What is a Quaker? Mark Russ explains all To The God Cast.

The God Cast with Fr Alex Frost and Guests.

Follow Fr Alex on X @alexdjfrost About Mark Russ JollyQuaker.com began in 2013 as a space to process and share my thoughts on Quaker theology. The name is inspired by ‘A Testament of Devotion’ by the Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly, one of the first books on Quaker spirituality I read. Kelly writes ‘I’d rather be jolly Saint Francis singing his canticle to the sun, than a dour sobersides Quaker.’ I don’t want to have to make a choice, so I’m a jolly Quaker. A Quaker-shaped Christian I grew up in a non-religious family, but intense experiences of spiritual joy in my late teens set me on a path of religious discovery. Joy was my doorway to the religious life. C. S. Lewis, another writer who has shaped my theology, said that ‘joy is the serious business of heaven.’ In the Quakers I found a community I could step through the doorway with, and became a member of the Religious Society of Friends when I was 20. The Quaker/St. Francis combination also speaks to my seeing Quakerism as part of the larger Christian tradition. I think of myself as a ‘Quaker-shaped Christian’ and a member of the universal Church. The Jesus story is how I make sense of my life and the world, and Quakerism is the lens through which I interpret the Jesus story. My theology has an ecumenical focus. I want to communicate a life-giving form of Christianity to my fellow Quakers, and offer the best of Quaker thought and spirituality to the wider Christian church. Queer If joy was my doorway to God, then the key that unlocked the door was my coming out as gay. When I was able to accept my sexuality, and love my whole self, I was able to love God. My queer experience of the self, the world and God is another foundation of my theology. I find the Spirit of Freedom (2 Cor. 3:17) in queer spaces, on the dancefloor of the gay nightclub, and in the love of my LGBT+ community. My faith is also queer in that I fully embrace the crossing of boundaries and muddying of waters. I’m too queer for the Christians, and too Christian for the Quakers, so I experiment with creating a joyful blend all of my own, exploring other streams of faith such as Franciscan and nature-based spiritualities. Appropriately, ‘jolly’ was a code word for gay in the early 20th century, so I’m a jolly Quaker in more ways than one.