If you read Kody’s post I linked to the other day, you may recall a letter to the new clerk of FUM from the superintendents of five Orthodox Quaker yearly meetings, which alarmed him so much that he’s been losing sleep.
Johan Maurer posted a quote and some thoughts a few days ago, and I just found the letter itself via Bill Samuel’s site. The full text:
October 28, 2008
Kelly Kellum, Presiding Clerk
Friends United Meeting
800 Quaker Lane
High Point, NC 27262
Dear Kelly Kellum,
The General Superintendents of Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Western and Wilmington Yearly Meetings, in prayerful consultation, feel led to write to you expressing our deep concern for the mission and future of Friends United Meeting. While you are relatively new to leadership in this organization we are sure that you are well aware of the organization’s often contentious history and the current undercurrents that erode unity and undercut important ministry.
In short, we believe that the current composition and structure of FUM is not working. We share a strong conviction that we can and must do better. Our dually-affiliated yearly meetings suffer from painful conflict connected to their relationship with FUM; conflict that eats up valuable time and energy. The five yearly meetings that we represent likewise often face painful division among our own meetings concerning our relationship with FUM and share the frustration of being yoked together with Friends who do not share a common sense of identity or a common vision for ministry. We observe that the FUM staff struggles to lead an organization divided by competing theologies and priorities. The most tragic result of this is that the work of FUM around the world suffers.
We have a vision of General Board meetings that could be times of deep prayer and celebration. Instead they often feel like times of outward filibusters and underlying tensions. We observe that deep differences in crucial matters such as the divinity of Jesus Christ, the atonement, the authority of scripture, and issues related to the FUM personnel policy continue to deeply divide us, with no real unity looming on the horizon.
Again, our concern is not only that we can do better, but that we must do better. We ask the FUM General Board Executive Committee immediately assume the task of searching for options that would address these concerns and that specific strategies be presented at our next meeting of the FUM General Board in February 2009.
Sincerely,
Doug Shoemaker – Indiana YM
Ron Bryan – Iowa Yearly Meeting
John Porter – North Carolina YM
Marlene Pedigo – Western YM
Steve Pedigo – Western YM
Marvin Hall – Wilmington YM
As Kody says, it is “unsettlingly ambiguous,” in that it doesn’t propose any specific solutions. But I find Johan’s analysis pretty convincing. His entire post and comments are well worth reading (as are all of his posts about FUM), but in short he seems to be saying that this could become a reprise of the realignment debate early 90s, when the FUM general secretary (of all people) proposed that FUM dissolve and its constituent meetings join either Evangelical Friends International or the liberal Friends General Conference. In his words, that suggestion failed
more because of faulty process than merit; this time, a perhaps similar vision is being pursued with directness and transparency, and with openness to other alternatives that could overcome FUM’s real problems.
He lists a number of alternatives in a comment, the most hopeful of which (#4) is basically that people remember that there are more important things Quakers should be doing than griping about FUM. The liberal yearly meetings, for example, could IMHO try to root out homophobia from our own communities before criticizing other ones.
I do think the letter makes an important point that liberal Friends routinely seem innocent of, and which I’ve pointed out repeatedly: that the differences between Orthodox and liberal FUM meetings go beyond the heterosexism of “the personnel policy.” Most FUM meetings have a much stricter take on scripture than liberal meetings do, which is a primary cause of both the personnel policy we talk so much about, as well as other differences we are only dimly aware of but which are very important to them – the divinity of Jesus, for example, as the letter says.
Any honest dialogue about the future of FUM has to recognize this – as a further reason to part ways, or as a further challenge to overcome in order to remain together.
