meetup Posts

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!

C Wess Daniels has a good post following up the Quaker Heritage Day events last weekend in Berkeley. The featured speaker was Brian Drayton, a New England Friend in the liberal unprogrammed tradition who's been doing a lot of good work around reclaiming traditionally-minded Quaker ministry (at least that's how I'd pigeon-hole him from afar, I've never actually met him!).

I've long noticed there are few active, online peace sites or communities that have the grassroots depth I see occurring elsewhere on the net. It's a problem for Nonviolence.org, as it makes it harder to find a diversity of stories. I have two types of sources for "Nonviolence.org":www.nonviolence.org. h4. The first is mainstream news I search through "Google News":http://news.google.com, "Technorati current events":http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/currentevents.html, then maybe "The New York Times":www.nytimes.com, "The Guardian":http://www.guardian.co.uk/, and "The Washington Post":http://www.washingtonpost.com/. There are lots of interesting articles on the war in iraq, but there's always a political spin somewhere, especially in timing. Most big news stories have broken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months later (e.g., Wilson's CIA wife being exposed, which was first reported on Nonviolence.org on July 22 but became headlines in early October). These news cycles are driven by domestic party politics, and at times I feel all my links make Nonviolence.org sound like an apparatchik of the Democratic Party USA. But it's not just the tone that makes mainstream news articles a problem--it's also the general subject matter. There's a lot more to nonviolence than antiwar exposes, yet the news rarely covers anything about the culture of peace. "If it bleeds it leads" is an old newspaper slogan and you will never learn about the wider scope of nonviolence by reading the papers. h4. My second source is peace movement websites And these are, by-and-large, uninteresting. Often they're not updated frequently. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shallow. You'll see the self-serving press release ("as a peace organization we protest war actions") and you'll see the exclamatory all-caps screed ("eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!"). These are fine as long as you're already a member of said organization or already have decided you're against the war, but there's little persuasion or dialogue possible in this style of writing and organizing. There are few people in the larger peace movement who regularly write pieces that are interesting to those outside our narrow circles. "David McReynolds":http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php and "Geov Parrish":http://www.workingforchange.com/column_lst.cfm?AuthrId=25 are two of those exceptions. It takes an ability to sometimes question your own group's consensus and to acknowledge when nonviolence orthodoxy sometimes just doesn't have an answer. And what of peace bloggers? I really admire "Joshua Micah Marshall":http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/, but he's not a pacifist. There's the excellent "Gutless Pacifist":http://www.gutlesspacifist.com/ (who's led me to some very interesting websites over the last year), "Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve":http://b-c.blogspot.com/, "Stand Down/No War Blog":http://www.nowarblog.org/ and a new one for me, "The Picket Line":http://www.sniggle.net/experiment/. But most of us are all pointing to the same mainstream news articles, with the same iraq War focus. If the web had started in the early 1970s, there would have been lots of interesting publishing projects and blogs growing out the activist communities. Younger people today are using the internet to sponsor interesting gatherings and using sites like Meetup to build connections, but I don't see communities built around peace the way they did in the early 1970s. There are few people building a life--hope, friends, work--around pacifism. Has "pacifism" become ossified as its own in-group dogma of a certain generation of activists? What links can we build with current movements? How can we deepen and expand what we mean by nonviolence so that it relates to the world outside our tiny organizations

Observations on the first Philadelphia Indie Allies Meetup. "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."

The informal network of younger Evangelical Christians centered around websites like theooze.com and JordanCooper.sk.ca has started sponsoring a monthly Indie Allies Meetup of "Independent Christian Thinkers." Unlike previous months, there were enough people signed up for the October meeting in the Philadelphia area to hold a "meetup," so two days ago Julie & I found ourselves in a Center City pizza shop with five other "Indie Allies."

According to Robert E. Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, I fall pretty squarely into the "Post Liberal" category, a la Stanley Hauerwas. While it's always dangerous labeling others, I think at least some of the other participants would be comfortable enough with the "Post Evangelical" label (the one pastor among us said that if I read Webber's book I'd know where he's coming from). One participant was from the Circle church Julie & I attended last First Day.

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.

The conversation was really interesting. After all my Quaker work, it's always amazing to find other people my age who actually think hard about faith and who are willing to build their life around it. There were times where I think we needed to translate ourselves and times where we tried to map out shared connections (i.e., Richard Foster was the known famous Quaker, I should read him if only to be able to discuss his relationship to Conservative and Liberal Friends).

It was really good to get outside of Quakerism and to hear the language and issues of others. One important lesson is that some of the strong opinions I've developed in response to Quaker culture need to be unlearned. The best example was social action. As I've written before on the website, I think the Friends peace testimony has become largely secularized and that social action has become a substitute for expressed and lived communal faith. Yet my Meetup cohorts were excited to become involved in social action. Their Evangelical background had dismissed good works as unnecessary--faith being the be-all--and now they wanted to get involved in the world. But I very much suspect that their good works would be rooted in faith to a degree that a lot of contemporary Quaker activist projects aren't. I need to remind myself that social witness (even my own) can be fine if truly spirit-led.

Committed religious people switching churches often bring with them the baggage of their frustrations with the first church and this unresolved anger often gets in the way of keeping true to God's call. Even though I'm not leaving Quakerism I have to identify and name my own frustrations so that they don't get in the way. Hanging out with other "Independent Christian Thinkers" is a way of keeping some perspective, of remembering that Post-Liberal is not exactly anti-Liberal.

Recommended I check out: N.T. Wright, at allelon.net. I just saw him referenced as a personal friend of some of the Republican party leadership in Congress, so this should be interesting.

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?