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Warning: this is a blog post about blogging.

A busy Quaker week. On Tuesday I heard North Carolina Friend Betsy Blake give a talk called "He Lives" at Pendle Hill, the story of how "Jesus has been her rock" to quote from the program description. It was a great talk and very well received.

Betsy is a graduate of the Quaker program at Guilford (so she was a good followup for Max Carter's talk this weekend) and she helped organize the World Gathering of Young Friends a few years ago. The talk was recorded and should be up on the Pendle Hill shortly (I'll add a link when it is) so I'll not try to be comprehensive but just share a few of my impressions.

Betsy is the kind of person that can just come under the radar. She starts telling stories, funny and poignant by turn, each one a Betsy story that you take on its own merits. It's only at the end of the hour that you fully realize she's been testifying to the presence of Jesus in her life in all this time. Real-life sightings, comforting hands on shoulders family tragedy, intellectual doubts and expanded spiritual connections all come together like different sides of the elephant.

One theme that came up a few times in the question-and-answer section is the feeling of a kind of spiritual tiredness--a fatigue from running the same old debates over and over. It's an exhaustion that squelches curiosity about other Friends and sometimes moves us to follow the easy path in times of conflict rather than the time-consuming & difficult path that might be the one we need to be on.

The last time I was in the Pendle Hill barn it was to listen to Shane Claiborne. I'm one of those odd people that don't think he's a very good speaker for liberal Quakers. He downplays the religious instruction he received as a child to emphasize the progressive spiritual smörgåsbord of his adulthood without ever quite realizing (I think) that this early education gave him the language and vocabulary to ground his current spiritual travels. Those who grow up in liberal Quaker meetings generally start with the dabbling; their challenge is to find a way to go deeper into a specific spiritual practice, something that can't be done on weekend trips to cool spiritual destinations.

Betsy brought an appreciation for her grounded Christian upbringing that I thought was a more powerful message. She talked about how her mom was raised in a tradition that could talk of darkness. When a family member died and doubt of God naturally followed, her mother was able to remind her that God had healed the beloved sister, only "not in the way we wanted." Powerful stuff.

The sounds at Pendle Hill were fascinating: the sound of knitting needles was a gentle click-clack through the time. And one annoying speaker rose at one point with an annoying sermonette that I realized was a modern-day version of Quaker singsong (liberal Friend edition), complete with dramatic pauses and over-melodious delivery. Funny to realize it exists in such an unlikely place!

And a plug that the Tuesday night speaker's series continues with some great Friends coming up, with North Carolina's Lloyd Lee Wilson at bat for next week. Hey, and I'll be there with Wess Daniels this May to lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends."

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.

"Ethnographic Study Looks at Gossip in the Workplace" in the NYTimes:

The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.

Some interesting here. They say gossip usually spirals down until someone intervenes to defend or deflect. In one school, gossip set up rival camps; teachers eventually left and student test scores fell.

Friends (and Christians more generally) are officially against gossip, though of course we're not immune and I've seen it act as almost a kind of currency in some settings. But what are the classic Quaker tools for deflecting this natural human tendency and keeping our communities from the downward spirals of camp building?

In Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he looks into the meaning of the word free. The word has two meanings: free as in "freedom" and free as in "price." Most of the romance languages divide these meanings into two different words, derived from liber and gratiis. Our double-duty English word comes from Old English freon or freogan, meaning "to free, love." In addition to free, this word also gave us our word friend. Anderson quotes etymologist Douglas Harper:

The primary sense seems to have been "beloved, friend"; which in some languages (notably Germanic and Celtic) developed a sense of "free," perhaps from the terms "beloved" or "friend" being applied to the free members of one's clan (as opposed to slaves). (P. 18)

This double-meaning of beloved and free made friend the perfect word for the early translators of the English bible when they got to John 15, where Jesus says:

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and [that] your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that ye love one another.

This was a favorite verse of a bunch of spiritual trouble-makers in England in mid-1600s, who liked it so much they started calling one another Friends. They were a new brother- and sister-hood of beloveds, newly freed of the tyrants of their age by their personal experience of Christ as friend, spreading the good news that we were all free and all commanded to love one another.

Mark Franek, a teacher with Friend School connections, recently wrote an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor called "Bring integrity to the Internet." Here's a taste:

The Internet, led by the pervasive power of Google's ranking system, has become an extension of your résumé. And here's the real kicker: When thwarted by a webmaster who refuses to give ground, an average citizen can have a very hard time getting links that lead to offensive material off the first page of Google's search results.

The stories are interesting to me as a fan of user-generated content. I love how the internet is empowering grassroots fact-checking and starting to allow for a distribution of information that is bringing transparency to some stubborn institutions.

Mark is a great writer and I've long enjoyed his blog. He's a public persona, a journalist and educator and he's not afraid of voicing strong opinions. So how can he protect his reputation? The most effective way is to be online in many different types of settings so that when your name goes into Google, people are seeing your content. Web 2.0 profile-based services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are giving us online footprints that rank high and solidify our online presence. When people ask why we should be on all of these different services, one good answer is that we're protecting our reputations.

I'll try to return to this soon in a more technical way over on my Martin Kelley consulting site.

Over the QuakerQuaker forum, a new blogger asked "I am new at blogging. Do you have any suggestions for my site?" I'll cross-post my answer here.

I think the success to any kind of writing is to first and foremost write about what interests you. Don't worry about whether there's an audience or not: with millions of people on the internet every day there's bound to be plenty of others who share your interests. Don't be afraid to be personal, quirky and idiosyncratic, as people come to blogs looking for personality.

The most interesting blogs have an intimacy and honesty to them. My blog posts are the kind of discussions I would have around my dining room table. Friends have a tendency to downplay our opinions in public settings. The Quaker blogs have given us a place to be respectfully honest, open and inquisitive. That openness has led many of us into surprising friendships.

I'd also recommend that you keep your blog open to development. I was four months into my QuakerRanter blog before I had the first post that I would now consider a "typical" QuakerRanter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you're comfortable in and many people find themselves interested in different topics than they initially imagined. Blogs often end up being very different than the one they thought they were starting! Most blogs last about two months and are abandoned: if you're blogging because you think you should be, then the motivation won't be enough to sustain you over the long term.

Finally, blogs are social. They're conversation. Encourage conversation on your blog. Respond to comments, on the blog and also in direct emails if people have provided them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and read them and comment on thoughtful posts. Get to know people and try to attend the events we're now listing here on QuakerQuaker. About half of my QuakerQuaker time is actually private emails and IM conversations with Friends and the comments I leave on blogs (some Quaker, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It's a social medium and the public blog is just one piece of that.

I'd love to hear what advice others have, either here on Quaker Ranter or over on the Forum post.