If you cycle through my last few months of comments, you'll see that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about who "we" Friends are and who we serve and the consequent question of why we organize into local meetings, national affiliations, blogs, etc.

Essential to this thinking has been Jeanne B's Social Class and Quakers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way culture and faith work to reinforce and sabotage one another, but class is a good one. If you travel from one theological brand of Friends to another, from one cultural zone to another (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rural) you'll see marked culture differences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban liberal Quaker stigma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty culture can unwittingly separate itself from potential allies in social change over tofu.

Since falling out of the rarefied world of professional Quakerism a year ago, I've become more local. I live in a small, largely agricultural town in rural South Jersey roughly equidistant from the region's skyscraper metropoli (I don't give its name for privacy reasons) and residents range from multi-generational families to Mexican farmworkers to people who got in trouble up north in NYC and are looking for a quieter place to come clean. I don't see Quakers in my day-to-day life anymore but I do interact with a more representative sampling of America, people who are all trying to get somewhere other than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do modern liberal Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jeanne's blog issues of safety-net public assistance that seem like do-gooder causes for most well-off liberal Friends are matters of personal practicality for more economically diverse religious bodies (the child care program that President Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doctor last Friday).

Last First Day I heard a good orthodox piece of Quaker ministry couched in a learned language, all talk of justification versus sanctification, with a bit of insider Quaker acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn't start off assuming middle class norms. What do our tofu covered dishes and vanilla soy chai's (I'm so addicted) have to do with living under Christ's instruction? And just which FGC outreach pamphlet should I be handing my new friend?

Enough for now. More soon. 

This First Day I stayed up late (I'm doing some fill-in night work these days and morning is late for me) and visited northwest Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting for worship and a monthly education hour they call "Forum." This month's focus was on Quaker blogging and I was asked to speak along with Imperfect Serenity Eileen Flanagan and Juliloquy (as usual I'm using the identities they give on the blog). In the audience were SEPTA Kid (who I knew I knew from Flickr!), A Thin Place Dan Evans and Christie, the yearly meeting staffer who helped put together the recent yearly meeting youth blog. When we began the Forum moderator asked for a show of hands for people who had blogs and there were even more bloggers there. Per capita Chestnut Hill might even outpace Twin Cities in blogdom. A few thoughts in no particular order:

Blogging Cultures

A recurring theme to the questions was privacy and how far we go to name ourselves and family members. All three of us cloak ourselves in one way or another (mine is primarily geographic, though Dan claimed he could find my address if he wanted (tell me if you can so I can see if I can plug up that hole!)). The whole concern seemed a little age-reflective, just in that I wondered if folks there knew just how open the whole Facebook/Myspace 20-something crowd can be. A difference of course is that we three panelists (and most of the audience) are of that professional age where we do have to worry about outward appearances. A common message on Myspace is the announcement that someone's got a job and will now take down their more wild pictures. Are the differences in how willing people are to share their lives online a reflection more of changing generational standards or age-based necessities?

Mommy and Daddy Blogs & Bloggings

We three bloggers were all parents of young'ish children and this all came up in our stories. With my small kids, family arrangement with my wife not being Quaker and current night-shift work, it's nearly impossible for me to give a lot of face-time to Quaker activities (Chris M recently posted about being able to accept an important meeting appointment that he had to turn down a few years ago, in part because of parental responsibilities). The particulars of my current life arrangement makes getting to worship a major accomplishment. Many bloggers are parents of small kids and our sites have given us the ability to stay more engaged in a sort of intellectual life than we could be otherwise. Many other bloggers seem to be geographically isolated from their peer group, which creates a similar dynamic.

Panels & Interest Groups, Workshops and Worship

It's tempting to compare this panel to the outwardly-similar interest group I convened with LizOpp and Robin M at last year's FGC Gathering. The most pronounced difference is that the interest group didn't focus on blogging but mentioned it only as a piece of our spiritual life story. Our concern was the ministry that was growing out of the blogosphere. We grounded our session in worship and as I wrote last summer, much of the talk had a feel of testimony to it.

At the Chestnut Hill Forum blogs were the focus. I'm quite qualified to talk about blogs and the internet from a purely technical and social standpoint, of course, and that's mostly what I did but it felt awkward for me. Christie touched on this when she asked a question towards the end about why my blog posts tend to have strong opinions but my presentation that day was so mild. The question has stayed with me and I think part of the difference is that the monthly Forum series is pattered after a secular educational model: it's more workshop that worship sharing. For me that kept it on a level on mechanics. I could share what's been happening on the Quaker blogosphere from a sociological standpoint but to give something approaching "testimony" would have felt out of place. Educational forums are fine and I don't want to dismiss their value but their form probably does keep the conversation at a particular level.

Contextless Forwards

In her question Christie also mentioned how certain posts of mine sometimes get forwarded around to yearly meeting staff. I consciously try to keep my blog wide-ranging, as a way to give readers a way to know the person behind the blog. I know what I write can sometimes be challenging. I know too that it's easy to dismiss challenges by taking statements out of context in such a way that the messenger can be parodied as some sort of other who can be safely ignored. Regular readers will hopefully catch the love that undergirds everything I write (my goal at least) and will understand the balance I try to keep between liberal and traditional Quakerism. But it's good to remember that some people only reading certain posts: I might want to take care to represent myself completely in everything post I write, even if it's only a disclaimer.

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Enough for now, I've got to wake up the baby from his nap. It was great to visit Chestnut Hill, where I've never worshiped before. It was quite refreshing to be a meeting where there's lots of parents and families. It was nice to meet the other bloggers and have a chance to talk about Friends and blogging to a new audience. Thanks to Amey for organizing it, my dear friend Thomas for tech'ing it up and to everyone who came and participated.

Today I posted an appreciation for Dean Freiday up on the Friends General Conference site (I was FGC's webmaster). It's well worth a read: Dean has been "convergent" for at least half a century, long before us internet kiddies started talking amongst ourselves (he's probably the only Friend featured on both the FGC and Barclay Press websites!). Johan Maurer could have easily cited Dean when he recently wrote that Convergent Friends are echoing the kinds of conversations that have been taking place among the leadership of the larger Friends organizations for decades.

The appreciation comes from FGC's Christian and Interfaith Relations Committee, universally called simply "CIRC" (even I had to check that I had the full name right). Now, I think its safe to say that CIRC is not one of FGC's sexiest committees. I mean that as an observation, not a dig, because I think it does fascinating stuff. For one thing it works with the World Council of Churches. Quakers were a founding member of the organization and we've always been something of a theological thorn in its side. Whenever the WCC tries to come up with a definition to unify world Christians it runs up against the peculiarities of Friends. And not just of Friends: I think we implicitly challenge the body to find a definition that would include the early primitive Christian communities. (The second link is to a British text but it gives a sense of this brand of Quaker ecumenical work).

CIRC is also the FGC committee most likely to hang out with Friends from the other branches; for example it appoints FGC's official observers to the Friends United Meeting Triennial. To use the new lingo, it's convergent.

Which begs the question: what's different between the new Convergence and the old Ecumenicalism? Are there points of connection? Are there opportunities for cross-fertilization? There are style differences, to be sure and I wonder if Robber Webber's generational chart (which I posted in my first Emergent Church piece) applies in any way, but any of these could certainly be creatively bridged, no?

The logistical process of putting Freiday's appreciation online involved an email back-and-forth with Tom P., an active committee member of CIRC, and that conversation suggested this post. He sounded quite excited when I gave the briefest overview of the Convergent Friends talk and wants to bring it to the attention of the committee. It could be very interesting.

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More:

• For more on Convergence, see Robin Mohr's coinage and C. Wess Daniel's Quaker Life article, plus of course much of what gets posted up on QuakerQuaker.org.
• Even Swarthmore likes Dean Freiday: this overview of his correspondence shows the breadth of his friendships.

I was given permission to pass along this data from the FGC-sponsored Youth Ministry Consultation that took place Third Month. A number of goals and projects had been brainstormed beforehand. The thirty-or-so participants at the Consultation were each given ten stars, which they were asked to put next to the projects they thought should be pursued. Every star acted as a vote that there was one person interested in that topic. The stars were coded to indicate the age range of the voter: High-Schooler, Adult Young Friend (18-37 years old) and older Friends.

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

Some sites and writings by the generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism, perhaps with different flavored toppings?