philadelphia area Posts

I've been lucky enough to have two houseguests this week: Micah Bales and Faith Kelley (no relation). They've come up to the Philadelphia area to help publicize a gathering of young adult Friends that will take place in Wichita in a few months. Before they left, I got them to share their excitement for the conference in front of my webcam.

Interview with Faith Kelley & Micah Bales, two of the organizers of the upcoming young adult Friends conference in Wichita Kansas.

FAITH: This is an invitation for a gathering for young adult Friends ages 18-35 from all the branches of the Religious Society of Friends from all across the continent. It's going to be in Wichita Kansas from May 28-31. It's a time to get together and learn about each other, to hear each other's stories and worship together. We're really excited by this opportunity to have people who have never been to these before and to have people who have been to other gatherings to come back.

MICAH: A lot of the advance material is already up online so you can get a good idea what this conference is going to be about and to get a sense of how to prepare yourself for a gathering like this. We'll be getting together with folks from all over the country, Canada and Mexico--we're hoping a lot of Hispanic Friends show up and we've already translated the website into Spanish. Registration is set up already; early registration goes until April 15. Airfare to Wichita is looking pretty good at the moment; if you register early you're likely to get a fairly decent plane ticket out.

FAITH: We're hoping people will choose to carpool together. So get organized, register early and look at the advance materials online.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
2010 Young Adult Friends Conference

The most excellent Peggy Senger Parsons of Oregon's Freedom Friends Church emailed me today saying she and the equally excellent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a workshop at the Philadelphia area Pendle Hill Retreat Center from 3/27-29. These two were crossing theological boundaries and pioneering the Convergent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twitter & Facebook. The workshop is called "Are we still a dangerous people?" and as rocking as that sounds, I'd be willing to listen to these two read the Salem, Oregon phone book for a weekend. If you have a pillow stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for commuters) then you should definitely try to make it (unfortunately I don't have a lumpy pillowcase and can't afford to take another three days off).

Peggy wrote that she wants to make herself "available for the Saturday afternoon free time for a conversation with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the party." That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some childcare schedules, I'll try to make that. That would be Saturday the 28th from 1:00-3:30pm.

• Peggy's blog post about the workshop
• QuakerQuaker Events listing
• Pendle Hill's listing

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.

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!

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.

Not really news, but Friends United Meeting recently dedicated their new Welcome Center in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On September 15, 2007, FUM dedicated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Bookstore as the new FUM Welcome Center. The Welcome Center contains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of during business hours. Tables and chairs to comfortably accommodate 50 people make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meetings, anniversary/birthday parties, etc. Reduced prices are available for churches.

Most Quaker publishers and booksellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pendle Hill bookstore and publishing operation, the AFSC Bookstore in Southern California, Barclay Press in Oregon. The veritable Friends Bookshop in London farmed out its mail order business a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a coffeebar: popular and cool I'm sure, but does London really needs another place to buy coffee? Rumor has it that Britain's publications committee has been laid down. The official spin is usually that the work continues in a different form but only Barclay Press has been reborn as something really cool. One of the few remaining booksellers is my old pals at FGC's QuakerBooks: still selling good books but I'm worried that so much of Quaker publishing is now in one basket and I'd be more confident if their website showed more signs of activity.

The boards making these decisions to scale back or close are probably unaware that they're part of a larger trend. They probably think they're responding to unique situations (the peer group Quakers Uniting in Publications sends internal emails around but hasn't done much to publicize this story outside of its membership). It's sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bodies have independently decided that publishing is not an essential part of their mission.

I usually skip out on meme games but I thought I'd try out Jeanne's class one. Bold are the privileges I can claim from my youth, italics are ones that I'm unsure of or that are more "yes but" kind of privileges. My mom's Lutheran pride kept her from wanting us to look or feel poor. Yes, I didn't have second-hand clothes but the rich kids often did. While they might wear scrubs from their parent's doctor practice or vintage clothes scored from a thrift-store outing, I was in striped button-down shirts from the respectable department store whose teen department was always empty of teen customers. Yes, respectable people on TV sound like me but that's because my mom dropped her childhood Pennsylvania Dutch accent and was hyper-aware of non-standard accents (a trait I've unfortunately picked up, I correct/mock Julie's "wooder" pronunciation for water before I can even think about it, it's like I have a very specificTourettes Syndrome that only applies to non-standard accents). Julie tallied up and commented on the quiz here in Jeanne's comments. It's fascinating to realize that although I grew up significantly poorer and have less than half Julie's "steps" she's much more culturally working class than I'll ever be.

Father went to college (he was secretive about past, he might have done a semester at St Joe's)
Father finished college
Mother went to college (two year secretarial program)
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (because we're good assimilationists)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Had to take out less than $5000 in student loans in order to go to college
Didn't need student loans to go to college out of high school
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp (day camp at the Y for a few summers)
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (pride kept us out of second-hand stores until we later crossed that class boundary where thrifting is cool precisely because its not a necessity)
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child (I was the only child at home after age 7)
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (my mom thought they were cheating)
Had your own TV in your room in High School (mostly as monitor for Radio Shack Color Computer she bought me junior year of high school)
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (we were more zoo/county fair/Independence Hall tour types (hey, they're all free/low-cost!))
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (n/a: included in apt rent, besides my mom would never let on that things were tight)

A list like this can never be all inclusive but it seems there are some big omissions. Where's anything about family structure and finances, like "You had two parental figures living in your house" and "Both parents contributed to family income" or "One parent stayed home or worked part-time"? In my own instance, my father had a secret other family and never paid for anything other than the occasional trip to Roy Rogers (secret family to "Little Marty" at least, the women and older children presumably noitced he was only around half the time and constructed some mental run-around to explain it away).

The other omission is social networks. I have no memory of family friends. I cannot name one friend of my father and my mother's friends were limited to a handful of "girls" at the office. By the time I got to high school I started to see how certain classmates were able to work the system to get the best teachers and classes and this was mostly accomplished by parents swapping notes after Hewbrew class or at church or at hockey practice. Friends are rightly noted for the strength of their social networks and I suspect these provide a social privilege that is far more valuable than parental salary.

Jeanne promises to write a part two to her post explaining what this all means to Friends. I'm looking forward to it though I'm unsure just what easy generalization can be made if we're looking at origins. One of the few surveys trying to be comprehensive found Philadelphia-area Friends don't reflect American averages yet for many convinced Friends our participation has mirrored (and perhaps been unconsciously motivated by) an upward class mobility. Keep an eye on Social Class & Quakers for more!