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The academic obsession with Quaker history is about 100 years old or so. From the beginning the rise of "Quaker history" has been tied to the arguments of the day. We want to boil "Quakerism" down to it essentials and separate out what is core from what was an artifact of 17th century England. Each branch raises up historians who argue that its churches' focus is the essential of those early Friends.

I consciously try not to use early Friends as justification. But I do use them for reference. I think a lot of the problem is we all have stereotypes about them. When I go back and read the old Books of Discipline, I find them much more nuanced and interior-focused than we give them credit for. 

Greg mentioned taverns, for example. It's not that earlier Friends thought everyone couldn't handle their liquor. They saw that some people couldn't and that spending a lot of time there tended to affect one's discernment and God-centeredness. They also saw that some people got really messed up by alcohol and eventually came to the conclusion that the safest way to protect the most vulnerable in the spiritual community was to stay out. 

The observations and logic are still valid. I've known senior members of past Quaker communities who have had alcohol problems but we don't know how to talk about it because we've decided it's a personal decision. 

What I try to do is not focus on the conclusions of early Friends but to drop into the conversations of early Friends. As I said, the old Books of Discipline are surprisingly relevant. And I love Thomas Clarkson, an Anglican who explained Quaker ways in 1700 and talked about the sociology of it more than Friends themselves did. It's a good way of separating out rules from knowledge. When we ground ourselves that way, we can more readily decide which of the classic Quaker testimonies are still relevant. That keeps us a living community testifying to the people of today. For what it's worth, there's quite a bit of mainstream interest in the stodgy traditions most of us have cast off as irrelevant....

Wess and I have often described Convergent Friends as a do-it-yourself culture. But this weekend I realized that there's something more to it. There's what you might call a "don't get stuck" ethos. 

On Saturday afternoon, the conversation turned to what our local monthly and yearly meetings aren't doing well. This is a pretty standard phase of any Quaker gathering thinking about renewal. We had asked for "signs of life" and "what does New Monasticism and Convergent Friends look like at meetings" but this quickly became talk of spiritual sickness and meetings that seemingly want to die. Fine enough, these exist and a half-session feeling sorry for ourselves might be cathartic, but I'm not sure the workshop ever fully got out of this funk. Pendle Hill was also hosting a "Grieving" workshop this weekend and I wanted to ask if all of the participants were sure they were in the right building.

Part of the shift of that amorphous group we've been calling "Convergent" is not getting stuck. We use the official structures when they're in place and healthy and helpful. When they're not we find informal ways to fill in the gaps. This has been happening for a long time in quasi-official networks, but the internet's accelerated the process by letting us find and communicate with minimal cost or organization. Most of us are working official and ad hoc techniques for spiritual nurture, oversight and pastoral care.

My guess is that this informal bootstrapping will feed back into formal process as time goes on. But more importantly, we're learning and spreading a culture of spiritual friendship and support that is flexible and spirit-led and not process-dependent. Praise God!

But let's be honest. I'm sure there are lots of people muttering "I told you so" tonight. The changes in the newspaper industry haven't been happening in secret. It's been obvious for awhile that the evolution is toward online ventures, yet the Philly.com website is just too busy and annoying for me to want to regularly use. I get a lot of my news from Twitter feeds (I follow NYTimes, CNNBrk, MSNBC and NPRNews) but when I recently checked out the PhillyInquirer, I did a pass. It was mostly sports news. I like sports sometimes but to me it's entertainment and not what I care about when I want news. How did I find out that the New York-based lenders won? From the New York Times' Twitter feed.

Is Philly news dead? Of course not. I recently helped former Inky journalist Tom Ferrick Jr put together Philadelphia Metropolis. It's not a replacement for a full newspaper, but it shows the kind of innovation that smart journalists can make even on shoestring budgets. Good articles, thought-provoking opinion pieces. New media is disrupting old media: that's a given. In an ideal world, the old guard takes their brand name and resources and mixes in vision and some good luck to make the transformation. The second-best scenario might be the suits taking over and stripping things down, making the situation clear for all involved. 

If local investors had enough cash on hand to push the bidding past $100,000 then maybe they have enough to do some outside-the-box experiments in new media journalism. 

My first reaction was "huh?" I warily responded: "you do know about FGC's Quakerfinder.org and FWCC's Meeting Map, right?" I had helped to build both sites and attested to the amount of work they represent. I was thinking of a kind way of discouraging Micah from this herculean task when he told me he and Jon were half done. He sent me the link: a beautiful website, full of cool maps, which they've now publicly announced at Quakermaps.com. I tried to find more problems but he kept answering them: "well, you need to have each meeting have it's own page," "it does," "well but to be really cool you'd have to let meetings update information directly" (an idea I suggested to FGC last month), "they will." There's still a lot of inputting to be done, but it's already fabulous.

Two people working a series of long days inputting information and embedding it on WordPress have created the coolest Meeting directory going. There's no six-figure grants from Quaker foundations, no certified programmers, no series of organizing consultations. No Salesforce account, Drupal installations, Vertical Response signups. No high paid consultants yakking in whatever consultant-speak is trendy this year.

Just two guys using open source and free, with the cost being time spent together sharing this project--time well spent building their friendship, I suspect.

I hope everyone's noticing just how cool this is--and not just the maps, but the way it's come together. Micah and Jon grew up in two different branches of Friends. As I understand they got to know each other largerly through Jon's now-famous and much-debated video Dance Party Erupts during Quaker Meeting for Worship. They built a friendship (which you can hear in Micah's recent interview of Jon) and then started a cool project to share with the world.

Convergent Friends isn't a theology or a specific group of people, but a different way of relating and working together. The way I see it, Quakermaps.com proves that QuakerQuaker.org is not a fluke. The internet exposes us to people outside our natural comfort zones and provides us ways to meet, work together and publish collaborations with minimal investment. The quick response, flexibility and off-the-clock ethos can come up with truly innovated work. I think the Religious Society of Friends is entering a new era of DIY organizing and I'm very excited. Micah and Jon FTW!

It's always fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of my blogging. Quakerranter, my "main" blog has been remarkably quiet. I'm still up to my eyeballs with blogging in general: posting things to QuakerQuaker, giving helpful comments and tips, helping others set up blogs as part of my consulting business. My Tumblr blog and Facebook and Twitter feeds all continue to be relatively active. But most of these is me giving voice to others. For two decades now, I've zigzagged between writer and publisher; lately I've been focused on the latter.

For many years I lived deeply embedded in communities they helped create. There's a recent interview with George Lakey about the founding of Movement for a New Society that he and they helped create. In the 1990s I liked to say how I lived "in its ruins," working at the publishing house, living in a coop house and getting my food from the coop that all grew out of MNS. I got to know the Willoughbys through Central Philadelphia meeting but also as friends. It was a treat to visit their house in Deptford, NJ--it adjoined a wildlife sanctuary they helped protect against the strip-mall sprawl that is the rest of that town. I last saw George a few months ago and while he had a bit of trouble remembering who I was, that irrepressible smile and spirit were very strong!

When news of George's passing started buzzing around the net I got a nice email from Howard Clark, who's been very involved with War Resisters International for many years. It was a real blast-from-the-past and reminded me how little I'm involved with all this these days. The Philadelphia office of New Society Publishers went under in 1995 and a few years ago I finally dropped the Nonviolence.org project that I had started to keep the organizing going. 

I've written before that the closest modern-day successor to the Movement for a New Society is the so-called New Monastic movement--explicitly Christian but focused on love and charity and often very Quaker'ish. Our culture of secular Quakerism has kept Friends from getting involved and sharing our decades of experience. Now that Shane Claiborne is being invited to seemingly every liberal Quaker venue, maybe it's a good opportunity to look back on our own legacy. Friends like George and Lillian invented this form. 

I miss the strong sense of community I once felt. Is there a way we can combine MNS & the "New Monastic" movement into something explicitly religious and public that might help spread the good news of the Inward Christ and inspire a new wave of lefty peacenik activism more in line with Jesus' teachings than the xenophobic crap that gets spewed by so many "Christian" activists? With that, another plug for the workshop Wess Daniels and I are doing in May at Pendle Hill: "New Monastics and Covergent Friends." If money's a problem there's still time to ask your meeting to help get you there. If that doesn't work or distance is a problem, I'm sure we'll be talking about it more here in the comments and blogs.

Update: David Alpert posted a nice remembrance of George.

Pics: George in 2002, from War Resisters International; the Golden Rule, 1959, from the Swarthmore Peace Collection. George at Fort Gulick in Panama (undated), also from Swarthmore.