Recently in alienation Category

Over on Friends Journal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Written by Margaret Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the different bodies of Friends, it's a bit of cold water for most of us. Official numbers are down in most places despite whatever official optimism might exist. Favorite line: "Perhaps those who leave are noticed less." I'm sure P.R. hacks in various Quaker organizations are burning the midnight oil writing response letters to the editor spinning the numbers to say things are looking up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: "Hispanic Friends Churches" in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There's surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I'll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations. I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an opportunity to share growth and challenges together.

Over on my design blog I've just posted an article, Banking on reputations, which looks at how the websites for high-profile cultural institutions are often built without regard to natural web publicity--there's no focus on net culture or search engine visibility. The sites do get visited, but only because of the reputation of the institution itself. My guess is that people go to them for very specific functions (looking up a phone number, ordering tickets, etc.). I finish by asking the question, "Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?"

I won't belabor the point, but I wonder if something similar is happening within Friends. It's kind of weird that only two people have commented on Johan Maurer's blog post about Baltimore Yearly Meeting's report on Friends United Meeting. Johan's post may well be the only place where online discussion about this particular report is available. I gave a plug for it and it was the most popular link from QuakerQuaker, so I know people are seeing it. The larger issue is dealt with elsewhere (Bill Samuel has a particularly useful resource page) but Johan's piece seems to be getting a big yawn.

It's been superseded as the most popular QuakerQuaker link by a lighthearted call for an International Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Livejournal blogger. It's fun but it's about as serious as you might expect. It's getting picked up on a number of blogs, has more links than Johan's piece and at current count has thirteen commenters. I think it's a great way to poke a little fun of ourselves and think about outreach and I'm happy to link to it but I have to think there's a lesson in its popularity vis-a-vis Johan's post.

Here's the inevitable question: do most Quakers just not care about Friends United Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting, about a modern day culture clash that is but a few degrees from boiling over into full-scale institutional schism? For all my bravado I'm as much an institutional Quaker as anyone else. I care about our denominational politics but do others, and do they really?

Yearly meeting sessions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gatherings are lucky if they get three to five percent attendance. The governing body of my yearly meeting is made up of about one percent of its membership; add a percent or two or three and you have how many people actually pay any kind of attention to it or to yearly meeting politics. A few years ago a Quaker publisher commissioned a prominent Friend to write an update to liberal Friends' most widely read introductory book and she mangled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication--even insiders don't care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most contemporary Friends post-institutional? The percentage of Friends involved in the work of our religious bodies has perhaps always been small, but the divide seems more striking now that the internet is providing competition. The big Quaker institutions skate on being recognized as official bodies but if their participation rate is low, their recognition factor small, and their ability to influence the Quaker culture therefore minimal, then are they really so important? After six years of marriage I can hear my wife's question as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the religious authority of these bodies come from? As someone who sees the world through a sociological/historical perspective, my question is complementary but somewhat different: if so few people care, then is there authority? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when a schism might mean the loss of control over a beloved school or campground--factor out the sentimental factor and what's left?

I don't think a diminishing influence is a positive trend, but it won't go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in committees). How are today's generation of Friends going to deal with changing cultural forces that are threatening to undermine our current practices? And how might we use the new opportunities to advance the Quaker message and Christ's agenda?

One thing I love about the internet and blogs is that they're opening up discussions in the Quaker world. Information and dialog that was once confined to a small group of insiders is opened up to what we might only-half jokingly label "the laity." The latest few entries to QuakerQuaker show this in operation.

Last month's annual sessions of Baltimore Yearly Meeting (the regional body for Friends those parts) were marked by an important report from its representatives to Friends United Meeting, an international body of Friends that Baltimore belongs to but has a complicated relationship with. Attendees at the yearly meeting session heard the report, of course, and news trickled out in various ways (one visitor IM'ed me that day with the briefest sketch).

Enter the internet. At some point Baltimore put the report up on their website. The information was there but there's no opportunity for discussion as the BYM website has no commenting feature. I posted the report up to QuakerQuaker and within a few hours, Johan Maurer was on top of it. Johan used to be the chief executive of Friends United Meeting and a wide experience with Friends from across the Quaker theological and cultural spectrum. He's also an active blogger and he posted a reply, What is really wrong with FUM, part two: the Baltimore YM report, that I find particularly useful. His blog has comments. I've put Johan's post up on QuakerQuaker and we now have a forum to try to tease apart the range of issues in the Baltimore report: leadership, theology, international relations, etc. How cool is that?

PS: I linked to the Wikipedia articles on Baltimore and Friends United Meeting. Has anyone else noticed Wikipedia makes a much more accessible introduction to Quaker bodies than their own websites?

Over on Nontheist Friends website, there’s an article looking back at ten years of FGC Gathering workshops on their concern. There was also a post somewhere on the blogosphere (sorry I don’t remember where) by a Pagan Friend excited that this year’s Gathering would have a workshop focused on their concerns.

It’s kind of interesting to look at the process by which new theologies are being added into Liberal Quakerism at an ever-increasing rate.

• Membership of individuals in meetings. There are hundreds of meetings in liberal Quakerism that range all over the theological map. Add to that the widespread agreement that theological unity with the meeting is not required and just about anyone believing anything could be admitted somewhere (or “grandfathered in” as a birthright member).

• A workshop at the Friends General Conference Gathering and especially a regular workshop at successive Gatherings. Yet as the very informed comments on a post a few years ago showed, theology is not something the planning workshop committee is allowed to look at and at least one proponent of a new theology has gotten themselves on the deciding committee. The Gathering is essentially built on the nondenominational Chautaqua model and FGC is perfectly happy to sponsor workshops that are in apparent conflict with its own mission statement.

• An article published in Friends Journal. When the the Quaker Sweat Lodge was struggling to claim legitimacy it all but changed its name to the “Quaker Sweat Lodge as featured in the February 2002 Friends Journal.” It’s a good magazine’s job to publish articles that make people think and a smart magazine will know that articles that provoke a little controversy is good for circulation. I very much doubt the editorial team at the Journal considers its agreement to publish to be an inoculation against critique.

• A website and listserv. Fifteen dollars at GoDaddy.com and you’ve got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are probably other mechanisms of legitimacy. My point is not to give comprehensive guidelines to would-be campaigners. I simply want to note that none of the actors in these decisions is consciously thinking “hey, I think I’ll expand the definition of liberal Quaker theology today.” In fact I expect they’re mostly passing the buck, thinking “hey, who am I to decide anything like that.”

None of these decision-making processes are meant to serve as tools to dismiss opposition. The organizations involved are not handing out Imprimaturs and would be quite horrified if they realized their agreements were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a commenter on my last post, on this summer’s reunion and camp for the once-young members of Young Friends North America, had a very interesting comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those previously involved in YFNA have taken leadership with FGC … with both positive and negative results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the legacy we are creating: do we like it?

I have the feeling that the current generation of liberal Quaker leadership doesn’t quite believe it’s leading liberal Quakerism. By “leadership” I don’t mean the small skim of the professional Quaker bureaucracy (whose members can get too self-inflated on the leadership issue) but the committees, clerks and volunteers that get most of the work done from the local to national levels. We are the inheritors of a proud and sometimes foolish tradition and our actions are shaping its future but I don’t think we really know that. I have no clever solution to the issues I’ve outlined here but I think becoming conscious that we’re creating our own legacy is an important first step.

Getting right back on the horse, I’m teaching Quakerism 101 at Moorestown NJ Meeting 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 and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what’s now called The Collegium Center 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 (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 (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion’s Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy’s Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

In the news front, I’m no longer working at FGC. Reasons are complicated, as is often the case. In eight years I did some good work with some great people. I’ll be missing the hard-working and faithful colleagues and committee members I got to serve with over the years. I’ll be working on building my tech career and look forward to new challenges. Transitions are always a bit scary, so hold us in your prayers in this time.

Last night I took advantage of an opportunity to stay late in the city to attend mid-week worship at a place I’ll call Meeting A (a thin disguise, but I don’t want this post to be about this particular meeting). Attendance was low, the worship never felt grounded and the one piece of vocal ministry didn’t speak to my condition. I came expecting all this but the behavior after the rise of meeting surprised me. The greeter asked a member to provided ten minutes of information about someone never identified who was engaged in a ministry shrouded in never-defined Quaker acronyms. This done, we were dismissed without even so much as a go-round of names. A few people beat feet for the door and others beat feet for their friends, backs turned to the newcomer.

There’s an irony in that this particular meeting was one of the targets of a multi-year yearly meeting campaign to field-test outreach ideas. Elaborate surveys, meeting self-evaluations and outside outreach mentors focused on six meetings. Gallons of ink continue to be spilt in yearly meeting publicity material about the program, yet after all years of attention no one at Meeting A apparently knows how to say “hello and howdido” to a stranger at mid-week worship. The failure of the the meeting’s outreach efforts seem pretty obvious: no one there cared about who a stranger was, why he had come, whether he had been to a Quaker Meeting before or might have any questions. No one gave the stranger any reason to ever come back.

About a year ago I had the opportunity to sit in on Meeting A’s religious education committee meeting. An exciting proposal for an adult R.E. program to attract newcomers was whittled down as every possible time for it was blocked by various committee meetings. There’s nothing the dying meeting needed more than fresh blood yet it fiercely prioritized an over-elaborated committee structure that left no room for either outreach.

The tyranny of programs

One thing I’ve been noticing lately is that many Friends try to use ambitious programs to achieve goals that are better met through simple ministries. Meeting A needs someone who holds a concern for friendliness. I’m sure there’s someone at the meeting carrying this gift; they could be identified and named. The Friend could be released from all committee work (gasp!) and given the simple permission to be friendly to newcomers and to any who might feel like outsiders to the meeting. They could hold the concern for friendliness and outreach at business meeting and gently labor with the meeting about the issues learned from befriending the newcomers. One or two people who faithfully held this as a calling could change the history of the meeting.

Part of this is a need to examine our dependence on committees. Meeting A is extreme but many Friends spend so much time in insider-focused committee meetings that they have little time to do much else. Why does the typical Quaker meeting have so many committees? Let’s take the ubiquitous peace and social concern committee. Why don’t rising concerns and ministries on social issues get brought to the ministry & council/overseers/elders and treated as any other leading? Meeting committees are often less interesting than the people in them. Many committees exude a chronic sense of being overburdened and actively resist taking on new leadings (in practice, this means that exciting ideas from younger Friends are routinely shut out,).

Why not release individual Friends to their leadings, with meeting testing and oversight and an open-ended possibility that leadings might come over time to be held by the meeting at large? Devolve some of the committee structure with a faith that the work that wouldn’t be picked up is the work we don’t need to be doing anyway. How amazing would it be to see a flowering of ministries or to see a whole meeting take on a homegrown concern? And how precious would it be if more individual Friends felt the encouragement to simply go up and talk to strangers at mid-week worship?

Over at the BarclayPress site there are a number of great articles on emergent church from the perspective of Evangelical Friends

One has to applaud the sheer honesty of the group of leading Quakers who have recently proposed turning the grounds of Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meetinghouse into a retirement home. It makes perfect sense. Arch Street is the host for our annual sessions, where the average age is surely over 70. Why not institutionalize the yearly meeting reality?

I’ve occasionally thought of Beppeblog’s Joe Guada as my blogging Quaker doppleganger. More than once he’s written the post I was about to write. And more than one important article of mine started as commentary to one of his insightful articles.

So I’m worried that he’s written the first of a multipart article asking Is it time to leave Quakerism. I’m worried not just that Quakerism would lose a bright Light, etc., etc, but because I know that now I’m going to have to publicly mull over the question that’s a constant background hum that I try not to think about.

How did Liberal Friends get to the place where many of our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they’d want to spend a week at a Quaker event playing Indian when they could be diving deeper into their own faith tradition.

Went to the opening of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s annual sessions yesterday. It’s hard to get too excited about it. It was the same people talking about the same issues. I really like and respect so many in the yearly meeting, but try as I might, I can never imagine this group on fire. What would it mean for us to scrap our plans and agendas to follow His?

I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it’s time for a moratorium of the word “community” and the phrases “faith community” and “community of faith.” Through overuse, we Friends have stretched this phrase past its elasticity point and it’s snapped. It’s become a meaningless, abstract term used to disguise the fact that we’ve become afraid to articulate a shared faith. A recent yearly meeting newsletter used the word “community” 27 times but the word “God” only seven: what does it mean when a religious body stops talking about God?

There’s that famous scene in the 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes” when our astronaut protagonist Charlton Heston realizes that the spaceship that brought him to the land where apes rule didn’t travel in space but in time. He’s escaping the primate theocracy, heading north along the coast, when he rounds a corner to see the charred ruin remains of the Statue of Liberty lying in the sand. He falls to his knees and screams out “YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!” He realizes that it was his own people who had destroyed everything they loved with their inattention and pettyness.

I’ve seen too many of my thirty-something contempories in the Society of Friends leave. Last week I had lunch with yet another who’s gone. “I feel like he’s just another eroded-away grain of sand in the delta of Quaker decline. He’s yet another Friend that Quakerism can’t afford to loose, but which Quakerism has lost. No one’s mourning the fact that he’s lost. No one has barely noticed.”

Some sites and writings by the generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism, perhaps with different flavored toppings?