A good post on guest blog curation under your masthead by +Danny Brown.

July 10, 2011

Reshared post from +Geoff Liv­ingston

A good post on guest blog cura­tion under your mast­head by +Dan­ny Brown.

Embed­ded Link

How To Be A Gra­cious Guest Blog Host – For Blog­gers By Bloggers
Hav­ing a guest blog­ger is a great way to expose your blog to new read­ers and grow your blog traf­fic. So here’s how to look after guest bloggers. 

Google+: View post on Google+

The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers

September 14, 2008

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 FGC 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, it was very clear I was­n’t wel­come in quickly-changing staff struc­ture and I found myself out of a job. The most excit­ing out­reach pro­grams I had worked on was a data­base that would col­lect the names and address­es of iso­lat­ed Friends, but It was qui­et­ly dropped a few months after I left. 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 occa­sion­al 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!

On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

November 29, 2006

I’ve been qui­et on the blogs late­ly, focus­ing on job search­es rather than rant­i­ng. I thought I’d take a lit­tle time off to talk about my lit­tle cor­ner of the career mar­ket. I’ve been apply­ing for a lot of web design and edit­ing jobs but the most inter­est­ing ones have com­bined these togeth­er in cre­ative ways. My qual­i­fi­ca­tions for these jobs are more the inde­pen­dent sites I’ve put togeth­er — notably Quak​erQuak​er​.org—than my paid work for Friends.

For exam­ple: one inter­est­ing job gets repost­ed every few weeks on Craigslist. It’s geared toward adding next-generation inter­ac­tive con­tent to the web­site of a con­sor­tium of sub­ur­ban news­pa­pers (appli­cants are asked to be “com­fort­able with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube…,” etc.). The qual­i­fi­ca­tions and vision are right up my alley but I’m still wait­ing to hear any­thing about the appli­ca­tion I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they’re con­tin­u­ing to post revised descrip­tions to Craigslist. Yes­ter­day’s ver­sion dropped the “con­ver­gence” lin­go and also dropped the pro­ject­ed salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actu­al­ly got through to an inter­view for a fab­u­lous job that con­sist­ed of putting togeth­er a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty site to fea­ture the lesser-known and quirky busi­ness­es of Philadel­phia. I had a great inter­view, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard noth­ing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up com­mu­ni­ca­tions went unan­swered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talk­ing about and emailed that the site did launch, just qui­et­ly. It looks good.

Cor­po­rate blog­ging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years polit­i­cal cam­paigns have come to con­sid­er blog­gers as an essen­tial tool in get­ting their mes­sage out. User-generated con­tent has become essen­tial feed­back and pub­lic­i­ty mech­a­nisms. My expe­ri­ence from the Quak­er world is that blog­gers are con­sti­tut­ing a new kind of lead­er­ship, one that’s both more out­go­ing but also thought­ful and vision­ary (I should post about this some­time soon). Blogs encour­age open­ness and trans­paren­cy and will sure­ly affect orga­ni­za­tion­al pol­i­tics more and more in the near future. Smart com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that want to grow in size and influ­ence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is lit­tle suc­cor to the present. In the Philadel­phia met­ro­pol­i­tan area it seems that the rare employ­er that’s think­ing in these terms have have a lot of back and forths try­ing to work out the job descrip­tion. Well, I only need one enlight­ened employ­er! It’s time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

Turning workshops into worship

July 4, 2006

Last night LizOpp, Robin M and myself host­ed our FGC Gath­er­ing inter­est group. The title was “On Fire!: Renew­ing Quak­erism through a Con­ver­gence of Friends.” All morn­ing long we’ve had Friends grab­bing our arms to tell us how pow­er­ful and impor­tant it was for them. One well-traveled Friend went so far as to say the spon­ta­neous wor­ship that occurred halfway through was the deep­est he’s expe­ri­enced in twen­ty years of Quak­erism. The obvi­ous chal­lenge for us hosts is keep­ing our egos secure­ly tamed from all this praise.

The work was­n’t ours. We sim­ply set the stage. My first impulse is to say we helped cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where the Spir­it could break into the event, but that’s not real­ly it. We tried to cre­ate a space where par­tic­i­pants would rec­og­nize when the Spir­it knocked on the door.

Powell House Weekend (Food for Fire par­tic­i­pants.Powell House Weekend (Blog­gers at the work­shop pose for a goofy attacking-one-another photo.

What hap­pened last night felt sim­i­lar to what hap­pened in last Feb­ru­ary’s Pow­ell House Food for the Fire work­shop. While I took notes and jour­naled a lot about it I nev­er gave a fol­lowup blog post. It was pow­er­ful and I need­ed to digest it. Luck­i­ly par­tic­i­pants Rob, Aman­da and Zach and Claire all shared about it or its themes in the weeks afterwards.

I’d like to share some­thing about the assump­tions and prepa­ra­tion that went into these two events. There’s no way to cre­ate a cookie-cutter agen­da to force a deep spir­i­tu­al high. In fact part of what’s need­ed is to move beyond pre­dictabil­i­ty. Both times I’ve had a clear sense that a point came when I was no longer facil­i­tat­ing, where Spir­it was active­ly guid­ing us and par­tic­i­pants were active­ly respond­ing to that process, even elder­ing us past the con­trol of facilitation.

When I came to Pow­ell House I had a work­shop descrip­tion and a keen inter­est in the top­ic. What I did­n’t bring was an agen­da. I’m try­ing to exper­i­ment with not being too pre­pared.* Ear­ly Friends held open meet­ings and while they often bore con­cerns and had themes that fre­quent­ly reoc­curred in their min­istry. Friends today rely very much on mod­els bor­rowed from high­er edu­ca­tion: we have work­shops that expect agen­das, we give talks that expect pre-printed speech­es. These are often the oppor­tu­ni­ties we get for teach­ing min­istries, yet they are very pro­grammed. The chal­lenge is to fig­ure out how to sub­vert them to allow for unpro­grammed surprise.

At Pow­ell House I spent time before each ses­sion walk­ing around the grounds in prayer for guid­ance on what to do next. I had brain­stormed ideas before­hand but my main prepa­ra­tion had been a lot of Quak­er read­ing and prayer in the weeks pre­ceed­ing the event. I want­ed the ses­sions to con­nect to the spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion of the par­tic­i­pants, as indi­vid­u­als and as a group. There were a few moments I thought I was nuts. For exam­ple, walk­ing around before the Pow­ell House Sat­ur­day after­noon ses­sion it seemed like read­ing a chap­ter of Samuel Bow­nas’s Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions would be a good idea, but by mid-afternoon I could see the sleepy faces. We did it any­way and faces and spir­it lit up. Peo­ple want­ed to engage with Bow­nas. As it turns out we read all of chap­ter three, “Advice to Min­is­ters in a State of Infan­cy.” It was so cool.

The real inbreak­ing hap­pened a lit­tle lat­er. The group was tired, din­ner was near­ing. I start­ed to rec­om­mend we go into a cir­cle to break up. One Friend inter­rupt­ed, looked at anoth­er across the room and said “you have some­thing to say, don’t you.” The sec­ond Friend said yes, then chal­lenged us that we had­n’t actu­al­ly answered our queries at all. The main ques­tion was still on the table. “What are we called to do?” There was a release. I knew I was not in con­trol of the work­shop any­more. We came into a prayer cir­cle and start­ed to talk about some of this. One Friend said some­thing about nam­ing who it is that call us. A theme came out that it was­n’t enough for us to find some sort of per­son­al sal­va­tion and com­fort in our Quak­er meet­ings: we need­ed to bring all the world into this if it was to be mean­ing­ful. It tru­ly felt like the Holy Spir­it was in the room. It was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly so com­fort­able and it some­how seemed like not enough, but it point­ed to the work we need­ed to do afterwards.

On Fire! FGC Interest GroupBlog­ging par­tic­i­pants of On Fire! work­shop pose togeth­er. About fifty peo­ple total came out for the Mon­day night inter­est group. Click pho­to for names and links.On Fire! FGC Interest Group
Lots of dis­cus­sions hap­pened at the rise of the worship.blank
The semi-impromptu post-discussion group. (Thanks for FGC’s Emi­ly for tak­ing & post­ing this!)

FGC Gath­er­ing pho­tos on Flickr and Tech­no­rati

Last night, at the FGC inter­est group, some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened. Robin, Liz and I had planned out the first half of the meet­ing. The most impor­tant piece: com­ing ear­ly to sit in prayer and hold­ing it well past the time the inter­est group was sup­posed to start. The work of Friends needs to be root­ed in wor­ship. We need to be still enough to hear the Holy Spir­it. If the medi­um is the mes­sage, our mes­sage was about the need to not pack our­selves in with agen­das. We start­ed pred­i­cat­bly enough by ask­ing the fifty-or-so par­tic­i­pants to give their names and to name a spir­i­tu­al prac­tice that gives them joy. We asked for space in between speak­ers to keep wor­ship at the fore and we were blessed by a self-faciliating group; Friends did hold the spaces in between.
Then the three of us told our sto­ries of start­ing spiritually-focused blogs and com­ing to find a fel­low­ship that extend­ed beyond our tra­di­tion­al Quak­er branch­es (hence the term “Con­ver­gence of Friends”). I went first and explained that I try­ing to be care­ful not to do this to lift myself up. My sto­ry is sim­ple and like those of many Friends. I was giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ny. The idea of tes­ti­mo­ny rang through­out the evening. Robin’s sto­ry in par­tic­u­lar was very ground­ed and com­ing last it took us into the unpro­grammed agenda-less time we had left free. Friends rose to give tes­ti­mo­ny of oth­er “con­ver­gent” expe­ri­ences, for exam­ple par­tic­pa­tion in the North­west Wom­en’s The­o­log­i­cal Con­fer­ences, events of the West­ern branch of the Chris­t­ian Friends Fellowship.

At some point a woman I did­n’t know stood up with­out being rec­og­nized and she had a pose of sup­pli­ca­tion. My first though, “oh no!” Then I noticed anoth­er Friend, wor­ship­ful in spir­it, who point­ed her to us. She said she was going to sing a song. “Oh no again!” I thought. But this was the facil­i­ta­tion com­ing off our shoul­ders. This was a Friend ris­ing to name what we need­ed and anoth­er Friend point­ing that we need­ed to go this direc­tion. It was like the two Pow­ell House Friends: one rec­og­niz­ing in the oth­er a need to share min­istry and being will­ing to break through “prop­er” group process. At the inter­est group the song was pow­er­ful, it brought us to a place where we could be low and thank­ful. We were now spon­ta­neous­ly in worship.

Liz, Robin and I had planned some clos­ing wor­ship but this was­n’t the time yet. But it was the time and the suceed­ing min­istry was heart­felt and large­ly from the Source.
The only fun­ny aside was that we felt we could­n’t let the group go on past our 8:45 end time, for the sim­ple rea­son that child­care end­ed then and we need­ed to let par­ents go. We men­tioned this around 8:30 but twen­ty min­utes lat­er the wor­ship was con­tin­u­ing. Just then the cell­phone of the Friend giv­ing min­istry went off: it was his daugh­ter call­ing to ask where he was! He turned off the phone but it gave us the excuse to close the meet­ing and invite an extend­ed meet­ing to con­tin­ue out­side. This was won­der­ful as there were a num­ber of oth­er similarly-themed inter­est groups (one on youth min­istries, the oth­er on the World Gath­er­ing of Young Friends) and par­tic­i­pants from all three groups met out­side and con­tin­ued the shar­ing for anoth­er two hours.

Lessons? Sim­ply to ground work­shop events in wor­ship, let the agen­da be emp­ty enough for the Spir­it to inter­vene (hav­ing back­up exer­cis­es just in case it does­n’t is fine!). I don’t think this is a fool­proof method. A lot depends on the par­tic­i­pants and how will­ing they are to share in the facil­i­a­tion and wor­ship. A lot also depends on Friends break­ing into the agen­da, for both times that was what turned the event from a work­shop to a gath­ered meeting.


* For me the dan­ger is a per­son­al style that has long relied on a last-minute mir­a­cles (I was the kind of col­lege stu­dent who read all the mate­r­i­al through the semes­ter but did­n’t actu­al­ly start writ­ing any­thing until the night before an assign­ment was due). I don’t want my the­ol­o­gy to be an excuse for my pro­cras­ti­na­tion and I try to test this regularly.

Related posts

Lots of folks have been talk­ing about the Gath­er­ing and the Mon­day night inter­est group:

I’m sure more reac­tion posts are up there and I’ll link to them as I find them. I sus­pect that in addi­tion to being the biggest group Quak­er blog­ger pho­to to date (sor­ry Gregg!), this will end up being the most blogged about Quak­er event yet, at least till Wess gath­ers West Coast­ers togeth­er next month. I count­ed at least 20 Quak­er blog­gers at the Gathering.

Love is unconditional and accepts us for who we are

March 15, 2006

I tried to post this as a com­ment on “this piece by James Riemermann”:http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker?m=299 on the Non­the­ist Friends web­site but the site expe­ri­enced a tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ty when I tried to sub­mit it (hope it’s back up soon!). James describes his post as a “rant” about “conservative-leaning lib­er­al Friends,” and one theme that got picked up in the com­ments was how he and oth­ers felt exclud­ed by us (for that is a term I use to try to describe my spir­i­tu­al con­di­tion). Rather than loose the com­ment I’ll just post it here.
Hi James and everyone,
Well, I think I was one of the first of the Quak­er blog­gers to talk about conservative-leaning lib­er­al Quak­ers back in July 2003. I too am not sure it’s any­thing worth call­ing a “move­ment.”
I hear this feel­ing of being exclud­ed but I’m not sure where that’s com­ing from. When James had a real­ly won­der­ful, thought-provoking response to my “We’re All Ranters Now” piece, I asked him if I could “reprint” the com­ment as its own guest piece. It got a lot of atten­tion, a lot of com­ments. I did­n’t real­ize you were using non​the​ist​friends​.org as a blog these days but “Robin M”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_robin_m/ of “What Canst Thou Say”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/ did and has added a link to your post from “QuakerQuaker.org”:www.quakerquaker.org, which again is a val­i­da­tion that yours is an impor­tant voice (I can pret­ty much guar­an­tee that this is going to be one of the more fol­lowed links). You and every­one here are part of the family.
Yes, we have some dis­agree­ments. I don’t think Quak­erism is sim­ply made up of who­ev­er makes it into the meet­ing­house. I think we have a tra­di­tion that we’ve inher­it­ed. This con­sists of prac­tices and val­ues and ways of look­ing at the world. Much of that tra­di­tion comes from the gospel of Jesus and the epis­tles between the ear­li­est Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. Much of what might feel like neu­tral Quak­er prac­tice is a clear echo of that tra­di­tion, and that echo is what I talk about that in my blogs. I think it’s good to know where we’re com­ing from. That does­n’t mean we’re stuck there and we adapt it as our rev­e­la­tion changes (this atti­tude is why I’m a lib­er­al Friend no mat­ter how much I talk about Christ). These blog con­ver­sa­tions are the ways we share our expe­ri­ences, min­is­ter to and com­fort one another.
That peo­ple hold dif­fer­ent reli­gious under­stand­ings and prac­tices isn’t in itself inher­ent­ly exclu­sion­ary. Diver­si­ty is good for us, right? There’s no one Quak­er cen­ter. There’s muli­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, much of it glo­ri­ous­ly over­lap­ping on the elec­tron­ic path­ways of the inter­net. That’s won­der­ful, it shows a great vital­i­ty. The reli­gious tra­di­tion that is Quak­erism is not dead, not moth­balled away in a liv­ing his­to­ry muse­um some­where. It’s alive, with its assump­tions and bound­aries con­stant­ly being revis­it­ed. That’s cool. If a par­tic­u­lar post feels too carp­ing, there’s always the “elder­ing of the back but­ton,” as I like to call it. Let’s try to hear each oth­er from where we are and to remain open to the min­istry from those who might appear to be com­ing from a dif­fer­ent place. Love is the first move­ment and love is uncon­di­tion­al and accepts us for who we are.
I bet­ter stop this before I get too mushy, with all this talk of love! See what I mean about being a lib­er­al Quaker?
Your Friend, Martin

Aggregating our Webs

June 16, 2005

On Beppe­blog, Joe talks about start­ing a clear­ness com­mit­tee [link long gone]to assist him with his strug­gles with Friends. But he also touch­es on some­thing I’ve cer­tain­ly also expe­ri­enced: the impor­tant role this elec­tron­ic fel­low­ship has been playing:

Just the oth­er day I real­ized that I felt more com­fort­able being a Friend since not attend­ing Meet­ing on an ongo­ing basis. My ongo­ing “e‑relationships” via the blo­gos­phere has helped me stay “con­nect­ed”. Observe how pleased I respond­ed to Liz’s recent post (the one that I quot­ed in the post before this one). It’s as if I’m starv­ing for good fel­low­ship of some kind or another.

There’s even more talk about internet-mediated discernment/fellowship in the “com­ments to his followup.

Giv­en all this, I’m not sure if I’ve ever high­light­ed a “vision for an expand­ed Quak­er Ranter site” that I put togeth­er for a “youth lead­er­ship” grant in Third Month:

I’ve been blessed to meet many of my [age] peers with a clear call to inspired min­istry. Most of these Friends have since left the Soci­ety, frus­trat­ed both by month­ly meet­ings and Quak­er bod­ies that did­n’t know what to do with a bold min­istry and by a lack of men­tor­ing elder­ship that could help sea­son these young min­is­ters and deep­en their under­stand­ing of gospel order. I would like to put togeth­er an inde­pen­dent online pub­li­ca­tion… This would explic­it­ly reach out across the dif­fer­ent braches of Friends and even to var­i­ous seek­er move­ments like the so-called “Emer­gent Church Movement.”

As I’ve writ­ten I was select­ed for one of their fel­low­ships (yea!!) but for an amount that was point­ed­ly too low to actu­al­ly fund much (huh??). There’s some­thing in the air how­ev­er. “Quak­er Dhar­ma” is ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions and Russ Nel­son’s “Plan­etQuak­er” is a sometimes-awkward auto­mat­ed answer (do its read­ers real­ly want to see the ultra­sounds?). I’m not sure any of these com­bo sites could actu­al­ly work bet­ter than their con­stituent parts. I find myself unin­ter­est­ed in most group blogs, aggre­ga­tors, and for­mal web­sites. The invi­did­ual voice is so important.

And don’t we already have a group project going with all the cross-reading and cross-linking we’re doing. Is that what Joe was talk­ing about? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found some new inter­est­ing blog­ger and went to post a wel­come in their com­ments only to have found that Joe or LizOpp had beat­en me to it. (Some of us are to the point of read­ing each oth­er’s minds. I think I could prob­a­bly write a great Beppe or LizOpp post and vice-versa.) Is this impulse to for­mal­ize these rela­tion­ships just a throw­back to old ideas of publishing?

Maybe the web’s form of hyper­link­ing is actu­al­ly supe­ri­or to Old Media pub­lish­ing. I love how I can put for­ward a strong vision of Quak­erism with­out offend­ing any­one – any put-off read­ers can hit the “back” but­ton. And if a blog I read posts some­thing I don’t agree with, I can sim­ply choose not to com­ment. If life’s just too busy then I just miss a few weeks of posts. With my “Sub­jec­tive Guide to Quak­er Blogs” and my “On the Web” posts I high­light the blog­gers I find par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, even when I’m not in per­fect the­o­log­i­cal uni­ty. I like that I can have dis­cus­sions back and forth with Friends who I don’t exact­ly agree with.

I have noth­ing to announce, no clear plan for­ward and no mon­ey to do any­thing any­way. But I thought it’d be inter­est­ing to hear what oth­ers have been think­ing along these lines.

Google can’t be wrong

December 7, 2003

I usu­al­ly think cyber-pranks are just sil­ly. But I have to laugh at this one: Enough blog­gers have linked to Pres­i­dent Bush’s offi­cial bio with the words “mis­er­able fail­ure” that if you now type that phrase into Google our Pres­i­dent comes up as the very first return. More on this “Google­bomb” from this News­day arti­cle. And just to help the results along, I’ll con­cur that I think he’s a mis­er­able fail­ure.