When I started blog­ging about Quaker issues seven years ago, I was a low-level cler­i­cal employee at an Quaker orga­ni­za­tion. It was clear I was going nowhere career-wise, which gave me a cer­tain free­dom. More impor­tantly, blogs were a nearly invis­i­ble medium, read by a self-selected group that also wanted to talk openly and hon­estly about issues. I started writ­ing about issues in among lib­eral Friends and about missed out­reach oppor­tu­ni­ties. A lot of what I said was spot on and in hind­sight, the archives give me plenty of “told you so” cred­i­bil­ity. But where’s the joy in being right about what hasn’t worked?

Things have changed over the years. One is that I’ve resigned myself to those missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Lots of Quaker money and humanly activ­ity is going into projects that don’t have God as a cen­ter. No amount of rant­ing is going to dis­suade good peo­ple from putting their faith into one more staff reor­ga­ni­za­tion, mis­sion rewrite or clever program.It’s a dis­trac­tion to spend much time wor­ry­ing about them.

But the biggest change is that my heart is squarely with God. I’m most inter­ested in shar­ing Jesus’s good news. I’m not a cheer­leader for any par­tic­u­lar human insti­tu­tion, no mat­ter how noble its inten­tions. When I talk about the good news, it’s in the con­text of 350 years of Friends’ under­stand­ing of it. But I’m well aware that there’s lots of peo­ple in our meet­ing­houses that don’t under­stand it this way any­more. And also aware that the seeker want­ing to pur­sue the Quaker way might find it more closely mod­eled in alter­na­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. There are peo­ple all over lis­ten­ing for God and I see many attempts at rein­vent­ing Quak­erism hap­pen­ing among non-Friends.

I know this obser­va­tion excites some peo­ple to indig­na­tion, but so be it: I’m trust­ing God on this one. I’m not sure why He’sgiven us a world why the com­mu­ni­ties we bring together to wor­ship Him keep get­ting dis­tracted, but that’s what we’ve got (and it’s what we’ve had for a long time). Every per­son of faith of every gen­er­a­tion has to remem­ber, re-experience and revive the mes­sage. That hap­pens in church build­ings, on street cor­ners, in liv­ing rooms, lunch lines and nowa­days on blogs and inter­net forums.We can’t get too hung up on all the ways the mes­sage is get­ting blocked. And we can’t get hung up by insist­ing on only one chan­nel of shar­ing that mes­sage. We must share the good news and trust that God will show us how to man­i­fest this in our world: his king­dom come and will be done on earth.

But what would this look like?

When I first started blog­ging there weren’t a lot of Quaker blogs and I spent a lot more time read­ing other reli­gious blogs. This was back before the emer­gent church move­ment became a wholly-ownedsubsidiaryof Zon­der­van and wasn’t dom­i­nated by hype artists (sorry, a lot of big names set off my slime-o-meter these days). There are still great blog­gers out there talk­ing about faith and read­ers want­ing to engage in this dis­cus­sion. I’ve been intrigued by the his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of Thomas Clark­son, the Angli­can who wrote about Friends from a non-Quaker per­spec­tive using non-Quaker lan­guage. And some­times I geek out and explain some Quaker point on a Quaker blog and get thanked by the author, who often is an expe­ri­enced Friend who had never been pre­sented with a clas­sic Quaker expla­na­tion on the point in ques­tion. My track­ing log shows seek­ers con­tinue to be fas­ci­nated and drawn to us for our tra­di­tional tes­ti­monies, espe­cially plainness.

I’ve put together topic lists and plans before but it’s a bit of work, maybe too much to put on top of what I do with Quak­erQuaker (plus work, plus fam­ily). There’s also ques­tions about where to blog and whether to sim­plify my blog­ging life a bit by com­bin­ing some of my blogs but that’s more logis­tics rather than vision.

• Mis­sion Cred­i­bil­ity by Angli­can Plain
• The New Land­scape of the Reli­gion Blo­gos­phere on the Imma­nent Frame, “prin­ci­pally writ­ten” by Nathan Schnei­der, who’s one of the con­trib­u­tors at Killing the Bud­dha.
• LizOpp’s I Blog Because I Dive.