A look at the gen­er­a­tional shifts fac­ing Friends.

Read­ing now (Ninth Month 2003): “The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals” by Robert E. Web­ber. Web­ber looks at the cul­tural and gen­er­a­tional shifts hap­pen­ing within the Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cal move​ment​.At the bot­tom of this page is a handy chart of the gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in the­ol­ogy, eccle­si­as­ti­cal par­a­digm, church polity. When I first saw it I said “yes!” to almost each cat­e­gory, as it clearly hits at the gen­er­a­tional forces hit­ting Quakerism.

Unfor­tu­nately many Friends in lead­er­ship posi­tions don’t really under­stand the prob­lems fac­ing Quak­erism. Well, that’s not true: they do, but they don’t under­stand the larger shifts behind them and think that they just need to redou­ble their efforts using the old meth­ods and mod­els. The Baby Boom gen­er­a­tion in charge knows the chal­lenge is to reach out to seek­ers in their twen­ties or thir­ties, but they do this by devel­op­ing pro­grams that would have appealed to them when they were that age. The cur­rent crop of out­reach projects and peace ini­tia­tives are all very 1980 in style. There’s no recog­ni­tion that the sec­u­lar peace com­mu­nity that drew seek­ers in twenty years ago no longer exists and that today’s seek­ers are look­ing for some­thing deeper, some­thing more per­sonal and more real.

When younger Friends are included in the sur­veys and com­mit­tees, they tend to be either the unin­volved chil­dren of impor­tant Baby Boom gen­er­a­tion Quak­ers, or those thirty-something Friends that cul­tur­ally and philo­soph­i­cally fit into the older par­a­digms. It’s fine that these two types of Friends are around, but nei­ther group chal­lenges Baby Boomer group-think. Out­spo­ken younger Friends are ostra­cized and usu­ally leave the Soci­ety in frus­tra­tion after a few years.

It’s a shame. In my ten years attend­ing Cen­tral Philadel­phia Monthly Meet­ing, I eas­ily met a hun­dred young seek­ers who cycled through, attend­ing for peri­ods rang­ing from a few months to a few years. I would often ask them why they stopped com­ing. Some­times they were just nice and said life was too busy, but of course that’s not a real answer: you make time for the things that are impor­tant and that feed you in some way. But oth­ers told me they found the Meet­ing unwel­com­ing, or Friends too self-congratulatory or super­fi­cial, the com­mu­nity more social than spir­i­tual. I went back to Cen­tral Philly one First Day after a two year absence and it was depress­ing how it was all the same faces. This is not a knock on Cen­tral Philly in par­tic­u­lar, since the same dynam­ics are at work in most of the “Lib­eral” Meet­ings I’ve attended, both in the FGC and FUM worlds–it’s a gen­er­a­tional cul­tural phe­nom­e­non. I have never found the young Quaker seeker com­mu­nity I know is out there, though I’ve glimpsed its con­stituent faces a hun­dred times: always just out of reach, never gelling into a movement.

I’m not sure what the answers are. Luck­ily it’s not my job to have answers: I leave that up to Christ and only con­cern myself with being as faith­ful a ser­vant to the Spirit as I can be (this spirit-led lead­er­ship style is exactly one of the gen­er­a­tional shifts Web­ber talks about). I’ve been given a clear mes­sage that my job is to stay with the Soci­ety of Friends, that I might be of use some­day. But there are a few pieces that I think will come out:

A re-examination of our roots, as Chris­tians and as Friends

What babies were thrown out with the bath­wa­ter by turn-of-the-century Friends who embraced mod­ernism and ratio­nal­ism and turned their back on tra­di­tional tes­ti­monies? This will require chal­leng­ing some of the sacred myths of con­tem­po­rary Quak­erism. There are a lot that aren’t par­tic­u­larly Quaker and we need to start admit­ting to that. I’ve per­son­ally taken up plain dress and find the old state­ments on the peace tes­ti­mony much deeper and more mean­ing­ful than con­tem­po­rary ones. I’m a pro­fes­sional web­mas­ter and run a promi­nent paci­fist site, so it’s not like I’m stuck in the nine­teenth cen­tury; instead, I just think these old tes­ti­monies actu­ally speak to our con­di­tion in the twenty-first Century.

A Desire to Grow

Too many Friends are happy with their nice cozy meet­ings. The meet­ings serve as fam­ily and as a sup­port group, and a real growth would dis­rupt our estab­lished pat­terns. If Quak­erism grew ten­fold over the next twenty years we’d have to build meet­ing­houses, have extra wor­ship, reor­ga­nize our com­mit­tees. Involved Friends wouldn’t know all the other involved Friends in their yearly meet­ing. With more mem­bers we’d have to become more rig­or­ous and dis­ci­plined in our com­mit­tee meet­ings. Quak­erism would feel dif­fer­ent if it were ten times larger: how many of us would just feel uncom­fort­able with that. Many of our Meet­ings are ripe for growth, being in boom­ing sub­urbs or thriv­ing urban cen­ters, but year after year they stay small. Many sim­ply neglect and screw up out­reach or reli­gious edu­ca­tion efforts as a way of keep­ing the meet­ing at its cur­rent size and with its cur­rent character.

A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment

Reli­gion in Amer­ica has become yet another con­sumer choice, an enter­tain­ment option for Sun­day morn­ing, and this par­a­digm is true with Friends. We com­plain how much time our Quaker work takes up. We com­plain about clear­ness com­mit­tees or vision­ing groups that might take up a Sat­ur­day after­noon. A more involved Quak­erism would real­ize that the hour on First Day morn­ing is in many ways the least impor­tant time to our Soci­ety. Younger seek­ers are look­ing for con­nec­tions that are deeper and that will require time. We can’t build a Soci­ety on the cheap. It’s not money we need to invest, but our hearts and time.

I recently vis­ited a Meet­ing that was set­ting up its first adult reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­gram. When it came time to fig­ure out the for­mat, a weighty Friend declared that it couldn’t take place on the first Sun­day of the month because that was when the finance com­mit­tee met; the sec­ond Sun­day was out because of the mem­ber­ship care com­mit­tee; the third was out because of busi­ness meet­ing and so forth. It turned out that reli­gious edu­ca­tion could be squeezed into one 45-minute slot on the fourth Sun­day of every month. Here was a small strug­gling meet­ing in the mid­dle of an sym­pa­thetic urban neigh­bor­hood and they couldn’t spare even an hour a month on reli­gious edu­ca­tion or sub­stan­tive out­reach to new mem­bers. Mod­ern Friends should not exist to meet in committees.

A renewal of dis­ci­pline and oversight

These are taboo words for many mod­ern Friends. But we’ve taken open-hearted tol­er­ance so far that we’ve for­got­ten who we are. What does it mean to be a Quaker? Seek­ers are look­ing for answers. Friends have been able to pro­vide them with answers in the past: both ways to con­duct one­self in the world and ways to reach the divine. Many of us actu­ally yearn for more care, atten­tion and over­sight in our reli­gious lives and more con­nec­tion with others.

A con­fronta­tion of our eth­nic and cul­tural bigotries

Too much of Quaker cul­ture is still rooted in elit­ist wealthy Philadel­phia Main Line “Wasp” cul­ture. For gen­er­a­tions of Friends, the Soci­ety became an eth­nic group you were born into. Too many Friends still care if your name is “Roberts,” “Jones,” “Lip­pen­cott,” “Thomas,” “Brin­ton.” A num­ber of nineteenth-century Quaker lead­ers tried to make this a reli­gion of fam­ily fief­doms. There was a love of the world and an urge for to be respected by the out­side world (the Epis­co­palians wouldn’t let you into the coun­try clubs if you wore plain dress or got too excited about religion).

Today we too often con­fuse the cul­ture of those fam­i­lies with Quak­erism. The most obvi­ous exam­ple to me is the oft-repeated phrase: “Friends don’t believe in pros­e­ly­tiz­ing.” Wrong: we started off as great speak­ers of the Truth, gain­ing num­bers in great quan­ti­ties. It was the old Quaker fam­i­lies who started fret­ting about new blood in the Soci­ety, for they saw birthright mem­ber­ship as more impor­tant than bap­tism by the Holy Spirit. We’ve got a lot of bag­gage left over from this era, things we need to re-examine, includ­ing: our will­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice Truth-telling in the name of polite­ness; an over-developed intel­lec­tu­al­ism that has become snob­bery against those with­out advanced school­ing; our taboo about being too loud or too “eth­nic” in Meeting.

Note that I haven’t specif­i­cally men­tioned racial diver­sity. This is a piece of the work we need to do and I’m happy that many Friends are work­ing on it. But I think we’ll all agree that it will take more than a few African Amer­i­cans with grad­u­ate degrees to bring true diver­sity. The Lib­eral branch of Friends spends a lot of time con­grat­u­lat­ing itself on being open, tol­er­ant and self-examining and yet as far as I can tell we’re the least ethnically-diverse branch of Amer­i­can Quak­ers (I’m pretty sure, any­one with cor­rob­o­ra­tion?). We need to re-examine and chal­lenge the unwrit­ten norms of Quaker cul­ture that don’t arise from faith. When we have some­thing to offer besides upper-class lib­er­al­ism, we’ll find we can talk to a much wider selec­tion of seekers.

Can we do it?

Can we do these re-examinations with­out rip­ping our Soci­ety apart? I don’t know. I don’t think the age of Quaker schisms is over, I just think we have a dif­fer­ent dis­ci­pline and church polity that let us pre­tend the splits aren’t there. We just self-select our­selves into dif­fer­ent sub-groups. I’m not sure if this can con­tinue indef­i­nitely. Every week our Meet­ings for Wor­ship bring together peo­ple of rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of wor­ship, we have indi­vid­ual med­i­ta­tion in a group set­ting, where every­one is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn’t Friends’ style and it’s not sat­is­fy­ing to many of us. I know this state­ment may seem like sac­ri­lege to many Friends who value tol­er­ance above all. But I don’t think I’m the only one who would rather wor­ship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper reli­gious fel­low­ship than that found in most con­tem­po­rary Meet­ings. Quak­erism will change and Mod­ernism isn’t the end of history.

How open will we all be to this process? How hon­est will we get? Where will our Soci­ety end up? We’re not the only reli­gion in Amer­ica that is fac­ing these questions.

See also:

On Quaker Ranter:

• It Will Be There in Decline Our Entire Lives. There’s a gen­er­a­tion of young Chris­tians dis­il­lu­sioned by mod­ern church insti­tu­tion­al­ism who are writ­ing and blog­ging under the “post-modern” “emer­gent church” labels. Do Friends have any­thing to offer these wea­ried seek­ers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism?
• Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?, my obser­va­tions from the Novem­ber 2003 “Indie Allies” meet-up.
• Sodium Free Friends, a post of mine urg­ing Friends to actively engage with our tra­di­tion and not just selec­tively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a sev­en­teen cen­tury Thich Nhat Hanh. “We poor humans are look­ing for ways to tran­scend the crap­pi­ness of our war– and consumer-obsessed world and Quak­erism has some­thing to say about that.”
• Peace and Twenty-Somethings: are the Emer­gent Church seek­ers cre­at­ing the kinds of youth-led inten­tional com­mu­ni­ties that the peace move­ment inspired in the 1970s?

Else­where:

• From Evan­gel­i­cal Friends Church South­west comes an emer­gent church” church plant­ing project called >Sim­ple Churches (since laid down, link is to archive). I love their intro: “As your peruse the links from this site please rec­og­nize that the Truth reflected in essays are often writ­ten with a ‘prophetic edge’, that is sharp, non com­pro­mis­ing and some­times rad­i­cal per­spec­tive. We believe Truth can be received with­out ‘curs­ing the dark­ness’ and encour­age you to reflect upon find­ing the ‘can­dle’ to light, per­son­ally, as you apply what you hear the Lord speak­ing to you.”
• The emer­gent church move­ment hit the New York Times in Feb­ru­ary 2004. Here’s a link to the arti­cle and my thoughts about it.
• “Ortho­dox Twenty-Somethings,” a great arti­cle from TheOoze (now lost to a site redesign of theirs), and my intro to the arti­cle Want to under­stand us?
• The blog­ger Punkmon­key talks about what a mis­sional com­mu­nity of faith would look like and it sounds a lot like what I dream of: “a mis­sional com­mu­nity of faith is a liv­ing breath­ing trans­par­ent com­mu­nity of faith will­ing to get messy while reach out to, and bring­ing in, those out­side the cur­rent community.”