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Pictures from this weekend's gathering of Conservative Friends (Quakers), held in Lancaster County PA and hosted by Keystone Fellowship Friends Meeting of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative.

Videos:

Arthur Berk on "Basic Christian Quakerism"



The Convincement Story of John L.: a particularly interesting story of a family's journey from the LDS (Mormon) Church to Friends.

Earlier today I posted an excerpt of an interesting article on Anabaptism on my Tumblr blog and it's engendered quite a conversation on Facebook about testimonies and empty forms, etc. It's true that any form of spiritual discipline can get twisted into look-at-me heroism or lets-talk-anything-but-God group conformity.

The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:

I've been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.

I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn't how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.

I'm experimenting with Quaker Quote of the Day for the QuakerQuaker Twitter account. You should be able to read them on Twitter here. Extended versions will be on QuakerQuaker's new QOTD blog.It's hard to pack a good quote into only 140 characters so there will be some shortening, but the full piece should give it a bit more context.

I'll be mostly quoting historical Friends but I might throw a living person in there once in awhile. I won't use a quote book to deliver the same adage you've heard a million times before. I'll also try not to chop it up into a meaning that goes against the author's intention.

Robin wrote a little about the New Monastic movement in a plug for the Pendle Hill workshop I'm doing with Wess Daniels this Fall.

Here's my working theory: I think Liberal Friends have a good claim to inventing the "new monastic" movement thirty years ago in the form of Movement for a New Society, a network of peace and anti-nuclear activists based in Philadelphia that codified a kind of "secular Quaker" decision-making process and trained thousands of people from around the world in a kind of engaged drop-out lifestyle that featured low-cost communal living arrangements in poor neighborhoods with part-time jobs that gave them flexibility to work as full-time community activists. There are few activist campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s that weren't touched by the MNS style and a less-ideological, more lived-in MNS culture survives today in borderline neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities. The high-profile new monastics rarely seem to give any props to Quakers or MNS, but I'd be willing to bet if you sat in on any of their meetings the process would be much more inspired by MNS than Robert's Rules of Order or any fifteen century monastic rule that might be cited.

For a decade I lived in West Philly in what I called "the ruins of the Movement for a New Society." The formal structure of MNS had disbanded but many of its institutions carried on in a kind of lived-in way. I worked at the remaining publishing house, New Society Publishers, lived in a land-trusted West Philly coop house, and was fed from the old neighborhood food coop and occasionally dropped in or helped out with Training for Change, a revived training center started by MNS-co-founder (and Central Philadelphia Meeting-member) George Lakey It was a tight neighborhood, with strong cross-connections, and it was able to absorb related movements with different styles (e.g., a strong anarchist scene that grew in the late 1980s). I don't think it's coincidence that some of the Philly emergent church projects started in West Philly and is strong in the neighborhoods that have become the new ersatz West Philly as the actual neighborhood has gentrified.

So some questions I'll be wrestling with over the next six months and will bring to Pendle Hill:

• Why haven't more of us in the Religious Society of Friends adopted this engaged lifestyle?
• Why haven't we been good at articulating it all this time?
• Why did the formal structure of the Quaker-ish "new monasticism" not survive the 1980s?
• Why don't we have any younger leaders of the Quaker monasticism? Why do we need others to remind us of our own recent tradition?
• In what ways are some Friends (and some fellow travelers) still living out the "Old New Monastic" experience, just without the hype and without the buzz?

It's entirely possible that the "new monasticism" isn't sustainable. At the very least Friends' experiences with it should be studied to see what happened. Is West Philly what the new monasticism looks like thirty years later? The biggest differences between now and the heyday of the Movement for a New Society is 1) the Internet's ability to organize and stay in touch in completely different ways; and 2) the power of the major Evangelical publishing houses that are hyping the new kids.

I'll be looking at myself as well. After ten years, I felt I needed a change. I'm now in the "real world"--semi suburban freestanding house, nuclear family. The old new West Philly monasticism, like the "new monasticism" seems optimized for hip twenty-something suburban kids who romanticized the gritty city. People of other demographics often fit in, but still it was never very scalable and for many not very sustainable. How do we bring these concerns out to a world where there are suburbs, families, etc?

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I feel I'm being called to be profoundly non-strategic these days. What do big words add to understanding? Our message is simple. All we need to do is love God and care for one another. Our task is not to know all the answers but to simply follow what small leads we've been given and trust in the Lord that this is the work of the Kingdom. It is too easy to adopt the clothes of a professionalism that hide a predatory motive and mask the unspoken fear at the root of our labors.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

I will worry less about those who seem intent to push houses across sandy soil. I will dig down looking for the bedrock and I will invite others to join with their shovels. I will stop worrying about the specks in my brothers' eyes.

And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them, I will shew you to whom he is like: He is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock. But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great. Quotes from Luke 6.

An interview with Raye, a member of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative who serves on their Electronic Outreach Committee. You can also watch it on QuakerQuaker: Quaker Video and Electronic Outreach.

Raye: Ohio Yearly Meeting holds our yearly meeting in Barnesville Ohio--some people know us as those Barnesville folks. We have an electronic Outreach Committee and that includes the oversight and ministry associated with our website. We spend time thinking about how to open up to people who might be interested in Friends' ways and might want to know more about us whether or not they've ever read the Journal of George Fox. We're trying to expand our witness, if you will.

One of the questions that has come up in this electronic outreach group is: what types of communication or video are useful for someone to get to know us but also respectful of the fact that we do worship and that worship is a spiritually intimate time. We're trying to bridge and deal with respecting the worshippers, the Friends themselves, to not put on a performance and yet to try to communicate what it is that is edifying in practice and worship.

Martin: How do you give newcomers a taste of Quakers without directing it too much? If you just have that silent empty box it's hard for newcomers to know what should be filling that box.

Raye: One of the things Friends have done for hundreds of years is to publish, to keep journals and to share that. But that's not all there is to the Friends experience. There are those quiet times and those moments of ministry that we believe are Spirit-inspired. Many of us wish we could give people a little taste of that because that doesn't show up in a lot of published writings. That spontaneous and timely, and at times prophetic, witness that we see in our Meetings. We have considered digital video as a way to do that.

Martin: I love the video possibilities here. Video can be a way of reaching out to more people.

Raye: It's not just anything that can be written. Certainly the writings that have been published are very helpful in getting some sort of a glimmer of where we have been, or in some cases where we are headed or where we are. But there is nothing like that experience of being with Friends in meeting. It doesn't always happen but there are these moments called a covered meeting or a gathered meeting where everybody seems to be in the same place spiritually and when seems to be messages and gifts coming through people. That's difficult to get across.

We're hoping that with video we can discuss these kinds of things after the fact. We don't want to turn it into a spectator sport or performance.

Martin: Authenticity is a key part of the Quaker message. You're not practicing what you're going to say for First Day or Sunday. You're sitting there and waiting for that immediate spirit to come upon you.

Raye: We don't know when that will happen. There are meetings where everybody is very quiet, where there's a sense of that spirit and unity but it may be an outwardly quiet meeting. I have been in meetings where someone stood up and began to sing their message or a psalm or someone had a wonderful sermon that was perfect for the moment. These things happen but we don't know when they will.

My F/friend Raye Hodgson is taking a train from Connecticut to South Jersey next week for a visit, and locals and would-be visitors are invited to my house for some worship! Raye's involved with Ohio Conservative and New England Friends and seems to be doing a cool sustainable agriculture project these days (which I didn't know except for Google!)

It's next Thursday, the 19th at 7:30pm in Hammonton. If you want to join but don't have my address just send me an email and I'll provide details. There's also a Facebook event listing for this. If enough people are interested we can have more occasional Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quakerly worship in this part of South Jersey! If you can't make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I'll keep you in the loop.

UPDATE: The worship went well, about half a dozen people showed up. If you want to be alerted to any follow-up worship opportunities in the Hammonton area send me an email and I'll add you to my list.

Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do--throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can't do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn't make sense.

A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn't pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend's experience is any guide, there's not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn't care much.

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox's example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of "historic peace church" members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn't figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox's kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee's pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn't mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ's sacrifice the Lamb's War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn't brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we're pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?

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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends" at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I'm already starting to blog about it.

Both of my workshop co-leaders Wess and Robin have now checked in with preliminary reports. More material is being collected on the QuakerQuaker event page.

Wess and I have both been uploading lots of photos to Flickr using the "quakerreclaiming2009" tag. I've been uploading my video interviews both on Youtube and QuakerQuaker. You can see them at the reclaiming2009 tag (I have the feeling we've just doubled the Quaker content on Youtube but it's not that extreme). Anyone present with more photos can either upload them to Flickr with the "quakerreclaiming2009" tag or send them directly up to QuakerQuaker. Same with videos.

Hey all, the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop at California's Ben Lomond Center wrapped up a few hours ago (I'm posting from the San Jose airport). I think it went well. There were about thirty participants. The makeup was very intergenerational and God and Christ were being named all over the place!



I myself felt stripped throughout the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease--not at how the workshop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work pointing out the layers of pride that I've used to protect myself over the last few years. This morning's agenda was mostly extended worship, begun with "Bible Reading in the Manner of Conservative Friends" (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me--I think God even joked around with me a bit.

As always, many of the high points came unexpectedly in small conversations, both planned and random. One piece that I'll be returning to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of movement piece by piece and not worry about the Big Conference or the Big Website that will change everything that we know. That's not how the Spirit works and our pushing it to work this way almost invariably leads to failure and wasted effort.

Another piece is that we need to start focusing on really building up the kind of habits that will work out our spiritual muscles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great analogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musicians and I hoped to get an interview with him on that but time ran out. I'll try to get a remote interview (an earlier interview with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first interview of the weekend!)

I conducted a bunch of video interviews that I'll start uploading to my Youtube account and on the "reclaiming2009" tag on QuakerQuaker. When you watch them, be charitable. I'm still learning through my style. But it was exciting starting to do them and it confirmed my sense that we really need to be burning up Youtube with Quaker stuff.

I need to find my boarding gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together collections of practices that Friends can try in their location Friends community. Gathering in Light Wess led a really well-received session that took the Lord's Prayer and turned it into an interactive small group even. We took photos and a bit of video and we'll be putting it together as a how-to somewhere or other.

Pictures going up on Flickr, I'll organize them soon. Also check out ConvergentFriends.org and the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop page on QuakerQuaker.

I wrote this in Eighth Month 2004 for the Plainandmodestdress discussion group back when the red dress MacGuffin made it's appearance on that board.

I wonder if it's not a good time for the Margaret Fell story. She was one of the most important founders of the Quaker movement, a feisty, outspoken, hardworking and politically powerful early Friend who later married George Fox.

The story goes that one day Margaret wore a red dress to Meeting. Another Friend complained that it was gaudy. She shot back in a letter that it was a "silly poor gospel" to question her dress. In my branch of Friends, this story is endlessly repeated out of context to prove that "plain dress" isn't really Quaker. (I haven't looked up to see if I have the actual details correct--I'm telling the apocryphal version of this tale.)

Before declaring her Friend's complaint "silly poor gospel" Margaret explains that Friends have set up monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting structures in order to discipline those walking out of line of the truth. She follows it by saying that we should be "covered with God's eternal Spirit, and clothed with his eternal Light."

It seems really clear here that Margaret is using this exchange as a teaching opportunity to demonstrate the process of gospel order. Individuals are charged with trying to follow Christ's commands, and we should expect that these might lead to all sorts of seemingly-odd appearances (even red dresses!). What matters is NOT the outward form of plain dress, but the inward spiritual obedience that it (hopefully!) mirrors. Gospel order says it's the Meeting's role to double-guess individuals and labor with them and discipline them if need be. Individuals enforcing a dress code of conformity with snarky comments after meeting is legalism--it's not gospel order and not proper Quaker process (I would argue it's a variant of "detraction").

This concern over legalism is something that is distinctly Quaker. Other faiths are fine with written down, clearly-articulated outward forms. Look at creeds for example: it's considered fine for everyone to repeat a set phrasing of belief, even though we might know or suspect that not everyone in church is signing off on all the parts in it as they mutter along. Quakers are really sticklers on this and so avoid creeds altogether. In worship, you should only give ministry if you are actively moved of the Lord to deliver it and great care should be given that you don't "outrun your Guide" or add unnecessary rhetorical flourishes.

This Plain and Modest Dress discussion group is  meant for people of all sorts of religious backgrounds of course. It might be interesting some time to talk about the different assumptions and rationales each of our religious traditions bring to the plain dress question. I think this anti-legalism that would distinguish Friends.

For Friends, I don't think the point is that we should have a formal list of acceptable colors--we shouldn't get too obsessed over the "red or not red" question. I don't suspect Margaret would want us spending too much time working out details of a standard pan-Quaker uniform. "Legalism" is a silly poor gospel for Friends. There's a great people to be gathered and a lot of work to do. The plainness within is the fruit of our devotion and it can certainly shine through any outward color or fashion!

If I lived to see the day when all the Quakers were dressing alike and gossiping about how others were led to clothe themselves, I'd break out a red dress too! But then, come to think about it, I DO live in a Quaker world where there's WAY TOO MUCH conformity in thought and dress and where there's WAY TOO MUCH idle gossip when someone adopts plain dress. Where I live, suspenders and broadfalls might as well be a red dress!

On a recent evening I met up with Gathering in Light Wess, who was in Philadelphia for a Quaker-sponsored peace conference. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great dinner, Wess and I tested some testimonies, and a revolving group of Friends ended up around a table in the conference's hotel lobby talking late into the night (the links are Wess' reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp account).

Of all of the many people I spoke with, only one had any kind of featured role at the conference. Without exception my conversation partners were fascinating and insightful about the issues that had brought them to Philadelphia, yet I sensed a pervading sense of missed opportunity: hundreds of lives rearranged and thousands of air miles flown mostly to listen to others talk. I spent my long commute home wondering what it would have been like to have spent the weekend in the hotel lobby recording ten minute Youtube interviews with as many conference participants as I could. We would have ended up with a snapshot of faith-based peace organizing circa 2009.

Next weekend I'll be burning up more of the ozone layer by flying to California to co-lead a workshop with Wess and Robin M. (details at ConvergentFriends.org, I'm sure we can squeeze more people in!) The participant list looks fabulous. I don't know everyone but there's at least half a dozen people coming who I would be thrilled to take workshops from. I really don't want to spend the weekend hearing myself talk! I also know there are plenty of people who can't come because of commitments and costs.

So we're going to try some experiments--they might work, they might not. On QuakerQuaker, there's a new group for the event and a discussion thread open to all QQ members (sign up is quick and painless). For those of you comfortable with the QQ tagging system, the Delicious tag for the event is "quaker.reclaiming2009". Robin M has proposed using #convergentfriends as our Twitter hashtag.

There's all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live blogging via Twitter, anyone?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract us from whatever message the Inward Christ might be trying to give us. But behind all this is a real questions about why and how we should gather together as Friends. As the banking system tanks, as the environment strains, as communications costs drop and we find ourselves in a curious new economy, what challenges and opportunities open up?

It's up on the sidebar and featured on QuakerQuaker, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas' post "Why I bother with religion." I've written about the Emergent Church / Quaker experiment that Kevin-Douglass is helping to organize down in Baltimore. Check out their new'ish website, http://www.setonhillfriends.org/ Here's a snippet of today's post:

Organized religion is based in community. Being in a community challenges me. Simply hanging out with my friends and engaging my family isn't enough. The risks of such an intentional community and the support available therein offer so much more than if I just do what comes easily or go along with what exists around me. I'm challenged in community. I'm held accountable. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an ethical society, the truth is that in a religious community, we all seek to go much deeper than the psychological or emotional levels. We seek to understand that Mystery -- God. We seek to understand that transformative and healing power that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas originally posted it to Facebook earlier today and I asked if he would sign up to QuakerQuaker and post it there. There's a lot of great stuff that goes up on Facebook and it's a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, but most posts are not visible beyond your own Facebook friends list (it depends on your privacy settings). If you post something really good about Friends or belief on Facebook, seriously consider whether you might repost it somewhere more public. If you don't have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on QuakerQuaker, where every registered user has blogging capabilities (it creates a bit of a metaphysical connundrum for the QuakerQuaker editors, as it means we'll be linking QQ posts to the QQ site, but that's fine).

Not something I'll do every day, but over on QuakerQuaker I cross-referenced today's One Year Bible readings with Esther Greenleaf Murer's Quaker Bible Index. Here's the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus' parable of wheat & tares and pearls. It's a particularly rich reading today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an interesting parable about letting the faithful and the unfaithful grow together.

As if knowing today is Inauguration Day, Isaac Penington turned it into a political reference: "But oh, how the laws and governments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their reformation, whose common work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!"

Margaret Fell sees the wheat and tares as an example of jealousy and false ministry: "Oh how hath this envious man gotten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bundles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seedsmen come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, ... & so it was easy to stir up jealousy in you, you having the ground of jealousy in yourselves which is as strong as death."

We get poetry from the seventeen century Elizabeth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that "the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appearance (even as the morning -light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in brightness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the firmament at noon-day height."

The parable of the tares became a call for tolerance in George Fox's understanding: "For Christ commands christian men to "love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their enemies [Mat 5:44];" and so not to persecute them. And those enemies may be changed by repentance and conversion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels' work to burn the tares, and not men's."

A century later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and worried about religious education and Quaker drift: "But for want of keeping an eye open to this preserving Power, a spirit of indifference hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a tendency to choke the good seed; those tender impressions and reproofs of instruction, which would have prepared our spirits, and have bound them to the holy law and testimonies of truth."

I hope all this helps us remember that the Bible is our book too and an essential resource for Friends. It's easy to forget this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is getting our Bible fix from mainstream Evangelical Christian sources whose viewpoints might be in pretty direct opposition from Quaker understandings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B's post on The New Calvinism or Tom Smith's very reasonable concerns about the literalism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and recommend). On the other hand, it's not uncommon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our religion as "Quaker," downgrade Christianity by making it optional, unmentionable or non-contextual and turning to the Bible only for the obligatory epistle reference.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the margins in the modern edition of Samuel Bownas' "A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Ministry," which were peppered with the Biblical references Bownas was casually citing throughout. On my second reading (yes it's that good!) I started looking up the references and realized that: 1) Bownas wasn't just making this stuff up or quoting willy-nilly; and 2) reading them helped me understand Bownas and by extension the whole concept of Quaker ministry. You're not reading my blog enough if you're not getting the idea that this is one of the kind of practices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talking about at the Convergent workshop next month. If you can figure out the transport then get yourself to Cali pronto and join us.

Over the QuakerQuaker forum, a new blogger asked "I am new at blogging. Do you have any suggestions for my site?" I'll cross-post my answer here.

I think the success to any kind of writing is to first and foremost write about what interests you. Don't worry about whether there's an audience or not: with millions of people on the internet every day there's bound to be plenty of others who share your interests. Don't be afraid to be personal, quirky and idiosyncratic, as people come to blogs looking for personality.

The most interesting blogs have an intimacy and honesty to them. My blog posts are the kind of discussions I would have around my dining room table. Friends have a tendency to downplay our opinions in public settings. The Quaker blogs have given us a place to be respectfully honest, open and inquisitive. That openness has led many of us into surprising friendships.

I'd also recommend that you keep your blog open to development. I was four months into my QuakerRanter blog before I had the first post that I would now consider a "typical" QuakerRanter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you're comfortable in and many people find themselves interested in different topics than they initially imagined. Blogs often end up being very different than the one they thought they were starting! Most blogs last about two months and are abandoned: if you're blogging because you think you should be, then the motivation won't be enough to sustain you over the long term.

Finally, blogs are social. They're conversation. Encourage conversation on your blog. Respond to comments, on the blog and also in direct emails if people have provided them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and read them and comment on thoughtful posts. Get to know people and try to attend the events we're now listing here on QuakerQuaker. About half of my QuakerQuaker time is actually private emails and IM conversations with Friends and the comments I leave on blogs (some Quaker, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It's a social medium and the public blog is just one piece of that.

I'd love to hear what advice others have, either here on Quaker Ranter or over on the Forum post.

My sort-of response to Callid's great Youtube piece on the Quaker testimonies, I compare the classic testimonies to a wiki: the collective knowledge of Friends distilled into specific cautions and guides. "We as Friends have found that...." I do talk about how the recent "SPICE" simplification (simplicity, integrity, integrity, community and equality) has robbed our notion of testimonies of some of their power.

This week I received an email from a young seeker in the Philadelphia area who found my 2005 article "Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings" published in FGConnections. She's a former youth ministries leader from a Pentecostal tradition, strongly attracted to Friends beliefs but not quite fitting in with the local meetings she's been trying. Somewhere she found my article and asks if I have any insights.

The 2005 article was largely pessimistic, focused on the "committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago" who had left Friends and blaming "an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future" but my hope paragraph was optimistic:

There is hope... A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there's a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

Hard to imagine that only three years ago I was an isolated FGC staffer left to pursue outreach and youth ministry work on my own time by an institution indifferent to either pursuit. Both functions have become major staff programs, but I'm no longer involved, which is probably just as well, as neither program has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most interesting work is still largely invisible.

Some of this work has been taken up by the new bloggers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be congealing around all the blogs, Twitter networks, Facebook friendships, intervisitations and IM chats. Many of us associated with QuakerQuaker.org have some sort of regular correspondence or participation with the Emerging Church movement, we regularly highlight "amazing conversations" from new Friends and seekers and there's a lot of inter-generational work going on. We've got a name for it in Convergent Friends, which reflects in part that "we" aren't just the liberal Friends I imagined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quaker flavors.

But we end up with a problem that's become the central one for me and a lot of others: what can we tell a new seeker who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but doesn't fit? I could point this week's correspondent to meetings and churches hundreds of miles from her house, or encourage her to start a blog, or compile a list of workshops or gatherings she might attend. But none of these are really satisfactory answers.   

Elsewhere:

Gathering in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advisor Ryan Bolger that talks about tribe-style leadership and a new kind of church identity that uses the instant communication tools of the internet to forge a community that's not necessarily limited to locality. Bolger's and his research partner report that they see "emerging initiatives within traditional churches as the next horizon for the spread of emerging church practices in the United States." More links from Wess' article on emerging churches and denominations.

John S made an interesting comment at the end of my last post (all ) about live twittering tonight's Presidential Debate got me thinking about a Quaker response to the debates might be. As I've admitted I can be rather snarky and partisan. So I prepared some interesting quotes from some old Quaker tesimonies and have been sprinkling them throughout my twitter commentary. 

• 1762: Friends ought not be active in electing to offices, the execution whereof tends to lay wast our Christian testimony
• <1879: Members should maintain inoffensive, circumspect emeanour towards all men, manifesting peaceable spirit of Christ.
• <1879: Friends should avoid those heats & controversies respecting the policies and govt's of the world.
• 1874: The mere natural wisdom and will of man have no palce in the church of Christ.
• 1808: The preservation of love and unity is a duty in every state of religious attainment.
• 1853: It is upon the simplicity of the Truth as it is in Jesus that our testimony to plainness and moderation rests.
• <1879: Friends are to avoid electing brethren to civil govt as may subject them to temptation of violating testimonies.
• 1808: Friends are not to unite in warlike measures, either offensive or defensive, we are subj of Messaih's peaceful reign.
• 1843: Fds must decline acceptance of any office or station in civil govt w/duties inconsistent w/our religious principles.
• 1843: Friends warned vs. raising & circulating paper credit w/appearance of value w/o intrinsic reality.
• 1843: Friends should be open-hearted and liberal in raising funds for relief for members in indigent circumstances.
• 1843: So may we be living members of the Church militant on earth; and inhabitants of that city which hath foundations.
• 1853: The standards which the world adopts in pursuit of trade and desire for riches in not safe for disciple of Christ.
• 1853: May no Friends involve themselves in worldy concerns disqualify for right use of their time, talents & temporal substance.

The quotes are culled from "Christian Advices" (1879) and "Rules of Discipline" (1843), both published by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I think these are Orthodox and Hicksite respectively, but I'm not an expert in the investigative details necessary to differentiate between yearly meeting publications. If anyone knows "Christian Advices" says it's available from the Friends Bookstore at 304 Arch Street; "Rules of Discipline" is printed by John Richards of 130 N. Third Street.

Update: I'll be adding #qqtalk to tonight's live Twitter blog of the Presidential debate. If you have a Twitter account you can just follow me at "martin_kelley" and non-Twitter users can see all the qqtalk posts by going to this "qqtalk" page. And definitely check out the fascinating discussions happening in the comments of this post!

Wess of GatheringinLight just emailed me if we might designate a "qqtalk" tag for those of us QuakerQuaker regulars who are live-blogging tonight's presidential debate on Twitter.com. Interesting idea but I'm worried that it will be too partisan. I, for one, have not been live blogging the debates as a Friend.

I've taken a lot of care to keep QuakerQuaker culturally-neutral so that we keep the focus on the faith. I want it to be a place where people from different backgrounds and values will find common ground in their interest in the role of Quaker tradition in their lives. I'm a leftie East Coast Christian anarco-pacifist--vegan, bike rider, you get the picture, right?--and while I can argue that my values jibe with my understanding of Quaker faith, I would never want to presume that you have to adopt them to be a good Quaker.

Part of the problem with Quakerism in all of its forms is that we've mixed up the faith with the culture and sometimes don't know where one ends and the other begins. That's kind of natural but it's led to a situation where we're sometimes divided against one another over the wrong issues. We also use the words "Quaker" or "Friends" as a shortcut for a range of values and don't do the work explaining how the faith leads to the values.

So in the few hours we have till the debate, any ideas about whether to adopt a qqtalk tag? Drop them in the comments. Also, if you're a Quaker who's going to be live-twittering tonight, leave your twitter name below so people can see what we're doing on an individual level if they want.

I'll start off:

I'm at http://twitter.com/martin_kelley and have been using #debate08 for my debate coverage.

Over on One Quaker Take, Timothy is surprised to read a definition of "Convergent Friend" that sounds a lot like a certain flavor of West Coast liberal Quakerism. It doesn't seem so surprising for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pastor at an Evangelical Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadelphia to attend a  "Meet-Up" of readers of emerging church blogs and realized I had more common ground with these younger Evangelicals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of "Convergence" will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that's almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we're starting from.

I don't think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations--the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren't Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can't rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can't help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn't look at one's beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I'm sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there's little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can't think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn't very new. It's just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It's finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

Friends never set out to start to their own religion; what became seen as the more "peculiar" Quaker practices were simply their interpretation of the proper mode of christian living. At some point some of these practices became forms, things done because that's what Quakers are supposed to do. The emptiness of this rationale led some of those in later generations to abandon them altogether. Neither path is very satisfactory. Those of us inspired by the Quaker tradition and have to sift through the half-remembered ancient forms to understand their rationale and continued relevancy.

When reading through Thomas Clarkson's account of Friends circa 1800, I was struck by the differing lengths of explanation needed for two customs. read earlier installments of my series you'll know that Thomas Clarkson was a British Anglican who  spent a lot of time with Friends around the turn of the 19th Century and published an invaluable multi-volumn apology in 1806. "A Portraiture of Quakerism" explains contemporary Friends practices and defends them as legitimate ways to lead a "christian" life.

The two practices that struck me were 1: the Quaker custom of using "thee" in speech and, 2: of using numbers for the names of days of the week and months of the year. Clarkson makes a good defense of the reasons behind the practices:

Many of the expressions, then in use, appeared to him to contain gross flattery, others to be idolatrous, others to be false representatives of the ideas they were intended to convey... Now he considered that christianity required truth, and he believed therefore that he and his followers, who prefessed to be christians in word and deed, and to follow the christian pattern in all things, as far as it could be found, were called upon to depart from all the censurable modes of seech, as much as they were from any of the customs of the world, which christianity had deemed objetionable. (p. 275-6, my edition, p. 199 in this edition in Google Books).

Clarkson takes the next four pages to explain some grammatical history. In Fox's time, "thee" was still at the tail end of being replaced by the grammatically-incorrect "you" for the second person singular, a cultural change that was a "trickle down" of the courtier's desire to flatter so-called superiors in church and state. To a band of religious reformers largely drawn from rural North England, the reappropriation of "thee" was a bold cultural statement. It spoke to both a grammatical integrity and a desire to flatten social classes in a radically idealistic religious society.

Following the history lesson, Clarkson turns to names of the days of the week and months of the years. Most are pagan names. Good christians seeking to honor the one true God and deny any false gods shouldn't spend their days invoking the Norse gods Tyr and Woden or the Roman gods Janus, Mars. Replacing them by Third Day, Fourth Day, First Month and Third Month strips them of their roots in non-christian cultures.

As Clarkson well knew, the question 150 years later (and now 350 years later) is whether these old peculiar customs carry any weight beyond a kind of 17th Century Quaker nostalgia. As he writes:

There is great absurdity, it is said, in supposing, that persons pay any respect to heathen idols, who retain the use of the ancient names of the divisions of time. How many thousands are there, who know nothing of their origin? The common people of the country know none of the reasons.

When I look at old customs I ask two questions:

1. The Elevator rule: could I explain to my peculiarity to a non-Quaker "average Joe" in under two minutes?
2. The Christian rule: could I make the argument that this practice is not just a Quaker oddity but something that every faithful and earnest Christian should consider adopting?

In these cases, thee fails and numbered days passes.

Let me explain: I can't really explain why I would use thee without going into a explanation of pre-17th Century grammar, talking about different forms of second person singular in the history of the English language and the retention of the second person singular in most romance languages. By the time I'd be done I'd come off as an over-educated bore.

In contrast I can say "Wednesday is named after the Norse god Woden, Thursday after Thor, January after the Roman Janus, etc., and as a one-God Christian I don't want to spend my days invoking their names constantly." A one-sentence explanation works even in modern America. I'll still be seen as an odd duck (nothing wrong with that) but at least people will leave the conversation knowing there's someone who thinks we really should be serious about only worshipping one God: mission accomplished, really.

I know faithful Friends who do use thee. I'm glad they do and don't want to double-guess their leadings. But for me the test of keeping it real (which I think is a ancient Quaker principle) means holding onto oddities that still point to their origins.

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken.  After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive.  I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"

I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:

I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.

The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.

The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.

But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young'ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled  "The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,"  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn't much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on "quakers" and "emerging church" nothing much came up. It's not surprising that there wasn't much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We're getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we're asked to lead worships and we've got a catchy name in "Convergent Friends."

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I've drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn't have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don't see one convinced young Friend profiled and it's post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occassional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren't anyone's target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting "Covergent" minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won't blow your cover guys!). I've seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it's not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here's my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the "convergent" theme next month. I'll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
  
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC's isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we'll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you're interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I've let my blog deteriorate into too much of a "life stream," all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You'll notice it's been redesigned. The right bar has the "life stream" stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I'll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don't want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I'm just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God's call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn't talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don't exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn't do much work in the temple and didn't spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the "bad" elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let's see where we can all get in the next five years!

Just got Carole Dale Spencer's Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism in the mail. There's been some blogger buzz around it and I'm glad to check it out for myself. I can tell right off the bat that I'm probably not going to be convinced by her arguments. Flipping through the index (the place to start any book like this) I see she makes three scant references to tradition-minded "Conservative" Friends. That's not a good sign, but she's far from the first modern historian to quarantine this branch to the footnotes.

I'll cut her some slack because she's traveling an interesting route. She's spending a lot of time talking about the Methodist and Holiness influences in Friends--John Wesley himself directly is indexed eighteen times. If you look at the people who defined modern 20th Century liberal Quakerism, folks like Rufus Jones (28 index references), you find that these influences were very strong. They still are, even if they go unacknowledged. And many of the issues Spencer is tracing are still with us and continue to be relevant even as some of us are talking up the possibilities of a new renewal/revival movement.

I'm still trying to figure out this idea I have of video interviews on practical faith. I'll just do some and see how they go. Wess at Gatheringinlight.com was willing to be guinea pig #1--thanks!

Warning: insider Quaker conversation to follow.

Over on her blog Robin M has a great post looking at the Convergent Friend conversation now. It's kind of State of the Convergent Friends report. It's very good and well worth a read and makes me wonder again where exactly I stand.

Even though I was around at the gestation and birth of the term, and even though it originally referred to a small group of bloggers who I all love, I go back and forth between using and refusing to use the label. I don't feel the need to always be explicitly "convergent." Sometimes I can just embody the spirit of it, which as a renewal movement is really just the same old spirit of Quakerism, which as its own renewal movement is the same old spirit of Christianity, with is just that spirit which animates the world.

See: it's too easy to throw up terms as a defense shield or as a way of boosting ourselves. I know I'm prone to this trap. I'll say "I'm doing this as a [Convergent Friend/Quaker/Christian]" as if that explains anything, as if careful listening to the Holy Spirit isn't all the authority that any of us needs.

I think a central part of the convergent experience is stepping outside of the institutional boxes and walking into the discomfort zone of our brand of Friends--asking the thorny questions and pointing out the inconvenient elephants. If "Convergent Friend" ever settles down into a set definition and annual rituals (like a Gathering interest group?), we'll see our own brier patches take root along those inconvenient pathways.

I've noticed Friends with bright ideas brand and sell themselves, and have wondered to myself how freely the gospel spirit is moving after ten years of Gathering workshops and Pendle Hill workshops. I'm not so much purist that I don't understand that sometimes those of us led to the ministry have to push through doubts and present things we've promised to present even if we're not in the best mood (praying that we find that groove). But I've also sat through committee meetings that felt like the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where I look around and realize the same people have been sitting in the same room having the same conversation for twenty years, and everyone is just so tired and the feeling is they're all reading a script and would want to be anywhere but where they are.

A friendly amendment to Convergent

Just the last thing is that for me if our work isn't ultimately rooted in sharing the good news then it's self-indulgent. I don't want to create a little oasis or hippy compound of happy people. Friends aren't going to go to heaven in our politically-correct smugness while the rest of the world is dying off. It's all of us or none of us. If we're not actively evangelizing <liberal translation: sharing the spiritual insights and gifts we've been given />, then we are part of the problem. "Convergence" is Quaker lingo. When we say it we're turning our back to the world to talk amongst ourselves: a useful exercise occassionally but not our main work.

I've been reading a lot of seeker blogs where Quakers are mentioned and I'm struck by how so many of the words we routinely use in our blogs and self-statements are totally alien to others.

It may be too late to throw a switch on the quickly-gathering-steam train that is the "Convergent Friends" express. But here's my friendly amendment: Convergent Friends need to be ready to get out of the Quaker conference centers and need to be ready to put aside the Quaker arcana we've accumulated over the years. If all we're doing is sitting around talking to roomfulls of Quakers in our hopeless-inaccessible lingo then we're fooling ourselves that any real renewal is happening.

Frankly, I have no idea what this would look like. I'm as clueless and scared by the possibilities as most of y'all. I just know we need to do it. Even if I had all the travel money and time in the world (I have neither), I don't know if I'd have enough motivation to get to the next Barnesville / Greensboro / Richmond / Newberg / wherever conference (I just realized I'm reinforcing my last Quaker post!). I love meeting other Friends and I soooo miss seeing other Friends in my current relative isolation. But. But. I wish I had a better ending to this post. I guess I'll just throw it out to the comments: what are we being called to do to send this work into the world?

Churches Retool Mission Trips - washingtonpost.com

A growing body of research questions the value of the trips abroad, which are supposed to bring hope and Christianity to the needy of the world, while offering American participants an opportunity to work in disadvantaged communities, develop relationships and charge up their faith. Critics scornfully call such trips "religious tourism" undertaken by "vacationaries."

My brand of religious don't do this kind of mission work but we are more and more enchanted with long-distance conferences. We now address every issue with a conference but do we ask any "research questions" about their effectiveness? The web is a great tool to extend the conference outward and yet, despite all the content that could be easily ported to the web, most conferences, consultations and gatherings barely exist online.

I know that real life has it's own value--I was happy to have a visit from individual traveler Micah Bales this weekend, a Friend with a great talent for the good question that stays with you long after his bus departs. I just wish I saw more media coming out of these big events, more ways to bootstrap the volumes of content produced at these events into something we can use for outreach.

If anecdotal evidence is an indication, most of the people who have come to Friends in the last half-decade first encountered us on Beliefnet, a for-profit dot-com with no connection to any Friends body. It's definitions of "Liberal Quakers" and "Orthodox Quakers" have become more important (de facto) than all of our books of Faith and Practice. Beliefnet, Wikipedia and a site called Religious Tolerance have become the definers of our faith to millions of seekers. Nothing we're doing comes close to Beliefnet.

And this is part fo the reason I've been fascinated by a Youtube video that was made this weekend. It's an introduction to "liberal Quakers" by someone who's never been to Quaker worship. While this might sound presumptuous, the real crime is that hers is the only American liberal Quaker introduction on Youtube. What the hell are we doing, Friends? I've been corresponding with the Youtuber. She's 22, a spiritual seeker who cobbled together a spirituality after following a couple of dead-end spiritual paths. She came across the Beliefnet quiz, came out a "liberal Quaker" and started looking for real world Friends. She tried the meeting in her home town but it looked deserted (!) and so started an email correspondence with a Friend she found on another meeting's website. She did the Youtube video because she couldn't find any American introductions and wanted to give back, especially to younger seekers that might not respond to a British Youtube series. Yes her video is awkward and a little sketchy on some points of liberal Quaker theology, but it's honest and doesn't contain any viewpoints you won't hear around most meetinghouses.

PS: Since writing this I've come across the first video from the just-concluded FGC Gathering. I don't know if it'll help with outreach but it is really funny. Thanks Skip, I feel like I was there! 

Survey: More have dropped dogma for spirituality in U.S. - USATODAY.com

"Every religious group has a major challenge on its hands from all directions," says [Pew Forum director Luis] Lugo. When he factors in Pew's February findings that 44% of adults say they've switched to another religion or none at all, Lugo says, "You have to wonder: How do you guarantee the integrity of a religious tradition when so many people are coming or going or following ideas that don't match up?"

Lugo's questions is particularly relevant for Friends, as many of us are converts. But the general turn toward a more experiential religiosity points to possibilities for further outreach. Don't have the time to check the survey itself but USAToday looks to have some good graphs about it.