Max Carter gave a talk for the Bible Association of Friends this past weekend at Moorestown (N.J.) Friends Meeting. Max is a long-time educator and currently heads the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College, a program that has produced a number of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Association is one of those great Philadelphia relics that somehow survived a couple of centuries of upheavals and still plugs along with a mission more-or-less crafted at its founding in the early 1800s: it distributes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools, and any First-day School class that might answer their inquiries.
Max’s program at Guilford is one of the recipients of the Bible Association’s efforts and he began by joking that his sole qualification for speaking at their annual meeting was that he was one of their more active customers.
Many of the students going through Max’s program grew up in the bigger East Coast yearly meetings. In these settings, being an involved Quaker teen means regularly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gathering every year, and having a parent on an important yearly meeting committee. “Quaker” is a specific group of friends and a set of guidelines about how to live in this subculture. Knowing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a suggestive question for Great Wind Blows is more important than even rudimentary Bible literacy, let alone Barclay’s Catechism. The knowledge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song (“with his shaggy shaggy locks”). So there’s a real culture shock when they show up in Max’s class and he hands them a Bible. “I’ve never touched one of these before” and “Why do we have to use this?” are non-uncommon responses.
None of this surprised me, of course. I’ve led high school workshops at Gathering and for yearly meeting teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been really shortchanged in the context of their faith. The Guilford program is a good introduction (“we graduate more Quakers than we bring in” was how Max put it) but do we really want them to wait so long? And to have so relatively few get this chance. Where’s the balance between letting them choose for themselves and giving them the information on which to make a choice?
There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so attendees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century older than the students Max was profiling. It’s pretty safe to say I was the youngest person there. It doesn’t seem healthy to have such separated worlds.
Convergent Friends
Max did talk for a few minutes about Convergent Friends. I think we’ve shaken hands a few times but he didn’t recognize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall opportunity to see firsthand how we’re described. It was positive (we “bear watching!”) but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most worrisome is that we’re a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I’ve graduated from even the most expansive definition of YAF and so have many of the other Convergent Friends (on a Facebook thread LizOpp made the mistake of listing all of the older Convergent Friends and touched off a little mock outrage – I’m going to steer clear of that mistake!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foundation Fellowship regular) came up and said that she had been thinking of going to the “New Monastics and Convergent Friends” workshop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hearing that CF’s were young adults. “That’s the first I’ve heard that” she said; “me too!” I replied and encouraged her to come. We definitely need to continue to talk about how C.F. represents an attitude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr’s October 2006 Friends Journal article brought it to wider attention.
Techniques for Teaching the Bible and Quakerism
The most useful part of Max’s talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. He
- Demystify the Bible: a great percentage of incoming students to the QLSP had never touched it so it seemed foreign;
- Make it fun: he has a newsletter column called “Concordance Capers” that digs into the derivation of pop culture references of Biblical phrases; he often shows Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian” at the end of the class.
- Make it relevant: Give interested students the tools and guidance to start reading it.
- Show the genealogy: Start with the parts that are most obviously Quaker: John and the inner Light, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
- Contemporary examples: Link to contemporary groups that are living a radical Christian witness today. This past semester they talked about the New Monastic movement, for example and they’ve profiled the Simple Way and Atlanta’s Open Door.
- The Bible as human condition: how is the Bible a story that we can be a part of, an inspiration rather than a literalist authority.
Random Thoughts:
A couple of thoughts have been churning through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work happening at the local yearly meeting level and start with younger Friends: middle school or high schoolers? And what about bringing convinced Friends on board? Most QLSP students are born Quaker and come from prominent-enough families to get meeting letters of recommendation to enter the program. Graduates of the QLSP are funneled into various Quaker positions these days, leaving out convinced Friends (like me and like most of the central Convergent Friends figures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was trying to pull together the mostly-convinced Central Philadelphia Meeting young adult community with the mostly-birthright official yearly meeting YAF group. I was convinced then and am even more convinced now that no renewal will happen unless we can get these complementary perspectives and energies working together.
PS: Due to a conflict between Feedburner and Disqus, some of comments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I’ve fixed it so that this odd spread won’t happen again.
Martin,
Thanks for this post! As the Director of the newly implemented Friends Leadership Program at George Fox, which draws Quakers who are Bible literate and lean more towards evangelical theology than those in Max’s group, this is still a fascinating topic to mull over. I was just at the Friends Center for a FAHE Quaker college fair, and after a brief presentation to everyone there about financial aid, was able to have some good conversations with folks about what it means to be a Christ-centered Quaker college. I imagine a class that was made up of students from the GF program and the Guilford program would be fascinating! Thus, one impetus for the CF flourishing. Anyway, just some thoughts. Thanks!
@Jaime: It’d be fascinating to hear what the resistance points are for George Fox students – what can you put in their hands that will elicit the responses “I’ve never held one of these!” and “why do we have to look at this?”
Martin,
Thanks for this post! As the Director of the newly implemented Friends Leadership Program at George Fox, which draws Quakers who are Bible literate and lean more towards evangelical theology than those in Max’s group, this is still a fascinating topic to mull over. I was just at the Friends Center for a FAHE Quaker college fair, and after a brief presentation to everyone there about financial aid, was able to have some good conversations with folks about what it means to be a Christ-centered Quaker college. I imagine a class that was made up of students from the GF program and the Guilford program would be fascinating! Thus, one impetus for the CF flourishing. Anyway, just some thoughts. Thanks!
@Jaime: It’d be fascinating to hear what the resistance points are for George Fox students – what can you put in their hands that will elicit the responses “I’ve never held one of these!” and “why do we have to look at this?”
I think an easy way is for parents to get a Bible for their child when he or she is born. It can be kept on the child’s dresser. That way it is just part of the child’s life from the get-go. Large print. Or, a children’s Bible with pictures. The Bible is a book of empowerment.
Thanks for sharing this Martin. I speak as a convinced Friend from a military family, member of Balt. YM, a product of its camping program through Catoctin, and a QLSP graduate whose narrow understanding of Quakerism was opened into a wide, rich buffet of Biblical and theological exploration through Max’s work at Guilford. Basically, I am the demograph that Martin speaks of, except that I am a convicted Friend. I now serve as PYM’s Middle School Program coordinator and hope to integrate some education around the Biblical roots of early Friends into the programming here.
I think the most clear way to spread this kind of work is to create/support similar programs at other institutions of higher education. Haverford has recently revived a Quaker community on its campus (yay!), and the Friends Leadership Program at George Fox sounds like another prime example. I also know that the QLSP program at Guilford is really operating at maximum capacity and those staffing it have a hard time avoiding burn-out. How could Friends support these programs better and ensure that they are effective, responsible, and sustainable?
Personally, the hardest thing I have dealt with, post-QLSP, is being more deeply and broadly versed in the Biblical foundations and early Quaker traditions and practices than the majority of people in my monthly meeting!
Beyond opening young’ns upto our rich roots, I think there is a very important question of: What then? Often times, I feel like my faith community doesn’t know what to do with me and can’t relate to the experience I’ve had through Max’s work and my time in QLSP. I can think of a number of other Friends who have had a similar experience and feel as though their energies and interests in pursuing ministry and a radically faithful life cannot find a proper container in their monthly meetings. My classmate Jon Watts comes to mind. It’s great to open us up, but ultimately, who is responsible to steward the young energy that arises after such folks have been exposed to the power and zeal of early Quakers’ witness and their foundational Biblical roots?
Also, if we want to bring contemporary Young Adult Friend perspectives and energies together in a fruitful way, I would suggest we move away from the model of having an occasional YAF gathering every two years or so. My experience with these is that, yes they are powerful, sometimes positive ways, and also sometimes in negative ways, but they are always inherently confrontational. Each person brings their perspective, their baggage, and their ministry into 72 hours of intense interaction, and quite often it’s hard to balance the ability to give and the ability to receive in such a short period of time. It creates a feeling in some that they have not been heard, and makes “Weighty” Friends/Quaker Celebrities out of others. Instead, why not establish a formal network for on-going, genuine relationships that facilitate real opportunities for deeper listening, slower learning, etc.? I’m sure there would be events that would come out of this, but they would be the culmination of a larger work, and not the beginning and the end of a work in one massively over-programmed weekend.
Lastly, this kind of network would also allow us, as Young Adult Friends, to formally participate in networks like the New Fire Movement of the National Council of Churches and the World Student Christian Federation. As someone who doesn’t feel understood or challenged in his home Meeting, and as someone interested in engaging the richness of the broader Christian and Quaker communities, these are the networks that I’ve ended up in, but I participate unofficially because Quakers lack a formal structure for their young people to formally engage. We used to have Young Friends of North America, but alas, no more…
@Stephen: interesting perspective, I’m emailing you to see if we can get this out wider.
interesting read. i actually took a look at this, hoping that it would speak to how Evangelical Quakers could have a more “Quakerly” perspective on the Bible, but it’s sort of the opposite perspective being offered. which is just as valid and needed i’m sure. my question is more along the lines of how can we teach the Bible in Evangelical Friends contexts without idolizing it. how can “remystify” it, in some sense.
@Joel: I’d imagine you’d have the mirrored problem. The divisions have created such an odd situation. Some places you have to go explain why Friends should be Christian and others why Christians should be Friends. I wonder if you’ve used Samuel Bownas’s book, “Descriptions of the Qualifications Necessary for a Gospel Minister,” combined with his journal. First published in 1750, “Descriptions” is a good description of Quaker ministry but it’s steeped in Biblical references – which the current edition has very helpfully labeled. Bownas is also pretty down-to-earth and practical. There are some good stories which can help humanize him. He’s always going off on evangelizing trips and will occasionally throw out funny stories about the state of the Religious Society of Friends in various places – he busts on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on one trip!