interesting stuff Posts

Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.

Not something I'll do every day, but over on QuakerQuaker I cross-referenced today's One Year Bible readings with Esther Greenleaf Murer's Quaker Bible Index. Here's the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus' parable of wheat & tares and pearls. It's a particularly rich reading today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an interesting parable about letting the faithful and the unfaithful grow together.

As if knowing today is Inauguration Day, Isaac Penington turned it into a political reference: "But oh, how the laws and governments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their reformation, whose common work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!"

Margaret Fell sees the wheat and tares as an example of jealousy and false ministry: "Oh how hath this envious man gotten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bundles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seedsmen come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, ... & so it was easy to stir up jealousy in you, you having the ground of jealousy in yourselves which is as strong as death."

We get poetry from the seventeen century Elizabeth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that "the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appearance (even as the morning -light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in brightness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the firmament at noon-day height."

The parable of the tares became a call for tolerance in George Fox's understanding: "For Christ commands christian men to "love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their enemies [Mat 5:44];" and so not to persecute them. And those enemies may be changed by repentance and conversion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels' work to burn the tares, and not men's."

A century later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and worried about religious education and Quaker drift: "But for want of keeping an eye open to this preserving Power, a spirit of indifference hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a tendency to choke the good seed; those tender impressions and reproofs of instruction, which would have prepared our spirits, and have bound them to the holy law and testimonies of truth."

I hope all this helps us remember that the Bible is our book too and an essential resource for Friends. It's easy to forget this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is getting our Bible fix from mainstream Evangelical Christian sources whose viewpoints might be in pretty direct opposition from Quaker understandings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B's post on The New Calvinism or Tom Smith's very reasonable concerns about the literalism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and recommend). On the other hand, it's not uncommon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our religion as "Quaker," downgrade Christianity by making it optional, unmentionable or non-contextual and turning to the Bible only for the obligatory epistle reference.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the margins in the modern edition of Samuel Bownas' "A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Ministry," which were peppered with the Biblical references Bownas was casually citing throughout. On my second reading (yes it's that good!) I started looking up the references and realized that: 1) Bownas wasn't just making this stuff up or quoting willy-nilly; and 2) reading them helped me understand Bownas and by extension the whole concept of Quaker ministry. You're not reading my blog enough if you're not getting the idea that this is one of the kind of practices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talking about at the Convergent workshop next month. If you can figure out the transport then get yourself to Cali pronto and join us.

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young'ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled  "The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,"  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn't much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on "quakers" and "emerging church" nothing much came up. It's not surprising that there wasn't much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We're getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we're asked to lead worships and we've got a catchy name in "Convergent Friends."

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I've drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn't have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don't see one convinced young Friend profiled and it's post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occassional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren't anyone's target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting "Covergent" minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won't blow your cover guys!). I've seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it's not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here's my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the "convergent" theme next month. I'll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
  
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC's isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we'll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you're interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I've let my blog deteriorate into too much of a "life stream," all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You'll notice it's been redesigned. The right bar has the "life stream" stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I'll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don't want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I'm just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God's call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn't talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don't exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn't do much work in the temple and didn't spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the "bad" elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let's see where we can all get in the next five years!

• Interview w/Chris Lehmann, principal of Philadelphia's "School 2.0" experiment
  "School 2.0" goes beyond technology. Likewise, a school that truly is designed for the future may also go beyond the literal building itself. Sometimes it shows up in small choices that allow kids and teachers to connect, collaborate, and create.
  (tags: tech tech.internetculture)
• Practical Theory
  Chris Lehman's blog. He's principle of PHiladelphia's new'ish Science Leadership Academy. Interesting stuff going on there.
  (tags: tech tech.internetculture)

Robin M over at What Canst Thou Say? has been hanging out with emergent church folks recently and reports back in a few posts. It's definitely worth reading, as is some of what's been coming out of the last week's youth gathering at Barnesville (including Micah Bales report) and the annual Conservative Friends gathering near Lancaster Pa., which I've heard bits and pieces about on various Facebook pages.

It sound like something's in the air. I wish I could sit in live in some of these conversations but just got more disappointing news on the job front so I'll continue to be more-or-less homebound for the foreseeable future. Out to pasture, that's me! (I'm saying that with a smile on my face, trying not to be tooooo whiny!)

Robin's post has got me thinking again about emergent church issues. My own dabbling in emergent blogs and meet-ups only goes so far before I turn back. I really appreciate its analysis and critique of contemporary Christianity and American culture but I rarely find it articulating a compelling way forward.

I don't want to merely shoehorn some appropriated Catholic rituals into worship. And pictures of emergent events often feel like adults doing vacation bible school. I wonder if it's the "gestalt" issue again (via Lloyd Lee Wilson et al), the problem of trying to get from here to there in an ad hoc manner that gets us to an mishmash of not quite here and not quite there. I want to find a religious community where faith and practice have some deep connection. My wife Julie went off to traditional Catholicism, which certainly has the unity of form and faith going for it, while I'm most drawn to Conservative Friends. It's not a tradition's age which is the defining factor (Zoroastrianism anyone?) so much as its internal logic. Consequently I'm not interested in a Quakerism (or Christianity) that's merely nostalgic or legalistic about seventeenth century forms but one that's a living, breathing community living both in its time and in the eternity of God.

I've wondered if Friends have something to give the emergent church: a tradition that's been emergent for three hundred years and that's maintained more or less regular correspondence with that 2000 year old emergent church. We Friends have made our own messes and fallen down as many times as we've soared but there's a Quaker vision we have (or almost have) that could point a way forward for emergent Christians of all stripes. There's certainly a ministry there, perhaps Robin's and perhaps not mine, but someone's.

Elsewhere:

Indiana Friend Brent Bill started a fascinating new blog last week after a rather contentious meeting on the future of Friends leadership. Friends in Fellowship is trying to map out a vision and model for a pastoral Friends fellowship that embodies Emergent Church leader Brian McLaren's idea of a "generous orthodoxy." Interesting stuff that echos a lot of the "Convergent Friends" conversation (here here and here) and mirrors some of the dynamics that have been going on within liberal Friends. The QuakerQuaker conversation has thus far been most intense among evangelical and liberal Friends, with middle American "FUM" Friends mostly sitting it out so it's great to see some connections being made there. Read "Friends in Fellowship" backwards, oldest post to newest and don't miss the comments as Brent is modeling a really good back and forth process with by answering comments with thoughtful posts.

Famously unapologetically liberal Friend Chuck Fager has some interesting correspondence over on A Friendly Letter about some of the elephants in the Friends United Meeting closet. Interesting and contentious both, as one might expect from Chuck. Well worth a read, there's plenty there you won't find anywhere else.

Finally, have I gushed about how fabulous the new'ish ConservativeFriend.org website is. Oh yes, I have, but that's okay. Visit it again anyway.

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.

Lazy guy I am, I'm going to cut-and-paste a comment I left over at Rich the Brooklyn Quaker's blog in response to his post What This Christian Is Looking For In Quakerism. There's been quite a good discussion in the comments. In them Rich poses this analogy:

During the Great Depression and World War II, I have been told that Franklin Roosevelt rallied the spirits of the American people with his "fireside chats". These radio broadcasts communicated information, projected hope, and called for specific responses from his listeners; including some acts of self-sacrifice and unselfishness... Often people would gather in small groups around their radios to hear these broadcasts, they would talk about what Roosevelt had said, and to some extent they were guided in their daily lives by some of what they had heard.