* re: quakers: oh yeah, quaker meetings for worship are NEAT. when i lived in Boston there was a really big one & i went a few times—the whole idea is, you sit in silence together, trying to focus on the presence of the Holy Spirit, and no one speaks until & unless they feel they are moved to do so by said spirit.
which in practice made for a really nice/peaceful kind of service—when i went, usually the first half-hour or so passed in just silent contemplation, and then maybe 1-4 people would feel moved to speak during the last half hour. and when people spoke, it would be like—some kind words about a member of their congregation who'd recently passed, or some insight they'd had during their morning commute, or some meditation on the nature of peace/war, stuff like that. no pressure whatsoever to speak if you didn't want to / didn't feel moved to, and no expectation / need to clap or react or anything after someone spoke—people would nod and then you'd get back to chilling in the silence.
and quakerism in general always struck me as shockingly egalitarian for such an old tradition—they also have a thing where they try to make all decisions by consensus, rather than by simple majorities. (plus all the usual stuff you probably already know... early abolitionists/suffragettes yada yada. it's neat stuff!)
* re: as for whether there's a hot new megachurch in Seattle... if there is one, i'm not aware of it. i'd be pretty ill-suited to notice that sort of thing—i suspect the groups i hang out tend even less religious than the seattle mean—but yeah, i got nothing. like, there is a pretty theologically conservative church downtown that draws a decent crowd, but i don't think it's the phenomenon that Mars Hill seems to have been. (if i were to hazard a guess, i'd honestly bet that the 2020s-flavored reactionary surge would not ride the church's coattails but instead be an areligious phenomenon this time round. like, Joe Rogan vibes or something...? idk lol)
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* re: quakers: oh yeah, quaker meetings for worship are NEAT. when i lived in Boston there was a really big one & i went a few times—the whole idea is, you sit in silence together, trying to focus on the presence of the Holy Spirit, and no one speaks until & unless they feel they are moved to do so by said spirit.
which in practice made for a really nice/peaceful kind of service—when i went, usually the first half-hour or so passed in just silent contemplation, and then maybe 1-4 people would feel moved to speak during the last half hour. and when people spoke, it would be like—some kind words about a member of their congregation who'd recently passed, or some insight they'd had during their morning commute, or some meditation on the nature of peace/war, stuff like that. no pressure whatsoever to speak if you didn't want to / didn't feel moved to, and no expectation / need to clap or react or anything after someone spoke—people would nod and then you'd get back to chilling in the silence.
and quakerism in general always struck me as shockingly egalitarian for such an old tradition—they also have a thing where they try to make all decisions by consensus, rather than by simple majorities. (plus all the usual stuff you probably already know... early abolitionists/suffragettes yada yada. it's neat stuff!)
* re: as for whether there's a hot new megachurch in Seattle... if there is one, i'm not aware of it. i'd be pretty ill-suited to notice that sort of thing—i suspect the groups i hang out tend even less religious than the seattle mean—but yeah, i got nothing. like, there is a pretty theologically conservative church downtown that draws a decent crowd, but i don't think it's the phenomenon that Mars Hill seems to have been. (if i were to hazard a guess, i'd honestly bet that the 2020s-flavored reactionary surge would not ride the church's coattails but instead be an areligious phenomenon this time round. like, Joe Rogan vibes or something...? idk lol)