sponsoring Posts

Just the quickest of posts to announce that Quaker Gatherings are now being covered on QuakerQuaker. Each event page tries to list all blog posts that refer to the event in question.

Past events covered: February's Young Adult Friends Gathering in New Jersey and FUM Board Meeting in Kenya, and the Quaker Heritage Day in Berkeley California last week. Upcoming events are FWCC Americas Meeting in Rhode Island (it includes a panel on Convergent Friends featuring Robin M and C Wess Daniels, May's Britain Yearly Meeting Sessions that will feature an official blog, and this summer's FGC Gathering whose damnably attractive advance program went up today.

I'm pretty excited by this development, which is really just a reflection of the growth of Quaker blogging. Too much of the public news from Quaker events has been barely-conceal boosterism, a publicity fluff piece for the sponsoring organization. In other words: dull and trite. The growing Quaker blog culture is very different from that of mainline Quaker institutions. There's a much greater transparency and openness and less of a sense that we have to identify and defend a particular Quaker tradition. We're much more willing to tell stories and wrestle with controversies.

Quaker events (at least in networked North America) are now being covered online in real time with more depth and opinion that we've previously seen. I think this is a good kick-in-the-pants for the bureaucratic dinosaurs of institutional Quakerism and an exciting opportunity for getting new voices and opinions heard.

As I see events unfolding in the Quakerosphere, I'll add more pages. They won't be limited to U.S. and British events except that we seem to be dominating this realm still. If too many events start being covered (which is only a matter of time) I'll have to figure out some way of breaking them down more.

In the news:  more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:

As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren't being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a "surge") of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?

Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he's fumbled this whole war?

Those Quaker Ranters readers who are coming to the FGC Gathering but haven't lost internet access yet might be interested in some of the events the Advancement & Outreach committee is sponsoring over the week. There will be a flyer in the registration packets (all these events will take place in Admin 203). For those not coming, I suspect I'll have some sort of Gathering round-up post at some point after it's all done. I'm also co-hosting a Monday night interest group with LizOpp and Robin: "On Fire! Renewing Quakerism through a Convergence of Friends." For details, see Liz's post or Robin's post.

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The FGC Advancement and Outreach committee is sponsoring afternoon events during four days of Gathering. Come share your outreach ideas, learn about FGC and support the growth of Quakerism!

All Friends Welcome, 1:30-3:00

Monday: "What Do Quakers Believe?" Come talk about the range of Quaker beliefs, from Robert Barclay to the present day, and explore what binds us together as Friends. Convened by Deborah Haines.

Wednesday: A special welcome to Friends from Pacific, North Pacific and Intermountain Yearly Meetings. Come talk about the spirit, concerns, and Quaker ways of these three independent yearly meetings.

Thursday: Visitors from Freedom Friends Church will join us to talk about the witness of this unique independent evangelical Friends Church.

Outreach Hours, 3:15-4:15

Sunday: Visibility. Interested in publicizing your meeting and getting the Quaker message out into your community? Friends are invited to come share their stories and questions and pick up a free copy of our "Inreach-Outreach Packet for Small Meetings." Jane Berger will host.

Monday: Isolated Friends & New Worship Groups. Learn about FGC's new service for Friends and seekers who live far from any meeting or worship group. Are you interested in helping to nurture new worship groups? Come find out what resources are available from the FGC Advancement Committee, and share your stories and ideas.

Wednesday: Friends interested in affiliation. FGC is an association of 14 yearly meetings and regional groups and 9 directly affiliated monthly meetings. A&O clerk Deborah Haines will talk about the work of FGC and the benefits of affiliation.

Thursday: Spiritual Hospitality. It's easy to feel isolated even within a local meeting. A&O coordinator Martin Kelley will talk about some strategies to overcome the isolations of age, theology, race, lifestyle, etc. What can meetings do to help these Friends not feel isolated?

This past weekend I took part in a "Youth Ministries Consultation" sponsored by Friends General Conference. Thirty Friends, most under the age of 35, came together to talk about their experience of Quakerism.

Burning up the blogosphere is a post and discussion on Michael J Totten's site about the "Workers World Party and International ANSWeR":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000131.html. He calls them "the new skinheads" (huh?), but his critique of these organizations and the "unconditional support" they give to anti-U.S. fascists the world over is valid. As a pacifist it's often a tough balancing act to try to remain a steady voice for peace: this spring we were trying to simultaneously critiquing both Saddam Hussein and U.S. war plans against iraq. Both left and right denounce pacifists for this insistence on consistency, but that's okay: it is these times when nonviolent activists have the most to contribute to the larger societal debate. But hard-left groups like International ANSWeR refuse to draw the line and refuse to condemn the very real evil that exists in the world. International ANSWeR has sponsored big anti-war rallies over the last year, but anti-war is not necessarily pro-nonviolence. Many of the participants at the rallies would never support International ANSWeR's larger agenda, but go because it's a peace rally, shrugging off the politics of the sponsoring group. I suspect that International ANSWeR's support base would disappear pretty quickly if they started rallying on other issues. International ANSWeR just had another rally last weekend but you didn't see it listed here on Nonviolence.org. Other peace groups co-sponsored it, echoing the All-caps/exclamation style of organizing. It's very strange to go the site of "United for peace," a coalition of peace groups, and look down the list of its next three events: "Stop the Wall!," "Stop the FTAA!, "Shut Down the School of the Americas" When did pacifism become shouting for attention alongside the Workers World Party? Why are we all about stopping this and shutting down that?

Context and observations arising from my Nonviolence.org post, Where is the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement? A comparison of 1970s peace culture with today's emergent church culture, with observations and cautions for contemporary Quaker peace networks.

Over on Nonviolence.org, I've posted something I originally started writing for my personal site: Where is the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement?. It asks why there's no the kind of young, grassroots culture around peace like the networks that I see "elsewhere on the net."

The piece speaks for itself but there is one point of context and a few observations to make. The first is that the grassroots culture I was thinking of when I wrote the piece was the "emergent church," "young evangelical" movement. Thirty years ago the kids I've met at Circle of Hope, a Philadelphia "emergent church" loosely affiliated with the Brethren could easily have been at a Movement for New Society* training: the culture, the interests, the demographics are all strikingly similar.

(MNS was a national but West Philly-centered network of group houses, publications, and organizing that forged the identities of many of the twenty-somethings who participated; Nonviolence.org is arguably a third-generation descendant of MNS, via New Society Publishers where I worked for six years).

The observation for Friends is that retro-organizing like the relatively-new "Pendle Hill Peace Network" [website URL long since dropped & picked up by spammer] will have a really hard time acting as any sort of outreach project to twenty-somethings (a main goal according to a talk given my monthly meeting by its director). The grassroots peace-centric communities that were thriving when the Network sponsors were in their twenties don't exist anymore. Rather predictably, the photographs of the next two dozen speakers for the Pendle Hill Peacebuilding Forum series show only one who might be under forty (maybe, and she's from an exotic locale which is why she gets in). I'm glad that a generation of sixty-something Quaker activists are guaranteed steady employment, but don't any Quaker institutions think there's one American activist under forty worth listening to?

I think the best description of this phenomenon comes from the military. They call it "incestuous amplification" and define it as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lockstep agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation." I suspect that peace activists are so worried about their own relevancy that they have a hard time recognizing new peers or changed circumstances.

These numbers and the lack of speaker diversity explain why I rarely even bother with Quaker peace conferences anymore. I wouldn't mind being overlooked in my peace ministry if I saw other activists my age being recognized. But I can't take my invisibility as feedback since it's clearly not about me or my work. The homogeneity of the speakers lists at most conferences sends a clear message that younger people aren't wanted except as passive audience members clapping for the inspiring fifty- to seventy-somethings on stage. How much of current retro peace organizing is just self-stroking Boomer fantasy?

The in-group incestuousness has created a generation gap of relevancy. When institutions and movements become myopic, they become irrelevant to those locked outside. We have to go elsewhere to build our identities.

The internet is one place to go. From there it's clear that the institutional projects don't have the "buzz," i.e., the support and excitment, that the Gen-X led projects do. The internet alone won't save us: there's only so much culture one can build online and computer-mediated discussions favor argumentation, rationality, and ideological correctness. But it's one of the few venues open to outsiders without cash or institutional clout.

But what about the content of a twenty-first century twenty-something peace movement?

Many of today's twenty-something Quakers were raised up as secular peace activists. Our religious education programs often de-emphasize controversial issues of faith and belief to focus on the peace testimony as the unifying Quaker value. Going to protests is literally part of the curriculum of many Young Friends programs. Even more of a problem, older Friends are often afraid to share their faith plainly and fully with younger Friends on a one-on-one basis. The practice of personal and Meeting-based spritual mentorship that once transmitted Friends values between generations is very under-utilized today.

Almost all of these Friends stop participating in Quakerism as they enter their twenties, coming back only occasionally for reunion-type gatherings. Many of these lapsed Friends are out exploring alternative spiritual traditions that more clearly articulate a faith that can give meaning and purpose to social action. I have friends in this lost Quaker generation that are going to Buddhist temples, practicing yoga spirituality, building sweat lodges and joining evangelical or Roman Catholic churches. Will they really be won back with another lecture series? What would happen if we Friends started articulating the deep faith roots of our own peace testimony? What if we started testifying to one another about that great Power that's taken away occasion for war, what if our testimony became a witness to our faith?

Why are a lot of the more thoughtful under-40s going to alternative churches and what are they hoping to find there?

Don't get me wrong: I hope these new peace initiatives do well and help to build a thriving twenty-something activist scene again. It's just that for fifteen years I've seen a sucession of projects aimed at twenty-somethings come and go, failing to ignite sustaining interest. I worry that things won't change until sponsoring organizations seriously start including younger people in the decision-making process from their inception and start recognizing that our focus might be radically different.

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Postscript

The idea of younger Friends actually taking leadership and starting a major peace initiative is not theoretical. My Nonviolence.org project is Google's top-ranked source for "nonviolence" and "Iraq anti-war" organizing, with thousands of visitors every day (over a million a year). It's been operating continuously since 1995, bringing up-to-date news and commentary about the peace movement, winning awards and getting write-ups in the top national papers. It is largely self-funded through my sucession of Quaker day jobs.

UPDATE: The Pendle Hill Peace Network was laid down in late 2005. The cited reason was "budgetary constraints," an empty excuse that sidesteps any responsibility for examining vision, inclusion or implimentation. It's forum is now an advertising stage for "free mature porn pics." It's very sad and there's no joy in saying "I told you so."

I share some observations about the different way institutional and outsider Friends use the internet in How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.

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.