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Max Carter gave the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (NJ) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at it's founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools and any First Day School class that might answer their inquiries.

Max's program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association's efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.

Many of the students going through Max's program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. "Quaker" is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay's Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song ("with his shaggy shaggy locks"). So there's a real culture shock when they show up in Max's class and he hands them a Bible. "I've never touched one of these before" and "Why do we have to use this?" are non-uncommon responses.

None of this surprised me, of course. I've led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction ("we graduate more Quakers than we bring in" was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where's the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?

There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. I pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn't seem healthy to have such separated worlds.

Convergent Friends

Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we've shaken hands a few times but he didn't recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we're described. It was positive (we "bear watching!") but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we're a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I've graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listed all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage--I'm going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the "New Monastics and Convergent Friends" workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF's were young adults. "That's the first I've heard that" she said; "me too!" I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr's October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.

Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism

The most useful part of Max's talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He

• Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
• Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called "Concordance Capers" that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" at the end of the class.
  
• Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
• Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
• Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they've profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta's Open Door.
• The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.

Random Thoughts:

A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.

PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I've fixed it so that this odd spread won't happen again.

I occasionally go back to my blogging archives to pick out interesting articles from one, five and ten years ago.

ONE YEAR AGO: The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers

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. 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).

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. 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?!?

Published 9/14/2008.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Vanity Googling of Causes

A poster to an obscure discussion board recently described typing a particular search phrase into Google and finding nothing but bad information. Reproducing the search I determined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actually quite accurate. I've been hearing an increasing number of stories like this. "Cause Googling," a variation on "vanity googling," is suddenly becoming quite popular. But the interesting thing is that these new searchers don't actually seem curious about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?

Published 10/2/2004 in The Quaker Ranter.

TEN'ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again
This piece is about the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia (Wikipedia). It's strange to see I was feeling war fatigue even before 9/11 and the "real" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There's a great danger in all this. A danger to the soul of America. This is the fourth country the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becoming routine. It is sandwiched between the soap operas and the sitcoms, between the traffic and weather reports. Intense cruise missile bombardments are carried out but have no effect on the psyche or even imagination of the U.S. citizens.

It's as if war itself has become another consumer good. Another event to be packaged for commercial television. Given a theme song. We're at war with a country we don't know over a region we don't really care about. I'm not be facetious, I'm simply stating a fact. The United States can and should play an active peacemaking role in the region, but only after we've done our homework and have basic knowledge of the players and situation. Isolationism is dangerous, yes, but not nearly as dangerous as the emerging culture of these dilettante made-for-TV wars.

Published March 25, 1999, Nonviolence.org

My F/friend Raye Hodgson is taking a train from Connecticut to South Jersey next week for a visit, and locals and would-be visitors are invited to my house for some worship! Raye's involved with Ohio Conservative and New England Friends and seems to be doing a cool sustainable agriculture project these days (which I didn't know except for Google!)

It's next Thursday, the 19th at 7:30pm in Hammonton. If you want to join but don't have my address just send me an email and I'll provide details. There's also a Facebook event listing for this. If enough people are interested we can have more occasional Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quakerly worship in this part of South Jersey! If you can't make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I'll keep you in the loop.

UPDATE: The worship went well, about half a dozen people showed up. If you want to be alerted to any follow-up worship opportunities in the Hammonton area send me an email and I'll add you to my list.

The most excellent Peggy Senger Parsons of Oregon's Freedom Friends Church emailed me today saying she and the equally excellent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a workshop at the Philadelphia area Pendle Hill Retreat Center from 3/27-29. These two were crossing theological boundaries and pioneering the Convergent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twitter & Facebook. The workshop is called "Are we still a dangerous people?" and as rocking as that sounds, I'd be willing to listen to these two read the Salem, Oregon phone book for a weekend. If you have a pillow stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for commuters) then you should definitely try to make it (unfortunately I don't have a lumpy pillowcase and can't afford to take another three days off).

Peggy wrote that she wants to make herself "available for the Saturday afternoon free time for a conversation with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the party." That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some childcare schedules, I'll try to make that. That would be Saturday the 28th from 1:00-3:30pm.

• Peggy's blog post about the workshop
• QuakerQuaker Events listing
• Pendle Hill's listing

Over the QuakerQuaker forum, a new blogger asked "I am new at blogging. Do you have any suggestions for my site?" I'll cross-post my answer here.

I think the success to any kind of writing is to first and foremost write about what interests you. Don't worry about whether there's an audience or not: with millions of people on the internet every day there's bound to be plenty of others who share your interests. Don't be afraid to be personal, quirky and idiosyncratic, as people come to blogs looking for personality.

The most interesting blogs have an intimacy and honesty to them. My blog posts are the kind of discussions I would have around my dining room table. Friends have a tendency to downplay our opinions in public settings. The Quaker blogs have given us a place to be respectfully honest, open and inquisitive. That openness has led many of us into surprising friendships.

I'd also recommend that you keep your blog open to development. I was four months into my QuakerRanter blog before I had the first post that I would now consider a "typical" QuakerRanter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you're comfortable in and many people find themselves interested in different topics than they initially imagined. Blogs often end up being very different than the one they thought they were starting! Most blogs last about two months and are abandoned: if you're blogging because you think you should be, then the motivation won't be enough to sustain you over the long term.

Finally, blogs are social. They're conversation. Encourage conversation on your blog. Respond to comments, on the blog and also in direct emails if people have provided them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and read them and comment on thoughtful posts. Get to know people and try to attend the events we're now listing here on QuakerQuaker. About half of my QuakerQuaker time is actually private emails and IM conversations with Friends and the comments I leave on blogs (some Quaker, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It's a social medium and the public blog is just one piece of that.

I'd love to hear what advice others have, either here on Quaker Ranter or over on the Forum post.

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.

A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that's been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It's a phenomena I've seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua's most brutal dictators by saying "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn't make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I'd suggest it doesn't make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion's integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off--politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don't, the people there to actually discuss your issues--the people you want--will leave.

I didn't know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recognition of all that doesn't negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken.  After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this "experiment" with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive.  I had to ask myself: "Do I need this negativity in my life right now?"

I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:

I've been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren't very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the "it eventually sorts out" argument but it often doesn't. I've seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It's a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn't make for a healthy spiritual community.

The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone's actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.

The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn't helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It's a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can't be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I've seen the problems meetings face when they haven't. But that doesn't make it any easier for you.

But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ's kingdom by dropping out? It's an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have "abandoned" their "Quaker experiment" because we're not living up to our own ideals.

Maybe I'm more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the "Quaker Ranter" has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren't evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren't conservative and asked "Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?" (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)

We should be more worried about the people of integrity we're losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we've lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don't want, then it's time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action--ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.

Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we're losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there's a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.

Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 "Lost Quaker Generation" series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies ("detraction" is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.

I think (I hope) we're helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It's no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of  olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it's always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.