churches Posts

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

This week I received an email from a young seeker in the Philadelphia area who found my 2005 article "Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings" published in FGConnections. She's a former youth ministries leader from a Pentecostal tradition, strongly attracted to Friends beliefs but not quite fitting in with the local meetings she's been trying. Somewhere she found my article and asks if I have any insights.

The 2005 article was largely pessimistic, focused on the "committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago" who had left Friends and blaming "an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future" but my hope paragraph was optimistic:

There is hope... A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there's a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

Hard to imagine that only three years ago I was an isolated FGC staffer left to pursue outreach and youth ministry work on my own time by an institution indifferent to either pursuit. Both functions have become major staff programs, but I'm no longer involved, which is probably just as well, as neither program has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most interesting work is still largely invisible.

Some of this work has been taken up by the new bloggers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be congealing around all the blogs, Twitter networks, Facebook friendships, intervisitations and IM chats. Many of us associated with QuakerQuaker.org have some sort of regular correspondence or participation with the Emerging Church movement, we regularly highlight "amazing conversations" from new Friends and seekers and there's a lot of inter-generational work going on. We've got a name for it in Convergent Friends, which reflects in part that "we" aren't just the liberal Friends I imagined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quaker flavors.

But we end up with a problem that's become the central one for me and a lot of others: what can we tell a new seeker who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but doesn't fit? I could point this week's correspondent to meetings and churches hundreds of miles from her house, or encourage her to start a blog, or compile a list of workshops or gatherings she might attend. But none of these are really satisfactory answers.   

Elsewhere:

Gathering in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advisor Ryan Bolger that talks about tribe-style leadership and a new kind of church identity that uses the instant communication tools of the internet to forge a community that's not necessarily limited to locality. Bolger's and his research partner report that they see "emerging initiatives within traditional churches as the next horizon for the spread of emerging church practices in the United States." More links from Wess' article on emerging churches and denominations.

Over on One Quaker Take, Timothy is surprised to read a definition of "Convergent Friend" that sounds a lot like a certain flavor of West Coast liberal Quakerism. It doesn't seem so surprising for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pastor at an Evangelical Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadelphia to attend a  "Meet-Up" of readers of emerging church blogs and realized I had more common ground with these younger Evangelicals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of "Convergence" will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that's almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we're starting from.

I don't think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations--the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren't Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can't rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can't help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn't look at one's beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I'm sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there's little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can't think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn't very new. It's just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It's finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

Please read Galante and Follieri: the Bishop and the Con Man, which lays out the details mentioned in this post.

The Diocese of Camden is in frantic spin control mode after yesterday's revelations that Bishop Galante personally received $400,000 from high flying Eurotrash con man Raffaelo Follieri for the sale of a beach house the Bishop had been unable to unload. Follieri's the guy who's been trying to buy up Catholic church properties across the country while making out with his Hollywood girlfriend on San Tropez beaches and partying it up with Bill Clinton's sleezy billionaire buddies.

It seems like a pretty clear cut case. Galante had his hand in Follieri's cookie jar. Sold his beach house to the guy who stood to profit most from the Bishop's plan to sell off half of South Jersey's churches. Oldest story in the book. Give him the cell next to Follieri's and they can reminisce about the good old days (NSFW).

I've been wondering just how the Diocese would try to spin this story as it waits for federal investigators to come knocking at the door. And today the official Spokesperson in Charge of Fairy Tales called up all the papers. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with:

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Turns out someone at the Vatican called someone at the Diocesan offices back in 2004 telling them to sell to Follieri. That's it. No one can remember who made the call. No one can remember who took the call. For all we know Follieri filled his mouth with cotton balls and did his best Marlon Brando imitation from the pay phone across the street.

The Archdioceses in Boston, New York, Newark and elsewhere told Follieri they had enough bridges thank you very much, but poor Grandpa Joe was confused and started lending him priests and giving him the keys to the beach house.

How could anyone imagine that Follieri was a crook? He seemed like any other Mother Teresa choir boy with his $10,000 suits, New York penthouse, heroin habit, convicted mob associates, San Tropez weekends and expensively-maintained Hollywood girlfriend. "Nobody was aware of problems with Mr. Follieri or his company at that time." Yeah right. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. And I'm the widow of the late John Paul II, recently deceased President of the Vatican, with frozen assets in Nigeria I'd like your help in securing. Please email me back at your earliest convenience Andy Walton, I know you won't be disappointed.

I haven't been following the chatter on the new Pew survey on religion. But I like this quote from a Orthodox Jewish rabbi that appeared in a San Diego paper:

"The churches and the synagogues today do not answer the needs of these people," he said. "Unfortunately, a lot of the churches and synagogues are not really places of godliness. They are places of politics, places of social action, places of fellowship, where people come together to meet each other. But in many respects, spirituality is lacking."

It's hard to know what to make of the report. Apparently about one in four Christians aren't sure if God exists and I'd be more worried except that the study found that one in five atheists do believe in God (maybe we should we should arrange a swap on some fog shrouded bridge somewhere). It seems to me the Pew report just confirms the rabbi's explanation that there are a lot of people claiming labels or religious affiliations for reasons other than faith belief.

Churches Retool Mission Trips - washingtonpost.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! 

It's been a fascinating education learning about institutional Catholicism these past few weeks. I won't reveal how and what I know, but I think I have a good picture of the culture inside the bishop's inner circle and I'm pretty sure I understand his long-term agenda. The current lightening-fast closure of sixty-some churches is the first step of an ambitious plan; manufactured priest shortages and soon-to-be overcrowded churches will be used to justify even more radical changes. In about twenty years time, the 125 churches that exist today will have been sold off. What's left of a half million faithful will be herded into a dozen or so mega-churches, with theology borrowed from generic liberalism, style from feel-good evangelicalism, and organization from consultant culture.

When diocesan officials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sentence and nod their heads approvingly. The conspiracy is real.

But I don't want to talk about Catholicism again. Let's talk Quakers instead, why not? I should be in some meeting for worship right anyway. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbringing after eleven years with us because she wanted a religious community that shared a basic faith and that wasn't afraid to talk about that faith as a corporate "we." It seems that Catholicism won't be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the Eastern Orthodox church? For that matter should I be running off to the Mennonites? See though, the problem is that the same issues will face us wherever we try to go. It's modernism, baby. No focused and authentic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the questions of course. Why would someone who dislikes Catholic culture and wants to dismantle it's infrastructure become a priest and a career bureaucrat? For that matter why do so many people want to call themselves Quakers when they can't stand basic Quaker theology? If I wanted lots of comments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ultimately the question is futile and beyond my figuring.

Another piece to this issue came in some questions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few others this past week in preparation for his upcoming presentation at Woodbrooke. He asked about how a particular Quaker institution did or did not represent or might or might not be able to contain the so-called "Convergent" Friends movement. I don't want to bust on anyone so I won't name the organization. Let's just say that like pretty much all Quaker bureaucracies it's inward-focused, shallow in its public statements, slow to take initiative and more or less irrelevant to any campaign to gather a great people. A more successful Quaker bureaucracy I could name seems to be doing well in fundraising but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more interested in donor-focused hype than long-term program implementation. 

One enemy of the faith is bureaucracy. Real leadership has been replaced by consultants and fundraisers. Financial and staffing crises--real and created--are used to justify a watering down of the message. Programs are driven by donor money rather than clear need and when real work might require controversy, it's tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quaker readers who think I'm talking about Quakers: no I'm talking about Catholics. Catholic readers who think I'm talking about Catholics: no, I'm talking about Quakers. My point is that these forces are tearing down religiosity all over. Some cheer this development on. I think it's evil at work, the Tempter using our leader's desires for position and respect and our the desires of our laity's (for lack of a better word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I'm tired of thinking that maybe if I try one more Quaker meeting I'll find the community where I can practice and deepen my faith as a Christian Friend. I'm stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feeling: Fox and the Peningtons and all the rest talked about isolation and about religious professionals who were in it for the career. I know from the blogosphere and from countless one-on-one conversations that there are a lot of us--a lot--who either drift away or stay in meetings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spiritual community for these outsider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our structures look like? If we let the generic churches go off to out-compete one other to see who can be the blandest, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

I guess this last paragraph is the new revised mission statement for the Quaker part of this blog. Okay kids, get a stepstool, go to your meeting library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out volume one of "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends" by Thomas Clarkson. Yes the 1806 version, stop the grumbling. Get out the ribbed packing tape and put it's cover back together--this isn't the frigging Library of Congress and we're actually going to read this thing. Don't even waste your time checking it out in the meeting's logbook, no one's pulled in down in fifty years and no one's going to miss it now. Really stuck, okay Google's got it too. Class will start shortly.