barclay press Posts

• Robin M reads thriving churches book, Christianity for the Rest of Us
  If the keys to a thriving congregation are shared tradition, practice, and wisdom -- how are we sharing these with each other, especially newcomers? My meeting is in a growing phase right now. Can we step into the opportunities that God is showing us?
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity quaker.outreach)
• Gregg K on the non-use of communion among Friends
  Only a few have anything to say in response to [question about use of communiion]. That troubles me; it tells me that we are not articulating well, we are not calling people toward, we are not setting before them the beautiful example of lives lit aflame.
  (tags: quaker quaker.evangelical quaker.ministry comment)
• Ben and Jody Richmond report from Friends Theological College in Western Kenya
  This is a testing time for the church in Kenya. Will we be able to be bearers of Good News that is deep enough to bring healing and hope to those who have been traumatized, and reconciliation to those who have experienced the reality of enmity?
  (tags: quaker quaker.kenya quaker.witness)
• Robin recommends Drayton's "Getting Rooted" pamphlet
  One of the best points for me was about maintaining the balance between finding our roots but not idolizing the past. It's good for anyone who has a tendency to think all the really good Quakers died before 1800.
  (tags: quaker quaker.books quaker.conservative)
• Robin on McLaren's social action
  So please excuse me if I feel like McLaren is re-stating the obvious. However, you know what else? Humans have a habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious, and not just so our mouths don't freeze up.
  (tags: comment)
• Pastor Blue Jeans on making Jesus more important than Tiger Woods
  Maybe it is time for the church... to pay less attention to who is in the White house, and God forgive me(I know God will), what changes are needed in the Book of Discipline, and more time worried about telling the Good News to the world.
  (tags: comment)
• Richard M on leadings to go ahead on faith alone
  When such a leading strikes you know that you are supposed to go to a certain place or to be with a certain person. One can feel a little foolish making what is sometimes a big effort to go somewhere with no clear idea as to what you are going to do.
  (tags: quaker quaker.discernment)
• Blog use at Penn Charter school
  "Blogs change the way I teach," Kim explains. "In the classroom, I control most of the conversation, even if I try to get out of the way. But online, young people can engage with one another and really learn from one another."
  (tags: tech tech.internetculture)

Not really news, but Friends United Meeting recently dedicated their new Welcome Center in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On September 15, 2007, FUM dedicated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Bookstore as the new FUM Welcome Center. The Welcome Center contains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of during business hours. Tables and chairs to comfortably accommodate 50 people make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meetings, anniversary/birthday parties, etc. Reduced prices are available for churches.

Most Quaker publishers and booksellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pendle Hill bookstore and publishing operation, the AFSC Bookstore in Southern California, Barclay Press in Oregon. The veritable Friends Bookshop in London farmed out its mail order business a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a coffeebar: popular and cool I'm sure, but does London really needs another place to buy coffee? Rumor has it that Britain's publications committee has been laid down. The official spin is usually that the work continues in a different form but only Barclay Press has been reborn as something really cool. One of the few remaining booksellers is my old pals at FGC's QuakerBooks: still selling good books but I'm worried that so much of Quaker publishing is now in one basket and I'd be more confident if their website showed more signs of activity.

The boards making these decisions to scale back or close are probably unaware that they're part of a larger trend. They probably think they're responding to unique situations (the peer group Quakers Uniting in Publications sends internal emails around but hasn't done much to publicize this story outside of its membership). It's sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bodies have independently decided that publishing is not an essential part of their mission.

Getting right back on the horse, I'm teaching Quakerism 101 at Moorestown NJ Meeting Wednesday evenings starting in a few weeks. The original plan was for the most excellent Thomas Swain to lead it but he's become rather busy after being tapped to be yearly meeting clerk (God bless 'im). He'll be there for the first session, I'll be on my own for the rest. A rather small group has signed up so it should be nice and intimate.

For the last year I've been pondering the opportunities of using mid-week religious education and worship as a form of outreach. Emergent Church types love small group opportunities outside of the Sunday morning time slot and it seems that mid-week worship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker traditions that might be worth revitalizing and recasting in an Emergent-friendly format.

Last Spring I spent a few months regularly attending one of the few surviving mid-week worships in the area and I found it intriguing and full of possibilities but never felt led to do more. It seemed that attenders came and went each week without connecting deeply to one another or getting any serious grounding in Quakerism.

Reflecting on the genesis of a strong Philadelphia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look something like this:

• 6pm: regular religious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where attenders would be free to share spiritual insights but they would also learn the orthodox Quaker take on the issue or concern (Barclay essentially).
• 7pm: mid-week worship, unprogrammed
• 8pm: unofficial but regular hang-out time, people going in groups to local diners, etc.

Unprogrammed worship just isn't enough (just when y'all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilburite....) . People do need time to be able to ask questions and explore spirituality in a more structured way. Those of us led to teaching need to be willing to say "this is the Quaker take on this issue" even if our answer wouldn't necessarily pass consensus in a Friends meeting.

People also need time to socialize. We live in an atomized society and the brunt of this isolation is borne by young adults starting careers in unfamiliar cities and towns: Quaker meeting can act as a place to plug into a social network and provide real community. It's different from entertainment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift thinking from "those Quakers are cool" to "I'm a Quaker and I'm cool" in such a way that these new Friends understand that there are challenges and disciplines involved in taking on this new role.

Perhaps the three parts to the mid-week worship model is head, spirit and heart; whatever labels you give it we need to think about feeding and nurturing the whole seeker and to challenge them to more than just silence. This is certainly a common model. When Peggy Senger Parsons and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what's now called The Collegium Center which is a Sunday night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that produced at least one couple (good friends of ours now!).

I don't know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people's heads too. The four weeks of Wednesday night religious ed at Moorestown might have something of this feel; it will be interesting to see.

For those interested in curriculum details, I'm basing it on Michael Birkel's Silence and Witness: the Quaker Tradition (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael's tried to pull together a good general introduction to Friends, something surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton's Friends for 300 Years it's getting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can Silence and Witness anchor a Quakerism 101 course? We'll see.

As supplementary material I'm using Thomas Hamm's Quakers in America (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion's Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy's Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

Today I posted an appreciation for Dean Freiday up on the Friends General Conference site (I was FGC's webmaster). It's well worth a read: Dean has been "convergent" for at least half a century, long before us internet kiddies started talking amongst ourselves (he's probably the only Friend featured on both the FGC and Barclay Press websites!). Johan Maurer could have easily cited Dean when he recently wrote that Convergent Friends are echoing the kinds of conversations that have been taking place among the leadership of the larger Friends organizations for decades.

The appreciation comes from FGC's Christian and Interfaith Relations Committee, universally called simply "CIRC" (even I had to check that I had the full name right). Now, I think its safe to say that CIRC is not one of FGC's sexiest committees. I mean that as an observation, not a dig, because I think it does fascinating stuff. For one thing it works with the World Council of Churches. Quakers were a founding member of the organization and we've always been something of a theological thorn in its side. Whenever the WCC tries to come up with a definition to unify world Christians it runs up against the peculiarities of Friends. And not just of Friends: I think we implicitly challenge the body to find a definition that would include the early primitive Christian communities. (The second link is to a British text but it gives a sense of this brand of Quaker ecumenical work).

CIRC is also the FGC committee most likely to hang out with Friends from the other branches; for example it appoints FGC's official observers to the Friends United Meeting Triennial. To use the new lingo, it's convergent.

Which begs the question: what's different between the new Convergence and the old Ecumenicalism? Are there points of connection? Are there opportunities for cross-fertilization? There are style differences, to be sure and I wonder if Robber Webber's generational chart (which I posted in my first Emergent Church piece) applies in any way, but any of these could certainly be creatively bridged, no?

The logistical process of putting Freiday's appreciation online involved an email back-and-forth with Tom P., an active committee member of CIRC, and that conversation suggested this post. He sounded quite excited when I gave the briefest overview of the Convergent Friends talk and wants to bring it to the attention of the committee. It could be very interesting.

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More:

• For more on Convergence, see Robin Mohr's coinage and C. Wess Daniel's Quaker Life article, plus of course much of what gets posted up on QuakerQuaker.org.
• Even Swarthmore likes Dean Freiday: this overview of his correspondence shows the breadth of his friendships.

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

In Fall 2005 I led a six-week Quakerism 101 course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting. It went very well. Medford has a lot of involved, weighty Friends (some of them past yearly meeting clerks!) and I think they appreciated a fresh take on an introductory course. The core question: how might we teach Quakerism today?

I’ve long been curious about whether anyone in the Evangelical branch of Friends has been following the “emergent church” movement. Now I find that Bruce Bishop , former Youth Superintendent of Northwest Yearly Meetings, has written a primer called Postmodernism: Taste and See that the Lord Is Good

bq. “Postmodernism”—we see that label bandied about quite a bit these days. And like the once-frequent phrase “Generation X,” postmodernism is often seen as anti-Christian and something that the church needs to fight. I would beg to differ.

I don’t particularly like the term “postmodern,” as the philosophical and pop-culture definitions almost completely contradict one another, but he’s talking philosophy, so MTV watchers should listen past the words. (Bishop is in good company in his continued use in the term: “Here’s Jordan Cooper”:http://www.jordoncooper.com/20040301archives.html#107896665936703076 and “Brian McLaren”:http://www.emergentvillage.com/index.cfm?PAGEID=797 talking about the problems with the term and their explanations of why they’re still using it).

I really really hope Bruce Bishop writes a follow-up addressing how Friends might relate to this movement (“see my thoughts here”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/emerging_church.php).