Quakerquaker

Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.

I was able to make up this list that displays QuakerQuaker.org membership profiles and upcoming gatherings in a geography-focused way.

Countries Australia Belgium Canada France Germany Greece Ireland Kenya Mexico Netherlands New Zealand United Kingdom United States

Select Cities London Philadelphia New York Richmond Greensboro Portland Seattle Birmingham Boston Minneapolis San Francisco U.S. Regions New England Mid-Atlantic Southeast US Great Plains Southwest Midwest North Pacific

U.S. States Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Gatherings by Theme Convergent Yearly Meetings Gatherings Retreats Online Young Adult Gatherings by Location New England United Kingdom Mid Atlantic Baltimore Philadelphia Great Plains Northwest Ohio

I've just signed up for Beacon Hill's Friends House's Quaker Studies class on "Moodle, Technique / Technology" that begins First Month 12.

An educator F/friend of mine has gushed on about Moodle, the open source education system and I have to admit it's always looked intriguing. I've taught a number of real-world Quakerism classes and I've wondered whether online courses could help connect Friends and seekers isolated by distance or theology. I've been wanting to try out one of Beacon Hill's online classes for awhile.

From the description:

Is online teaching new to you?

Don't know where to start?

We'll begin with the simplest interactive course: a "welcome to the class" section with a reading and one forum. We'll talk about technology: how settings change the forum interface; but we'll also discuss teaching technique: how to present introductory material to students who may have a wide range of experience and expectations.

Over the 10 weeks, we'll cover: introducing the moodle environment; chats; forums; choices and surveys; lessons; assignments; databases; wikis; quizzes.

You will have your own lesson space to explore all these tools and will be expected to look at each other's work and react to it. By March we should all be ready to design and offer creative Moodle courses of our own.

Classes only cost $25. You can find out more about the Beacon Hill's Moodle online class and all their Quaker Studies classes. If anyone would be interested in some sort of QuakerQuaker-sponsored classes, let me know. We've got a lot of well-qualified Quaker teachers in the network and a lot of isolated Friends wanting to learn more.

Max Carter gave the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (NJ) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at it's founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools and any First Day School class that might answer their inquiries.

Max's program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association's efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.

Many of the students going through Max's program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. "Quaker" is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay's Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song ("with his shaggy shaggy locks"). So there's a real culture shock when they show up in Max's class and he hands them a Bible. "I've never touched one of these before" and "Why do we have to use this?" are non-uncommon responses.

None of this surprised me, of course. I've led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction ("we graduate more Quakers than we bring in" was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where's the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?

There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. I pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn't seem healthy to have such separated worlds.

Convergent Friends

Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we've shaken hands a few times but he didn't recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we're described. It was positive (we "bear watching!") but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we're a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I've graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listed all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage--I'm going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the "New Monastics and Convergent Friends" workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF's were young adults. "That's the first I've heard that" she said; "me too!" I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr's October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.

Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism

The most useful part of Max's talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He

• Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
• Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called "Concordance Capers" that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" at the end of the class.
  
• Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
• Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
• Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they've profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta's Open Door.
• The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.

Random Thoughts:

A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.

PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I've fixed it so that this odd spread won't happen again.

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.

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?

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.

A few of you might have noticed that yesterday's quote was from the gospel reading of the One Year Bible plan. It's January 15th and I'm still following the readings. It's only twenty or so minutes a day, which seems quite manageable. Each day has readings from four parts of the Bible, which I hope helps keep me motivated through Leviticus!

Oregon Quakers Gregg K Gregg Koskela and AJ Schwanz posted about the One Year Bible plan at the start of the year and I know of at least one other online Friend following it. It's never too late to start. A great resource has been the One Year Bible Blog from a guy named Mike, who links the the day's reading and gives his own daily commentary. He has a good sense of humor and it's obvious he has a real ministry and leading to sharing the Bible like this.

I started a One Year Bible Quaker Group over at QuakerQuaker where people can learn more and discuss the day's reading with other Friends. Check it out. I'm reading OYBB's Mike every day and I've also followed his suggestion and bought the One Year Bible for New Believers, which presents each day's reading altogether. It's a great way to keep up without being glued to the computer.

Just finished setting up the old QuakerQuaker categories onto the new site. Here are links to each of them:

blogs, books, christianity, clearness, community, conservative, convergent, diversity, evangelical, green, liberal, ministry, parenting, plain, sexuality, universalism, videos, witness, youth.

When you write or see a good linkable URL that you think belongs in these categories, just bookmark it using the http://del.icio.us system using "quaker.whatever" as it's tag. For example, a post about Convergent Friends should be tagged quaker.convergent

Yes it's true Virginia, QuakerQuaker has moved to it's new digs. It's all chaotic but fun, so go check it out. Comments, kudos or complaints can be dropped on the feedback discussion or as a comment here. More features will be coming soon, but then aren't they always? A big shout out of thanks to recent QQ donors who helped make this possible and to the brave early adopters who have been testing the site for the past couple of weeks.


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QQ is also a great source for info on Quaker Events, Quaker videos and Quaker photos.