God Keeps Calling Us to Grow

An Interview with Paul Buckley, Author of Primitive Quakerism Revived

Friends Journal discussed revival with Quaker historian Paul Buckley, author of Primitive Quakerism Revived: Living as Friends in the Twenty-First Century. Buckley worships with Clear Creek Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, and travels in the ministry urging spiritual renewal among Friends.

Sharlee DiMenichi: Please give an overview of what convinces Friends in the United States that a Quaker revival is needed.

Paul Buckley: I’m sorry to say I don’t think that Friends in the United States, by and large, are convinced. I can tell you why I’m convinced. I think we’ve lost track of where we came from. We have reached a point where many people seem to believe that being a Quaker is whatever they say it is, and “whatever I say it is” has no generalizability. I find this very, very unfortunate. We have a history. We have a set of beliefs laid out in the seventeenth century by people like George Fox, Isaac Penington, William Penn, and Robert Barclay that form a coherent whole. There has been change over time, and some of it may be inspired and appropriate. But often it seems that it’s more, “Well, this is what I think.”

So why do we need a revival? We need a revival because we need to know who we are, and we don’t know who we are unless we know where we started and which of the many alternative ideas that have been introduced over the last 350 years are consistent with that tradition and which of them are, frankly, just not. They may be important to an individual, but if we’re a society, we have common beliefs that underlie who we are as a people, and we owe it to ourselves to know what they are.

So, when you ask for my reasons for thinking that we need a revival, I should refer you to the section titled “Ten Signs We Need a Revival” in Primitive Quakerism Revived. The subheadings are:

1. God Is Not the Center of Our Lives and Our Meetings
2. Being Quaker Is Not Our Primary Identification
3. The Individualism among Friends
4. The Redefinition of Community
5. Being Unwilling to Say What We Believe
6. Ritualizing Meeting for Worship
7. Encrusting Outward Characteristics
8. Treating Outreach as an Activity
9. Accommodating to the Surrounding Culture
10. Being Admired

SD: How have the pandemic and virtual meetings impacted efforts to renew Quakerism?

PB: Honestly, I don’t know. I know that the use of Zoom made it possible for people to participate in various meetings near and far. During lockdown, that was invaluable. I’m not sure that it still is as valuable, but if you are looking for a different way to worship from what you can get locally, it may be. Just in the last week, I tripped over a quote from the seventeenth century from Isaac Penington:

And oh, how sweet and pleasant is it to the truly spiritual eye to see several sorts of believers, several forms of Christians in the school of Christ, every one learning their own lesson, performing their own peculiar service, and knowing, owning, and loving one another in their several places and different performances to their Master, to whom they are to give an account, and not to quarrel one with another about their different practices! [Rom 14:4] For this is the true ground of love and unity, not that such a man walks and does just as I do, but because I feel the same Spirit and life in him, and in that he walks in his rank, in his own order, in his proper way and place of subjection to that; and this is far more pleasing to me than if he walked just in that rank wherein I walk; nay, so far as I am spiritual, I cannot so much as desire that he should do so, until he be particularly led thereto, by the same Spirit which led me.

In other words, we don’t all have to do exactly the same thing and say the same thing. Recognizing that different people are called in different ways is part of being a Friend. But Penington is not saying everybody should be a Quaker and then do whatever they want. He’s saying, those of you who are Quakers, be Quakers. And be glad that other people are called to be Congregationalists, Puritans, or Presbyterians, and that they are faithful in doing so.

That’s part of why I feel we need a revival. We have taken the essence of what Penington said, and instead of seeing it as being loving to people who are called to different things, we have tried to make the Society of Friends into “everybody can be a Friend. You can believe whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, and you can call yourself a Quaker.” We lose a sense of who we are. We cannot support each other as a community if we don’t have some sense of what’s anchoring that community.

So the book I wrote, Primitive Quakerism Revived, is not saying, “Go back, read what they said in the seventeenth century, and do that,” but, “Go back and see what they said, and then see how that relates to where we are today. And if there’s no line connecting the two, maybe we’re in the wrong place.”

It is a disservice when people come to our meetings who are contemporary Seekers, and our response to them is, “Oh, yeah, you can join us. You can be part of our meeting.” Instead of asking, “What’s the best place for you? What would serve your spiritual needs?” If our meeting is the right place, oh wonderful! But if it’s not, we need to help them find that other place where they belong, where they can spiritually shine and where they can live their lives faithfully. Instead of trying to squeeze them in and changing this community in order to make it fit them.

SD: What are some examples of historic Quaker revival movements in the United States that still influence Friends today?

PB: Well, I wanted to stay out of the nineteenth century, but I think that the separations that we suffered in the nineteenth century were, in fact, rooted in attempts to revive Quakerism, just doing it from very different starting points.

Quakers have been around for a century and a half or two centuries since then, and we know that God has been active in our lives, in our communities, in our Society, and that we have been guided. Although I disagree with some of the places people got to, I think that the Gurneyites, the Wilburites, and the Hicksites all go back to the same starting point. Each branch in its own way had been called, and each in its own way revived the Society of Friends. They recognized that it had grown spiritually flabby. They had different prescriptions and different solutions. They had a sense that God had called us to grow as a people, but they fought over which way to grow, and so they separated. But perhaps it was several successful revivals that really underlie those separations, and we should be celebrating them.

SD: Please give me an overview of how yearly meetings and monthly meetings play a role in revival movements, and talk about how that happens today.

PB: I don’t think it’s so much the meetings, as individuals within the meetings. I think what happens is that we have individuals who spiritually catch fire, who become spiritually charged, and who feel called to follow in our old tradition of traveling in the ministry and sharing that message. To a degree, I have done that, but other Friends have done a lot more traveling and have invested a lot more effort in helping Friends to think about what it means to be a Friend and to change their lives and to change their meetings.

When such an individual comes and sparks a fire in the monthly meeting, that’s when the monthly meeting plays a role. I think it’s only when you’ve got a number of monthly meetings that have caught fire in the same way that the yearly meeting plays a role in revival. Yearly meetings are not very effective in this matter: they provide forums rather than direction.

SD: How would you describe the long-term impacts of the separations you were describing on people’s views of revival?

PB: Well, certainly we have very different views of the externalities, such as how we are to worship: not just the form of worship but the content of worship. Starting in the ’40s, then in the ’50s, and a little later, there were attempts to form united yearly meetings. A united yearly meeting might accept some unprogrammed meetings as well as some meetings having an order of worship on Sunday morning: some being more Christocentric and others being more Liberal. I think that experiment failed. I regret that. I deeply regret that we put the externalities above the commonalities of spiritual belief: of a relationship to God and to each other.

SD: How do Quaker revival movements fit in with the larger history of religious revivals in the United States?

PB: A lot of the important things that happened in the United States had to do with slavery. They’re not called Southern Baptists because it sounded nice; it’s because there were Baptists in the South who had no problem with slavery. Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists separated on that basis. A lot of American religious separations were over the issue of slavery in one way or another. We Friends mostly avoided that.

Wesleyan theology was another important theological argument that powered the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. That one we shared in. Friends had a spiritual void in the late-eighteenth century that was filled with ideas that we took in from the wider society. Wesleyan theology was one; revolutionary thought, the American Revolution and the French Revolution; Enlightenment thought; and a variety of other ideas were drawn on to fill that void. These redefined for some people what it meant to be a Friend, and it led to separations.

This is what I fear we’re doing today: we’re taking in things from the wider society and saying, “These are the things that are important to being a Friend.” At least since the 1960s, politics has had an enormous effect on some Friends. Politics has been behind a number of the separations that have taken place recently in the Society of Friends. For example, for too many people, being a good Democrat is by definition what it means to be a Quaker. The two can go together, but it used to be that a majority of Friends were Republicans, and that fit very nicely then, too.

SD: What would you like to add?

PB: We need to remember the early Friends felt they were reviving Christianity, not inventing Quakerism. In the seventeenth century, we rightfully described ourselves as “primitive Christianity revived” or “primitive Christianity restored.”

They had a view of God’s interactions with humanity that you can see in the Bible, and you can see in Christian history. In the Bible, God doesn’t just send one prophet; God sends multiple prophets: one after the other after the other. Why? Because God sends prophets who preach a message of fidelity: faithfulness. And the people say, “Oh yeah! Wow! That’s our God! We’re God’s people!” And then, well, they get a little lazy, and they fall into what would be called “apostasy.” They start going to the sacred grove of oaks to pray when the rains don’t come, instead of being faithful, or they have a queen who comes in and brings all her priests for the worship of Baal.

You have this cycle: God calls the people; the people say, “Yes, this is what we want!” and then they fall away. And God says, “Alright, I’ll give you a new prophet,” and this goes on and on, and on and on. The cycle from revival to apostasy to new revival is not a flat curve where each turn returns to the same baseline. It is an upward spiral with each turn ascending, as God reveals a bit more of God’s self, and humanity is beckoned a little closer to the Divine. And you can see Jesus as one more cycle, a very radical one but the same thing. The people have lost that essential connection with God, and Jesus comes to show them how to do it.

You can also read church history in the same way. You’ve got the initial church planting by Paul, Peter, James, and others in different places, and they start drifting in different directions, and so the Protestant Reformation (which might better be called the Protestant revival) happens. But what happened? You have a revival with Martin Luther, and then the next generation or the generation after that becomes comfortable. Even worse, they become politically powerful, and when they do, they figure out that they can persecute other people. They can try and drive others into their churches.

So then God intervenes again. How? One example is George Fox. Think of Fox as an Old Testament prophet sent to call back to faithfulness the Protestants in England. That’s how early Friends saw what they were doing. They were restoring and reviving true Christianity. You have to start with that basis, that understanding, to know who we were originally as a people.

It’s not that Fox has a new idea: “Hey! Christ Jesus has come to teach his people himself!” This is not a new idea. He didn’t preach, “George Fox has come to teach you,” but, “Christ Jesus has come to teach.” Their expectation was “We’re going to revive! We’re going to restore what it means to be a Christian!”

It is important to remember that revivals are initiated by God sending a prophet (e.g., Isaiah, Martin Luther, George Fox, or Mary Baker Eddy). When people attempt to undertake this work on their own, they are false prophets and doomed to fail.

Finally, while early Friends were (and we today are) most familiar with revivals in Judeo-Christian history, God sends prophets to many peoples: the Buddha and Mohammed come immediately to mind, but there are many more. God has many chosen peoples, each with its own divine calling.