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.

Con­formed to the World

The issue that spoke most strongly this week­end was the expe­ri­ence of not being known. Young and old we longed for a nam­ing & nur­tur­ing of gifts. We longed to be seen as mem­bers one of another. Early on a young Friend from a well-known fam­ily said she often felt she was seen as her mother’s daugh­ter or con­fused with cousins and aunts. Another Friend with pedi­gree com­plained that as a young per­son inter­ested in Quak­erism he was seen by nom­i­nat­ing com­mit­tees as a generic “Young Friend” who could be slot­ted into any com­mit­tee as its token youth rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Another young Friend agreed that, yes, there is “affir­ma­tive action for young Friends.”

Affir­ma­tive action?!? For young Friends?? At this state­ment my jaw dropped. Through­out most of my time as a twenty– and thirty-something Friend I have felt almost com­pletely invis­i­ble. I’d have to walk on water to be named to a com­mit­tee by my yearly meet­ing (only in the last year has a yearly meet­ing nom­i­nat­ing committee-member approached me). I can get pro­filed in the New York Times for my peace work but request as I try I can’t even get on the mail­ing list for my yearly meeting’s peace committee!

And yet the deeper issue is the same for me and the annointed young Friends: we are seen not as our­selves but in rela­tion (or non-relation) to other Friends. We are all tokens. As a small group of us met to talk about the issue of gift-naming, we real­ized the prob­lem wasn’t just lim­ited to those under forty. Even older Friends longed to be part of meet­ings that would know us, meet­ings that would see beyond our most obvi­ous skins of age, race and birth fam­ily to our deeper, ever-changing and refresh­ing souls. We all long for oth­ers to give nur­tur­ing guid­ance and lov­ing over­sight to that deep­est part of our­selves! How we long to whis­per, sing and shout to one another about the Spirit’s move­ment inside us. We all long for a reli­gious soci­ety where expec­ta­tions aren’t lim­ited by our out­ward differences.

This isn’t about fill­ing com­mit­tees and find­ing clerks. What if we could go beyond the super­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ties of nice­ness main­tained in so many Meet­ings to find some­thing more real–a “cap­i­tal ‘C’ Com­mu­nity” as one Friend put it? This is about liv­ing that beloved Com­mu­nity. Con­sul­ta­tions and pro­grams are easy but the hard work is chang­ing atti­tudes and chang­ing our expec­ta­tions of one another, expec­ta­tions that keep us from hav­ing to get to know one another.

One Body in Christ

As the con­sul­ta­tion wrapped up we were given an overview of the next steps: set­ting up com­mit­tees, doing fundrais­ing, sup­port­ing iden­ti­fied youth work. It’s all fine and good but it was a pretty generic list of next-steps that could have been gen­er­ated even before the meet­ing.
Caught up in the idea of a “youth min­istries pro­gram” are assump­tions that the prob­lem is with the youth and that the solu­tion will come through some sort of pro­gram­ming. I don’t think either premise is accu­rate. The real change needs to be cul­tural and it needs to extend far past youth. Even most of the older Friends at the con­sul­ta­tion saw that. But will they bring it back to the larger orga­ni­za­tion? Last Novem­ber I shared some con­cerns about the Youth Min­istries ini­ta­tive with its orga­niz­ing committee:

I haven’t heard any apol­o­giz­ing from older Friends for the neglect and invis­i­bil­ity that they’ve given my gen­er­a­tion. I haven’t heard any­one talk about address­ing the issues of Quaker ageism or the the cul­ture of FGC insti­tu­tional nepo­tism. At [the FGC gov­ern­ing board’s annual meet­ing] I heard a state­ment that a youth min­istries pro­gram would be built on the ongo­ing work of half-a-dozen listed com­mit­tees, most of which I know haven’t done any­thing for youth ministries.

The point was hit home by an older Friend at the con­sul­ta­tion dur­ing a small-group break­out. He explained the all-too-familiar ratio­nale for why we should sup­port youth: “because they are an invest­ment in our future, they’re our lead­er­ship twenty and thirty years from now.” I sus­pect that a num­ber of Friends on gov­ern­ing boards–not just of FGC but of our ser­vice pro­grams and yearly meetings–look at “youth min­istries” in a similarly-condescending, dis­mis­sive way, as invest­ment work in the future. Why else would younger Friends be so under-represented in most Quaker com­mit­tees and pro­gram work?

The prob­lems tran­scend Quaker insti­tu­tions. But Friends Gen­eral Con­fer­ence is in a par­tic­u­larly good posi­tion to model the work. Will FGC cre­ate a youth min­istries ghetto or will it do the hard work of inte­grat­ing its com­mit­tees? Will it finally start spon­sor­ing young min­is­ters in its Trav­el­ing Min­istries pro­gram? Will FGC ini­ti­ate out­reach efforts specif­i­cally tar­geted at 20-somethings (the demo­graphic of the great major­ity of seek­ers who come to our doors)? Will there ever be a Friend under thirty-five invited to give a major Gath­er­ing ple­nary talk?

Trans­formed by the Renew­ing of Our Minds

The con­sul­ta­tion was just 30 Friends. Most of the most excit­ing young Friends I know weren’t even invited and really couldn’t be with such a lim­ited atten­dance cap. One older Friend tried to sum up the week­end by say­ing it was the start of some­thing impor­tant, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s really only another step along the way, the con­tin­u­a­tion of work that’s been going on for 100 years, 350 years, 2000 years or more depend­ing on your frame of ref­er­ence. This is work that will con­tinue to be done over the course of gen­er­a­tions, in hun­dreds of meet­ing­houses and it will involve every­one in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends in one way or another.

Lurk­ing unnamed in the back­ground of the Youth Min­istries Con­sul­ta­tion is the pop­u­lar “Quaker” sweat lodge, which became so pop­u­lar pre­cisely because it was partly orga­nized by young Friends, gave them real lead­er­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties and knew–knew with a cer­tainty–that they could expe­ri­ence the divine and share that expe­ri­ence with their peers. If FGC’s pro­grams can’t match those cri­te­ria, then FGC will suf­fer the loss of yet another gen­er­a­tion.
What was impor­tant to me were the trends rep­re­sented. There was a def­i­nite inter­est in get­ting more deeply involved in Quak­erism and in explor­ing the reli­gious side of this Soci­ety of Friends.

Grace Given Us

One strug­gle we’re going to con­tinue to have is with lan­guage. For one small-group break­out, the orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee broke issues down by top­ics. One was dubbed “Lead­er­ship Train­ing.” With that moniker it was surely going to focus on some sort of delim­ited, secular–and quite frankly boring–program that would be based on an orga­ni­za­tional design model. It wasn’t the con­cern I had heard raised so I asked if we could rename it to a “nam­ing of gifts” group; thank­fully the sug­ges­tion was eagerly accepted. Renam­ing it helped ground it and gave the small group that gath­ered per­mis­sion to look at the deeper issues involved. No one in our small group pointed out that our dis­cus­sion uncon­sciously echoed Paul’s let­ter to the Romans:

Do not be con­formed to this world, but be trans­formed by the renew­ing of your minds, so that you may dis­cern what is the will of God–what is good and accept­able and per­fect… For as in one body we have many mem­bers, and not all the mem­bers have the same func­tion, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and indi­vid­u­ally we are mem­bers one of another. We have gifts that dif­fer accord­ing to the grace given to us. Romans 12.

This uncon­scious Chris­tian­ity is very strong among our branch of Quak­ers. As our small group dis­cussed nam­ing of gifts we turned to the roles of our monthly meet­ings and started label­ing their func­tions. As the mis­sion state­ment was worked out point by point, I noticed we were recre­at­ing gospel order. I sug­gested that one was to “for­give each other our tres­passes,” which was an idea the small group liked. Even so, a few mem­bers didn’t want to use that language.

We were talk­ing gospel order, but with san­i­tized lan­guage; it’s an odd­ity that we mod­ern lib­eral Friends turn so often to sec­u­lar vocab­u­lary: we talk of child­hood devel­op­ment mod­els, we use orga­ni­za­tional design lingo, we speak in the Quaker committee-speak.

My feel­ing is that lib­eral Friends do want to be reli­gious. But we’ve spent a gen­er­a­tion replac­ing any word that hints of reli­gion with sec­u­lar­ized alter­na­tives and that now we often can’t think past this self-limited vocab­u­lary. One word that needs to be exer­cised more is “God.” If you want to be a mod­ern day Quaker min­is­ter, just refor­mu­late every sec­u­lar­ized Quak­er­s­peak query you see to include “God.” When Friends ask “How can my monthly meet­ing meet my needs,” nicely sug­gest that we also ask “How can my monthly meet­ing meet God’s needs.” I found myself con­stantly refor­mu­lat­ing queries over the week­end. It’s kind of odd that the word “God” has become so absent from a Peo­ple gath­ered in the knowl­edge that “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple Him­self,” but that’s the Soci­ety we’ve inher­ited and this is where our min­istry must start.

Near the end of the con­sul­ta­tion one college-age Friend explained a moment when her Quak­erism was trans­formed from out­ward iden­tity to an inward knowl­edge. “It’s my lan­guage now” she declared to us. Yes, it is. And that’s youth min­istry and elder min­istry, the good news that there’s a God we can name who will reveal what is “good and accept­able and per­fect.” That’s our work today, that is the min­istry of our ages.

More Read­ing:

FGC pub­lished a Good News Bul­letin about the Youth Min­istries Consultation.