Tom Gates (1)Rezensionen

Relates stories which arose out of the authors’ experiences of living and working at a Quaker mission hospital in rural western Kenya.

This pamphlet contains the stories of an American Quaker doctor's compassionate encounter with Kenyans in their country. The stories describe the challenges to alleviate suffering and African faith in response. The author learned they live by the conviction that our lives are not our own. This is a conviction deeper than the intellect, deeper than words, deeper even than the Christianity of the last hundred years. It is a conviction as deep as the roots of the timeless baobab tree, as ancient as venerated ancestors.

“In Quaker faith and practice, the individual and the meeting are in a dynamic, mutually supportive and reciprocal relation.”

In this essay, Tom Gates examines many of the factors affecting the relationship between the Seeker and the Meeting, before and during membership. While a person may be drawn to Quakerism for a particular reason, over time the individual’s needs, and the way in which the Meeting community is able to meet them, can change. There are stages to be gone through as we grow into the life of the meeting community. Is it peace we are after? Service? Shared values? A deepening of our faith? What, exactly, is a leading? Tom Gates examines the many aspects of membership and the obligations it may impose on us, individually and as a faith family.

What does it mean to be a witness to Truth? The author draws from the experiences of the captive Hebrews as told in the Book of Isaiah, as well as the discoveries and practices of early Friends, to offer perspective and insights for 21st-century Quakers who are trying to live in faithful witness to the Light. What is our testimony today, and how can we best express it in the context of a modern world filled with "false idols," such as the lure of wealth and comfort, side-by-side with overwhelming powers that wreak havoc on peace and environmental sustainability? Poised between the temptation of complacency and despair, how do we live our witness?

More stories from this American doctor’s compassionate encounter with Africans in their country. The stories describe the challenges of suffering and African faith in response.

What does it mean to be a witness to Truth? The experiences of the captive Hebrews as told in the Book of Isaiah, as well as the discoveries and practices of early Friends, offers perspective and insights for 21st-century Quakers who are trying to live in faithful witness to the Light. What is our testimony today, and how can we best express it in the context of a modern world filled with "false idols?"

In this essay Tom Gates examines many of the factors affecting the relationship between the Seeker and the Meeting, before and during membership. While a person may be drawn to Quakerism for a particular reason, over time the individual’s needs, and the way in which the Meeting community is able to meet them, can change. There are stages to be gone through as we grow into the life of the meeting community. Is it peace we are after? Service? Shared values? A deepening of our faith? What, exactly, is a leading? Tom Gates examines the many aspects of membership and the obligations it may impose on us, individually and as a faith family.

Gates looks at membership in terms of four aspects.
1. a sense of belonging
2. shared values
3. transformation
4. obedience

I admit to being startled at the thought that we are called to obedience, yet after reading this pamphlet, I think I do understand the meaning Gates attaches to it.

The first two, belonging and a sense of shared values, came easy to me when I began attending my first Quaker Meeting. The notion of being transformed seems so heady, so other worldly that I hesitate to claim it, yet I realize I am being transformed, and I hope to go on being transformed my whole life. And obedience? Surely not obedient to the Meeting, but obedient to God's call to me? Yes, I do try. Some days I am more successful than others.

An excellent pamphlet exploring the Quaker experience of a gathered meeting for worship and the individual & group practices that help bring it about. Based on a lecture delivered to the 2006 annual sessions of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

An excellent pamphlet exploring the Quaker experience of a gathered meeting for worship and the individual & group practices that help bring it about. Based on a lecture delivered to the 2006 annual sessions of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

This pamphlet takes off from Isaiah 44:8, "You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?" and explores what it means to be God's witnesses. After discussing both transcendence and immanence, this leads Gates on to ask us, What is Friends' testimony now, as we live in this modern age of "empire and exile?" He also asks the crucial question of how we transcend the temptation to despair, or our tendency to avoid facing our fear and grief for the world. He explains the basic principles of Active Hope, citing the book of that name by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone.
This is a lovely and enlightening discussion of faithfulness and testimony in our own age, making crystal clear the oneness of what we often think of as two: spiritual devotion and testimony. The theology is useful as part of the project of renewing Quakerism for our times. The pamphlet is based on a series of Bible talks at New England Yearly Meeting 2014.

This pamphlet spends three quarters of its space with exegesis/history and one quarter on environmental concerns. Gates is identifying attempts at ecological salvation for the earth with a testimony the 21st century needs to embrace for human survival, but the work is unbalanced.

The section in the middle of the pamphlet subtitled "Testimonies as Stories of Witness," is quite moving. In it, Gates speaks to the notion (I'm sure it is not original with him) that God does not call us to be successful, but to be faithful; acting with faith, we become effective. We can be proud of our history, "but what are we doing now?" he asks. We need to be aware that each of us has a personal testimony (Thomas Kelly, _A Testimony of Devotion_) that we need to uncover and pursue--that "we cannot die on every cross, nor our we expected to" (Kelly).

But then the last quarter prescribes our 21st c. testimony to be focused on the sustainability of our biosphere. It seems that Gates has determined that he is to take up the cross that Joanna Macy, Chris Johnstone, and Doug Gwyn have recently lifted up...and that we each of us also need to shoulder.

It is a pamphlet worth reading, but I expected more coherence from Gates.½

Gates writes stories from his experience as a doctor at a Friends' hospital in Kenya. His stories tell the spiritual meaning of what happened, inspired by how his African patients and friends saw their own lives. Gates finds that we have much to learn from Africans about how to live our own lives, suffering, and faith. He introduces each story with a Bible passage, since one of the things he learned from his Kenyan hosts was that the Bible helps them and us to interpret their and our lives, and their/our lives to interpret the Bible.

This is a lovely pamphlet of stories about spiritual lessons learned by the authors during their time working at Lugulu Friends Hospital in Kenya. The lessons are relevant to all of us, about leadings, trust, hope, a tender heart, knowing God, being rich in a poor world, receiving though giving lovingly, and finding joy.

This very wonderful pamphlet is about what belonging to a living spiritual community offers, and is both a vision and a challenge to us. Is our meeting a community that nurtures the spiritual growth and the lifelong process of spiritual maturing and transformation of its members?
Gates explains the Quaker meeting as a place of acceptance and loving welcome, a place of shared values as lived out in our Testimonies, a place of transformation offering both challenge and support, and a place of obedience and faithfulness to the leadings of the Spirit. These can be seen as stages of deepening our understanding and developing our practice as we live in the spiritual community that the meeting can and should offer. The challenge to the meeting is to meet each participant where they are, while at the same time lifting up to them a vision of and support for where they might be going.
Note that despite the title, it is not about the formal process or meaning of institutional membership in the RSF.

Wonderful way to view the role of the local Quaker community (i.e. one's Quaker meeting) vis-a-vis our relationship to one another, and to the meeting, as a convenant community.

Gates was a doctor at Friends Lugulu Hospital in Kenya. These are stories about specific patients and what he learned from his experiences there. Thought provoking; it left me wondering how I can better help in this world.½

PHP #371

PHP #341

PHP #319

Reviewed by Paul Buckley in The Friends Journal, April 2016
https://www.friendsjournal.org/witnesses-witness-testimony-biblical-quaker-tradi...

The use of eyeglasses spread rapidly in Europe following Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452. For many people, placing a single lens between an eye and a printed page made blurry letters clear and readable. In less than half a century, it was discovered that lining up multiple lenses allowed an individual to see what had previously been unimagined: very small structures such as the cells in an organism, and very distant objects, like the mountains on the moon and the myriad stars in the Milky Way. Compounding the effects of lenses didn’t just make the known more visible, it gave people the ability to see and think about things in ways that had been impossible before.

It is common these days to talk about examining a text through a lens as a way to provide context for a reader. We all carry bits and pieces of our life stories and experiences along when we read and selectively use that information as we try to make what another has written clear and readable. For example, I read the gospels through a Quaker lens and as a result, I probably see Jesus as more of a pacifist than someone from a more traditional Christian background. The lens I use brings certain aspects of the text into focus—but sometimes at the cost of obscuring other attributes. In this pamphlet, Thomas Gates uses multiple lenses; each illuminates a particular aspect of a story in the scriptures or in Quaker writings, but in addition, he lines them up to reveal the unexpected.

This pamphlet is based on a series of Bible Half-Hours that Gates presented to New England Yearly Meeting in 2014. They were a close consideration of the theme of the annual sessions, “You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?” (Isaiah 43:10, 43:12, and 44:8). Gates examined what it means to witness, who a witness is, and what a witness does in the context of ancient Israel, in the New Testament, and among Friends. He uses the expected works of early Quakers—Fox, Penn, and Barclay—but also less well-known seventeenth-century voices such as Sarah Blackborow and Thomas Lurting. He follows the evolution of Quaker thought through later Friends such as Thomas Kelly, Doug Gwyn, and the authors of recent articles in Friends Journal. To these sectarian viewpoints, he adds those of outsiders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Walter Brueggemann.

If this were simply a survey of past witnesses to Truth, it would be of value; Friends should know and be proud of what we have accomplished, and how we rightly claim a place in a millennia-long cloud of witnesses. But Gates challenges us to go deeper, “Will we be content with merely polishing the Quaker museum, or will we discern new ways of doing Truth, of bearing witness . . . to suffer for the Truth?” Are we observers or witnesses?

There is a lot packed into this short pamphlet. Reaching beyond each passage and each separate context, Gates presents an amalgam, with each lens focusing its light into the others. The result is challenging, but the prize is worth the effort.

(Friends Journal, April 1, 2016, Reviewed by Paul Buckley)