The Quaker Ranter

The primitive message of Friends (W Penn)

2010-09-24T17:09:24Z

William Penn, on the "primitive Message" of Friends:

That God is Light and in Him is no Darkness at all; and that he has sent His Son a Light into the World, to Enlighten all Men in order to Salvation and that they that say they have Fellowship with God, and are his Children and People, and yet walk in Darkness, viz. in Disobedience to the light in their Consciences, and after the Vanity of this World, they Lie, and do not the Truth. But they all such as love the Light, and bring their Deeds to it, and walk in the Light, as God is Light, the Blood of Jesus Christ His Son, should cleanse them from all Sin.

From "Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers," p. 42 of my edition). I share this in part because Brent Bill's been asking about the message of Friends. It was interesting to read Penn's answer at breakfast this morning! It's well worth unpacking the grammar of the long clauses!

The Biggest Most Vibranty Most Outreachiest Program Ever

2010-09-21T16:21:42Z

In my twenty-plus years with Friends, I've seen Big Outreach Projects come and go. I'm afraid I can't even remember most of the Great Names they had. Is there a repository for their Bold Mission Statements? Videos from their Important Conferences? You'd think with all this talk of Community and Vibrance and Roots and Newness that the Society of Friends would be busting out at the seams. Well, I thought I'd get into the act, throw my hat in the ring if you will and give you the Biggest Newiest Outreachiest Program Ever:

When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch.

I'll leave the details up to you. Your place, a local restaurant, sandwiches at the meetinghouse, doesn't matter. Total newcomer, someone from another meeting, a old regular who hasn't shown up in awhile, doesn't matter. When someone you didn't expect shows up for worship on First Day Morning, say hi and invite them to a meal. What's that? You missed it?

When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch.

I warn you, you might be venturing into Quaker Uncomfort Zones:

You'll have to talk with someone you didn't meet decades ago (GASP!)
You'll have to practice clearly talking about your faith, not just the how's and the who's but the why's (AHHHH!)
You'll have learn what the current generation of seekers are actually seeking (UH-OH!)

Now I realize this proposal is HERESY! It's a complete violation of QUAKER PRINCIPLES! Cost of the program: nothing. Number of committees needed to oversee it: zero. Mission statement: twelve words, already written (Review with me: "When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch"). Planning consultations: none. Amount of airfare transporting Important Friends hither and yon: zero. Presentations at yearly meetings: none. Staff support: none. Grant proposals: none. Oh but don't get me wrong, THERE ARE HUGE COSTS! You might have to schedule that committee meeting for another day!!! You might have to have that Important Conversation with a fellow committee member by PHONE later in the afternoon!!! You might have one hour less on First Day for all of the Critically Important Things You Have to Do. Your Facebook friends won't be particularly impressed when you update to say you had lunch with someone they've NEVER EVEN HEARD OF!

Random capitalization aside for a moment, I realize that there are Friends with a gift of hospitality. And some of us can come out of our shells if we make a bit of effort (it's not the most natural thing for me either). I've seen a few meetings and yearly meetings that seem to have a talent for hospitality so I know it's possible. But I visit a lot of meetings these days and have to report that I rarely have the opportunity for more than ten minutes of idle chit-chat after worship before everyone's jumped in their cars. I've seen Friends so involved with committee-work that they don't notice new people or notice when regulars stop coming. Newcomers typically look around with a mix of hopefulness and anxiety at the rise of worship. Handshakes and introductions are helpful; welcome tables, brochure racks and name tags are all very good. But depending on personality, shy visitors will only stick around for a few minutes if no one engages them any further. Like all of us, they're looking for a personal connection and want more than just a few questions answered Wikipedia-style. Not everyone will take us up on our offer of lunch but they'll remember we offered and will be that much more likely to return a second time.

So, one more time, in case missed it, the most outreachiest program ever:

When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch.

Now go off and outreach. I hear the blueberry waffles down the street are really yummy.

Getting a horse to drink

2010-09-15T19:40:20Z

This weekend I gave a talk at the Arch Street Meetinghouse after the Interim Meeting sessions of Philadlephia Yearly Meeting. Interim Meeting is the governing body that meets between yearly meeting business sesssions. In an earlier blog post I called it "the establishment" and I looked forward to sharing the new life of the blogging world and Convergent Friends with this group. I had been asked by the most excellent Stephen Dotson to talk about "Finding Fellowship Between Friends Thru The Internet."

I was curious to return to Interim Meeting, a group I once served on. There were about seventy-five people in the room for Interim Meeting sessions. I was probably the third or fourth youngest. That's two whole generations that are largely missing from PYM leadership. I know I shouldn't be surprised; it's not a new phenomenon. But if you had told me twenty years ago that I'd be entering middle age and could still walk into a room full of Quakers and find myself among the youngest, well... To put it in perspective, if Interim Meeting were as diverse as QuakerQuaker, the room would have had 16 YAFs (18-35 year olds) and 25 Friends between 35 and 49. The works out to about thirty people younger than me.

As I sat in the meeting, I kept seeing glimpses of issues that I planned to address afterwards in my talk: how to share and write about our faith; how to publicize our activity and communicate both among ourselves and with the outside world; how to engage new and younger members in our work. The do-it-yourself models and flexibile social structures that are developing online could be useful examples as PYM renegotiates the relationships between paid staff, administrative committees, volunteers and monthly meetings due to the pressure of shrinking resources. But to my surprise, only eleven people came to the talk. I don't think there were any senior staff present and I didn't recognize anyone from the long table full of PYM clerks, alternate clerks and alternate alternate clerks. The intimacy was nice but it was hardly the "take it to the estabishment" kind of event I had imagined.

The talk itself went well, despite or maybe because of its intimacy. I had asked Seth H (aka Chronicler) along for spiritual support and he wrote a nice review on QuakerQuaker. Steve T, an old friend of mine from Central Philly days, took some pictures which I've included here. I videoed the event, though it will need some work to tighten it down to something anyone would want to watch online. The people who attended wanted to attend and asked great questions. It was good working with Stephen Dotson again in the planning. I would wish that more Philadelphia Friends had more interest in these issues but as individuals, all we can do is lead a horse to water. In the end, the yearly meeting is in God's hands.

Staying loose and open to new energy and God's direction

2010-09-09T19:54:45Z

Micah Bales has today's must-read piece, "Bridging the Generational Divide in Ministry." Here's a variation of my comment on it. On Facebook I joked that I could throw away my notes for this weekend's talk after Phila YM's Interim Meeting session and just read Micah's post. Some of these observations and concerns will surely make their way into the talk, as it's already some of the territory I've been exploring for it. My comment:

It's funny how much of this echos my experience with unprogrammed Friends. I've met a lot burnt-out Friends who clearly aren't called to continue the work but do so out of guilt. I'm a bit believer in dropping ministry that no longer feels led and letting Jesus pick up the pieces. So many times I've seen the next generation just form out of thin air, ready to take on the work.

This is all tied in with the dynamic that I've been calling "The Lost Quaker Generation," where my visionary GenX peers tried ambitious projects, got nothing but flack and finally dropped out, bruised and confused. As a group, Millenials have been able to stay looser with the official organizations. There's a lot more openness to starting their own networks and worship groups self-led projects that are side by side with the official institutional work. (All this is not strictly generational of course. By sheer orneriness I didn't leave. In the end, I saw the truth of Fox's famous opening, that even though all the ministers and learned people will disappoint us, yet there was still one, Christ Jesus, who can speak to our condition and guide us.)

One of the most fascinating pieces of the "Convergent Friends" character is that the group doesn't spend a lot of time complaining or worrying itself about Quaker institutions that are terminally stuck. We work with ones that are open to new energy and God's direction and we supplement it with what you call the "unexpected ministry."

I agree with you that so much of this goes way beyond Friends. I think our historic flexibility around ministry is actually one of the gifts we have for larger Christianity as it explores these waters. Are we ready to greet it and share?

Taking the Quaker web to the Establishment

2010-09-03T17:55:09Z

In just over a week I'm going to be talking at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia about online communities and the Quaker web world (open to all, details below). It's occurring after the rise of Interim Meeting, which is the governing board that meets periodically between the annual yearly meeting sessions. While there are those of us who straddle the worlds of official Quakerdom and the Quaker blogosphere, these tend to be different spheres. Six years ago I wrote about the ways I saw insider Friends use the web and while the divide has flattened somewhat, it still exists.

So next Seventh Day gives us the rare chance to explain our web workings to a group of establishment Friends. What kinds of things would you like them to know? Any messages I should pass along. As an example, on Facebook Jan Lyn Lewis shared the story of housebound and disabled Friends who are using online meetings for worship for real fellowship. The whole Convergent Friends phenomenon has been fueled in part by how easy it is to find Friends "across the aisle" on the "wrong" side of the theological divides and to get to know them. How does any of this translate into yearly meeting structure? Should it? Can it? Should we not even worry?

Finding Fellowship between Friends Through the Internet
Arch Street Meetinghouse, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia PA
Seventh Day, 9/11/2010, from 2:30pm-3:30pm.

ps: I was scheduled for Eleventh Month but bumped up for scheduling reasons, which is why I'm asking these questions with such short notice! Photo of Arch Street circa 1900 swiped from QuakerJane and crudely photoshopped with a pic from the kids' birthday party.

Crunching the data

2010-09-03T03:37:51Z

I'm almost through the stats on the new QuakerAds.com network for August. This is the first of my monthly tally-ups. Between the three publisher sites we've had 133,991 ad impressions--our total inventory of space over this time. About 16% of those were filled with paid QuakerAds ads. Another 23% are legacy ads sold by QuakerQuaker and Friends Journal before the launch of QuakerAds. The rest is what we call "house ads"--ads for the ad network itself and I still have the occasional Google-served Adword ad popping up on QuakerQuaker (more for variety than income as they don't pay very much).

It's a nice start for a project that's only about six weeks old. I'll probably blog more about this on the QuakerAds blog itself. Check here for the always updated Participating Publishers and Advertisers list. It's a pretty cool list of Quaker projects. If you want to join this group, check out the Advertisers page or the Publishers page.

Quakerranter Vlog: Talking about Quaker Ads

2010-07-29T23:42:14Z

Martin returned with his vlog series, talking today about the recently-launched Quaker Ad Network.

Spending all our time discussing the latest ideas

2010-06-26T16:33:11Z

This passage from Acts 17 made me laugh in recognition. How many of us are like the First Century Athenians, followers of anything that is new: academic trends, social networks, the 24-hour news feeds? Paul's message was simple: that the God and peace we seek is close at hand and the one we're most tempted to overlook.

It should be explained that all the Athenians as well as the foreigners in Athens seemed to spend all their time discussing the latest ideas. So Paul, standing before the council, addressed them as follows: "Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious in every way, for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And on of your altars had this inscription on it: 'To an Unknown God.' This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I'm telling you about.

He is the God who made the world and everything in it... His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feeling their way toward him and find him--though he is not very far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist.

This is the New Living Translation.

Communities vs Religious Societies

2010-06-15T21:51:32Z

Over on Tape Flags and First Thoughts, Su Penn has a great post called "Still Thinking About My Quaker Meeting & Me." She writes about a process of self-identity that her meeting recently went through it and the difficulties she had with the process.

I wondered whether this difficulty has become one of our modern-day stages of developing in the ministry. Both Samuel Bownas (read/buy) and Howard Brinton (buy) identified typical stages that Friends growing in the ministry typically go through. Not everyone experiences Su's rift between their meeting's identity and a desire for a God-grounded meeting community, but enough of us have that I don't think it's the foibles of particular individuals or monthly meetings. Let me tease out one piece: that of individual and group identities. Much of the discussion in the comments of Su's post have swirled around radically different conceptions of this.

Many modern Friends have become pretty strict individualists. We spend a lot of time talking about "community" but we aren't practicing it in the way that Friends have understood it--as a "religious society." The individualism of our age sees it as rude to state a vision of Friends that leaves out any of our members--even the most heterodox. We are only as united as our most far-flung believer (and every decade the sweep gets larger). The myth of our age is that all religious experiences are equal, both within and outside of particular religious societies, and that it's intolerant to think of differences as anything more than language.

This is why I cast Su's issues as being those of a minister. There has always been the need for someone to call us back to the faith. Contrary to modern-day popular opinion, this can be done with great love. It is in fact great love (Quaker Jane) to share the good news of the directly-accessible loving Christ, who loves us so much He wants to show us the way to righteous living. This Quaker idea of righteousness has nothing to do with who you sleep with, the gas mileage of your car or even the "correctness" of your theology. Jesus boiled faithfulness down into two commands: love God with all your might (however much that might be) and love your neighbor as yourself.

A "religious society" is not just a "community." As a religious society we are called to have a vision that is stronger and bolder than the language or understanding of individual members. We are not a perfect community, but we can be made more perfect if we return to God to the fullness we've been given. That is why we've come together into a religious society.

"What makes us Friends?" Just following the modern testimonies doesn't put us very squarely in the Friends tradition--SPICE is just a recipe for respectful living. "What makes us Friends?" Just setting the stopwatch to an hour and sitting quietly doesn't do it--a worship style is a container at best and false idol at worst. "How do we love God?" "How do we love our neighbor?" "What makes us Friends?" These are the questions of ministry. These are the building blocks of outreach.

I've seen nascent ministers ("infant ministers" in the phrasing of Samual Bownas) start asking these questions, flare up on inspired blog posts and then taildive as they meet up with the cold-water reality of a local meeting that is unsupportive or inattentive. Many of them have left our religious society. How do we support them? How do we keep them? Our answers will determine whether our meeting are religious societies or communities.

Wikileaks Whistleblower is Arrested

2010-06-07T15:30:30Z

The NYTimes is reporting that a military analyst who leaked the "Collateral Murder" videos to Wikileaks has been arrested.

If you missed the leaks at the time, you can watch them at CollateralMurder.com. They are videos taken from the gun-sights of US helicopters, complete with the commentary from military personnel firing down into the Iraqi neighborhoods below them. The videos capture the killing of civilians, including two Reuters journalists. They show just how impersonal murder has become. This is a video game war and there's no real consequence to shooting the wrong target from thousands of feet away.

The arrested soldier is Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md. Motives for leaking the videos are unreported at this time, but one would suspect they include a moral revulsion to what the American war has become. The war has largely been fought out of sight. Manning has helped give us a glimpse of what's happening. It's horrific in its banality but so is the war in Iraq.

Mt Airy for sale: the Mom move begins

2010-05-28T12:50:43Z

The big changes feel official now: yesterday my mom signed the papers to put her house up for sale and there it is on the realtor's website. Here's the agent's description:

Welcome to 20 Westview Street in West Mt Airy. This 4 Bed 1.5 Bath Victorian Twin has been meticulously maintained and shows great pride of ownership inside and out. The first floor exudes natural light and has space for all! Enter into the charming living room with stunning Harvey Windows. The spacious dining room offers you plenty of options for family time and entertaining. The 1st floor powder room is a wonderful finishing touch. Off the kitchen is a rare bonus room - a sitting room, study, office or TV Room --that has a has a clear view of the gardens that await you out back. The master bedroom is an oasis with a sitting room and bedroom that looks out over the gardens. What a way to start your DAY! The extra bedrooms all offer generous space. The back yard is one of a kind and a gardner's dream. Don't miss out on this rare find in W Mt Airy! Walk to Germantown Avenue.

If anyone knows anyone looking for a nice house in Mt Airy, Philadelphia, here's the listing. More pics on the Flickr set. When dust has settled and more papers have been signed, my mother will be moving in with us. That should be great. She and the kids are especially looking forward to spending more time together.

Two Theories of Change and Liberal Friends

2010-05-25T13:23:10Z

Over in the NYTimes columnist David Brooks talks about Two Theories of Change. He's talking about modern American politics but it seems relevant to Friends. Here's his summary of a new paper by Yuval Levin of the University of Chicago:

[Thomas] Paine believed that societies exist in an "eternal now." That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again

[Edmund] Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

For Brooks, the Paine folllowers are Tea Party activists who think it's fine to "sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role."

But for Friends, especially Liberal Friends, this touches on the nature of "Continual Revelation" that has been at the center of much of our deliberations for about a hundred years now. Are we in an "eternal now," ready to reinvent liberal Quakerism every thirty years and only willing to read old Friends to pull quotes out of context? Or are we tinkerers of tradition, trustees keeping the parts oiled for the next generation?

I can think of particular Friends who follow Paine's continual revolution model and others who follow Burke's long chain model. Somehow both feel limited. To subscribe strongly to either is a kind of fundamentalism. We are in an eternal now (Christ has come to teach the people himself) but we have 350 of experiences and techniques that have taught us how to be ready to act in that now. Insisting on both seems important.

Early Friends as reference, not justification

2010-05-23T21:36:24Z

My response to the excellent Greg Woods' If I wanted to live by 1600s standards, I would be Amish. Greg talks about the over-obsession with Early Friends and the tendency to use them as ways to accuse others of un-Quakerism.

The academic obsession with Quaker history is about 100 years old or so. From the beginning the rise of "Quaker history" has been tied to the arguments of the day. We want to boil "Quakerism" down to it essentials and separate out what is core from what was an artifact of 17th century England. Each branch raises up historians who argue that its churches' focus is the essential of those early Friends.

I consciously try not to use early Friends as justification. But I do use them for reference. I think a lot of the problem is we all have stereotypes about them. When I go back and read the old Books of Discipline, I find them much more nuanced and interior-focused than we give them credit for.

Greg mentioned taverns, for example. It's not that earlier Friends thought everyone couldn't handle their liquor. They saw that some people couldn't and that spending a lot of time there tended to affect one's discernment and God-centeredness. They also saw that some people got really messed up by alcohol and eventually came to the conclusion that the safest way to protect the most vulnerable in the spiritual community was to stay out.

The observations and logic are still valid. I've known senior members of past Quaker communities who have had alcohol problems but we don't know how to talk about it because we've decided it's a personal decision.

What I try to do is not focus on the conclusions of early Friends but to drop into the conversations of early Friends. As I said, the old Books of Discipline are surprisingly relevant. And I love Thomas Clarkson, an Anglican who explained Quaker ways in 1700 and talked about the sociology of it more than Friends themselves did. It's a good way of separating out rules from knowledge. When we ground ourselves that way, we can more readily decide which of the classic Quaker testimonies are still relevant. That keeps us a living community testifying to the people of today. For what it's worth, there's quite a bit of mainstream interest in the stodgy traditions most of us have cast off as irrelevant....

Do it yourself and don't get stuck

2010-05-18T14:29:20Z

This weekend was the long-prepared New Monastics and Convergent Friends weekend at Pendle Hill, co-led by myself and Wess Daniels, with very helpful eldership from Ashley W. As I posted afterwards on Facebook, "I feel we served the Lord faithfully, navigating the hopes and fears of the members of the church who gathered into this short-lived community. Not the conversation we expected, but the conversation we were given, which is enough (always) and for which we feel gratitude."

Wess and I have often described Convergent Friends as a do-it-yourself culture. But this weekend I realized that there's something more to it. There's what you might call a "don't get stuck" ethos.

On Saturday afternoon, the conversation turned to what our local monthly and yearly meetings aren't doing well. This is a pretty standard phase of any Quaker gathering thinking about renewal. We had asked for "signs of life" and "what does New Monasticism and Convergent Friends look like at meetings" but this quickly became talk of spiritual sickness and meetings that seemingly want to die. Fine enough, these exist and a half-session feeling sorry for ourselves might be cathartic, but I'm not sure the workshop ever fully got out of this funk. Pendle Hill was also hosting a "Grieving" workshop this weekend and I wanted to ask if all of the participants were sure they were in the right building.

Part of the shift of that amorphous group we've been calling "Convergent" is not getting stuck. We use the official structures when they're in place and healthy and helpful. When they're not we find informal ways to fill in the gaps. This has been happening for a long time in quasi-official networks, but the internet's accelerated the process by letting us find and communicate with minimal cost or organization. Most of us are working official and ad hoc techniques for spiritual nurture, oversight and pastoral care.

My guess is that this informal bootstrapping will feed back into formal process as time goes on. But more importantly, we're learning and spreading a culture of spiritual friendship and support that is flexible and spirit-led and not process-dependent. Praise God!

After the dust of the Inquirer/Daily bidding war

2010-04-29T00:30:23Z

Image via Wikipedia

News is just in that the bankruptcy bidding war over the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News papers is over. The outsiders won: the lenders, aka the hedge funds. The local team lost and the suits have the papers. What does it mean? I don't know, but the new changes are not likely to make newspaper lovers happy. Cost efficiencies will be cited. There will be certainly be layoffs and a reduction in quality of the papers. I can't believe the new owners will let both continue.

But let's be honest. I'm sure there are lots of people muttering "I told you so" tonight. The changes in the newspaper industry haven't been happening in secret. It's been obvious for awhile that the evolution is toward online ventures, yet the Philly.com website is just too busy and annoying for me to want to regularly use. I get a lot of my news from Twitter feeds (I follow NYTimes, CNNBrk, MSNBC and NPRNews) but when I recently checked out the PhillyInquirer, I did a pass. It was mostly sports news. I like sports sometimes but to me it's entertainment and not what I care about when I want news. How did I find out that the New York-based lenders won? From the New York Times' Twitter feed.

Is Philly news dead? Of course not. I recently helped former Inky journalist Tom Ferrick Jr put together Philadelphia Metropolis. It's not a replacement for a full newspaper, but it shows the kind of innovation that smart journalists can make even on shoestring budgets. Good articles, thought-provoking opinion pieces. New media is disrupting old media: that's a given. In an ideal world, the old guard takes their brand name and resources and mixes in vision and some good luck to make the transformation. The second-best scenario might be the suits taking over and stripping things down, making the situation clear for all involved.

If local investors had enough cash on hand to push the bidding past $100,000 then maybe they have enough to do some outside-the-box experiments in new media journalism.