Go check out Mobtown Blues for a great post called All paths don't lead to the same mountain. that starts off about a talk by Brian McLaren, one of the emergent church's most prominent pastors, and goes on to talk about a recent Quaker outreach at a large East Coast liberal Friends meeting:

I was distressed to hear speaker after speaker extol Quakerism for what it is not: not oppressive, not judgemental, not elitism, not closed-minded, not fundamentalist, not doctrinaire... very few spoke of what makes the faith distinctive or spiritually powerful in its own right.

And then he delivers the punch line:

A couple of my friends, a same-sex couple who had expressed keen interest in exploring Quakerism were so appalled by the self-congratulatory smugness on display at that newcomers' breakfast, by the implicit condemnation of all of those other, "less evolved" faith traditions, that they never came back to the meeting.

He hits on so many true things here: that Quaker smugness, the claim we've transcended human biases, the negatively-stated identity.

Seekers try out a religious tradition because they think there might be some truth in its teachings. We do them a disservice when we meet them at the door with a watered-down gruel. And we do our meetings a disservice, as those seekers who have come looking for a positive Quakerism go elsewhere while the newcomers that do stay come because they liked the refugee religious attitude they were presented with.

The coincidence in all this is that last night Bill Samuel commented on the blog. Bill has been one of the most tireless Quaker outreach voices, most lately with Quakerinfo.com, but a few years ago he left Friends to worship at Cedar Ridge Community Church, an emergent church pastored by?.. Pastored by Brian McLaren. And he wrote that he knew other Friends who had left their meetings to join Cedar Ridge.

McLaren is good at articulating a positive vision of church, something Friends could once do too. I've visited one of Philadelphia's emergent churches a few times, though I'm not quite ready to join Bill as a "post-Quaker." Still, how many important once-Quakers and almost-Quakers have been lost with our fear of self-identity?

Rick Jahnkow argues in May's Nonviolent Activist that there's a Decreased Likelihood of Draft. There are many aging pacifists that have become obsessed lately with the idea that compulsory military service might be returning to the United States. For example, I've watched the leader of one annual anti-draft workshop predict the draft's imminent return year after year, in ever more excited terms and wondered what evidence this organizer has seen that I haven't.

Jahnkow watches this issue as much as anyone in his work for the San Diego-based Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft and he's been watching the hype build as he's become more skeptical:

Warnings about an impending draft have been circulating on the Internet for months now. Some are tying a possible draft to the election and predicting with bold certainty that conscription will be introduced in 2005... The energy that�s been generated on this topic has been both amazing and, I have to confess, somewhat seductive to anti-draft organizations like the one for which I work.

Most of the people I've seen get excited by a possible return of the draft were in their teens back in the Vietnam War era. Their organizing sometimes seems almost nostalgic for the issues of their youth. They're trying to save the current generation from having to go through the same trauma. But the older activists' anti-draft work is often patronistic and self-congratulatory, for it doesn't take into account the fact that younger Americans don't need saving.

The bottom line truth is that the Pentagon simply couldn't reinstate the draft. Jahnkow cites a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that found that 88 percent of people 18-29 oppose a return of the draft. There would be mass mayhem if the draft returned. While some young men would surely obey, a huge percentage would actively defy it. Even if only 10% dramatically refused, the system would break down. This is a generation raised in a post-punk culture and many of its members aggressively question authority. They were raised by parents who lived through the sixties and saw widespread lies and abuse of power, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The media mythology around sixties-era radicalism has kept us from realizing that there's a baseline of everyday radicalism today that far overshadows much of what was going on thirty years ago. The Pentagon knows this better than the peace movement does.

It's not the only nostalgic protesting this generation is engaging in these days and I've compared revived organizing around phone war tax resistance to "recycling dead horses." I agree with Rick that today's teens and twenty-somethings have real issues which we need to address. He says it so well:

The latter point leads me to the second reason why I have some negative feelings about the current concern over the draft: Much of the anxiety is coming from people who are ignoring the more pressing problem of aggressive military recruiting, which, among other things, disproportionately affects non-affluent youths and people of color. In essence, there has been a draft for these individuals�a poverty draft�and yet it has drawn relatively little attention from antiwar activists. There is a race and class bias reflected in this that needs to be seriously considered and addressed by the general peace movement.

Here's the link to his article again

Related:

• Last November we published a provocative article by pacifist Johann Christoph Arnold arguing that A Military Draft Would be Good for Us and a personal response piece I wrote about how the pressures of a military draft can force an eighteen year old to really think hard about issues of war and peace.
• Nonviolence.org has guide to issues of military conscription and conscientious objection. We also watch issues of the peace movement, and tend to highlight generational issues a lot.
• The Urban Legend debunkers at Snopes.com have tracked and researched the draft fear emails going around. They don't think a draft is coming back and any time soon, citing many sources.

The other day I had lunch with an old friend of mine, a thirty-something Quaker very involved in nation-wide pacifist organizing. I had lost touch with him after he entered a federal jail for participating in a Plowshares action but he's been out for a few years and is now living in Philly.

We talked about a lot of stuff over lunch, some of it just movement gossip. But we also talked about spirituality. He has left the Society of Friends and has become re-involved in his parents' religious traditions. It didn't sound like this decision had to do with any new religious revelation that involved a shift of theology. He simply became frustrated at the lack of Quaker seriousness.

It's a different kind of frustration than the one I feel but I wonder if it's not all connected. He was drawn to Friends because of their mysticism and their passion for nonviolent social change. It was this combination that has helped power his social action witness over the years. It would seem like his serious, faithful work would be just what Friends would like to see in their thirty-something members but alas, it's not so. He didn't feel supported in his Plowshares action by his Meeting.

He concluded that the Friends in his Meeting didn't think the Peace Testimony could actually inspire us to be so bold. He said two of his Quaker heroes were John Woolman and Mary Dyer but realized that the passion of witness that drove them wasn't appreciated by today's peace and social concerns committees. The radical mysticism that is supposed to drive Friends' practice and actions have been replaced by a blandness that felt threatened by someone who could choose to spend years in jail for his witness.

I can relate to his disappointment. I worry about what kinds of actions are being done in the name of the Peace Testimony, which has lost most of its historic meaning and power among contemporary Friends. It's invoked most often now by secularized, safe committees that use a rationalist approach to their decision-making, meant to appeal to others (including non-Friends) based solely on the merits of the arguments. NPR activism, you might say. Religion isn't brought up, except in the rather weak formulations that Friends are "a community of faith" or believe there is "that of God in everyone" (whatever these phrases mean). That we are led to act based on instructions from the Holy Spirit directly is too off the deep end for many Friends, yet the peace testimony is fundamentally a testimony to our faith in God's power over humanity, our surrender to the will of Christ entering our hearts with instructions which demand our obedience.

But back to my friend, the ex-Friend. I feel like he's just another eroded-away grain of sand in the delta of Quaker decline. He's yet another Friend that Quakerism can't afford to loose, but which Quakerism has lost. No one's mourning the fact that he's lost, no one has barely noticed. Knowing Friends, the few that have noticed have probably not spent any time reaching out to him to ask why or see if things could change and they probably defend their inaction with self-congratulatory pap about how Friends don't proselytize and look how liberal we are that we say nothing when Friends leave.

God!, this is terrible. I know of DOZENS of friends in my generation who have drifted away from or decisively left the Society of Friends because it wasn't fulfilling its promise or its hype. No one in leadership positions in Quakerism is talking about this lost generation. I know of very few thirty-something Friends who are involved nowadays and very very few of them are the kind of passionate, mystical, obedient-to-the-Spirit servants that Quakerism needs to bring some life back into it. A whole generation is lost--my fellow thirty-somethings--and now I see the passionate twenty-somethings I know starting to leave. Yet this exodus is one-by-one and goes largely unremarked and unnoticed (but then I've already posted about this: It will be in decline our entire live).

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Update 10/05

I feel like I should add an addendum to all this. As I've spoken with more Friends of all generations, I've noticed that the attention to younger Friends is cyclical. There's a thirty-year cycle of snubbing younger Friends (by which I mean Friends under 40). Back in the 1970s, all twenty-year-old with a pulse could get recognition and support from Quaker meetings and I know a lot of Friends of that generation who were given tremendous opportunities despite little experience. A decade later the doors had started to close but a hard-working faithful Friend in their early twenties could still be recognized. By the time my generation came along, you could be a whirlwind of great ideas and energy and still be shut out of all opportunities to serve the Religious Society of Friends.

The good news is that I think things are starting to change. There's still a long way to go but a thaw is upon us. In some ways this is inevitable: much of the current leadership of Quaker institutions will be retired or in the graves ten years from now and I think they're starting to realize it. There are problems, most notably tokenism--almost all of the younger Friends being lifted up now are the sons & daughters of prominent "committee Friends." The biggest problem is that a few dozen years of lax religious education and "roll your own Quakerism" means that many of the members of the younger generation can't even be considered spiritual Quakers. Our Meetinghouses are seen as a place to meet other cool, progressive young hipsters, while spirituality is sought from other sources. We're going to be spending decades untangling all this and we're not going to have the seasoned Friends of my generation to help bridge the gaps.

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Related Reading

• After my friend Chris posted below I wrote a follow-up essay, Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quakers Style.
• Many older Friends hope that a resurgence of the peace movement might come along and bring younger Friends in. In Peace and Twenty-Somethings I look at the generational strains in the peace movement.
• Beckey Phipps conducted a series of interviews that touched on many of these issues and published it in FGConnections. FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century asks many of the right questions. My favorite line: "It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs--they've disappeared."

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

Reading now (Ninth Month 2003): "The Younger Evangelicals" by Robert E. Webber. Webber looks at the cultural and generational shifts happening within the Christian Evangelical movement.At the bottom of this page is a handy chart of the generational differences in theology, ecclesiastical paradigm, church polity. When I first saw it I said "yes!" to almost each category, as it clearly hits at the generational forces hitting Quakerism.

Unfortunately many Friends in leadership positions don't really understand the problems facing Quakerism. Well, that's not true: they do, but they don't understand the larger shifts behind them and think that they just need to redouble their efforts using the old methods and models. The Baby Boom generation in charge knows the challenge is to reach out to seekers in their twenties or thirties, but they do this by developing programs that would have appealed to them when they were that age. The current crop of outreach projects and peace initiatives are all very 1980 in style. There's no recognition that the secular peace community that drew seekers in twenty years ago no longer exists and that today's seekers are looking for something deeper, something more personal and more real.

When younger Friends are included in the surveys and committees, they tend to be either the uninvolved children of important Baby Boom generation Quakers, or those thirty-something Friends that culturally and philosophically fit into the older paradigms. It's fine that these two types of Friends are around, but neither group challenges Baby Boomer group-think. Outspoken younger Friends are ostracized and usually leave the Society in frustration after a few years.

It's a shame. In my ten years attending Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, I easily met a hundred young seekers who cycled through, attending for periods ranging from a few months to a few years. I would often ask them why they stopped coming. Sometimes they were just nice and said life was too busy, but of course that's not a real answer: you make time for the things that are important and that feed you in some way. But others told me they found the Meeting unwelcoming, or Friends too self-congratulatory or superficial, the community more social than spiritual. I went back to Central Philly one First Day after a two year absence and it was depressing how it was all the same faces. This is not a knock on Central Philly in particular, since the same dynamics are at work in most of the "Liberal" Meetings I've attended, both in the FGC and FUM worlds--it's a generational cultural phenomenon. I have never found the young Quaker seeker community I know is out there, though I've glimpsed its constituent faces a hundred times: always just out of reach, never gelling into a movement.

I'm not sure what the answers are. Luckily it's not my job to have answers: I leave that up to Christ and only concern myself with being as faithful a servant to the Spirit as I can be (this spirit-led leadership style is exactly one of the generational shifts Webber talks about). I've been given a clear message that my job is to stay with the Society of Friends, that I might be of use someday. But there are a few pieces that I think will come out:

A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends

What babies were thrown out with the bathwater by turn-of-the-century Friends who embraced modernism and rationalism and turned their back on traditional testimonies? This will require challenging some of the sacred myths of contemporary Quakerism. There are a lot that aren't particularly Quaker and we need to start admitting to that. I've personally taken up plain dress and find the old statements on the peace testimony much deeper and more meaningful than contemporary ones. I'm a professional webmaster and run a prominent pacifist site, so it's not like I'm stuck in the nineteenth century; instead, I just think these old testimonies actually speak to our condition in the twenty-first Century.

A Desire to Grow

Too many Friends are happy with their nice cozy meetings. The meetings serve as family and as a support group, and a real growth would disrupt our established patterns. If Quakerism grew tenfold over the next twenty years we'd have to build meetinghouses, have extra worship, reorganize our committees. Involved Friends wouldn't know all the other involved Friends in their yearly meeting. With more members we'd have to become more rigorous and disciplined in our committee meetings. Quakerism would feel different if it were ten times larger: how many of us would just feel uncomfortable with that. Many of our Meetings are ripe for growth, being in booming suburbs or thriving urban centers, but year after year they stay small. Many simply neglect and screw up outreach or religious education efforts as a way of keeping the meeting at its current size and with its current character.

A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment

Religion in America has become yet another consumer choice, an entertainment option for Sunday morning, and this paradigm is true with Friends. We complain how much time our Quaker work takes up. We complain about clearness committees or visioning groups that might take up a Saturday afternoon. A more involved Quakerism would realize that the hour on First Day morning is in many ways the least important time to our Society. Younger seekers are looking for connections that are deeper and that will require time. We can't build a Society on the cheap. It's not money we need to invest, but our hearts and time.

I recently visited a Meeting that was setting up its first adult religious education program. When it came time to figure out the format, a weighty Friend declared that it couldn't take place on the first Sunday of the month because that was when the finance committee met; the second Sunday was out because of the membership care committee; the third was out because of business meeting and so forth. It turned out that religious education could be squeezed into one 45-minute slot on the fourth Sunday of every month. Here was a small struggling meeting in the middle of an sympathetic urban neighborhood and they couldn't spare even an hour a month on religious education or substantive outreach to new members. Modern Friends should not exist to meet in committees.

A renewal of discipline and oversight

These are taboo words for many modern Friends. But we've taken open-hearted tolerance so far that we've forgotten who we are. What does it mean to be a Quaker? Seekers are looking for answers. Friends have been able to provide them with answers in the past: both ways to conduct oneself in the world and ways to reach the divine. Many of us actually yearn for more care, attention and oversight in our religious lives and more connection with others.

A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

Too much of Quaker culture is still rooted in elitist wealthy Philadelphia Main Line "Wasp" culture. For generations of Friends, the Society became an ethnic group you were born into. Too many Friends still care if your name is "Roberts," "Jones," "Lippencott," "Thomas," "Brinton." A number of nineteenth-century Quaker leaders tried to make this a religion of family fiefdoms. There was a love of the world and an urge for to be respected by the outside world (the Episcopalians wouldn't let you into the country clubs if you wore plain dress or got too excited about religion).

Today we too often confuse the culture of those families with Quakerism. The most obvious example to me is the oft-repeated phrase: "Friends don't believe in proselytizing." Wrong: we started off as great speakers of the Truth, gaining numbers in great quantities. It was the old Quaker families who started fretting about new blood in the Society, for they saw birthright membership as more important than baptism by the Holy Spirit. We've got a lot of baggage left over from this era, things we need to re-examine, including: our willingness to sacrifice Truth-telling in the name of politeness; an over-developed intellectualism that has become snobbery against those without advanced schooling; our taboo about being too loud or too "ethnic" in Meeting.

Note that I haven't specifically mentioned racial diversity. This is a piece of the work we need to do and I'm happy that many Friends are working on it. But I think we'll all agree that it will take more than a few African Americans with graduate degrees to bring true diversity. The Liberal branch of Friends spends a lot of time congratulating itself on being open, tolerant and self-examining and yet as far as I can tell we're the least ethnically-diverse branch of American Quakers (I'm pretty sure, anyone with corroboration?). We need to re-examine and challenge the unwritten norms of Quaker culture that don't arise from faith. When we have something to offer besides upper-class liberalism, we'll find we can talk to a much wider selection of seekers.

Can we do it?

Can we do these re-examinations without ripping our Society apart? I don't know. I don't think the age of Quaker schisms is over, I just think we have a different discipline and church polity that let us pretend the splits aren't there. We just self-select ourselves into different sub-groups. I'm not sure if this can continue indefinitely. Every week our Meetings for Worship bring together people of radically different beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of worship, we have individual meditation in a group setting, where everyone is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn't Friends' style and it's not satisfying to many of us. I know this statement may seem like sacrilege to many Friends who value tolerance above all. But I don't think I'm the only one who would rather worship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper religious fellowship than that found in most contemporary Meetings. Quakerism will change and Modernism isn't the end of history.

How open will we all be to this process? How honest will we get? Where will our Society end up? We're not the only religion in America that is facing these questions.

See also:

On Quaker Ranter:

• It Will Be There in Decline Our Entire Lives. There's a generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism who are writing and blogging under the "post-modern" "emergent church" labels. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism?
• Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?, my observations from the November 2003 "Indie Allies" meet-up.
• Sodium Free Friends, a post of mine urging Friends to actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. "We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world and Quakerism has something to say about that."
• Peace and Twenty-Somethings: are the Emergent Church seekers creating the kinds of youth-led intentional communities that the peace movement inspired in the 1970s?

Elsewhere:

• From Evangelical Friends Church Southwest comes an emergent church" church planting project called >Simple Churches (since laid down, link is to archive). I love their intro: "As your peruse the links from this site please recognize that the Truth reflected in essays are often written with a 'prophetic edge', that is sharp, non compromising and sometimes radical perspective. We believe Truth can be received without 'cursing the darkness' and encourage you to reflect upon finding the 'candle' to light, personally, as you apply what you hear the Lord speaking to you."
• The emergent church movement hit the New York Times in February 2004. Here's a link to the article and my thoughts about it.
• "Orthodox Twenty-Somethings," a great article from TheOoze (now lost to a site redesign of theirs), and my intro to the article Want to understand us?
• The blogger Punkmonkey talks about what a missional community of faith would look like and it sounds a lot like what I dream of: "a missional community of faith is a living breathing transparent community of faith willing to get messy while reach out to, and bringing in, those outside the current community."

	Traditional Evangelicals 1950-1975	Pragmatic Evangelicals 1975-2000	Younger Evangelicals 2000-
Theological Commitment	Christianity as a rational worldview	Christianity as therapy Answers needs	Christianity as a community of faith. Ancient/Reformation
Apologetics Style	Evidential Foundational	Christianity as meaning-giver Experiential Personal Faith	Embrace the metanarrative Embodied apologetic Communal faith
Ecclesial Paradigm	Constantinian Church Civil Religion	Culturally sensitive church Market Driven	Missional Church Counter cultural
Church Style	Neighbourhood churches Rural	Megachuruch Suburban Market targeted	Small Church Back to cities Intercultural
Leadership Style	Pastor centred	Managerial Model CEO	Team ministry Priesthood of all
Youth Ministry	Church-centred programs	Outreach Programs Weekend fun retreats	Prayer, Bible Study, Worship, Social Action
Education	Sunday School Information centred	Target generational groups and needs	Intergenerational formation in community
Spirituality	Keep the rules	Prosperity and success	Authentic embodiment
Worship	Traditional	Contemporary	Convergence
Art	Restrained	Art as illustration	Incarnational embodiment
Evangelism	Mass evangelism	Seeker Service	Process evangelism
Activists	Beginnings of evangelical social action	Need-driving social action (divorce groups, drug rehab	Rebuild cities and neighborhoods

There are plenty of conservative sites jumping on the recantation of the Voices in the Wilderness ex-member. Most of the posts to Charles Brown's article seem to be from former liberals who are too happy to condemn their own former naivete: bq. "But there was a time when, as a college student infatuated by radical politics, I once shared a similar naive perception of world events as Voices in the Wilderness (and as I recollect, probably distributed their literature as well)." Brown situated Voices in the Catholic left tradition (fair enough) and it's fascinating to see how many of the critiquers echoing Brown are from the Catholic right: "It's a timely read... given the prominence the anti-sanctions position was accorded by Church leaders." A lot of the pull of this story seems to be cultural politics within the Catholic Church and the role of politics and activism. I'd love to hear some reasoned debate about all this, not just self-congratulatory ex-liberal boasting. The Voices site is silent about this, maybe that's the right response for now.