Robin M posts this week about “two Con­ver­gent Events”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2007/07/two-convergent-events-in-california.html hap­pen­ing in Cal­i­for­nia in the next month or two. And she also tries out a sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion of Con­ver­gent Friends:
bq. peo­ple who are engaged in the renewal move­ment within the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, across all the branches of Friends.
It sounds good but what does it mean? Specif­i­cally: who isn’t for renewal, at least on a the­o­ret­i­cal level? There are lots of faith­ful, smart and lov­ing Friends out there advo­cat­ing renewal who don’t fit my def­i­n­i­tion of Con­ver­gent (which is fine, I don’t think the whole RSoF _should_ be Con­ver­gent, it’s a move­ment in the river, not a dam).
When Robin “coined the term”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2006/01/robinopedia-convergent-friends.html at the start of 2006 it seemed to refer to gen­eral trends in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends and the larger Chris­t­ian world, but it was also refer­ring to a spe­cific (online) com­mu­nity that had had a year or two of con­ver­sa­tion to shape itself and model trust and account­abil­ity. Most impor­tantly we each were going out of our way to engage with Friends from other Quaker tra­di­tions and were each called on our own cul­tural assump­tions.
The coined term implied an expe­ri­ence of sort. “Con­ver­gent” explic­itly ref­er­ences “Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Friends (“Con-”) and the “Emer­gent Church movement”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_church (“-ver­gent”). It seems to me like one needs to look at those two phe­nom­e­non and their rela­tion to one’s own under­stand­ing and expe­ri­ence of Quaker life and com­mu­nity before really under­stand­ing what all the fuss has been about. That’s hap­pen­ing lots of places and it is not sim­ply a blog phe­nom­e­non.
Nowa­days I’m notic­ing a lot of Friends declar­ing them­selves Con­ver­gent after read­ing a blog post or two or attend­ing a work­shop. It’s becom­ing the term _du jour_ for Friends who want to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves from business-as-usual, Quakerism-as-usual. This fits Robin’s sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion. But if that’s all it is and it becomes all-inclusive for inclusivity’s sake, then “Con­ver­gent” will drift away away from the roots of the con­ver­sa­tion that spawned it and turn into another buzz­word for “lib­eral Quaker.” This is start­ing to hap­pen.
The term “Con­ver­gent Friends” is being picked up by Friends out­side the dozen or two blogs that spawned it and mov­ing into the wild–that’s great, but also means it’s def­i­n­i­tion is becom­ing a mov­ing tar­get. Peo­ple are grab­bing onto it to sum up their dreams, visions and frus­tra­tions but we’re almost cer­tainly not mean­ing the same thing by it. “Con­ver­gent Friends” implies that we’ve all arrived some­where together. I’ve often won­dered whether we shouldn’t be talk­ing about “Con­verg­ing Friends,” a term that implies a par­al­lel set of move­ments and puts the rather impor­tant ele­phant square on the table: con­verg­ing toward what? What we mean by con­ver­gence depends on our start­ing point. My attempt at a label was the rather clunky “conservative-leaning lib­eral Friend”:http://www.quakerranter.org/conservative_liberal_quakers_and_not_becoming_a_leastcommondenominator_sentimental_faith.php, which is prob­a­bly what most of us in the lib­eral Quaker tra­di­tion are mean­ing by “Con­ver­gent.“
I started map­ping out a “lib­eral plan for Con­ver­gent Friends”:http://www.quakerranter.org/emergent_church_movement_the_younger_evangelicals_and_quaker_renewal.php a cou­ple of years before the term was coined and it still sum­ma­rizes many of my hopes and con­cerns. The only thing I might add now is a para­graph about how we’ll have to work both inside and out­side of nor­mal Quaker chan­nels to effect this change (Johan Mau­rer “recently wrote”:http://johanpdx.blogspot.com/2007/07/fum-retreat-what-did-we-accomplish.html an inter­est­ing post that included the won­der­ful descrip­tion of “the lovely sub­ver­sives who ignore struc­tures and com­mu­ni­cate on a purely per­sonal basis between the camps via blogs, vis­i­ta­tion, and other means” and com­pared us to SCUBA divers (“ScubaQuake​.org” any­one?).
Robin’s inclu­sive def­i­n­i­tion of “renewal” def­i­nitely speaks to some­thing. Infor­mal renewal net­works are spring­ing up all over North Amer­ica. Many branches of Friends are involved. There are themes I’m see­ing in lots of these places: a strong youth or next-generation focus; a reliance on the inter­net; a curios­ity about “other” Friends tra­di­tions; a desire to get back to roots in the sim­ple min­istry of Jesus. What­ever label or labels this new revival might take on is less impor­tant than the Spirit behind it.
But is every hope for renewal “Con­ver­gent”? I don’t think so. At the end of the day the path for us is nar­row and is given, not cho­sen. At the end of day–and begin­ning and middle–the work is to fol­low the Holy Spirit’s guid­ance in “real time.” Def­i­n­i­tions and care­fully selected words slough away as mere notions. The newest mes­sage is just the old­est mes­sage repack­aged. Let’s not get too caught up in our own hip verbage, lec­ture invi­ta­tions and glo­ri­ous atten­tion that we for­get that there there is one, even Christ Jesus who can speak to our con­di­tion, that He Him­self has come to teach, and that our mes­sage is to share the good news he’s given us. The Tempter is ready to dis­tract us, to puff us up so we think we are the mes­sage, that we own the mes­sage, or that the mes­sage depends on our flow­ery words deliv­ered from podi­ums. We must stay on guard, hum­bled, low and pray­ing to be kept from the temp­ta­tions that sur­round even the most well-meaning renewal attempts. It is our faith­ful­ness to the free gospel min­istry that will ulti­mately deter­mine the fate of our work.