Churches Retool Mis­sion Trips — wash​ing​ton​post​.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!