uk news Posts

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!

Churches Retool Mission Trips - washingtonpost.com

A growing body of research questions the value of the trips abroad, which are supposed to bring hope and Christianity to the needy of the world, while offering American participants an opportunity to work in disadvantaged communities, develop relationships and charge up their faith. Critics scornfully call such trips "religious tourism" undertaken by "vacationaries."

My brand of religious don't do this kind of mission work but we are more and more enchanted with long-distance conferences. We now address every issue with a conference but do we ask any "research questions" about their effectiveness? The web is a great tool to extend the conference outward and yet, despite all the content that could be easily ported to the web, most conferences, consultations and gatherings barely exist online.

I know that real life has it's own value--I was happy to have a visit from individual traveler Micah Bales this weekend, a Friend with a great talent for the good question that stays with you long after his bus departs. I just wish I saw more media coming out of these big events, more ways to bootstrap the volumes of content produced at these events into something we can use for outreach.

If anecdotal evidence is an indication, most of the people who have come to Friends in the last half-decade first encountered us on Beliefnet, a for-profit dot-com with no connection to any Friends body. It's definitions of "Liberal Quakers" and "Orthodox Quakers" have become more important (de facto) than all of our books of Faith and Practice. Beliefnet, Wikipedia and a site called Religious Tolerance have become the definers of our faith to millions of seekers. Nothing we're doing comes close to Beliefnet.

And this is part fo the reason I've been fascinated by a Youtube video that was made this weekend. It's an introduction to "liberal Quakers" by someone who's never been to Quaker worship. While this might sound presumptuous, the real crime is that hers is the only American liberal Quaker introduction on Youtube. What the hell are we doing, Friends? I've been corresponding with the Youtuber. She's 22, a spiritual seeker who cobbled together a spirituality after following a couple of dead-end spiritual paths. She came across the Beliefnet quiz, came out a "liberal Quaker" and started looking for real world Friends. She tried the meeting in her home town but it looked deserted (!) and so started an email correspondence with a Friend she found on another meeting's website. She did the Youtube video because she couldn't find any American introductions and wanted to give back, especially to younger seekers that might not respond to a British Youtube series. Yes her video is awkward and a little sketchy on some points of liberal Quaker theology, but it's honest and doesn't contain any viewpoints you won't hear around most meetinghouses.

PS: Since writing this I've come across the first video from the just-concluded FGC Gathering. I don't know if it'll help with outreach but it is really funny. Thanks Skip, I feel like I was there! 

For those who love real-live conspiracies, there's the case of this week's three cut undersea cables.

On Wednesday the anchor of a ship off of Alexandria, Egypt, sliced through two important fiber optic internet cables that serve critical traffic between Western Europe and the Middle East and India. On Friday, a cable off Dubai was cut for still undetermined reasons, one proffered explanation being (yes) an errant anchor. One commentator called it "a national disaster," citing the almost complete loss of communication in Egypt; about 20-30% of Indian's traffic is affected. Here's a cool map of the undersea world from the Guardian.

Apparently some aren't calling these closely-time cuts such a coinkydink. The USS Jimmy Carter nuclear submarine (named after a US Navy submarine officer who later went into politics) is a spy sub specially designed with a kind of underwater "shuttle craft" perfect for installing taps. Can we add large-scale internet failure to the cost of war?

When I was about seven I wrote a school report on the Glomar Explorer, a hugely-expensive deep-sea drilling ship built by eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes to extract minerals from the ocean floor. Well, at least that was the cover story. Shortly after my report, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the real story: the Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship built to recover a sunken Soviet sub off of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean (I myself didn't learn about this until only a few years ago).

Then of course there's the true stories of the secret White House, secret Pentagon and secret Congress, three separate underground mini-cities carved inside Appalachian ridges in the 1950s to be used in case of Ruskie attack. The locations are well known now. Interesting Fact #1: if you study maps you'll see underused interstate highways leading from Washington to the secret White House and secret Pentagon, ready for quick escape. Interesting Fact #2: the secret Congress is much further away, has no mysteriously-placed highway and was unknown to most if not all members of Congress; whoops!, no legislative branch! I can't find the websites listing all this very quickly but they're there and it's all pretty much out in the open now. When looking I found Interesting Fact #3: the White House East Wing was built in WWII to hide construction of a underground bunker, the famous "War Room" fictionalized in Doctor Strangelove. Veeery interestink, mein fuhrer, I mean mein President.

For those thinking I'm just busting on the U.S., rest assured. I have one client in a Far East Asian country I won't name who can't access this website, my design site, her internet bank, or any Blogspot-hosted site because the country's leaders have put a firewall around the whole frigging country, blocking off sites they don't like!

MONDAY UPDATE: From Egypt's Ministry of Communication: "A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time." (via Jesse Robbins @ O'Reilly)

Lots of links today as I finally checked through my blogrolls!

• RobinM announces Convergent Friends' Dinner in Indiana this April 2008
  Coinciding with meeting of Friends World Committee for Consultation. "Want to come? If you're reading this, and the idea of an informal meal with Friends you've never met before sounds good to you, you're invited."
  (tags: quaker.fwcc)
• Boundless Linda on laying down her own sword
  I came to Meeting today with an angry and resentful heart and I almost didn't come. As I sat here in worship, I felt such a shift in me. I'm thinking about the sword that I am called again and again to lay down, my need to be right.
  (tags: quaker quaker.alienation)
• Fellowship Brent on pulling in newcomers
  It made me wonder how many other folks have visited Friends and wondered if somebody had forgotten their part of the program? Do we do anything to help people know what to expect? A little pamphlet on silence and worship hardly seems like enough.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• Silly Poor Peggy P with some gratitude toward the Qr blogosphere
  With out the Quaker blogosphere I would not know Robin, or the term convergent. I would not know Peterson Toscano, or Marvin Bloom. I would not have met Wess and Emily. I would not know my fellow Quaker Agitator who quits blogging more often than I post.
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs quaker.convergent)
• Kenya news from the Friends World Committee on Consultation
  Friends have been contacting the World Office asking how they can help in the current emergency, and with peace and reconciliation in the longer term.
  (tags: quaker quaker.kenya)
• Quaking Elizabeth revisits the Good Samaritan
  Sounds to me like Jesus isn't just telling us that we need to be kind and loving. Seems to me that Jesus is actively shaming our little cookie-seeking lawyer. I'm going with the shame-on-you version of the story, 'cause I like that Jesus best.
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity quaker.outreach)
• A Silly Poor Gospel: Soon and very Soon
  Peggy P has a blogger contest the week I'm too busy to surf!
  (tags: comment)
• Boundless Linda on "eco-Friendly" travel to Gathering
  We need to talk with one another, worship together, play together. Since there is such value to our gathering as Friends, shouldn't our meetings labor to support means of travel that allow us to live more fully our testimonies?
  (tags: quaker.fgc)
• Thin Place Dan on forgiveness as salvation and spiritual peace
  The doctrine of forgiveness shows up in a lot of different places. It is explicit in the Lord's Prayer, but it is also inherent in the commandments that we love our neighbors as ourselves, that we love our enemies, and that we not judge others.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry)
• Bill Clendineng on describing Meeting as a verb
  What if we reframe "meeting" as a verb? We could add a comma to the sign out front, making it "Plainfield Friends, meeting" -- as in "these are Plainfield Friends, who are meeting here." However, this would probably only confuse people more.
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach)
• Will T on prayers for Kenya
  And I think how my faithfulness to the Peace Testimony and honesty and the command to love my neighbor and to bless those who persecute me would be tested if I were to find myself in such a situation. And I pray for [those] faced with exactly that test.
  (tags: quaker quaker.kenya)
• Unafraid Angelina on the gift of Quaker diversity
  I have a large extended family, so thinking of Quakers (and more broadly, Christians) in that way is constructive for me: we don't necessarily have to agree with or like one another, but there is an imperitive to at least respect if not love one another.
  (tags: quaker quaker.convergent quaker.youth)
• Bird-dogging for peace
  Peace groups on bus caravan asking hard questions of candidates
  (tags: quaker.video quaker.witness)
• Video introductions to Friends
  An introduction to the Friends Meeting House, Watford, UK
  (tags: quaker.videos quaker.outreach)

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.

Just over the wires: Mistrial declared court-martial of war objector. Details:

A military judge declared a mistrial on Wednesday in the court-martial of a U.S. Army officer, who publicly refused to fight in Iraq and criticized the war.

It's great to see that some soldiers are seriously debating the ethics of this war.

Looking back at Friends' responses to the Christian Peacemaker hostages

When four Christian Peacemakers were taken hostage in Iraq late last November, a lot of Quaker organizations stumbled in their response. With Tom Fox we were confronted by a full-on liberal Quaker Christian witness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophetic witness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many organizations that couldn’t manage anything beyond the boilerplate social justice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in captivity but throughout the ordeal I was mad at the exposed fracture lines between religious witness and social activism.

Whenever a situation involving international issues of peace and witness happens, the Quaker institutions I'm closest to automatically defer to the more political Quaker organizations: for example, the head of Friends General Conference told staff to direct outsiders inquiring about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a committed volunteer. The American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation have knowledgeable and committed staff, but their institutional culture doesn't allow them to talk Quakerism except to say we're a nice bunch of social-justice-loving people. I appreciate that these organizations have a strong, vital identity and I accept that within those confines they do important work and employ many faithful Friends. It's just that they lack the language to explain why a grocery store employee with a love of youth religious education would go unarmed to Badgdad in the name of Christian witness.

The wider blogosphere was totally abuzz with news of Christian Peacemaker Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the topic). There were hundreds of posts and comments, including long discussions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost everyone wondered why the CPT workers were there and while the opinions weren't always friendly (the hostages were often painted as naive idealists or disingeneous terrorist sympathizers), even the doubters were motivated by a profound curiosity and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blogosphere, yet where could we find a Quaker response and explanation? The AFSC responded by publicizing the statements of moderate Muslim leaders (calling for the hostages' release; I emailed back a suggestion about listing Quaker responses but never got a reply). Friends United Meeting put together a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was targeted toward Friends. The CPT site was full of information of course, and there were plenty of stories on the lefty-leaning sites like ElectronicIraq and the UK site Ekklesia. But Friends explaining this to the world?

The Quaker bloggers did their part. On December 2 I quickly re-jiggered the technology behind QuakerQuaker.org to provide a Christian Peacemaker watch on both Nonviolence.org and QuakerQuaker (same listings, merely rebranded for slightly-separate audiences, announced on the post It's Witness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage situation and included many posts from the Quaker blogger community that had recently congealed.

But here's the interesting part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quaker blogging community. We already had gathered together as a group of Friends who were willing to write about spirituality and witness. Our conversations had been small and intimate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I sometimes get painted as some sort of fundamentalist Quaker, but the truth is that I've wanted to build a community that would wrestle with these issues, figuring the wrestling was more important than the language of the answers. I had already thought about how to encourage bloggers and knit a blogging community together and was able to use these techniques to quickly build a Quaker CPT response.

Two other Quakers who went out of their way to explain the story of Tom Fox: his personal friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethecaptivesnow.org site was put together impressively fast and contained a lot of good links to news, resources and commentary. But like me, they were over-worked bloggers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is director of Quaker House but he never said this was part of the work).

After an initial few quiet days, Tom's meeting Langley Hill put together a great website of links and news. That makes it the only official Quaker organization that pulled together a sustained campaign to support Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what's up with all this? Should we be happy that all this good work happened by volunteers? Johan Maurer has a very interesting post, Are Quakers Marginal that points to my earlier comment on the Christian Peacemakers and doubts whether our avoidance of "hireling priests" has given us a more effective voice. Let's remember that institutional Quakerism began as support of members in jail for their religious witness; among our earliest committee gatherings were meetings for sufferings--business meetings focused on publicizing the plight of the jailed and support the family and meetings left behind.

I never met Tom Fox but it's clear to me that he was an exceptional Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quaker faith and social action. Tom was a healer, a witness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I wonder if it was this very wholeness that made his work hard to categorize and support. Did he simply fall through the institutional cracks? When you play baseball on a disorganized team you miss a lot of easy catches simply because all the outfielders think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what happened? And is this what would happen again?