leadership Posts

Max Carter gave the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (NJ) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at it's founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools and any First Day School class that might answer their inquiries.

Max's program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association's efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.

Many of the students going through Max's program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. "Quaker" is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay's Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song ("with his shaggy shaggy locks"). So there's a real culture shock when they show up in Max's class and he hands them a Bible. "I've never touched one of these before" and "Why do we have to use this?" are non-uncommon responses.

None of this surprised me, of course. I've led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction ("we graduate more Quakers than we bring in" was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where's the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?

There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. I pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn't seem healthy to have such separated worlds.

Convergent Friends

Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we've shaken hands a few times but he didn't recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we're described. It was positive (we "bear watching!") but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we're a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I've graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listed all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage--I'm going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the "New Monastics and Convergent Friends" workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF's were young adults. "That's the first I've heard that" she said; "me too!" I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr's October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.

Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism

The most useful part of Max's talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He

• Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
• Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called "Concordance Capers" that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" at the end of the class.
  
• Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
• Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
• Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they've profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta's Open Door.
• The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.

Random Thoughts:

A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.

PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I've fixed it so that this odd spread won't happen again.

This week I received an email from a young seeker in the Philadelphia area who found my 2005 article "Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings" published in FGConnections. She's a former youth ministries leader from a Pentecostal tradition, strongly attracted to Friends beliefs but not quite fitting in with the local meetings she's been trying. Somewhere she found my article and asks if I have any insights.

The 2005 article was largely pessimistic, focused on the "committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago" who had left Friends and blaming "an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future" but my hope paragraph was optimistic:

There is hope... A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there's a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

Hard to imagine that only three years ago I was an isolated FGC staffer left to pursue outreach and youth ministry work on my own time by an institution indifferent to either pursuit. Both functions have become major staff programs, but I'm no longer involved, which is probably just as well, as neither program has decided to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most interesting work is still largely invisible.

Some of this work has been taken up by the new bloggers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be congealing around all the blogs, Twitter networks, Facebook friendships, intervisitations and IM chats. Many of us associated with QuakerQuaker.org have some sort of regular correspondence or participation with the Emerging Church movement, we regularly highlight "amazing conversations" from new Friends and seekers and there's a lot of inter-generational work going on. We've got a name for it in Convergent Friends, which reflects in part that "we" aren't just the liberal Friends I imagined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quaker flavors.

But we end up with a problem that's become the central one for me and a lot of others: what can we tell a new seeker who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but doesn't fit? I could point this week's correspondent to meetings and churches hundreds of miles from her house, or encourage her to start a blog, or compile a list of workshops or gatherings she might attend. But none of these are really satisfactory answers.   

Elsewhere:

Gathering in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advisor Ryan Bolger that talks about tribe-style leadership and a new kind of church identity that uses the instant communication tools of the internet to forge a community that's not necessarily limited to locality. Bolger's and his research partner report that they see "emerging initiatives within traditional churches as the next horizon for the spread of emerging church practices in the United States." More links from Wess' article on emerging churches and denominations.

Over on One Quaker Take, Timothy is surprised to read a definition of "Convergent Friend" that sounds a lot like a certain flavor of West Coast liberal Quakerism. It doesn't seem so surprising for me as it comes from Gregg Koskela, a pastor at an Evangelical Friends church. It was five years ago this month that I went to a loud pizza shop in Philadelphia to attend a  "Meet-Up" of readers of emerging church blogs and realized I had more common ground with these younger Evangelicals than I would have ever thought:

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it's safe to say we are all "post" something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren't working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There's something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it's finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we're more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

Rich the Brooklyn Quaker was recently asking about early Friends views of atonement and heaven and hell and it's a great post, but so is Marshall Massey's comment about how later Friends altered the message in distinctly different ways. The different flavors of Friends have spent a lot of energy minimizing certain parts of the Quaker message and over-emphasizing others and maybe the truth lies in some of the nuances we long ago paved over.

I have a working theory that a movement of "Convergence" will feel suspiciously liberal in evangelical circles, suspiciously evangelical in liberal circles, and suspiciously worldly in Quaker conservative circles. But that's almost to be expected. The work to be done is different depending on where we're starting from.

I don't think Friends are alone in these kinds of matters. I see this phenomenon in other religious denominations--the post-Evangelicals I broke pizza with back in 2003 weren't Quakers. But Friends might have a better way out of the existential puzzles that arise. For we (generally) believe that our action should be motivated first and foremost by the direct instruction of the risen Christ working on us now. That means we can't rely on canned answers. What worked in the past might not work now. The faith is the same. But what needs to be done and what needs to be preached is very much a here-and-now kind of proposition.

I can't help but think of Howard Brinton. Back in the 1950s his generation managed a reunification of East Coast Quaker factions that had been warring for over a century. One way they did it was hanging out together and then redefining what it meant to be a Friend. In Friends for 300 Years, Brinton argued that tests for membership shouldn't look at one's beliefs or practices. It was a truce and I'm sure it made sense at the time: there was a fairly strong consensus on what Quakerism meant and the fights at the edges over details were distracting. Fifty years later, there's little consensus among Philadelphia Friends and even those in leadership positions are loathe to talk about faith or practice except in a kind of code. I can't think of a single Philadelphia Friend who publicly expresses Quaker belief with the clarity or passion of mid-century figures like Brinton, Thomas Kelly or Rufus Jones.

What worked in the past might not work now. What sounds like old hat to to us might be very liberating for others. Convergence isn't very new. It's just keeping ourselves from ossifying into our own human concepts and staying open to the direct Christ. It's finding a way to maintain that crazy balance between tradition and the inward light. Same as it ever was.

It's been a fascinating education learning about institutional Catholicism these past few weeks. I won't reveal how and what I know, but I think I have a good picture of the culture inside the bishop's inner circle and I'm pretty sure I understand his long-term agenda. The current lightening-fast closure of sixty-some churches is the first step of an ambitious plan; manufactured priest shortages and soon-to-be overcrowded churches will be used to justify even more radical changes. In about twenty years time, the 125 churches that exist today will have been sold off. What's left of a half million faithful will be herded into a dozen or so mega-churches, with theology borrowed from generic liberalism, style from feel-good evangelicalism, and organization from consultant culture.

When diocesan officials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sentence and nod their heads approvingly. The conspiracy is real.

But I don't want to talk about Catholicism again. Let's talk Quakers instead, why not? I should be in some meeting for worship right anyway. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbringing after eleven years with us because she wanted a religious community that shared a basic faith and that wasn't afraid to talk about that faith as a corporate "we." It seems that Catholicism won't be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the Eastern Orthodox church? For that matter should I be running off to the Mennonites? See though, the problem is that the same issues will face us wherever we try to go. It's modernism, baby. No focused and authentic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the questions of course. Why would someone who dislikes Catholic culture and wants to dismantle it's infrastructure become a priest and a career bureaucrat? For that matter why do so many people want to call themselves Quakers when they can't stand basic Quaker theology? If I wanted lots of comments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ultimately the question is futile and beyond my figuring.

Another piece to this issue came in some questions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few others this past week in preparation for his upcoming presentation at Woodbrooke. He asked about how a particular Quaker institution did or did not represent or might or might not be able to contain the so-called "Convergent" Friends movement. I don't want to bust on anyone so I won't name the organization. Let's just say that like pretty much all Quaker bureaucracies it's inward-focused, shallow in its public statements, slow to take initiative and more or less irrelevant to any campaign to gather a great people. A more successful Quaker bureaucracy I could name seems to be doing well in fundraising but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more interested in donor-focused hype than long-term program implementation. 

One enemy of the faith is bureaucracy. Real leadership has been replaced by consultants and fundraisers. Financial and staffing crises--real and created--are used to justify a watering down of the message. Programs are driven by donor money rather than clear need and when real work might require controversy, it's tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quaker readers who think I'm talking about Quakers: no I'm talking about Catholics. Catholic readers who think I'm talking about Catholics: no, I'm talking about Quakers. My point is that these forces are tearing down religiosity all over. Some cheer this development on. I think it's evil at work, the Tempter using our leader's desires for position and respect and our the desires of our laity's (for lack of a better word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I'm tired of thinking that maybe if I try one more Quaker meeting I'll find the community where I can practice and deepen my faith as a Christian Friend. I'm stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feeling: Fox and the Peningtons and all the rest talked about isolation and about religious professionals who were in it for the career. I know from the blogosphere and from countless one-on-one conversations that there are a lot of us--a lot--who either drift away or stay in meetings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spiritual community for these outsider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our structures look like? If we let the generic churches go off to out-compete one other to see who can be the blandest, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

I guess this last paragraph is the new revised mission statement for the Quaker part of this blog. Okay kids, get a stepstool, go to your meeting library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out volume one of "A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends" by Thomas Clarkson. Yes the 1806 version, stop the grumbling. Get out the ribbed packing tape and put it's cover back together--this isn't the frigging Library of Congress and we're actually going to read this thing. Don't even waste your time checking it out in the meeting's logbook, no one's pulled in down in fifty years and no one's going to miss it now. Really stuck, okay Google's got it too. Class will start shortly.

• 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)

I recently applied for a position at a well-known Quaker social justice organization and decided to put together something of an activist resume. The resume I usually circulate understandably focuses on my tech work and professional experience and tries the impossible task of downplaying the Quaker connection (I've almost heard the application being crumpled on the other end of a phone interview when I've tried to explain what an "Advance and Outreach Coordinator" does!). I should have known that in the Bizarro World that is Quaker peace activism I wouldn't even get a sit-down interview for a job I'm professionally over-qualified for, but putting together this alternative time line was kind of fun so I'll share it here.

1987: Internship, United Farm Workers. Staffed petition drive out of NYC office, planned Philadelphia-area appearances by Cesar Chavez. I even got to do a little ghost writing for Cesar!

Late 1980s: Core member of Students Against Sexual Stereotyping, Villanovans Against Racism, VCACA (Central America solidarity) and other college-based social justice initiatives.

1988-9: Editor, The VACUUM, an alternative weekly for Villanova University. Most notably raised campus awareness around issues of acquaintance rape. Such a proto-blog publication, I should repost some of those articles someday! Right: vintage picture from the yearbook.

1991: Intern, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Peace Committee. Participated in anti-recruitment counseling, preparation of Camden NJ's Newton Friends Meeting for tutoring program.

1991: Member, Corn Rice and Beans affinity group. Street theater, etc., started vigils for first Gulf War on west side of City Hall.

1991: Founding member, Philadelphia anti-war coalition.

1992: Organizer of responses to Christopher Columbus re-enactment ships' arrival in Philadelphia. Participated in various actions that acted as core of Philadelphia Inquirer coverage (article behind paywall but starts "Hey, Columbus, ya shoulda stayed home. Shouldn't have come to America. Definitely shouldn't have come up the Delaware. The Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria... sailed into Philadelphia yesterday..., expecting a hero's welcome. Instead they got bludgeoned by the vast array of anti-Columbus forces.")

1994-6: Founding member, Philly Food Not Bombs. Collected food & served at area protests and at weekly meals in West Philadelphia.

1993: Acquisitions Editor onStopping Rape: A Challenge for Men by Rus Ervin Funk.

1994-7: Board member, New Society Educational Foundation. Served as treasurer in critical time of transition.

1995: Acquisitions Editor, With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion, and Moral Imagination by Joseph Gerson. A co-publication with the American Friends Service Committee.

1995: Acquisitions Editor, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel. Still listed as a top-40 book on racism by Amazon.com.

1995-present: Founder, Nonviolence.org. One of the first peace-focused internet portals. Through this project served as webmaster to numerous national U.S. peace groups including War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation and Pax Christi USA.

1996: Fellowship, Friends Institute of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to support Nonviolence.org development.

1997-8: National Committee Member, War Resisters League.

1998: Profile, New York Times, "Iraqi Crisis Increases Activity on Peace Network" (Feb 21). Headlining article in CyberTimes edition. Still have desk and bookshelves, cat was old girlfriend's.

1998: Featured Op-Ed, USAToday, "Missiles Aren’t the Answer" (Nov 16th).

1998: Featured Guest, Oliver North Radio Show (Nov 16). To my everlasting regret, Ollie had a guest host on Mondays and I was eviscerated by his fill-in!

2000: Video/Web Transfer Editor, Philadelphia Independent Media Center. Edited and transfered raw footage of the Republican National Convention to the Philadelphia Indymedia.org website. I should dig up my protest videos and post them sometime.

2005: Fellowship, Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership Program. Named after long-time AFSC Executive Director and his wife, fellowship supported development of new online magazine.

2006: Organized media campaign to support members of Christian Peacemaker Teams kidnapped in Iraq. Created syndicated news feeds for both activist and Quaker audiences.

Related: professional resume, workshops and publications list, list of organizations I've worked with, LinkedIn profile.

In a stunning turnaround, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran has not been trying to build atomic weapons since 2003:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

First thoughts: what would the world be like if we had seen a statement like this regarding Iraq in early 2003? We know now that Saddam Hussein had long since abandoned nuclear aspirations and that his military infrastructure was so weakened by years of embargoes that it was a threat to no one. A number of us challenged the Bush Administration's experts, pointing to the weaknesses in the evidence publicly presented. It's hard to hide a major weapons program or a major alliance like the Saddam-Al Qaeda partnership. If these had been real we would have had more convincing evidence.

Sanctions and international pressure successfully stopped Saddam Hussein's ambitions against Iraq's neighbors. If the world had just waited him out, he might have eventually been deposed or even come around--who would have thought that Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi would still be around in 2007 and that the U.S. would have full diplomatic relations with him!

Second thoughts: we've been rattling the sabers of war for four years? What if Bush had actually started a war with Iran?

Third thoughts: all indications were that the U.S. intelligence agencies have been under intense pressures to deliver assessments that fit with Administration policy: Bush wants to fight Saddam and the CIA gives him lame reasons that Congress is too weak to challenge. Does today's turnaround signal the waning of the Bush powers in these last years of his Presidency so that the National Intelligence Estimate is finally credible? Or has the White House decided it doesn't want to continue threatening war? The conspiracy-minded will note that the Iowa Caucus is exactly a month away and will ask which Republican candidate stands to gain from a stand-down with Iran.

Finally, for now, the fourth thought: Iran has had a vested interest in looking tough. What will happen there now? Fortunately this latest report paints an Iranian leadership that's rational, saying that its "decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs." Iran is still a dangerous country (as is the U.S.) so what happens now?