Great piece from Johan­na Jack­son on cre­at­ing new mod­els of Quak­er communities

I’m real­ly strug­gling a lot with this. I attend­ed a Philadel­phia Year­ly Meeting-sponsored vir­tu­al work­shop the oth­er night. It was led by Friends from Middletown/Delco Meet­ing and was well-done and spir­i­tu­al­ly deep. But so many of the par­tic­i­pants were the same old faces. Mean­while every oth­er day there’s a breath­less post on /r/Quakers from some­one who just dis­cov­ered us and the Quak­er Dis­cord you can almost count the fre­quen­cy of new­bie posts in min­utes. How do we bridge the gray­ing depth of our often small and pre­dictable meet­ings with the swirling chaos of an online forum. Quak­er­S­peak kind of does that (it’s almost always cit­ed in response to a Newcomer’s query): it turns thought­ful Friends into com­pelling ten-minute sound­bites. But I real­ly feel the gulf between very set­tled meet­ing Friends and a wider move­ment toward us than few of our for­mal struc­tures can address.

I par­tic­u­lar­ly like this part of Johanna’s article:

In my research and Quak­er min­istry, I have met many younger Friends who are either blocked by the Quak­er struc­ture, or unen­thu­si­as­tic about it. These Friends tend to val­ue open­ness and flu­id­i­ty more than procedures.