britain yearly meeting Posts

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 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, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). 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 occassional 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!

Update from yesterday's post. The new FGC Quakeryouth site is now effusively thanking QuakerQuaker for development of the "quaker.youth" tag and for extensive use of content on the site that was compiled by yours truly.

For the record: everyone that wants to share QuakerQuaker material is warmly encouraged to do so. I really want this to be an open standard and a way for us to easily share content. But please do the courtesy of contacting me first and please make sure that every page that includes materials compiled by QuakerQuaker says so and has a link.

I'm archiving yesterday's post (those wondering what the fuss was about can read it here) but I'll copy a few paragraphs below since they talk about how Quaker institutions have been working cooperatively with QuakerQuaker. I'm happy to add FGC to the list.

QuakerQuaker co-editor C. Wess Daniels and I worked with the staff of Britain Yearly Meeting to cover May's annual sessions and support their official sessions blog (Wess himself wrote for it). BYM helped publicize the QuakerQuaker tagging system ("quaker.britain-ym" in that instance) and we re-wrote the system to pull in their blog.

I'm currently working closely with staff of Friends World Committee for Consultation to cover their upcoming Triennial in Dublin. This has included my programming a custom feed with javascript support so that they can pull the QuakerQuaker material into a special page on the FWCC site itself. I've done this publicity work for Britain Yearly Meeting and FWCC for free, in the interest of sharing Friends' good news with the world.

All this work is more than just whipping up a computer-generated feed. I have a sophisticated series of searches that allows me to scan the internet daily for Quaker posts and I watch what items are being added to the feed (by trouble-makers, spammers or automation) and take out inappropriate links.

If you think of the Quaker blogosphere as a garden, I'm nurturing new plants by finding new bloggers, encouraging them with links, attention and a lot of behind-the-scenes friendly emails. I'm also weeding out the latest spam attacks and bringing human intelligence to a semi-automated process so that the material is focused, relevant and interesting. Computers don't create communities: caring, thoughtful and selfless people do. And it's not just me, it's the half dozen QuakerQuaker co-editors and the extended family of Quaker bloggers who routinely gather together from our separate traditions to swap stories, visions and faith around the metaphorical campfire that is QuakerQuaker.

Just the quickest of posts to announce that Quaker Gatherings are now being covered on QuakerQuaker. Each event page tries to list all blog posts that refer to the event in question.

Past events covered: February's Young Adult Friends Gathering in New Jersey and FUM Board Meeting in Kenya, and the Quaker Heritage Day in Berkeley California last week. Upcoming events are FWCC Americas Meeting in Rhode Island (it includes a panel on Convergent Friends featuring Robin M and C Wess Daniels, May's Britain Yearly Meeting Sessions that will feature an official blog, and this summer's FGC Gathering whose damnably attractive advance program went up today.

I'm pretty excited by this development, which is really just a reflection of the growth of Quaker blogging. Too much of the public news from Quaker events has been barely-conceal boosterism, a publicity fluff piece for the sponsoring organization. In other words: dull and trite. The growing Quaker blog culture is very different from that of mainline Quaker institutions. There's a much greater transparency and openness and less of a sense that we have to identify and defend a particular Quaker tradition. We're much more willing to tell stories and wrestle with controversies.

Quaker events (at least in networked North America) are now being covered online in real time with more depth and opinion that we've previously seen. I think this is a good kick-in-the-pants for the bureaucratic dinosaurs of institutional Quakerism and an exciting opportunity for getting new voices and opinions heard.

As I see events unfolding in the Quakerosphere, I'll add more pages. They won't be limited to U.S. and British events except that we seem to be dominating this realm still. If too many events start being covered (which is only a matter of time) I'll have to figure out some way of breaking them down more.

Over on the photo sharing service Flickr, I'm noticing a bunch of photos from this week's Britain Yearly Meeting session. One contributor has tagged (labelled) all her photos with "britainyearlymeeting06" which means they're all available on one page. Cool, but what would be even cooler is if every Flickr user at the event used the same tag. We'd then have a nearly real-time group photo essay of the yearly meeting sessions.

So this year I'm going to tag all my personal photos from next month's Friends General Conference Gathering of Friends as "FGCgathering06". I invite any other Flickr-using attenders to do the same. While I do work at FGC, please note this is not any sort of official FGC decision, it's just my own idea to share photos and to see how we can use these online networks to share and promote Quakerism. In a few weeks you'll start seeing entries via flickr and technorati. I'll probably start with a few pictures of the bookstore truck being loaded for its cross-country trek.

Blog posts:
If your blogging system doesn't support the use of tags, then simply add this line in the bottom of each of your Gathering-related posts:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/FGCgathering06" rel="tag">FGCgathering06</a>

Two of the blasts that hit London today were near Friends House, the home of Britain Yearly Meeting, which is acting as a relief center. From TimesOnline

Ministers and priests went on to the streets to work alongside the emergency services, helping to comfort traumatised commuters. At Friends House, opposite Euston Station, Quakers set up an emergency unit for the hundreds of people blocked in the middle of the explosions at Kings Cross, Woburn Place and Russell Square.

The Quakers offered free tea, coffee and telephone calls to all the people affected by the blasts as well as emotional support. Many of the hundreds of people stuck in Euston were witness to the explosions, with one young woman describing how she saw the bus explode and thought it was another 9/11.

She has become partially deaf and is resting in the Quaker First Aid room.

The hundreds of people who are in Friends House remain stuck there for the foreseeable future and many are unsure how they will return home tonight.

Friends House also gets a mention in this Guardian piece

Responses from the Quaker Blogosphere:

Rob of Consider the Lillies is okay and is posting reactions. The Contemplative Activist reminds us to live in that virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars'. Peterson Toscano wonders if the bombings really are senseless in light of our cultural attitudes--"You push me; I push you harder; you push me back, and it goes on and on and on." Beppe turns to a recent passage from his scripture study to gage just what Jesus might have done. I will try to continue updating these responses as they come in.

Our prayers are with all those in London today: the dead, the injured, the scared. And with those whose fear turns to anger and will inevitably lead to calls for retribution. Our Friends Peace Testimony helps us keep our groundedness in times of horror and I am grateful to hear that Friends are there, ready to tend to the wounded of body and soul.

Elsewhere

Apparently Wikipedia is now covering news and is one of the better sources of information on the London bombings.