Opening Doors and Moving on Up

Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence has announced that Barry Crossno will be their new incom­ing Gen­eral Sec­re­tary. Old time blog­gers will remem­ber him as the blog­ger behind The Quaker Dharma. FGC’s just pub­lished an inter­view with him and one of the ques­tions is about his blog­ging past. Here’s part of the answer:

Blog­ging among Friends is very impor­tant.  There are not a lot of Quak­ers.  We’re spread out across the world.  Blog­ging opens up dia­logues that just wouldn’t hap­pen oth­er­wise.  While I laid down my blog, “The Quaker Dharma,” a few years ago, and my think­ing on some issues has evolved since then, I’m clear that blog­ging is what allowed me to give voice to my call.  It helped open some of the doors that led me to work for Pen­dle Hill and, now by exten­sion, FGC.  A lot of cut­ting edge Quaker thought is being shared through blogs.

I thought it might be use­ful to fill in a lit­tle bit of this story. If you go read­ing through the back com­ments on Barry’s blog you’ll see it’s a time machine into the early Quaker blog­ging com­mu­nity. I first posted about his blog in Feb­ru­ary of 2005 with Quaker Dharma: Let the Light Shine and I high­lighted him reg­u­larly (March, April, June) until the proto-QuakerQuaker “Blog Watch” started run­ning. There I fea­tured him twice that June and twice more in August, the most active period of his blogging.

It’s nos­tal­gic to look through the com­menters: Joe G., Peter­son Toscano, Mitchell San­tine Gould, Dave Carl, Bar­bara Q, Robin M, Brandice (Quaker Mon­key), Eric Muhr, Nancy A… There were some good dis­cus­sions. Barry’s most exu­ber­ant post was Let’s Begin, and LizOpp and I espe­cially labored with him to ground what was a very clear and obvi­ous lead­ing by hook­ing up with other Friends locally and nation­ally who were inter­ested in these efforts. I offered my help in hook­ing him up with FGC  and he wrote back “If you know peo­ple at other Quaker orga­ni­za­tions that you wish me to speak to and coor­di­nate with or pos­si­bly work for, I will.”

And that’s what I did. My super­vi­sor, FGC Devel­op­ment head Michael Wajda, was plan­ning a trip to Texas and I started talk­ing up Barry Crossno. I had a hunch they’d like each other. I told Michael that Barry had a lot of expe­ri­ence and a very clear lead­ing but needed to spend some time grow­ing as a Quaker–an incu­ba­tion period, if you will, among grounded Friends. In the first part of the FGC inter­view he mov­ingly talks about the ground­ing his time at Pen­dle Hill has given him.

In Octo­ber 2006 he announced he was clos­ing a blog that had become largely dor­mant. It’s worth quot­ing that first for­mal goodbye:

I want to thank those of you who chose to actively par­tic­i­pate. I learned a lot through our exchanges and I think there were many peo­ple who ben­e­fited from many of the posts you left. On a purely per­sonal note, I learned that it’s good to tem­per my need to GO DO NOW. Some of you really helped men­tor me con­cern­ing effec­tively lis­ten­ing to guid­ance and help­ing me under­stand that act­ing locally may be bet­ter than try­ing to take on the whole world at once.

I also want to share that I met some peo­ple and made con­tacts through this process that have opened tremen­dous doors for me and my abil­ity to put myself in ser­vice to oth­ers. For this I am deeply grate­ful. I feel sure that some of these ties will live on past the clos­ing of the Quaker Dharma.

Those of you famil­iar with pieces like The Lost Quaker Gen­er­a­tion and Pass­ing the Faith, Planet of the Quak­ers Style know I’ve long been wor­ried that we’ve not doing a good job iden­ti­fy­ing, sup­port­ing and retain­ing vision­ary new Friends. Around 2004 I stopped com­plain­ing (mostly) and just started look­ing for oth­ers who also held this con­cern. The online orga­niz­ing has spilled over into real world con­fer­ences and work­shops and is much big­ger than one web­site or small group. Now we see “grad­u­ates” of this net­work start­ing to take on real-world responsibilities.

Barry’s a bright guy with a strong lead­ing and a healthy ambi­tion. He would have cer­tainly made some­thing of him­self with­out the blogs and the “doors” opened up by myself and oth­ers. But it would have cer­tainly taken him longer to crack the Philadel­phia scene and I think it very likely that FGC would have announced a dif­fer­ent Gen­eral Sec­re­tary this week if it weren’t for the blogs.

Quak­erQuaker almost cer­tainly has more future Gen­eral Sec­re­taries in its mem­ber­ship rolls. But it would be a shame to focus on that or to imply that the pin­na­cle of a Quaker lead­ing is mov­ing to Philadel­phia. Many parts of the Quaker world are already too enthralled by it’s staff lists. What we need is to extend a cul­ture of every­day Friends ready to boldly exclaim the Good News–to love God and their neigh­bor and to leap with joy by the pres­ence of the Inward Christ. Friends’ cul­ture shouldn’t focus on staffing, flashy pro­grams or fundrais­ing hype.  At the end of the day, spir­i­tual out­reach is a one-on-one activ­ity. It’s peo­ple spend­ing the time to find one another, share their spir­i­tual jour­ney and share oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow in their faith.

Quak­erQuaker has evolved a lot since 2005. It now has a team of edi­tors, dis­cus­sion boards, Face­book and Twit­ter streams, and the site itself reaches over 100,000 read­ers a year. But it’s still about find­ing each other and encour­ag­ing each other. I think we’ve proven that these over­lap­ping, dis­trib­uted, largely-unfunded online ini­tia­tives can play a crit­i­cal out­reach role for the Soci­ety of Friends. What would it look like for the “old style” Quaker orga­ni­za­tions to start sup­port­ing inde­pen­dent Quaker social media? And how could our net­works rein­vig­o­rate cash-strapped Quaker orga­ni­za­tions with fresh faces and new mod­els of com­mu­ni­ca­tion? Those are ques­tions for another post.