Over on my design blog I’ve just posted an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tural insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ural web publicity–there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­ity. The sites do get vis­ited, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cific func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing within Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­mented on Johan Maurer’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Yearly Meeting’s report on Friends United Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuaker, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larger issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­larly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuaker link by a light­hearted call for an Inter­na­tional Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m happy to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­ity vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends United Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Yearly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tional schism? For all my bravado I’m as much an insti­tu­tional Quaker as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tional pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Yearly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my yearly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­ally pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to yearly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quaker pub­lisher com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­eral Friends’ most widely read intro­duc­tory book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication–even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quaker insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­ity to influ­ence the Quaker cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they really so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­ity of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­ity? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or campground–factor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tural forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quaker mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?