 ordinary people.

A lot of Quaker meetings might not appreciate him, because he loves hunting. He has a hunter’s watchful eyes and he notices absolutely everything. He loves the outdoors and he’s happiest whenever he can spend time just being with nature. He can name every tree, almost every kind of wildlife, and tell you where to find things in every season. He brings home 6 or 7 deer every fall, and whatever he and his family can’t fit in their freezer, he donates to the local food pantry.

He’s a lot more politically conservative than most of the people you’d find in an unprogrammed Quaker meeting, but he’s thoughtful and he cares a lot more about character in people than about political affiliation. He’s unflinchingly honest, utterly reliable, and keeps his word about everything – while he wouldn’t put it in the same words as George Fox, Truth is at the heart of his spirituality.

This weekend, he brought his 7-year-old grandson with him to our monthly work day. It was a gift to watch the two of them together. He glowed with love and pride as he showed his grandson how to do simple tasks, and you could see the hope shining in his face that his grandson would learn the skills he has.

On Sunday morning I usually save the hour before meeting for worship begins to visit with people who arrive early. This Sunday, I talked for nearly an hour with one of our oldest greeters. He’s in his mid 80’s, and his great love in life is gospel music. He follows gospel groups the way other people follow sports teams – he knows their names, their hits, their life stories and concert tours.

This Sunday he brought in a laptop which his daughter handed down to me. He confessed that he didn’t know how to run it. He said he’d heard about the Internet, and wondered if any of his gospel music groups might be on it. We turned his laptop on, connected it to the meeting WiFi, and headed for YouTube.

As you might expect, it only took a few seconds before we found dozens of videos. As soon as one song finished, he’d name another that he wished he could see. After 4 or 5 gospel groups had showed up, there were tears of joy rolling down his cheeks. He said he’d heard there was some “really bad stuff” on the Internet, and that people have to be careful, but he said that being able to watch and hear his beloved music was “a miracle” to him.

I talked for a few minutes before meeting with another member, a retired police officer who just lost his daughter-in-law this week. In broken words, he said that “it wasn’t supposed to be this way” – that she shouldn’t have died so young.

I talked with our clerk of Ministry and Counsel, a wonderful guy from Brazil who is still homesick for his native country after 20 years of living in the U.S. A deeply spiritual person with a beautiful voice, he often enriches our worship with his singing and guitar.

The elder who sat with me on the facing bench is a middle-aged woman who left school at age 16 to work as a florist. April is her busiest time of the year and she was pretty tired last Sunday. For our meeting’s Easter breakfast, she brought a 5-gallon bucket full of flowers, and in 15 minutes she effortlessly whipped up a dozen gorgeous table decorations, which we later used for our Flowering Cross during Easter worship. One of her other gifts is that she offers the most beautiful and sensitive prayers of anyone in the entire meeting. I always feel privileged to listen when she prays.

What’s my point? Quakers talk a good game about diversity, but in the real world we often come up short. Just like everyone else, we like to be comfortable, and one easy path to comfort is to hang out with people who look and think just the way we do. Most Quaker meetings wind up with a remarkably homogenous makeup. Whether it’s a liberal unprogrammed meeting, an evangelical meeting, a university-centered meeting, or a rural meeting, there tends to be relatively little real diversity within the group.

Most meetings would be better off with a wider range of experiences and life journeys, and nearly all meetings would be better off ditching the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways we make people feel like outsiders when they “don’t fit” our meeting’s profile. Real diversity – the kind that welcomes people as they are, and eagerly listens to their stories and welcomes their gifts – is one of the most wonderful things we can offer.

Besides the usual Quaker assortment of teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers and counselors, the meeting I’m fortunate to serve includes:

• an environmental attorney
• the daughter of a famous NASCAR driver, who runs our local food pantry
• a woman who ran a successful hot air balloon business
• a blind programmer who worked for NASA
• a family who are all professional rodeo riders
• a transgendered wood carver
• a retired restaurant owner who also attends Pentecostal services
• a Mexican immigrant who runs a successful landscape business
• a young sawmill owner and his wife

We are blessed to have so many different people! Even though we seldom agree about politics, solutions to social problems, and many other things, we have discovered a unity which comes from a much deeper place.

“. . .though the way seem to thee divers, yet judge not the way, lest thou judge the Lord, and knowest not that several ways (seeming to reason) hath God to bring his people out by, yet all are but one in the end. . .Deep is the mystery of Godliness. . .”

–  George Fox, Epistle, 1653

Quakers and Christmas

As I write this, Christmas is about 3 weeks away. Stores in our area have been playing Christmas music for at least 2 months now, and cable TV is in non-stop Christmas special mode, as they pull out every Christmas movie in their libraries, no matter how good or bad it is.

Quakers have not always celebrated Christmas. Actually, this wasn’t just a Quaker thing; many of the Puritans in the mid-1600’s in England were also strongly opposed to the holiday. Under Oliver Cromwell’s government, Christmas celebrations of any kind were forbidden by law. The Puritans thought that Christmas was really a pagan holiday, adapted and adopted by the Catholic church. The Puritans thought that Christmas, along with saints, stained glass, most of the sacraments, and over a thousand years of celebration, should be swept away.

Preachers were arrested in the middle of worship services for preaching about Christmas. Shopkeepers were required by law to keep their businesses open. A poster in Boston, a Puritan stronghold, will give you the idea:

PUBLICK NOTICE

The Observation of CHRISTMAS having been deemed
a Sacrilege, the exchanging of Gifts and Greetings,
dressing in fine Clothing, Feasting and similar
Satanical practices are hereby
FORBIDDEN
with the Offender liable to a fine of FIVE SHILLINGS

(OK, tell us what you really think about this!)

Quakers disagreed with Puritans on a lot of issues, but Christmas was one they agreed on. Well into the mid-1800’s, Quaker books of Faith and Practice admonished Friends not to observe what they called “Days and Times”, since all days were equally holy. Quakers were also cautioned against “those tumultuous demonstrations of joy, and nightly illuminations, which are generally attended with rioting, drunkenness, and many other excesses incompatible with the Christian name.”

In the 1700’s, Friends were even advised not to attend performances of music such as Handel’s Messiah, on the grounds that it “artificially stimulated the passions” and was therefore not relying on the leading of the Holy Spirit.

I remember, early in my work as a Quaker pastor, a dear elderly Friend who had lived for many years in Philadelphia scolding me because I had set up an Advent wreath and invited the children to come and light another candle each week.

Not all Quakers still think this way. Last weekend, the Young Friends of our meeting put on a hilarious Christmas dinner theater production. This year, our meeting is having a Christmas “memory tree” and hanging ornaments with the names of loved ones written on them in silver, gold and red glitter glue. At worship, everyone in the meeting came down to hang them on the tree together.

For many years, Springfield Friends has had a special “White Christmas” collection from individuals and Sunday School classes. This year, the offering will be divided between the local food pantry which we support all year, and scholarships for kids to attend Quaker Lake Camp.

A tradition at our meeting going back several generations is handing out “treat bags” after worship on one of the Sundays close to Christmas. Each bag has a couple of oranges, some nuts, a candy bar and a peppermint stick. Older members of the meeting can recall years during the Depression when the brown paper bags were the only special Christmas treat they received.

Me, I’m a sucker for Christmas – I have a whole shelf filled with Christmas stories, and our family has Christmas ornaments which we’ve treasured for several generations. I’ve collected dozens of carols and give programs of Christmas music. I’ve written a Christmas devotional book (What Does An Angel Look Like?), and even now that our children are adults, we still hang Christmas stockings every year.

This afternoon I spent an hour unpacking and setting up two Nativity creches here at the meetinghouse. We have several more at home – a carved ebony Nativity from Kenya, where Joseph and Mary have African faces and are seated under an acacia tree; a Bolivian Nativity where all the members of the Holy Family are singing out the windows of a bright yellow bus; a tiny porcelain French Nativity from Normandy with figures 3/4 of an inch tall; a Baroque-style Italian Nativity from my childhood; a terracotta Nativity made by a group of Catholic nuns who live with the poorest of the poor.

In my thinking, there’s nothing wrong with trying to understand how and why Jesus came into the world. And it’s worth remembering that when Jesus told us to care for “the least of these”, he was including himself.

For those of you who are troubled by the commercialism, the overconsumption, and all of the ridiculous things which have been added on to the Christmas story, from the Little Drummer Boy to the endless Hallmark Christmas drivel romances – I get it! I share your concern, and I reject the same things you do. But I don’t think that the cure is to do away with Christmas. I think we would do better to re-read the gospel stories about the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, and to re-discover the Light in the gospel of John.

So, if you’re not offended, let me wish you all a blessed and merry Christmas, in Jesus’ name.

Straight talk on preventing child abuse

The news this week reported that a grand jury has found evidence that over 300 Roman Catholic priests and workers in 6 dioceses in Pennsylvania molested over 1,000 children during a period going back decades. The news has re-opened a major wound in the Catholic church and in the hearts and minds of churches around the world.

Not only did these horrible things take place, but the church did not deal effectively with the perpetrators. In many cases, they were simply transferred to other places, where they very probably did the same things again to other children. The leaders who oversaw them were promoted, even as they failed in one of the most basic responsibilities of the church: to protect the youngest and the least.

In one of his clearest commandments in the entire gospel, Jesus said: “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)

I have a personal stake in this issue. I am a former Catholic. Although I left the Catholic church many years ago for other reasons, many of my family still belong. I have many Catholic friends. My book shelves include many Catholic devotionals. When I go on retreat, I often spend a few days in a Trappist community. So, the news this week shakes me. My mother, who died a year ago, was a devout Catholic all her life. But for the last 10 years or more, she didn’t go to Mass, because at least 3 of her parish priests – people she trusted – were dismissed or transferred because of sexual offenses.

Quakers and other Protestants shouldn’t think that this problem is confined to the Catholic branch of the Christian family. During my own career as a pastor, I have had to intervene twice in situations where we found out that members or attenders of the meeting were major league sexual offenders. The shock and conflict of the discovery dominated the life of the meeting for months.

Most yearly meetings recommend that everyone who works with young people should have a background check. Most local meetings I have been a part of resist this, saying that “But we know that person – they have belonged here for years!” Requiring a background check feels to some Friends like an invasion of privacy, or that it goes against the openness and trust which they value in a Quaker meeting. Why should we do a background check on a beloved grandmother who has been teaching Sunday School for 40 years? Why should we check out a popular youth leader in their 20’s?

There are compelling reasons why we need background checks, though. Many people who prey on children like to hide in church communities. The invisibility, the access to children, the many rooms and small spaces in church buildings and meetinghouses, all provide cover and camouflage for their activities. Even worse, things that take place in a religious atmosphere let predators intimidate children by saying that God will punish them if they tell their parents or speak to anyone.

When the meeting I served was wavering on this issue, I went first and had a criminal record check done on myself. The Young Friends leaders volunteered next, and soon all the meeting staff and all of the First Day School teachers agreed. In today’s world, parents need to know that this kind of “due diligence” check has been made. It tells them that we are actively looking out for the safety of their children.

Part of my annual routine with committee clerks and other leaders, as well as with all meeting staff, is having “the Talk” – what we do when we hear any complaints or rumors about sexual offenses, unwanted physical contact, harassment, inappropriate e-mails or offensive language. They are encouraged to contact the pastor, the clerk, or the clerk of Ministry and Counsel immediately, and we let them know that any such behavior is not acceptable in our meeting, will be dealt with. We will respect their privacy as much as they ask, but the meeting will not tolerate such behavior or enable it by our inaction or silence.

Background checks and leader awareness will never guarantee that we won’t have problems, of course. But for many Friends meetings, these are important first steps, and we need to be able to assure visitors, newcomers and families that we have taken them.

I’m sure that this post will trigger a lot of bad memories in some readers. Some of you may have other suggestions about how to prevent or how to handle these situations. Let me repeat: they can happen anywhere, even in a Friends meeting, and we need more open discussion and practical steps.

Cherry blossoms

I’ve got a thing for cherry trees. As I write this, a big cherry tree is in full bloom right outside my office window. It looks like daylight fireworks – tens of thousands of pale pink blossoms exploding exuberantly, about 30 feet from my desk.

The Japanese have an enormous nation-wide cultural thing for cherry blossoms. During cherry blossom season, huge crowds of people go to the parks to enjoy them. Every night on national TV there are reports of how the season is progressing in different parts of the country. Pictures of cherry blossoms are on everything from kimonos to corporate logos. Every school child in Japan knows the cherry blossom song – Sakura, sakura.

Part of the Japanese love for cherry blossoms is simply that they’re so beautiful – something beyond our human ability to make or build. It’s a beauty which stretches our sense of the divine, which connects us directly to God without any words or explanation being necessary.

The other side of cherry blossoms, of course, is that they are fragile and only last a few days. A high wind or a late frost can wipe them away. This year we had a long spell of unseasonably cool weather (for North Carolina) which made the cherry blossom season last longer than usual. We had a sleet storm last weekend and I thought they would all be gone, but it warmed up the next day and they bloomed more beautifully than ever before.

For the Japanese, cherry blossoms are a symbol of life – how brief a time we have here on earth, how important it is to stop and appreciate moments of beauty, how much our souls yearn to connect with God.

Sometimes I think that Quakers have it right, when we stop to listen or wait until God speaks, remembering the advice of London Yearly Meeting: “Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts, which are the leadings of God.” At our best, Quakers are experts at noticing those “cherry blossom moments” in our individual lives and in our life together.

In our not-so-good times, though, we forget that time is flying past, that a whole generation can come and go without our trying to really listen to them. We live in the past so much that we can completely miss the present, and do nothing to build for the future.

Yesterday evening I was walking home from our midweek Bible study and happened to look up and saw the full moon nestled in the top branches of the cherry tree. If I’d been walking along as usual with my nose to the ground I would have completely missed this transcendent moment, which brought me to a stop for at least ten minutes. It was a blessing beyond words.

Even though the tree outside my office is still in full bloom, a few petals are already falling. There’s a beauty in that, too, when a light breeze makes the petals fall like rain, and children from the neighborhood go dancing through them with their hands reaching up toward the sky. There’s a beauty in old things (and older people) who have filled their lives with beauty and know the right time to fall to the ground.

Yesterday when I went to open up for Bible study, a couple of dozen cherry petals blew in through the door to rest on the mat. Even in our indoor lives, God has a way of invading our space with beauty and with reminders to stop and enjoy.

Trash talk

Every now and then, when I’ve got a free half hour and need a break, I grab a couple of big black garbage bags and a set of nabbers and walk along the roads that bound our meeting’s property. It still amazes me, the things people throw out.

Today I filled two large bags in no time at all. Dozens and dozens of bottles – North Carolina doesn’t have a bottle and can deposit law. Hard liquor, malt liquor, soft drinks, go cups, soda cans, bottled water, baby food, energy drinks, you name it. I know every fast food place in this part of town, and I could probably tell them all what their customers’ favorites are. I picked up soda straws, empty cigarette and cigar packages (Newport Menthol appears to be the favorite around here), snuff containers, paper bags, styrofoam trays and lottery tickets.

Some things were too big to pick up or drag back, and will have to wait till our meeting’s Clean Up Day next month – a shopping cart, old tires, a TV set, old window frames. Down at the corner by the cemetery, this week somebody abandoned a Chevy 3500 van in the ditch. Whoever did it left the license plate on, so when I called it in the police will have something to go on. Maybe it was stolen or taken for a joyride.

As a Christian, I know I’m supposed to be non-judgmental, but picking up hundreds of pounds of other people’s litter every year gets to be kind of old. I mentioned this to the head of our House and Grounds committee, a native of the area famous for his bluntness, who said, “Hell, they don’t care! They just drivin’ on down the road and phwtt! out the window she goes!”

Quakers are supposed to be advocates for world peace and non-violence, and I don’t think I would actually do any physical harm to these jerks. But it’s depressing to think that there is simply no way anyone on earth could reason with people who throw their trash by the roadside. They really don’t care, and I doubt that anyone will ever make them care.

There are much worse sins than littering, but in a way it’s symptomatic of the way human beings are broken. How could people who are made in God’s image, who were formed for the garden of Eden, who were told by God to be stewards of this earth, act this way?

Could be that their parents didn’t teach them. Could be that they’re so poor that they don’t feel any sense of ownership or belonging or responsibility for the community they live in. But I have a feeling that until people care enough to quit littering, we won’t have peace in this part of North Carolina. And if we keep filling up the world with garbage and don’t care who has to deal with it, we may not have peace with our neighbors, or with the world.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep on picking up trash in our neighborhood.

Happy New Year!

Quakers, of all people, recognize that whatever we call “worship” doesn’t have to follow any set guidelines. Even in Quaker meetings where the worship is programmed or semi-programmed, most don’t have a lectionary (a regular schedule of Scripture readings used by many churches).

We have customs, and many of our customs can get pretty set in stone – there’s the time-worn joke, all too true, about a visitor being told by an old-timer, “You’re sitting in my seat!” Quaker prayers and sermons can start sounding pretty much the same from one week to the next – or from one year or decade to the next.

Entering a worship space can be very daunting. Newcomers may be impressed by our plain and simple architecture, but they may also be wondering, “Where’s the cross?” Or, if they walk in during open worship, they may be wondering, “Why isn’t anybody saying anything?” Even lifelong members and attenders may not know the reasons why Quakers do some things (and don’t do others).

It’s nice when we can shake things up and let everyone recapture the sense of wonder, of worship, of friendship and joy.

Last Sunday, on New Year’s Eve, we were expecting record low temperatures and a correspondingly low turnout for worship. The big room where we worship most Sundays was likely going to be three-quarters empty, and it was going to take a LOT of fuel oil to bring it up to a comfortable level of warmth.

So we asked around to see if anyone would mind if we moved worship into the chapel, a smaller, seldom-used room which was built in the 1950’s to accommodate the large number of weddings we held during the Baby Boom years. We sent out a mass e-mail, and put up some signs re-directing people to the chapel on Sunday morning.

One other factor was that most of us were feeling pretty “Christmased out”. The avalanche of Christmas specials on TV, the carols in the stores that started playing this year back in September, the sales, the decorations, the parties, the whole nine yards of American hyper-celebration. Our meeting didn’t stand aside from all this, either – our young people put on a creative and hugely successful Christmas dinner theater. Our choir had a wonderful Christmas music Sunday. We packed the worship room for our Christmas Eve candlelight service. We were “all in” for Christmas this year, but by New Year’s Eve we all felt a little trashed – the pastor included.

So, we moved into a different and slightly unfamiliar space for worship. We still had about a dozen poinsettias left (most of them had gone home the week before), so we put them on the windowsills. I thought some people might be chilly – people in North Carolina get cold any time the outdoor temperature drops below 30 degrees – so I put a bunch of shawls and blankets up on the railing of the facing bench. Best of all, I brought in a couple of rocking chairs from my office.

No one really wanted yet another sermon about the meaning of Christmas, so we ditched the sermon. Instead, I read the story of the wise people who came seeking the newborn baby Jesus, and played a bunch of carols which were new to most of the people at worship that day – the Holly Tree Carol, The Friendly Beasts and the ancient carol, The Miraculous Harvest. They were surprised when I told them that I Wonder As I Wander was collected in nearby Murphy, North Carolina, by the pioneering folklorist, John Jacob Niles.

One of my deepest convictions is that Christ came not just for Christians in America, but for people everywhere in the world, so we sang Silent Night in several languages. I shared the new carol I wrote this year, A Christmas Blessing. And we all joined in singing O Come, All Ye Faithful.

Instead of being spread out thinly in a chilly room, we were just a little bit crowded in the chapel, and it felt great. Two of our older members beamed at everyone from the rocking chairs – it felt more like a family get-together in a living room than like a church. Or is church supposed to feel that way?

Altogether, it was a wonderful morning, and people lingered after meeting longer than usual to ask about each others’ families and to wish each other a happy New Year.