Chuck Fager

Indiana Trainwreck Chuck Fager

In 2008, a Quaker meeting in the West Richmond Friends Meeting of Richmond, Indiana quietly adopted a policy statement affirming the presence and participation of LGBTQ persons in all aspects of its fellowship, and posted this new statement, called a Minute, on its website. Officials in the meeting's regional association, Indiana Yearly Meeting, took exception to this new statement, and told West Richmond to remove it from the site. West Richmond declined. The resulting controversy unfolded over the next five years, and resulted in a major division in what had once been among the largest Quaker communities in the United States. This dispute soon engulfed all the meetings in the association. It involved issues ranging far beyond matters of sexual preference: debates over the place and role of Jesus and the Bible in Christian belief; Quaker history, church structure and governance; and recent social-cultural conflicts that have roiled American society and politics at every level. The struggle around West Richmond Friends Meeting drew the attention of Stephen Angell and Chuck Fager, Editors of the independent journal "Quaker Theology." While the journal was not intended as a news organ, Angell and Fager agreed that their central topic, theology, was entangled with the West Richmond situation in all its aspects. Moreover, no other Quaker publication was reporting on the situation. So they did, in a series of detailed reports and commentary. These reports make up the only extensive account of the debate and its outcome now available. In "Indiana Trainwreck," this material has been compiled, for the use of both historians and general readers. For historians, it is a unique resource for research. For general readers, it is a rare closeup view of issues that reverberate widely across our culture, and have implications far beyond the boundaries of a small Midwestern religious sect. Indeed, the Indiana virus spread, and parallel conflicts soon convulsed several other American Quaker associations; in turn, "Quaker Theology" reported on them as well. While the local; institutional divisions have been more or less resolved, the issues involved certainly have not. They still simmer both among Quakers and in society at large. Thus "Indiana Trainwreck" is intended as the first in a series, titled "The Separation Generation," as a record of this emblematic struggle, and a resource for study, discussion, and perhaps a contribution to some better future resolution.