commitment to christ Posts

On a recent evening I met up with Gathering in Light Wess, who was in Philadelphia for a Quaker-sponsored peace conference. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great dinner, Wess and I tested some testimonies, and a revolving group of Friends ended up around a table in the conference's hotel lobby talking late into the night (the links are Wess' reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp account).

Of all of the many people I spoke with, only one had any kind of featured role at the conference. Without exception my conversation partners were fascinating and insightful about the issues that had brought them to Philadelphia, yet I sensed a pervading sense of missed opportunity: hundreds of lives rearranged and thousands of air miles flown mostly to listen to others talk. I spent my long commute home wondering what it would have been like to have spent the weekend in the hotel lobby recording ten minute Youtube interviews with as many conference participants as I could. We would have ended up with a snapshot of faith-based peace organizing circa 2009.

Next weekend I'll be burning up more of the ozone layer by flying to California to co-lead a workshop with Wess and Robin M. (details at ConvergentFriends.org, I'm sure we can squeeze more people in!) The participant list looks fabulous. I don't know everyone but there's at least half a dozen people coming who I would be thrilled to take workshops from. I really don't want to spend the weekend hearing myself talk! I also know there are plenty of people who can't come because of commitments and costs.

So we're going to try some experiments--they might work, they might not. On QuakerQuaker, there's a new group for the event and a discussion thread open to all QQ members (sign up is quick and painless). For those of you comfortable with the QQ tagging system, the Delicious tag for the event is "quaker.reclaiming2009". Robin M has proposed using #convergentfriends as our Twitter hashtag.

There's all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live blogging via Twitter, anyone?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract us from whatever message the Inward Christ might be trying to give us. But behind all this is a real questions about why and how we should gather together as Friends. As the banking system tanks, as the environment strains, as communications costs drop and we find ourselves in a curious new economy, what challenges and opportunities open up?

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!

There's an interesting discussion in the comments from my last post about Convergent Friends and Ohio Conservatives. and one of the more interesting comes from a commenter named Diane. My reply to her got longer and longer and filled with more and more links till it makes more sense to make it its own post. First, Diane's question:

I don’t know if I’m “convergent,” (probably not) but I have been involved with the emerging church for several years and with Quakerism for a decade. I also am aware of the house church movement, but my experience of it is that is is very tangentially related to Quakerism.

I really, really hope and pray that Christian revival is coming to liberal Friends, but personally I have not seen that phenomenom. Where do you see it most? Do you see it more as commitment to Christ or as more people being Christ curious, to use Robin’s phrase?

As I wrote recently I think convergence is more of a trend than an identity and I'm not sure whether it makes sense to fuss about who's convergent or not. As with any question involving liberal Friends, whether there's "Christian revival" going on depends on what what you mean by the term. I think more liberal Friends have become comfortable labeling themselves as Christ curious; it has become more acceptable to identify as Christian than it was a decade or two ago; a significant number of younger Friends are very receptive to Christian messages, the Bible and traditional Quaker testimonies than they were.

These are individual responses, however. Turning to collective Quaker bodies there are few if any beliefs or practices left that liberal Friends wouldn't allow under the Quaker banner if they came wrapped in Quakerese from a well-connected Friend; the social testimonies stand in as the unifying agent; it's still considered an argument stopper to say that any proffered definition would exclude someone.

I'd argue that liberal Quakerism is becoming ever more liberal (and less distinctively Quaker) at the same time that many of those in influence are becoming more Christian. It's a very proscribed Christianity: coded, tentative and most of all individualistic. It's okay for a liberal Friend to believe whatever they want to believe as long as they don't believe too much. Whether the quiet influence of the rising generation of conservative-friendly leadership is enough to hold a Quaker center in the centrifuge that is liberal Quakerism is the $60,000 question. I think the leadership has an inflated sense of its own influence but I'm watching the experiment. I wish it well but I'm skeptical and worry that it's built on sand.

Some of the Christ-curious liberal Friends are forming small worship groups and some of these are seeking out recognition from Conservative bodies. It's an achingly small movement but it shows a desire to be corporately Quaker and not just individualistically Quaker. With the internet traditional Quaker viewpoints are only a Google search away; sites like Bill Samuel's Quakerinfo.com and blogs like Marshall Massey's are breaking down stereotypes and doing a lot of invaluable educating (and I could name a lot more). It's possible to imagine all this cooking down to a third wave of traditionalist renewal. Ohio Yearly Meeting-led initiatives like the Christian Friends Conference and All Conservative Gatherings are steps in the right direction but any real change is going to have to pull together multiple trends, one of which might or might not be Convergence.

Our role in this future is not to be strategists playing Quaker politics but servants ready to lay down our identities and preconceptions to follow the promptings of the Inward Christ into whatever territory we're called to:

From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. Matthew 16:21-28.

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand what brought me there. During the stressful process of deciding which college to attend, I felt a strong but slightly mysterious urge to explore Quakerism in my undergraduate years. Two years later, this same urge led me to buy a motorcycle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spiritual journey up the Eastern seaboard visiting Quaker meetings. While Guilford had excited and even irritated my curiosity about the workings of Quakerism, I knew little about how Quakers were over a large area of the country. I wanted to find out how Quakers worked as a group across a wide area of the country, and if I could learn how to be a leader within that community.

A Guest Piece by Jeffrey Hipp

"I take this commitment of membership very seriously – to labor, nurture, support and challenge my fellow Friends; to walk in the Light together, and to give, receive, and pray with my fellow sojourners when the next step is unclear. My feet are on solid ground."

A guest piece from Rob of Consider the Lillies

Rob describes himself: "I’m a twenty-something gay Mid-western expatriate living in Boston. I was inspired to begin a blog based on the writings of other urban Quaker bloggers as they reflect and discuss their inward faith and outward experiences. When I’m not reading or writing, I’m usually with my friends, traveling about, and/or generally making an arse of myself."

Colleen Carroll's book The New Faithful is an attempt to examine the religious phenomenon of Christian theological "orthodoxy" among current twenty and thirty-somethings. We purchased this book out of a sense of longing to hear the stories of fellow young Christians sympathetic to the issues we face. We opened The New Faithful eager to hear the voice of someone in our age bracket crying from the rooftops. But her book is hardly unproblematic: she weakened the book when she decided to make it a Republican-Party calling card...

Now reading with Julie. The author is Colleen Carroll, a journalist in her late twenties. Another "Emergent Church" book, it focuses on Catholic renewal. Discovered via Orthodox Twenty-Somethings, a review in TheOoze.

Review/Thoughts By Julie & Martin

Colleen Carroll's book The New Faithful is an attempt to examine the religious phenomenon of Christian theological "orthodoxy" among current twenty and thirty-somethings. Her goal is to consider two groups: the young evangelical Protestant and Roman Catholic devout. Considering that this demographic is virtually invisible to the religious and social establishments dominated predominantly by white, upper middle class/upper class Baby Boomers, Carroll's book represents a welcome and refreshing endeavor.

We purchased this book because we longing to hear stories of fellow young Christians sympathetic to the issues we face as two theologically conservative, post-liberal twenty/thirty-somethings. In an age dedicated to progress, openness, post-modernism, subjectivism, and, of course, metaphor, we're often written off as reactionaries, as if simply believing something too much is a form of violence or bigotry. We find we often have a lot more in common with those of other faiths who also take care to root themselves in their tradition.

We opened The New Faithful eager to hear the voice of someone in our age bracket crying from the rooftops, "There IS objective truth, and there are young people who believe his name is Jesus!" In this sense, Carroll's book has served as a reassurance that this demographic does, in fact, exist. But her book is hardly unproblematic.

The book started off great: Carroll's writing style not only held our attention but was also insightful. We identified with much of what she was relating. So much so, in fact, that we found ourselves underling paragraph after paragraph:

These young adults are not perpetual seekers. They are committed to a religious world view that grounds their lives and shapes their morality. They are not lukewarm believers or passionate dissenters. When they are embracing a faith tradition or deepening their commitment to it, they want to do so wholeheartedly or not at all. When they are attracted to tradition in worship or in spirituality, they want to understand the underlying reality of that tradition and use it to transform their lives. That sense of commitment and total acceptance of orthodoxy sets them apart from many of their peers and fellow believers who share their affection for the trappings of religious tradition but reject its theological and moral roots. p. 11

Not far into the book, however, an annoying tendency soon became manifest. It appeared as if Carroll has a rule of not talking to anyone who isn�t an Ivy League graduate with Tom Cruise looks and a stock broker past. A remarkable number of interviewees were described as having movie star features. They were from elite colleges. They were the trend-setters of the future.

At the first repetition of this formula, we thought she had probably written the book too fast and gotten careless with a repeated assertion. At the second repetition we grumbled that she needed a good copyeditor. By the third time, we concluded she just had major class insecurities and needed to spend a little one-on-one time with therapist.

Finally, we began to suspect something else was at work. Many of these interviewees worked, lived, and worshipped in the Washinton DC area. Carroll's focus on the uniqueness of her subjects as persons with innate leadership potential began to feel more and more like a promotion for a Future Leaders of America banquet. As we read on, it became more than obvious that she was writing this book for a particular audience. What we originally took to be sloppy journalism appeared more and more to be political talking-points. The first rule of interviews is to repeat the same points over and over so that the journalists will transmit the message you want. Why was a professional journalist writing on Gen-X relgious movements sounding so much like a politician?

Halfway through the book we finally decided to google "Colleen Carroll," found her website and learned that our suspicions were confirmed. After the book came out she was invited to a number of speaking engagements sponsored by conservative Repubican Party politicians. She was well-received and before long got one of the most coveted jobs a twenty-something reporter could hope for: speechwriter to the President himself, George W. Bush.

A certain amount of congratulations are in order: this is quite a feather-in-the-cap for an ambitious journalist. Unfortunately though, she weakened the book when she decided to make it a Republican-Party calling card. More than that, the book itself is a compromise. Carroll cannot be trusted because her scholarship is not real. She not only began with a premise and sought out to prove it; she intentionally rejected any phenomena that failed to serve her agenda.

While the book brilliantly critiques Baby Boomer liberals, it gives Boomer conservatives a free pass. There's nothing in this book that would upset a politically powerful, middle-aged conservative like Attorney General John Ashcroft. Just the opposite: this is a cooing love song promising that his spiritual and political offspring are resurging: good-looking, trend-setting, righteous conservatives are taking back the college campuses from the peace and justice Catholics at the Newman Center. Nor does the book take on the incestuous amplification and group-think inherent in many religious institutions. Sadly, Carroll steers clear of any issue that might divide the old conservatives from the new ones.

The book could have been more. When Carroll writes about the problems of Baby Boomer liberal othodoxy in contemporary religious life, she's fantastic. She has good observations and writes with wit and humor. As we're both politically liberal (or perhaps more accurately, post-liberal), we enjoyed this tremendously and would love to recommend this as a book that attempts to correct what we see as the over-reach and thoughtlessness that's overcome religious liberalism in the past few generations. But this audience would most likely see the uncritical conservative political agenda and dismiss Carroll's entire thesis. (Julie would actually still recommend the book, with the caveats she lists at the end of this review.)

It's instructive to compare this book to Robert Webber's The Younger Evangelicals (see my bookstore review here) which contrasts the three twentieth-century generations, showing that the new conservatism is often a knowing and sophisticated reappropriation of religious practices or attitudes that have been lost or de-emphasized. Webber's twenty-somethings don't fit neatly into old left/right, conservative/liberal political stereotypes, but instead bring a new perspectives on faithfulness, issue advocacy and self-identity.

How we longed to see Carroll turn her observant gaze on examples that flew in the face of picture-perfect, white, upper-middle class, Christian traditionalists. The voice of a sincere, devout gay Catholic who was traditionalist in everything but his sexual orientation, for example. Or some D.C.-area activist who took his cue from Pope John Paul II and was outspokenly anti-war and critical of Presidential appeals to Christians to support the Iraq War. Or someone who worked on the street to build ties of understandings between Christians and Muslims as a way to defuse the "War on Terror" rhetoric. We could list dozens of examples like these, of individuals who are theologically conservative, but not necessarily politically conservative. It is apparent to us, as witnesses to this on a daily basis, that all too often theological liberals feel that they must also be politically liberal, and vice versa. This is not always the case. This is a major issue for many young Christians, and a divisive issue generationally. But Carroll wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole--it's simply too controversial. And besides, it would be too messy, it would spoil her neat and tidy thesis.

We're still only two-thirds of the way through the book. We've read reviews that it picks up again later. She's on EWTN tonight (March 11) & we're really looking forward to seeing it. Despite our reservations, we really like a lot of what she's saying. It's just that we wish she had said so much more. She tries so hard not to alienate politicaly-conservative Boomers that she backs off a lot of important issues just as she's about to say something interesting. It's fine if she's a Republican, but why does she consistently insist that the conservative religious orthodoxy has to line up so perfectly with the conservative political powers that be?

More to come as we continue reading the book....

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Note: Julie would recommend the book, but with serious reservations. Her reason: There are NO other books that she considers worthwhile out there that are attempting to describe this phenomena. Her reservations: 1. Carroll's scholarship is awful. No, it's actually painful it's so bad. She doesn't even quote studies themselves. She was obviously too lazy to read the actual studies so instead read, for example, Time Magazine's synopsis of a study and so instead quoted that. She also quotes highly questionable sources. Also, her sample is not at all adequate. This leads to point #2: Carroll seems to have race and class issues and they stick out like a sore thumb in the book. It would've been cool to hear from a few African-American Catholics and the struggles they face in the Church, for example. And hey, what about some homely people too?! Not all of us Catholic traditionalists look like fashion models. And 3. Carroll, in my humble opinion, compromised the very endeavor she undertook because, while The New Faithful is really an extended opinion piece, she tried to make it look as if it was academically responsible (or at least quasi-scholarly), and it is not. The point: take The New Faithful with a grain of salt. Realize that yes, likely the phenomenon of Christian orthodoxy among the young is probably legitimate, but that her picture of it is not. She makes good points, it is an interesting read, and it may be foundational for future writers on this topic. For that, Julie would like to thank Colleen Carroll for being so perceptive and for taking the time to write the book.