Strangely enough, the Philadel­phia Inquirer has pub­lished a front-page arti­cle on lead­er­ship in Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing, “Friends frus­trate some of their flock, Quak­ers bogged down by process, two lead­ers say”. To me it comes off as an extended whine from the for­mer PhYM Gen­eral Sec­re­tary Thomas Jeav­ons. His cri­tiques around Philadel­phia Quaker cul­ture are well-made (and well known among those who have seen his much-forwarded emails) but he doesn’t seem as insight­ful about his own fail­ings as a leader, pri­mar­ily his inabil­ity to forge con­sen­sus and build trust. He fre­quently came off as too ready to bypass rightly-ordered decision-making processes in the name of strong lead­er­ship. The more this hap­pened, the more dis­trust the body felt toward him and the more intractible and politi­cized the sit­u­a­tion became. He was the wrong leader for the wrong time. How is this wor­thy of the front-page news­pa­per status?

The “Mak­ing New Friends” out­reach cam­paign is a cen­tral exam­ple in the arti­cle. It might have been more suc­cess­ful if it had been given more sea­son­ing and if out­sider Friends had been invited to par­tic­i­pate. The cam­paign was kicked off by a sur­vey that con­firmed that the great­est threat to the future of the yearly meet­ing was “our grey­ing mem­ber­ship” and that out­reach cam­paigns “should tar­get young adult seek­ers.” I attended the yearly meet­ing ses­sion where the sur­vey was pre­sented and the cam­paign approved and while every Friend under forty had their hands raised for com­ments, none were rec­og­nized by the clerk. “Mak­ing New Friends” was the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to tap younger Friends but the work seemed designed and under­taken by the usual sus­pects in yearly meeting.

Like a lot of Quaker orga­ni­za­tions, Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing has spent the last fif­teen years largely rely­ing on a small pool of estab­lished lead­er­ship. There’s lit­tle atten­tion to lead­er­ship devel­op­ment or tap­ping the large pool of tal­ent that exists out­side of the few dozen insid­ers. This Spring Jeav­ons had an arti­cle in PYM News that talked about younger Friends that were the “future” of PYM and put the cut-off line of youthfulness/relevance at fifty! The recent polit­i­cal bat­tles within PYM seemed to be over who would be included in the insider’s club, while our real prob­lems have been a lack of trans­parency, inclu­sion and patience in our deci­sion mak­ing process.

Philadel­phia Friends cer­tainly have their lead­er­ship and author­ity prob­lems and I under­stand Jeav­ons’ frus­tra­tions. Much of his analy­sis is right. I appre­ci­ated his reg­u­larly col­umn in PYM News, which was often the only place Christ and faith was ever seri­ously dis­cussed. But his approach was too heavy handed and cor­po­rate to fit yearly meet­ing cul­ture and did lit­tle to address the long-term issues that are lap­ping up on the yearly meet­ing doorsteps.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard some very good things about the just-concluded yearly meet­ing ses­sions. I sus­pect the yearly meet­ing is actu­ally begin­ning a kind of turn-around. That would be welcome.

Don’t miss:

• The Inquirer has an inter­est­ing com­ment thread on the article
• More blog chat­ter via these tech­no­rati links: Here and here (stu­pid blog-unfriendly Inquirer URL system)