An Anthology of Quaker and Ecumenical Voices
assembled by Marshall Massey
What is the difference between tolerating your neighbors and genuinely caring for them? In January 2004, Marshall Massey — a historically grounded Quaker theologian and longtime contributor to soc.religion.quaker — turned to a thread on Christian Universalism and declared that tolerance, as an ideology of non-judgment, was not the Quaker testimony of community but its opposite.
To make his case, Massey assembled a wide-ranging anthology: psychologists, Christian theologians, Quaker theologians, Quaker historians, and Yearly Meeting minutes — all pointing toward the same conclusion. Community is not produced by tolerance (which merely refuses to judge) but by caring and involvement. Where tolerance says "I won't interfere," community says "I am invested in you."
The result is one of the richest anthologies of Quaker thought on community produced in the early-internet era — a document that stands as much as a Quaker reader on the theology of fellowship as it does as a Usenet post.
Tolerance is refusing to pass judgment on others. Exactly — and that is a demonstration of indifference to where those others are at.
Someone who cares is (by definition) not indifferent; she may be approving or disapproving, or she may feel that it is irrelevant, but regardless of what she feels, she is invested in that person, not just tolerating that person's views. She has an involvement, not just a hands-off refusal to judge.
Communities are built by caring and involvement. Subdivisions where people do not care about their neighbors, do not get involved with their neighbors, but simply tolerate, are not communities — they are just densely populated areas.
Observations from Outside the Quaker Tradition
There is nothing the threatened soul needs more than the sustaining power of a warm and loyal fellowship. The sense of isolation is a prolific cause of personality disorder. A friend of mine who became psychological consultant in a gastrointestinal clinic discovered that one of his first needs in caring for his patients was to discover groups into which they might be introduced and where they could find real friendship. They needed, for recovery to health, to be received into some group in which they would be valued, respected, and loved, and where they would be given opportunity to participate in activities directed toward worthwhile ends. They needed to be saturated with the spirit of groups which cherished wholesome attitudes of faith, hope, love and self-respect. And these groups he found first of all in the churches.
— Charles T. Holman, Getting Down to Cases (The Macmillan Co., 1942)
People are coming to church not simply to partake of the sacred but to partake of sacred community.
— Milton J. Rosenberg in Practical Psychology, 1957
In a world like ours, it is tempting to seek community, any community, as a good in itself. Liberal society has a way of making us strangers to one another as we go about detaching ourselves from long-term commitments, protecting our rights, thinking alone. Our society is a vast supermarket of desire in which each of us is encouraged to stand alone and go out and get what the world owes us.
In a world like ours, people will be attracted to communities that promise them an easy way out of loneliness, togetherness based on common tastes, racial or ethnic traits, or mutual self-interest. There is then little check on community becoming as totalitarian as the individual ego. Community becomes totalitarian when its only purpose is to foster a sense of belonging in order to overcome the fragility of the lone individual.
Christian community is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus.
— Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Abingdon Press, 1989), pp. 77–78
Observations from within the Quaker Tradition
The Quaker movement, in Fox's thinking, was individuals coming together in this experience [of the transforming, purifying Word] to be a people, living in a new order of community.
— Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (Friends United Press, 1986), p. 73
The core of the Quaker tradition is a way of inward seeking which leads to outward acts of integrity and service. Friends are most in the Spirit when they stand at the crossing point of the inward and the outward life. And that is the intersection at which we find community. Community is a place where the connections felt in the heart make themselves known in bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening up our hearts.
— Parker J. Palmer, A Place Called Community (Pendle Hill Pamphlet, 1977)
Howard Brinton suggested that "the Quaker method is likely to be successful in proportion as the members are acquainted with one another, better still if real affection exists among them." (Reaching Decisions: The Quaker Method) This is a description of a community. Not just a group of people who happen to be gathered together in one place, but a group which shares a commonality of spiritual direction: searching and waiting. A faith community.
— Keith Redfern, "Our Meetings for Business," The Friends' Quarterly 28:2 (1994)
Whether we are part of a large Meeting, a small Meeting, or a Worship Group, and whether we can participate regularly or only infrequently, we are engaged in the continual process of creating a living community based on love. This is Quaker faith and practice in a nutshell.
I believe what we are doing when we participate in the ongoing creation of a Quaker Meeting is of earth-shaking importance. We are creating a living laboratory — a crucible — where the potential of all our human aspirations, emotions, fears, passions, and longings may be expressed in the context of learning to acknowledge, then accept, and eventually welcome each other. We are acting in the faith that community is good, that it is an essential part of God's creation.
— Marty Walton, The Meeting Experience: Practicing Quakerism in Community (Canadian Quaker Pamphlet Series No. 45, 1997)
When we are drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God, we find ourselves in a new and particular relationship to a few of our fellows. The relationship is so surprising and rich that we despair of finding a word to name it. The word Fellowship is pale and thin in comparison. For a new kind of life-sharing and of love has arisen of which we had had only dim hints before. Are these the bonds which knit together the early Christians, the very warp and woof of the Kingdom of God?
"See how these Christians love one another" might well have been a spontaneous exclamation in the days of the apostles. The Holy Fellowship, the Blessed Community has always astonished those who stood without it. The sharing of physical goods in the primitive church is only an outcropping of a profoundly deeper sharing of a Life, the base and center of which is obscured, to those who are still oriented about self, rather than about God. To others, tragic to say, the very existence of such a Fellowship within a common Life and Love is unknown and unguessed. In its place, psychological and humanistic views of the essential sociality and gregariousness of man seek to provide a social theory of church membership. From these views spring church programs of mere sociability. The precious word Fellowship becomes identified with a purely horizontal relation of man to man, not with that horizontal-vertical relationship of man to man in God.
But every period of profound re-discovery of God's joyous immediacy is a period of emergence of this amazing group inter-knittedness of God-enthralled men and women. It appeared in vivid form among the early Friends. We don't create it deliberately; we find it and we find ourselves increasingly within it as we find ourselves increasingly within Him.
— Thomas R. Kelly, "The Blessed Community" (1939)
...We had a general men's meeting and a general women's meeting, through which men's meetings and women's meetings were established in all other parts to take care of the poor and other affairs of the church. And when it was ended it was hard for Friends to part, for the glorious power of the Lord which was over all and his blessed Truth and life flowing amongst them had so knit and united them together that they spent two days in taking leave of one another and Friends went away being mightily filled with the presence and power of the Lord.
— George Fox, Journal, entry for 1672
Collective Statements of Friends
Our congregations and our members individually need, above all things, to manifest a spiritual fellowship vitally in touch with the needs of men. [We should] bear in mind that it will be the warmth of fellowship and of brotherhood in our congregations that will attract and speak of the love of God.
— London Yearly Meeting, minute (1906)
Is your Meeting a loving community of which Christ is the center?
— Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Faith and Practice (1955, 1978), p. 190: query
Friends consider the Meeting as one family in which the welfare of each individual should be of utmost concern to all.
— Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends (Conservative), Discipline (1974), p. 49: Advice on Care of Membership
What can we do to deepen our relationships with one another?
— Iowa Yearly Meeting of Friends (Conservative), "Advices and Queries" (1996): Query on Harmony Within the Meeting
Colophon
Posted to soc.religion.quaker by Marshall Massey ([email protected]) on 14 January 2004, in a thread on Christian Universalism and Quaker identity. The anthology was assembled by Massey as part of a sustained argument that the Quaker testimony of community is not served by liberal tolerance — which is mere non-judgment, mere indifference — but only by genuine caring, involvement, and covenant. All quoted sources are attributed within the text.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
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