Over on Friends Jour­nal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Writ­ten by Mar­garet Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the dif­fer­ent bod­ies of Friends, it’s a bit of cold water for most of us. Offi­cial num­bers are down in most places despite what­ever offi­cial opti­mism might exist. Favorite line: “Per­haps those who leave are noticed less.” I’m sure P.R. hacks in var­i­ous Quaker orga­ni­za­tions are burn­ing the mid­night oil writ­ing response let­ters to the edi­tor spin­ning the num­bers to say things are look­ing up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meet­ings affil­i­ated with Friends United Meet­ing and in those affil­i­ated with Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence. A curios­ity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meet­ings that are dual affil­i­ated. These blended yearly meet­ings are going through var­i­ous degrees of iden­tity cri­sis and hand-wringing over their sta­tus and yet their own mem­ber­ship num­bers are strong. Could it be that seri­ous the­o­log­i­cal wrestling and com­pli­cated spir­i­tual iden­ti­ties cre­ate health­ier reli­gious bod­ies than mono­cul­tural groupings?

The big news is in the south: “His­panic Friends Churches” in Mex­ico and Cen­tral Amer­ica are boom­ing, with spillover in el Norte as work­ers move north to get jobs. There’s sur­pris­ingly lit­tle inter­ac­tion between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker estab­lish­ment (maybe not sur­pris­ing really, but still sad). I’ll leave you with a chal­lenge Mar­garet gives readers:

One ques­tion that often puz­zles me is why so many His­panic Friends
con­gre­ga­tions are meet­ing in churches belong­ing to other denom­i­na­tions.
I would love to see estab­lished Friends meet­ings with their own
prop­erty shar­ing space with His­panic Friends. It would be an
oppor­tu­nity to share growth and chal­lenges together.

Not really news, but Friends United Meet­ing recently ded­i­cated their new Wel­come Cen­ter in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2007, FUM ded­i­cated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Book­store as the new FUM Wel­come Cen­ter. The Wel­come Cen­ter con­tains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of dur­ing busi­ness hours. Tables and chairs to com­fort­ably accom­mo­date 50 peo­ple make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meet­ings, anniversary/birthday par­ties, etc. Reduced prices are avail­able for churches.

Most Quaker pub­lish­ers and book­sellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pen­dle Hill book­store and pub­lish­ing oper­a­tion, the AFSC Book­store in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bar­clay Press in Ore­gon. The ver­i­ta­ble Friends Book­shop in Lon­don farmed out its mail order busi­ness a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a cof­fee­bar: pop­u­lar and cool I’m sure, but does Lon­don really needs another place to buy cof­fee? Rumor has it that Britain’s pub­li­ca­tions com­mit­tee has been laid down. The offi­cial spin is usu­ally that the work con­tin­ues in a dif­fer­ent form but only Bar­clay Press has been reborn as some­thing really cool. One of the few remain­ing book­sellers is my old pals at FGC’s Quaker­Books: still sell­ing good books but I’m wor­ried that so much of Quaker pub­lish­ing is now in one bas­ket and I’d be more con­fi­dent if their web­site showed more signs of activity.

The boards mak­ing these deci­sions to scale back or close are prob­a­bly unaware that they’re part
of a larger trend. They prob­a­bly think they’re respond­ing to unique sit­u­a­tions (the peer group Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions sends inter­nal emails around but hasn’t done much to pub­li­cize this story out­side of its mem­ber­ship). It’s sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bod­ies have inde­pen­dently decided that pub­lish­ing is not an essen­tial part of their mission.

Over on my design blog I’ve just posted an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tural insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ural web publicity–there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­ity. The sites do get vis­ited, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cific func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing within Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­mented on Johan Maurer’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Yearly Meeting’s report on Friends United Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuaker, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larger issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­larly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuaker link by a light­hearted call for an Inter­na­tional Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m happy to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­ity vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends United Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Yearly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tional schism? For all my bravado I’m as much an insti­tu­tional Quaker as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tional pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Yearly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my yearly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­ally pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to yearly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quaker pub­lisher com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­eral Friends’ most widely read intro­duc­tory book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication–even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quaker insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­ity to influ­ence the Quaker cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they really so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­ity of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­ity? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or campground–factor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tural forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quaker mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?

Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions, bet­ter known as “QUIP”, is a col­lec­tion of 50 Quaker pub­lish­ers, book­sellers and authors com­mit­ted to the “min­istry of the writ­ten word.” I often think of QUIP as a sup­port group of sorts for those of us who really believe that pub­lish­ing can make a dif­fer­ence. It’s also one of those places where dif­fer­ent branches of Friends come together to work and tell sto­ries. QUIP ses­sions strike a nice bal­ance between work and unstruc­tured time, it’s has its own nice cul­ture of friend­li­ness and coop­er­a­tion that are the real rea­son many of us go every year.

Con­tinue…