Teaching Quakerism again

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Quakerism 101 classes at Moorestown Meeting NJGet­ting right back on the horse, I’m teach­ing Quak­erism 101 at “Moorestown NJ Meeting”:http://www.moorestownfriendsmeeting.org/ Wednes­day evenings start­ing in a few weeks. The orig­i­nal plan was for the most excel­lent Thomas Swain to lead it but he’s become rather busy after being tapped to be yearly meet­ing clerk (God bless ‘im). He’ll be there for the first ses­sion, I’ll be on my own for the rest. A rather small group has signed up so it should be nice and inti­mate.
For the last year I’ve been pon­der­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties of using mid-week reli­gious edu­ca­tion and wor­ship as a form of out­reach. Emer­gent Church types love small group oppor­tu­ni­ties out­side of the Sun­day morn­ing time slot and it seems that mid-week wor­ship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker tra­di­tions that might be worth revi­tal­iz­ing and recast­ing in an Emergent-friendly for­mat.
Last Spring I spent a few months reg­u­larly attend­ing one of the few sur­viv­ing mid-week wor­ships in the area and I found it intrigu­ing and full of pos­si­bil­i­ties but never felt led to do more. It seemed that atten­ders came and went each week with­out con­nect­ing deeply to one another or get­ting any seri­ous ground­ing in Quak­erism.
Reflect­ing on the gen­e­sis of a strong Philadel­phia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look some­thing like this:
* 6pm: reg­u­lar reli­gious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where atten­ders would be free to share spir­i­tual insights but they would also learn the ortho­dox Quaker take on the issue or con­cern (Bar­clay essen­tially).
* 7pm: mid-week wor­ship, unpro­grammed
* 8pm: unof­fi­cial but reg­u­lar hang-out time, peo­ple going in groups to local din­ers, etc.
Unpro­grammed wor­ship just isn’t enough (just when y’all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilbu­rite.…) . Peo­ple do need time to be able to ask ques­tions and explore spir­i­tu­al­ity in a more struc­tured way. Those of us led to teach­ing need to be will­ing to say “this is the Quaker take on this issue” even if our answer wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily pass con­sen­sus in a Friends meet­ing.
Peo­ple also need time to social­ize. We live in an atom­ized soci­ety and the brunt of this iso­la­tion is borne by young adults start­ing careers in unfa­mil­iar cities and towns: Quaker meet­ing can act as a place to plug into a social net­work and pro­vide real com­mu­nity. It’s dif­fer­ent from enter­tain­ment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift think­ing from “those Quak­ers are cool” to “I’m a Quaker and I’m cool” in such a way that these new Friends under­stand that there are chal­lenges and dis­ci­plines involved in tak­ing on this new role.
Per­haps the three parts to the mid-week wor­ship model is head, spirit and heart; what­ever labels you give it we need to think about feed­ing and nur­tur­ing the whole seeker and to chal­lenge them to more than just silence. This is cer­tainly a com­mon model. When “Peggy Sen­ger Parsons”:http://www.unction.org/PP-Home.htm and “Alivia Biko”:http://aliviabiko.org/ came to the FGC Gath­er­ing and shared “Free­dom Friends”:http://freedomfriends.org/ wor­ship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what’s now called “The Col­legium Center”:http://www.collegiumcenter.org/events.php which is a Sun­day night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that pro­duced at least one cou­ple (good friends of ours now!).
I don’t know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people’s heads too. The four weeks of Wednes­day night reli­gious ed at Moorestown might have some­thing of this feel; it will be inter­est­ing to see.
For those inter­ested in cur­ricu­lum details, I’m bas­ing it on Michael Birkel’s “Silence and Wit­ness: the Quaker Tradition”:http://quakerquaker.org/books/1570755183 (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael’s tried to pull together a good gen­eral intro­duc­tion to Friends, some­thing surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton’s _Friends for 300 Years_ it’s get­ting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can _Silence and Witness_ anchor a Quak­erism 101 course? We’ll see.
As sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­ial I’m using Thomas Hamm’s “Quak­ers in America”:http://quakerbooks.org/get/0–231-12362–0 (Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion’s “Con­vinced Quak­erism: 2003 Wal­ton Lecture”:http://quakerbooks.org/get/11–99-01239–4 (South­east­ern Yearly Meet­ing Wal­ton Lec­ture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy’s “Quaker Treasure”:http://quakerbooks.org/get/11–99-01006–5 (Bea­con Hill Friends House Weed Lec­ture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pam­phlet “Four Doors to Quaker Worship”:http://quakerbooks.org/get/0–87574-306–4 (Pen­dle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Atten­tive read­ers will see echos from my pre­vi­ous “Quak­erism 101 class at Med­ford Meeting”:http://www.quakerranter.org/quakerism_101.php.

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