This past week­end I gave a talk at the Arch Street Meet­ing­house after the Interim Meet­ing ses­sions of Phi­ladle­phia Yearly Meet­ing. Interim Meet­ing is the group that meets sort-of monthly between yearly meet­ing busi­ness sess­sions. In an ear­lier blog post I called it “the estab­lish­ment” and I looked for­ward to shar­ing the new life of the blog­ging world and Con­ver­gent Friends with this group. I had been asked by the most excel­lent Stephen Dot­son to talk about “Find­ing Fel­low­ship Between Friends Thru The Inter­net.”

I was curi­ous to return to Interim Meet­ing, a group I served on about half a decade ago. As I sat in the meet­ing, I kept see­ing glimpses of issues that I planned to address after­wards in my talk: how to talk afresh about faith; how to pub­li­cize our activ­ity and com­mu­ni­cate both among our­selves and with the out­side world; how to engage new and younger mem­bers in our work.

Turns out I didn’t get the chance. Only half a dozen or so mem­bers of Interim Meet­ing stuck around for my pre­sen­ta­tion. No announce­ment was made at the end of ses­sions. None of the senior staff were there and no one from the long table full of clerks, alter­nate clerks and alter­nate alter­nate clerks came. Eleven peo­ple were at the talk (includ­ing some who hadn’t been at Interim Meet­ing). The inti­macy was nice but it was hardly the “take it to the estabish­ment” kind of event I had imagined.

The talk itself went well, despite or maybe because of its inti­macy. I had asked Seth H (aka Chron­i­cler) along for spir­i­tual sup­port and he wrote a nice review on Quak­erQuaker. Steve T, an old friend of mine from Cen­tral Philly days, took some pic­tures which I’ve included here. I videoed the event, though it will need some work to tighten it down to some­thing any­one would want to watch online. The peo­ple who attended wanted to attend and asked great ques­tions. It was good work­ing with Stephen Dot­son again in the plan­ning. I would wish that more Philadel­phia Friends had more inter­est in these issues but as indi­vid­u­als, all we can do is lead a horse to water. In the end, the yearly meet­ing is in God’s hands.

Below are obser­va­tions from Interim Meet­ing and how the Con­ver­gent Friends move­ment might address some of the issues raised. Let me stress that I offer these in love and in the hope that some hon­est talk might help. I’ve served on Interim Meet­ing and have given a lot of time toward PYM over the last twenty years. This list was for­warded by email to senior staff and I present them here for oth­ers who might be con­cerned about these dynamics.

GENERATIONAL FAIL:

There were about seventy-five peo­ple in the room for Interim Meet­ing ses­sions. I was prob­a­bly the third or fourth youngest. By U.S. cen­sus def­i­n­i­tions I’m in my eighth year of mid­dle age, so that’s really sad. That’s two whole gen­er­a­tions that are largely miss­ing from PYM lead­er­ship. I know I shouldn’t be sur­prised; it’s not a new phe­nom­e­non. But if you had told me twenty years ago that I’d be able to walk into Interim Meet­ing in 2010 and still be among the youngest, well… Well, frankly I would have uttered a choice epi­thet and kicked the Quaker dust from my shoes (most of my friends did). I know many Friends bod­ies strug­gle with age diver­sity but this is par­tic­u­larly extreme.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: About 33% of QuakerQuaker’s audi­ence is GenX and 22% are Mil­lenials. If Interim Meet­ing were as diverse as Quak­erQuaker there would have been 16 YAFs (18–35 year olds) and 25 Friends 35 and 49 years of age. I would have been about the 29th youngest in the room–middle aged, just where I should be! Quak­erQuaker has an age diver­sity that most East Coast Friends Meet­ings would die for. If you want to know the inter­ests and pas­sions of younger Friends, Quaker blogs are an excel­lent place to learn. There are some very dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tional and style dif­fer­ences at play (my post seven years ago, a post from Micah Bales this past week).

DECISION-MAKING

The first part of the ses­sions was run with what’s called a “Con­sent Agenda,” a leg­isla­tive mea­sure where mul­ti­ple agenda items are approved en masse. It rests on the ide­al­is­tic notion that all seventy-five atten­dees has come to ses­sions hav­ing read every­thing in the quarter-inch packet mailed to them (I’ll wait till you stop laugh­ing). Interim Meet­ing lumped thir­teen items together in this man­ner. I sus­pect most Friends left the meet­ing hav­ing for­got­ten what they had approved. Most edu­ca­tors would say you have to rein­force read­ing with live inter­ac­tion but we bypassed all of that in the name of efficiency.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Quaker blogs are won­der­fully rich sources of dis­cus­sion. Com­ments are often more inter­est­ing than the orig­i­nal posts. Many of us have writ­ten first drafts of pub­lished arti­cles on our blogs and then pol­ished them with feed­back received in the com­ments. This kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion feed­back is pow­er­ful and doesn’t take away from live meeting-time. There’s a ton of pos­si­bil­i­ties for shar­ing infor­ma­tion in a mean­ing­ful way out­side of meetings.

MINUTES OF WITNESS

Two “min­utes” (a kind of Quaker statement/press release) were brought to ses­sions. Both were vet­ted through a lengthy process where they were approved first by monthly and then quar­terly meet­ings before com­ing before Interim Meet­ing. A minute on Afghanistan was nine months old, a response to a troop level announce­ment made last Decem­ber; one against Mar­cel­lus Shale drilling in Penn­syl­va­nia was undated but it’s a topic that peaked in main­stream media five months ago. I would have more appre­ci­a­tion of this cum­ber­some process if the min­utes were more “sea­soned” (well-written, with care taken in the dis­cern­ment behind them) but there was lit­tle in either that explained how the issue con­nected with Quaker faith and why we were lift­ing it up now as con­cern. A senior staffer in a small group I was part of lamented how the min­utes didn’t give him much guid­ance as to how he might explain our con­cern with the news media. So here we were, approv­ing two out-of-date, hard-to-communicate state­ments that many IM reps prob­a­bly never read.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Blog­ging gives us prac­tice in talk­ing about spir­i­tu­al­ity. Com­menters chal­lenge us when we take rhetor­i­cal short­cuts or make assump­tions or trade on stereo­types. Most Quaker blog­gers would tell you they’re bet­ter writ­ers now than when they started their blog. Spir­i­tual writ­ing is like a mus­cle which needs to be exer­cised. To be bluntly hon­est, two or three blog­gers could have got­ten onto Skype, opened a shared Google Doc and ham­mered out bet­ter state­ments in less than an hour. If we’re going to be approv­ing these kinds of thing we need to prac­tice and increase our spir­i­tual literacy.

THE ROLE OF COMMITTEES

The sec­ond part was Interim Meet­ing look­ing at itself. We broke into small groups and ask­ing three ques­tions: “What is the work of Interim Meet­ing,” “Are we sat­is­fied with how we do this now?” and “If we were to make changes, what would they be?.” I thought to myself that the rea­son I ever go to events like this is to see dear Friends and to see what sparks of life are hap­pen­ing in the yearly meet­ing. As our small group went around, and as small groups shared after­wards, I real­ized that many of the peo­ple in the room seemed to agree: we were hun­gry for the all-to-brief moments where the Spirit broke into the reg­i­mented Quaker process.

One star­tling tes­ti­mo­nial came from a mem­ber of the out­reach com­mit­tee. She explained that her com­mit­tee, like many in PYM, is an admin­is­tra­tive one that’s not sup­posed to do any out­reach itself–it’s all sup­posed to stay very “meta.” They recently decided to have a pic­nic with no busi­ness sched­uled and there found them­selves “going rogue” and talk­ing about out­reach. Her spirit rose and voice quick­ened as she told us how they spent hours dream­ing up out­reach projects. Of course the out­reach com­mit­tee wants to do out­reach! And with state PYM is in, can we really have a dozen peo­ple sequestered away talk­ing about talk­ing about out­reach. Shouldn’t we declare “All hands on deck!” and start doing work? It would have been time well spent to let her share their ideas for the next thirty min­utes but of course we had to keep mov­ing. She fin­ished quickly and the excite­ment leaked back out of the room.

FOLLOW-UP THOUGHTS AND THE FUTURE OF THE YEARLY MEETING

Now I need to stress some things. I had some great one-on-one con­ver­sa­tions in the breaks. A lot of peo­ple were very nice to me and gave me hugs and asked about fam­ily. These are a com­mit­ted, hope­ful group of peo­ple. There was a lot of faith in that room! Peo­ple work hard and serve faith­fully. But it feels like we’re trapped by the sys­tem we our­selves cre­ated. I wanted to share the excite­ment and direct­ness of the Quaker blog­ging world. I wanted to share the robust­ness of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques we’re using and the power of dis­trib­uted pub­lish­ing. I wanted to share the new spirit of ecu­men­ti­cal­ism and cross-branch work that’s happening.

I’ve been vis­it­ing local Friends Meet­ings that have half the atten­dance they did ten years ago. Some have trou­ble break­ing into the double-digits for Sun­day morn­ing wor­ship and I’m often the youngest in the room, bring­ing the only small kids. I know there are a hand­ful of thriv­ing meet­ings, but I’m wor­ried that most are going to have close their doors in the next ten to twenty years.

I had hoped to show how new com­mu­ni­ca­tion struc­tures, the rise of Con­ver­gent Friends and the seek­ers of the Emerg­ing Church move­ment could sig­nal new pos­si­bil­i­ties for Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing. Toward the end of Interim Meet­ing, some Friends bemoaned our lack of resources and clerk Thomas Swain reminded them that with God there is no lim­i­ta­tion and noth­ing is impos­si­ble. Some of the things I’m see­ing online are the impos­si­ble come to life. Look at Quak­erQuaker: an unstaffed online mag­a­zine run­ning off of a $50/month bud­get and get­ting 10,000 vis­its a month. It’s not any­thing I’ve done, but this com­mu­nity that God has brought together and the tech­no­log­i­cal infra­struc­ture that has allowed us to coor­di­nate so eas­ily. It’s far from the only neat project out there and there are a lot more on the draw­ing boad. Some yearly meet­ings are engag­ing with these new pos­si­bilites. But mine appar­ently can’t even stay around for a talk.