going out of business Posts

Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.

Interesting reading today about how our Quaker structures can choke the Spirit and hem in our communities. Johan M is no stranger to Quaker institutions, but in "Clerk Please" he writes:

But who will see and proclaim these things to new audiences if we are so busy trying to sort out our structures, nomination processes, and interpersonal animosities that we don't take the time to discern and honor leadings?

Susanne K echos some of these themes in her latest post, "Quakerism and Structure":

One of the key parts of George Fox's revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit... My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 50 years. He believes that the spark of the initial vision and passion of religious groups only survives for about 50 years before developing structures start to choke the movement of the Spirit.

It's been about eighteen months since I was sidelined from the professional Quaker world (I work for some Quakers now, but on a contract basis and the relationship is much different). A year or two before this, my monthly meeting melted down and more or less devolved into a worship group and while I've found a more active meeting to attend, it's not particularly close and I haven't joined.

The result of these two changes is that I haven't sat in a staff meeting for over a year; I don't attend business meetings; I don't belong to any committees; I don't represent any group at conferences. After years of being what Evan Welkin called an uberQuaker, I'm an uninvolved slacker. Bad Martin, right?

Except I'm not uninvolved of course. I feel I'm doing as much now to help people find and grow into Quakerism than I did when I was paid to do this. I don't spend much time with that 2% skim of Quaker elite who attend all the same conferences and appoint each other to all the same committees, but then catering to their needs was pretty high maintenance and was never something I thought of as the real mission.

Suzanne talks about the "Sabbatical Year" meme, and of course lots of electrons fly about the blogosphere about the possibilities of the Emerging Church movement. There's a hunger for a different way of being a Friend. I know one Quaker who threatens to burn down the famous meetinghouse he worships in because he feels that the building has become an empty icon, a weight of bricks upon the Spirit (I'll leave him anonymous in case something mysterious happens to the meetinghouse tonight!). How tragic would it be, really, if some of institutional baggage was laid down and we had to find other ways to confirm and support one another's ministries?

I love teaching Quakerism, I love helping Quakers use the internet for outreach and I love reaching out to potential Friends with my writing. I'm doing all that without committees or staff meetings. No budgets to fight over, no mission statements to write.

Half a decade ago now I wrote about the "lost Quaker generation," active and visionary Gen X Friends who seemed to be dropping out in droves. We're all keeping in better touch now via Facebook but I haven't noticed much jumping back into the fray. What I have noticed is a phenomenon where Friends half a generation older are taking on Quaker responsibilities only to drop away from active meeting involvement when their terms ended. 

If we could pull together all of the dropouts together and start meetings that focused on worship, religious education and deep-community activities, I think we'd see something interesting. I envy those with less-musty, Gen-X heavy meetings nearby (Robin M showcased her meeting recently). And don't get me wrong: I also love the old Quaker ideal of the strong local Quaker community and the bonds of the community on the individual, etc., etc. But I don't see meetings like that anywhere nearby and the only clear leading I really have is to continue this "freelance" teaching, writing and organizing. It's not the situation I want but it's the situation I have and at this point I have to just trust the leadings as they come step by step and have faith they're going somewhere. Boy though, I wish I knew where all this was heading sometimes!

Robin M posts this week about two Convergent Events happening in California in the next month or two. And she also tries out a simplified definition of Convergent Friends:

people who are engaged in the renewal movement within the Religious Society of Friends, across all the branches of Friends.

It sounds good but what does it mean? Specifically: who isn't for renewal, at least on a theoretical level? There are lots of faithful, smart and loving Friends out there advocating renewal who don't fit my definition of Convergent (which is fine, I don't think the whole RSoF should be Convergent, it's a movement in the river, not a dam).

When Robin coined the term at the start of 2006 it seemed to refer to general trends in the Religious Society of Friends and the larger Christian world, but it was also referring to a specific (online) community that had had a year or two of conversation to shape itself and model trust and accountability. Most importantly we each were going out of our way to engage with Friends from other Quaker traditions and were each called on our own cultural assumptions.

The coined term implied an experience of sort. "Convergent" explicitly references Conservative Friends ("Con-") and the Emergent Church movement ("-vergent"). It seems to me like one needs to look at those two phenomenon and their relation to one's own understanding and experience of Quaker life and community before really understanding what all the fuss has been about. That's happening lots of places and it is not simply a blog phenomenon.

Nowadays I'm noticing a lot of Friends declaring themselves Convergent after reading a blog post or two or attending a workshop. It's becoming the term du jour for Friends who want to differentiate themselves from business-as-usual, Quakerism-as-usual. This fits Robin's simplified definition. But if that's all it is and it becomes all-inclusive for inclusivity's sake, then "Convergent" will drift away away from the roots of the conversation that spawned it and turn into another buzzword for "liberal Quaker." This is starting to happen.

The term "Convergent Friends" is being picked up by Friends outside the dozen or two blogs that spawned it and moving into the wild--that's great, but also means it's definition is becoming a moving target. People are grabbing onto it to sum up their dreams, visions and frustrations but we're almost certainly not meaning the same thing by it. "Convergent Friends" implies that we've all arrived somewhere together. I've often wondered whether we shouldn't be talking about "Converging Friends," a term that implies a parallel set of movements and puts the rather important elephant square on the table: converging toward what? What we mean by convergence depends on our starting point. My attempt at a label was the rather clunky conservative-leaning liberal Friend, which is probably what most of us in the liberal Quaker tradition are meaning by "Convergent."

I started mapping out a liberal plan for Convergent Friends a couple of years before the term was coined and it still summarizes many of my hopes and concerns. The only thing I might add now is a paragraph about how we'll have to work both inside and outside of normal Quaker channels to effect this change (Johan Maurer recently wrote an interesting post that included the wonderful description of "the lovely subversives who ignore structures and communicate on a purely personal basis between the camps via blogs, visitation, and other means" and compared us to SCUBA divers ("ScubaQuake.org" anyone?).

Robin's inclusive definition of "renewal" definitely speaks to something. Informal renewal networks are springing up all over North America. Many branches of Friends are involved. There are themes I'm seeing in lots of these places: a strong youth or next-generation focus; a reliance on the internet; a curiosity about "other" Friends traditions; a desire to get back to roots in the simple ministry of Jesus. Whatever label or labels this new revival might take on is less important than the Spirit behind it.

But is every hope for renewal "Convergent"? I don't think so. At the end of the day the path for us is narrow and is given, not chosen. At the end of day--and beginning and middle--the work is to follow the Holy Spirit's guidance in "real time." Definitions and carefully selected words slough away as mere notions. The newest message is just the oldest message repackaged. Let's not get too caught up in our own hip verbage, lecture invitations and glorious attention that we forget that there there is one, even Christ Jesus who can speak to our condition, that He Himself has come to teach, and that our message is to share the good news he's given us. The Tempter is ready to distract us, to puff us up so we think we are the message, that we own the message, or that the message depends on our flowery words delivered from podiums. We must stay on guard, humbled, low and praying to be kept from the temptations that surround even the most well-meaning renewal attempts. It is our faithfulness to the free gospel ministry that will ultimately determine the fate of our work.

Just a little note to everyone that I've blogged a couple of posts over on Nonviolence.org. They're both based on "peace mom" Cindy Sheeran's "resignation" from the peace movement yesterday.

It's all a bit strange to see this from a long-time peace activist perspective. The movement that Sheehan's talking about and now critiquing is not movement I've worked with for the last fifteen-plus years. The organizations I've known have all been housed in crumbling buildings, with too-old carpets and furniture lifted as often as not from going out of business sales. Money's tight and careers potentially sacrificed to help build a world of sharing, caring and understanding.

The movement Sheehan talks about is fueled by millions of dollars of Democratic Party-related money, with campaigns designed to mesh well with Party goals via the so-called 527 groups and other indirect mechanisms. Big Media likes to crown these organizations as the antiwar movement, but as Sheehan and Amy Goodman discuss in today's Democracy Now interview, corporate media will end up with much of the tens of millions of dollars candidates are now raising. Sheehan makes an impassioned plea for people to support those grassroots campaigns that aren't supported by the "peace movement" but this reinforces the notion that its the moneyed interests that make up the movement. I'm sure she knows better but it's hard to work for so long and to make so many sacrifices and still be so casually dismissed--not just me but thousands of committed activists I've known over the years.

There are a few peace organizations in that happy medium between toadying and poverty (nice carpets, souls still intact) but it mystifies me why there isn't a broader base of support for grassroots activism. I myself decided to leave professional peace work almost a decade ago after the my Nonviolence.org project raised such pitiful sums. At some point I decided to stop whining about this phenomenon and just look for better-paying employment elsewhere but it still fascinates me from a sociological perspective.

I've been quiet on the blogs lately, focusing on job searches rather than ranting. I thought I'd take a little time off to talk about my little corner of the career market. I've been applying for a lot of web design and editing jobs but the most interesting ones have combined these together in creative ways. My qualifications for these jobs are more the independent sites I've put together -- notably QuakerQuaker.org -- than my paid work for Friends.

For example: one interesting job gets reposted every few weeks on Craigslist. It's geared toward adding next-generation interactive content to the website of a consortium of suburban newspapers (applicants are asked to be "comfortable with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube...," etc.). The qualifications and vision are right up my alley but I'm still waiting to hear anything about the application I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they're continuing to post revised descriptions to Craigslist. Yesterday's version dropped the "convergence" lingo and also dropped the projected salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actually got through to an interview for a fabulous job that consisted of putting together a blogging community site to feature the lesser-known and quirky businesses of Philadelphia. I had a great interview, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard nothing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up communications went unanswered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talking about and emailed that the site did launch, just quietly. It looks good.

Corporate blogging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years political campaigns have come to consider bloggers as an essential tool in getting their message out. User-generated content has become essential feedback and publicity mechanisms. My experience from the Quaker world is that bloggers are constituting a new kind of leadership, one that's both more outgoing but also thoughtful and visionary (I should post about this sometime soon). Blogs encourage openness and transparency and will surely affect organizational politics more and more in the near future. Smart companies and nonprofits that want to grow in size and influence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is little succor to the present. In the Philadelphia metropolitan area it seems that the rare employer that's thinking in these terms have have a lot of back and forths trying to work out the job description. Well, I only need one enlightened employer! It's time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

Looking back at Friends' responses to the Christian Peacemaker hostages

When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late last November, a lot of Quaker organizations stumbled in their response. With Tom Fox we were confronted by a full-on liberal Quaker Christian witness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic witness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many organizations that couldn’t manage anything beyond the boilerplate social justice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in captivity but throughout the ordeal I was mad at the exposed fracture lines between religious witness and social activism.

Whenever a situation involving international issues of peace and witness happens, the Quaker institutions I'm closest to automatically defer to the more political Quaker organizations: for example, the head of Friends General Conference told staff to direct outsiders inquiring about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a committed volunteer. The American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation have knowledgeable and committed staff, but their institutional culture doesn't allow them to talk Quakerism except to say we're a nice bunch of social-justice-loving people. I appreciate that these organizations have a strong, vital identity and I accept that within those confines they do important work and employ many faithful Friends. It's just that they lack the language to explain why a grocery store employee with a love of youth religious education would go unarmed to Badgdad in the name of Christian witness.

The wider blogosphere was totally abuzz with news of Christian Peacemaker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hundreds of posts and comments, including long discussions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost everyone wondered why the CPT workers were there and while the opinions weren't always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive idealists or disingeneous terrorist sympathizers), even the doubters were motivated by a profound curiosity and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blogosphere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and explanation? The AFSC responded by publicizing the statements of moderate Muslim leaders (calling for the hostages' release; I emailed back a suggestion about listing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meeting put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was targeted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of information of course, and there were plenty of stories on the lefty-leaning sites like ElectronicIraq and the UK site Ekklesia. But Friends explaining this to the world?

The Quaker bloggers did their part. On December 2 I quickly re-jiggered the technology behind QuakerQuaker.org to provide a Christian Peacemaker watch on both Nonviolence.org and QuakerQuaker (same listings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audiences, announced on the post It's Witness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage situation and included many posts from the Quaker blogger community that had recently congealed.

But here's the interesting part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blogging community. We already had gathered together as a group of Friends who were willing to write about spirituality and witness. Our conversations had been small and intimate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I sometimes get painted as some sort of fundamentalist Quaker, but the truth is that I've wanted to build a community that would wrestle with these issues, figuring the wrestling was more important than the language of the answers. I had already thought about how to encourage bloggers and knit a blogging community together and was able to use these techniques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.

Two other Quakers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his personal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethecaptivesnow.org site was put together impressively fast and contained a lot of good links to news, resources and commentary. But like me, they were over-worked bloggers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is director of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).

After an initial few quiet days, Tom's meeting Langley Hill put together a great website of links and news. That makes it the only official Quaker organization that pulled together a sustained campaign to support Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what's up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work happened by volunteers? Johan Maurer has a very interesting post, Are Quakers Marginal that points to my earlier comment on the Christian Peacemakers and doubts whether our avoidance of "hireling priests" has given us a more effective voice. Let's remember that institutional Quakerism began as support of members in jail for their religious witness; among our earliest committee gatherings were meetings for sufferings--business meetings focused on publicizing the plight of the jailed and support the family and meetings left behind.

I never met Tom Fox but it's clear to me that he was an exceptional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a witness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I wonder if it was this very wholeness that made his work hard to categorize and support. Did he simply fall through the institutional cracks? When you play baseball on a disorganized team you miss a lot of easy catches simply because all the outfielders think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what happened? And is this what would happen again?

A guest piece by Evan Welkin

Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand what brought me there. During the stressful process of deciding which college to attend, I felt a strong but slightly mysterious urge to explore Quakerism in my undergraduate years. Two years later, this same urge led me to buy a motorcycle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spiritual journey up the Eastern seaboard visiting Quaker meetings. While Guilford had excited and even irritated my curiosity about the workings of Quakerism, I knew little about how Quakers were over a large area of the country. I wanted to find out how Quakers worked as a group across a wide area of the country, and if I could learn how to be a leader within that community.