One writer’s take on G+ via +N

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One writer’s take on G+ via +N. Jeanne Burns. Makes me think I should do a bit more curat­ing os shar­ing groups: http://​inky​girl​.com/​i​n​k​y​g​i​r​l​-​m​a​i​n​/​2​0​1​1​/​7​/​9​/​w​h​y​-​i​m​-​l​o​v​i​n​g​-​g​o​o​g​l​e​-​p​e​r​s​p​e​c​t​i​v​e​-​o​f​-​a​-​w​r​i​t​e​r​-​i​l​l​u​s​t​r​a​t​o​r​-​m​u​s​.​h​tml

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Blogging for the Kingdom

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Warn­ing: this is a blog post about blogging.

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.
When I started blog­ging about Quaker issues seven years ago, I was a low-level cler­i­cal employee at an Quaker orga­ni­za­tion. It was clear I was going nowhere career-wise, which gave me a cer­tain free­dom. More impor­tantly, blogs were a nearly invis­i­ble medium, read by a self-selected group that also wanted to talk openly and hon­estly about issues. I started writ­ing about issues in among lib­eral Friends and about missed out­reach oppor­tu­ni­ties. A lot of what I said was spot on and in hind­sight, the archives give me plenty of “told you so” cred­i­bil­ity. But where’s the joy in being right about what hasn’t worked?
Things have changed over the years. One is that I’ve resigned myself to those missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Lots of Quaker money and humanly activ­ity is going into projects that don’t have God as a cen­ter. No amount of rant­ing is going to dis­suade good peo­ple from putting their faith into one more staff reor­ga­ni­za­tion, mis­sion rewrite or clever program.It’s a dis­trac­tion to spend much time wor­ry­ing about them.
But the biggest change is that my heart is squarely with God. I’m most inter­ested in shar­ing Jesus’s good news. I’m not a cheer­leader for any par­tic­u­lar human insti­tu­tion, no mat­ter how noble its inten­tions. When I talk about the good news, it’s in the con­text of 350 years of Friends’ under­stand­ing of it. But I’m well aware that there’s lots of peo­ple in our meet­ing­houses that don’t under­stand it this way any­more. And also aware that the seeker want­ing to pur­sue the Quaker way might find it more closely mod­eled in alter­na­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. There are peo­ple all over lis­ten­ing for God and I see many attempts at rein­vent­ing Quak­erism hap­pen­ing among non-Friends.
I know this obser­va­tion excites some peo­ple to indig­na­tion, but so be it: I’m trust­ing God on this one. I’m not sure why He’sgiven us a world why the com­mu­ni­ties we bring together to wor­ship Him keep get­ting dis­tracted, but that’s what we’ve got (and it’s what we’ve had for a long time). Every per­son of faith of every gen­er­a­tion has to remem­ber, re-experience and revive the mes­sage. That hap­pens in church build­ings, on street cor­ners, in liv­ing rooms, lunch lines and nowa­days on blogs and inter­net forums.We can’t get too hung up on all the ways the mes­sage is get­ting blocked. And we can’t get hung up by insist­ing on only one chan­nel of shar­ing that mes­sage. We must share the good news and trust that God will show us how to man­i­fest this in our world: his king­dom come and will be done on earth.
But what would this look like?
When I first started blog­ging there weren’t a lot of Quaker blogs and I spent a lot more time read­ing other reli­gious blogs. This was back before the emer­gent church move­ment became a wholly-ownedsubsidiaryof Zon­der­van and wasn’t dom­i­nated by hype artists (sorry, a lot of big names set off my slime-o-meter these days). There are still great blog­gers out there talk­ing about faith and read­ers want­ing to engage in this dis­cus­sion. I’ve been intrigued by the his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of Thomas Clark­son, the Angli­can who wrote about Friends from a non-Quaker per­spec­tive using non-Quaker lan­guage. And some­times I geek out and explain some Quaker point on a Quaker blog and get thanked by the author, who often is an expe­ri­enced Friend who had never been pre­sented with a clas­sic Quaker expla­na­tion on the point in ques­tion. My track­ing log shows seek­ers con­tinue to be fas­ci­nated and drawn to us for our tra­di­tional tes­ti­monies, espe­cially plainness.
I’ve put together topic lists and plans before but it’s a bit of work, maybe too much to put on top of what I do with Quak­erQuaker (plus work, plus fam­ily). There’s also ques­tions about where to blog and whether to sim­plify my blog­ging life a bit by com­bin­ing some of my blogs but that’s more logis­tics rather than vision.
Inter­est­ing stuff I’m read­ing that’s mak­ing me think about this:


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What is this QuakerQuaker thing?

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There’s been some head-scratching going on about Quak­erQuaker over the last few weeks. In the ser­vice of trans­parency I’ve posted my con­trib­u­tor guide­lines on the “About Quak­erQuaker page”. Here they are:

Post should be explic­itly Quaker: Any thought­ful posts from any branch of Friends that wres­tles in some way with what it means to be a Quaker is fair game. While we all have our own issues that con­nect deeply with our under­stand­ing of our faith, the Blog­watch only seems to work if it keeps focused on Quak­erism, on how we our faith and lives inter­act. Back when this was just a links list on my per­sonal site I would get com­plaints when I added some­thing that seemed related to my under­stand­ing of Quak­erism but that wasn’t specif­i­cally writ­ten from a Quaker stand­point (when we want to make this kind of link we should do so on our per­sonal blogs where we can put it in bet­ter context).

Post should be timely: I’ve billed Quak­erQuaker as “a guide to the Quaker con­ver­sa­tion” and links should go to recently-written arti­cles with strong voices. We’re not try­ing to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive list of Quaker web­sites, so no link­ing to orga­ni­za­tional home­pages. While most links should go to blog posts, it’s fine to include good arti­cles from Quaker pub­li­ca­tions. A link to some­thing like a press release or new book announce­ment should only be made if it’s extra­or­di­nary. Remem­ber that Quak­erQuaker posts will only appear on the main site for a few days (if the ini­tial setup goes well I can start work on some ideas to giave a more time­less ele­ment to the site).

Post should be Inter­est­ing: Don’t book­mark every­thing you find. If the post feels pre­dictable or snoozy, just ignore it (even if the writer or topic is impor­tant). The Quaker blog­gers all have their audi­ences and we don’t need to high­light every post of every blog­ger. Only make the link if the post speaks out to you in some way (it’s quite pos­si­ble that one of the other con­trib­u­tors will pick up, find­ing some­thing you didn’t and high­light­ing it in their descrip­tion). That said, the posts you link to don’t have to be mas­ter­pieces; they can have gram­mat­i­cal and log­i­cal mis­takes. What’s impor­tant is that there’s some idea in there that’s inter­est­ing. It might be a good dis­ci­pline for each of us not to add our the posts from our own per­sonal blogs but to let one of the other con­trib­u­tors do it for us.

That’s it. While there are some vague assump­tions in all this about the role of tra­di­tion and com­mu­nity, dis­ci­pline and indi­vid­u­al­ism, there’s noth­ing about the­ol­ogy or who gets linked. This is a pub­li­ca­tion, with some­thing of an edi­to­r­ial voice in that I’ve cho­sen who gets to add links and asked them to be sub­jec­tive, but its very mel­low and I’ve been happy to see con­trib­u­tors range far afield. Google tells us that this is one of 18.7 mil­lion “Quaker” web­sites and $10/month will get you your own so let’s not do too much navel-gazing about what’s linked or not linked. If you don’t find it inter­est­ing, there are plenty of non-subjective Quaker blogs lists out there. I do lis­ten to feed­back and am always twid­dling with the site so feel free to send email to me at mar​tinkel​ley​.com/​c​o​n​t​act.

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