Ben Pink Dandelion > Quotes

“early Friends understood the inward encounter as Christ come again, an inward experience of the Second Coming,”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“As Quakers, we are part of community rooted in the experience of transformation. This transformation is inward, it is personal, and it is collective.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“we cannot say we seek to encounter the Divine in our meetings for worship and also say categorically that there is nothing beyond the material world.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“Here again, we have an emphasis on the authenticity of the inward, an insistence that coming outwardly to outward things, such as the Scriptures, gives us no clue as to their real meaning. We have to approach the whole of the created world from this space, a practised place, of inward transformation. We can say nothing in any meaningful spiritual sense unless it is inwardly from God.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“looking at ourselves as a community rooted in spiritual experience.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“God is a mystery, unknowable in an ultimate sense, an experience rather than a doctrine.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“We have become paralysed about leadership, conflating our theology of gifts with misunderstood notions of spiritual equality.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“We have to an extent ignored our book of discipline, resting instead on a self-made oral tradition, and ignored the crucial task of teaching Quakerism.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“We have misunderstood the nature of testimony, seeing it as a set of optional values rather than the life we have no choice but to lead. We have at times lost the authority to act on behalf of the collective over individual preferences. We have lost our primal language, a single set of understandings behind and beyond all the detail of doctrine, and have needed to become practised in translation as we have adopted a spirituality of many tongues.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“We act not out of our own authority but from an accompanied place.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“The absence of outward forms in our worship has led to a powerful sense of presence in the inward streams of our corporate life. Our collective processes enable us to live in the spiritual space.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“As individuals, we give up some of our individual freedoms in order to be nurtured through community life.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“collective transformation,”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“The process of giving way to the Light takes us into a place of intimacy with God, and impels us to challenge the injustices humanity besets itself with. We are transformed in our spiritual experience to act collectively as co-agents with God of transformation in the world. We are transformed in order to transform.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“We try to build community upon earth as we imagine it may be in heaven, and our gospel order is a way of reflecting what we sense is the divine imperative for how we are to organise as a church (where we understand the term ‘church’ to refer to the community of believers).”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“we are part of a group which displaces individualism in favour of divine authority discerned through our collective processes.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“Fox had ‘nothing outwardly to help’ him because there was nothing outward that could help him. True spirituality was inward, yet pregnant with these outward consequences. The first Quakers were very distinctive kinds of Christians. Only with the second generation of Friends – those brought up as Quakers, who were waiting for their own convincement – did these hallmarks of a faithful life become aspirational codes, a way to live out their personal ‘in the meantime’. Even then though, Friends lived with and out of their sense of encounter, and stories of Sarah Lynes Grubb, Daniel Wheeler and Elizabeth Fry are just few examples of corporately affirmed obedience to the Light.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“My starting point is the reality of spiritual experience.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“In the last 150 years, in a context very different from the seventeenth century, our Quaker landscape has been recast, and our version of Quakerism has been reinvented in fresh and modern ways. We have prioritised experience over doctrine, have wanted Quakerism to be ever open to new Light and new ideas, and have emphasised innovation over tradition. We participate and believe in ways very different from our forebears.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker

“In the broadest spiritual terms, it is not the maintenance of a Quaker approach to spirituality that matters, but faithfulness to the experience itself and all it requires of us: we do not have a monopoly on God.”
― Ben Pink Dandelion, Open for transformation: Being Quaker