Some pseudo-convergent outreach events at Gathering

June 30, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Those Quak­er Ranters read­ers who are com­ing to the “FGC Gathering”:www.FGCquaker.org/gathering but haven’t lost inter­net access yet might be inter­est­ed in some of the events the Advance­ment & Out­reach com­mit­tee is spon­sor­ing over the week. There will be a fly­er in the reg­is­tra­tion pack­ets (all these events will take place in Admin 203). For those not com­ing, I sus­pect I’ll have some sort of Gath­er­ing round-up post at some point after it’s all done. I’m also co-hosting a Mon­day night inter­est group with LizOpp and Robin: “On Fire! Renew­ing Quak­erism through a Con­ver­gence of Friends.” For details, see “Liz’s post”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2006/06/interest-group-at-gathering.html or “Robin’s post”:http://robinmsf.blogspot.com/2006/06/convergent-travels.html.

bq.. The FGC Advance­ment and Out­reach com­mit­tee is spon­sor­ing after­noon events dur­ing four days of Gath­er­ing. Come share your out­reach ideas, learn about FGC and sup­port the growth of Quakerism!
*All Friends Wel­come, 1:30 – 3:00*
Mon­day: “What Do Quak­ers Believe?” Come talk about the range of Quak­er beliefs, from Robert Bar­clay to the present day, and explore what binds us togeth­er as Friends. Con­vened by Deb­o­rah Haines.
Wednes­day: A spe­cial wel­come to Friends from Pacif­ic, North Pacif­ic and Inter­moun­tain Year­ly Meet­ings. Come talk about the spir­it, con­cerns, and Quak­er ways of these three inde­pen­dent year­ly meetings.
Thurs­day: Vis­i­tors from Free­dom Friends Church will join us to talk about the wit­ness of this unique inde­pen­dent evan­gel­i­cal Friends Church.
*Out­reach Hours, 3:15 – 4:15*
Sun­day: Vis­i­bil­i­ty. Inter­est­ed in pub­li­ciz­ing your meet­ing and get­ting the Quak­er mes­sage out into your com­mu­ni­ty? Friends are invit­ed to come share their sto­ries and ques­tions and pick up a free copy of our “Inreach-Outreach Pack­et for Small Meet­ings.” Jane Berg­er will host.
Mon­day: Iso­lat­ed Friends & New Wor­ship Groups. Learn about FGC’s new ser­vice for Friends and seek­ers who live far from any meet­ing or wor­ship group. Are you inter­est­ed in help­ing to nur­ture new wor­ship groups? Come find out what resources are avail­able from the FGC Advance­ment Com­mit­tee, and share your sto­ries and ideas.
Wednes­day: Friends inter­est­ed in affil­i­a­tion. FGC is an asso­ci­a­tion of 14 year­ly meet­ings and region­al groups and 9 direct­ly affil­i­at­ed month­ly meet­ings. A&O clerk Deb­o­rah Haines will talk about the work of FGC and the ben­e­fits of affiliation.
Thurs­day: Spir­i­tu­al Hos­pi­tal­i­ty. It’s easy to feel iso­lat­ed even with­in a local meet­ing. A&O coor­di­na­tor Mar­tin Kel­ley will talk about some strate­gies to over­come the iso­la­tions of age, the­ol­o­gy, race, lifestyle, etc. What can meet­ings do to help these Friends not feel isolated?

Why would a Quaker do a crazy thing like that?

June 10, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Look­ing back at Friends’ respons­es to the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er hostages

When four Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers were tak­en hostage in Iraq late last Novem­ber, a lot of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions stum­bled in their response. With Tom Fox we were con­front­ed by a full-on lib­er­al Quak­er Chris­t­ian wit­ness against war, yet who stepped up to explain this modern-day prophet­ic wit­ness? AFSC? FCNL? FGC? Nope, nope and nope. There were too many orga­ni­za­tions that couldn’t man­age any­thing beyond the boil­er­plate social jus­tice press release. I held my tongue while the hostages were still in cap­tiv­i­ty but through­out the ordeal I was mad at the exposed frac­ture lines between reli­gious wit­ness and social activism.

When­ev­er a sit­u­a­tion involv­ing inter­na­tion­al issues of peace and wit­ness hap­pens, the Quak­er insti­tu­tions I’m clos­est to auto­mat­i­cal­ly defer to the more polit­i­cal Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions: for exam­ple, the head of Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence told staff to direct out­siders inquir­ing about Tom Fox to AFSC even though Fox had been an active leader of FGC-sponsored events and was well known as a com­mit­ted vol­un­teer. The Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee and Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion have knowl­edge­able and com­mit­ted staff, but their insti­tu­tion­al cul­ture does­n’t allow them to talk Quak­erism except to say we’re a nice bunch of social-justice-loving peo­ple. I appre­ci­ate that these orga­ni­za­tions have a strong, vital iden­ti­ty, and I accept that with­in those con­fines they do impor­tant work and employ many faith­ful Friends. It’s just that they lack the lan­guage to explain why a gro­cery store employ­ee with a love of youth reli­gious edu­ca­tion would go unarmed to Badg­dad in the name of Chris­t­ian witness.

The wider blo­gos­phere was total­ly abuzz with news of Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Team hostages (Google blogsearch lists over 6000 posts on the top­ic). There were hun­dreds of posts and com­ments, includ­ing long dis­cus­sions on the biggest (and most right-leaning) sites. Almost every­one won­dered why the CPT work­ers were there, and while the opin­ions weren’t always friend­ly (the hostages were often paint­ed as naive ide­al­ists or disin­gen­u­ous ter­ror­ist sym­pa­thiz­ers), even the doubters were moti­vat­ed by a pro­found curios­i­ty and desire to understand.

The CPT hostages were the talk of the blo­gos­phere, yet where could we find a Quak­er response and expla­na­tion? The AFSC respond­ed by pub­li­ciz­ing the state­ments of mod­er­ate Mus­lim lead­ers (call­ing for the hostages’ release; I emailed back a sug­ges­tion about list­ing Quak­er respons­es but nev­er got a reply). Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing put togeth­er a nice enough what-you-can-do page that was tar­get­ed toward Friends. The CPT site was full of infor­ma­tion of course, and there were plen­ty of sto­ries on the lefty-leaning sites like elec​tron​i​ci​raq​.net and the UK site Ekkle­sia. But Friends explain­ing this to the world?

The Quak­er blog­gers did their part. On Decem­ber 2 I quick­ly re-jiggered the tech­nol­o­gy behind Quak​erQuak​er​.org to pro­vide a Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er watch on both Non​vi​o​lence​.org and Quak­erQuak­er (same list­ings, mere­ly rebrand­ed for slightly-separate audi­ences, announced on the post It’s Wit­ness Time). These pages got lots of views over the course of the hostage sit­u­a­tion and includ­ed many posts from the Quak­er blog­ger com­mu­ni­ty that had recent­ly congealed.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: I was able to do this only because there was an active Quak­er blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty. We already had gath­ered togeth­er as a group of Friends who were will­ing to write about spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and wit­ness. Our con­ver­sa­tions had been small and inti­mate but now we were ready to speak to the world. I some­times get paint­ed as some sort of fun­da­men­tal­ist Quak­er, but the truth is that I’ve want­ed to build a com­mu­ni­ty that would wres­tle with these issues, fig­ur­ing the wrestling was more impor­tant than the lan­guage of the answers. I had already thought about how to encour­age blog­gers and knit a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er and was able to use these tech­niques to quick­ly build a Quak­er CPT response.

Two oth­er Quak­ers who went out of their way to explain the sto­ry of Tom Fox: his per­son­al friends John Stephens and Chuck Fager. Their Freethe​cap​tives​now​.org site was put togeth­er impres­sive­ly fast and con­tained a lot of good links to news, resources and com­men­tary. But like me, they were over-worked blog­gers doing this in their non-existant spare time (Chuck is direc­tor of Quak­er House but he nev­er said this was part of the work).

After an ini­tial few qui­et days, Tom’s meet­ing Lan­g­ley Hill put togeth­er a great web­site of links and news. That makes it the only offi­cial Quak­er orga­ni­za­tion that pulled togeth­er a sus­tained cam­paign to sup­port Tom Fox.

Lessons?

So what’s up with all this? Should we be hap­py that all this good work hap­pened by vol­un­teers? Johan Mau­r­er has a very inter­est­ing post, “Are Quak­ers Mar­gin­al?” that points to my ear­li­er com­ment on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­ers and doubts whether our avoid­ance of “hireling priests” has giv­en us a more effec­tive voice. Let’s remem­ber that insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism began as sup­port of mem­bers in jail for their reli­gious wit­ness; among our ear­li­est com­mit­tee gath­er­ings were meet­ings for suf­fer­ings — busi­ness meet­ings focused on pub­li­ciz­ing the plight of the jailed and sup­port the fam­i­ly and meet­ings left behind.

I nev­er met Tom Fox but it’s clear to me that he was an excep­tion­al Friend. He was able to bridge the all-too-common divide between Quak­er faith and social action. Tom was a heal­er, a wit­ness not just to Iraqis but to Friends. But I won­der if it was this very whole­ness that made his work hard to cat­e­go­rize and sup­port. Did he sim­ply fall through the insti­tu­tion­al cracks? When you play base­ball on a dis­or­ga­nized team you miss a lot of easy catch­es sim­ply because all the out­field­ers think the next guy is going to go for the ball. Is that what hap­pened? And is this what would hap­pen again?

Sharing our Quaker event photos

June 1, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Over on the pho­to shar­ing ser­vice Flickr, I’m notic­ing a bunch of pho­tos from this week’s Britain Year­ly Meet­ing ses­sion. One con­trib­u­tor has tagged (labelled) all her pho­tos with “britainyearlymeeting06” which means they’re all avail­able on one page. Cool, but what would be even cool­er is if every Flickr user at the event used the same tag. We’d then have a near­ly real-time group pho­to essay of the year­ly meet­ing sessions.

So this year I’m going to tag all my per­son­al pho­tos from next mon­th’s Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence Gath­er­ing of Friends as “FGCgathering06″. I invite any oth­er Flickr-using atten­ders to do the same. While I do work at FGC, please note this is not any sort of offi­cial FGC deci­sion, it’s just my own idea to share pho­tos and to see how we can use these online net­works to share and pro­mote Quak­erism. In a few weeks you’ll start see­ing entries via flickr and tech­no­rati. I’ll prob­a­bly start with a few pic­tures of the book­store truck being loaded for its cross-country trek. Update: one embed­ded below.
Blog posts:
If your blog­ging sys­tem does­n’t sup­port the use of tags, then sim­ply add this line in the bot­tom of each of your Gathering-related posts:

Update: here’s one:

Packing our own bags at the checkout line

May 30, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Over on Beppe­blog, “Lib­er­al Quak­erism is no longer Quak­erism”, the first of a multi-post series. In part one, Beppe looks at our dif­fi­cul­ty artic­u­lat­ing a col­lec­tive voice that might pro­claim “Truth.” Indi­vid­u­al­ism has real­ly tak­en a hit on Quak­ers, that’s for sure. In this day and age, how can a group set itself apart as a “reli­gious soci­ety” – a coher­ent com­mu­ni­ty of believ­ers? I don’t find ful­fill­ment in my own self and I’m an awful­ly slow learn­er when I try to fig­ure out things myself. I need oth­er’s wis­dom but books and blogs only take me so far.

As Dave Carl reminds us in the com­ments, the inward Christ is avail­able to all, every­where. But just because you can have a vis­i­ta­tion while stand­ing in the super­mar­ket check­out line does­n’t make the super­mar­ket a reli­gious soci­ety or the cashier a min­is­ter. Many of our meet­ings are good for the casu­al seek­er who wants a stress-free med­i­ta­tion cen­ter. The RSOF seems to serve many seek­ers as an in-between point: a place of entry back into the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion (for those who have been alien­at­ed by false prophets) but not a final des­ti­na­tion in itself. If you want to get seri­ous you often have to leave. That’s a shame, not only for the lost seek­er, but for our own reli­gious soci­ety which sees a con­stant “brain drain” leaking-out of gift­ed ministers.

I turn on the TV and radio and hear all sorts of per­ver­sions of the gospel being spout­ed out (yes­ter­day’s Memo­r­i­al Day pap was par­tic­u­lar­ly annoy­ing – has­n’t any of these Chris­tians read the Ser­mon on the Mount?!?). The world still needs the kind of rad­i­cal, back-to-the-roots Chris­tian­i­ty that Quak­ers have long held up as an alter­na­tive. But how can we unite to speak with that prophet­ic voice if we have no col­lec­tive voice.

I’m not as pes­simistic as all this sounds. I think most Friends want some­thing more. We’re con­stant­ly lif­ing up the exam­ple of dead Friends with prophet­ic voic­es and there’s a strong pride in our his­to­ry of social jus­tice. Our mod­ern cul­ture of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty blinds us to how these voic­es got nutured and how those old-timey Friends were able to come togeth­er to speak out these truths. But Friends have often been lured away from our call­ing and every age has had faith­ful Friends who have been will­ing to hit their heads against the brick walls of frus­tra­tion time and time again in order to remind us of who we are. The back-and-forth of reach­ing out into the world and pulling back into our tra­di­tion is actu­al­ly itself part of our tra­di­tion and Quak­er bod­ies have often seen health­i­est when we’ve been able to hold both together.

PS: Check here for Beppe’s sec­ond post, which argues that “Lib­er­al Quak­erism con­tin­ues to be Quakerism.”

Maguire​On​line​.com

May 18, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ist James Maguire came to me with an exist­ing site built in Mov­able Type. I’ll redesigned the nav­i­ga­tion, cre­at­ing cus­tomized side­bars that changed accord­ing to the cat­e­go­ry. He’s done great stuff with his site and it’s well worth look­ing through. Favorites of mine: his video appear­ances on talk shows and his 100 Books Worth Read­ing list.

Vis­it: James Maguire Online.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

The bully, the Friend and the Christian

April 21, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Lazy guy I am, I’m going to cut-and-paste a com­ment I left over at Rich the Brook­lyn Quak­er’s blog in response to his post “What This Chris­t­ian Is Look­ing For In Quakerism”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-this-christian-is-looking-for-in.html. There’s been quite a good dis­cus­sion in the com­ments. In them Rich pos­es this analogy:
bq. Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion and World War II, I have been told that Franklin Roo­sevelt ral­lied the spir­its of the Amer­i­can peo­ple with his “fire­side chats”. These radio broad­casts com­mu­ni­cat­ed infor­ma­tion, pro­ject­ed hope, and called for spe­cif­ic respons­es from his lis­ten­ers; includ­ing some acts of self-sacrifice and unselfish­ness… Often peo­ple would gath­er in small groups around their radios to hear these broad­casts, they would talk about what Roo­sevelt had said, and to some extent they were guid­ed in their dai­ly lives by some of what they had heard.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Visiting a Quaker School

April 18, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I had an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty last Thurs­day. I skipped work to be talk with two Quak­erism class­es at Philadel­phi­a’s William Penn Char­ter School (thanks for the invite Michael and Thomas!). I was asked to talk about Quak­er blogs, of all things. Sim­ple, right? Well, on the pre­vi­ous Tues­day I hap­pened upon this pas­sage from Bri­an Dray­ton’s new book, On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Min­istry:

I think that your work will have the great­est good effect if you wait to find whether and where the springs of love and divine life con­nect with this open­ing before you appear in the work. This is even true when you have had an invi­ta­tion to come and speak on a top­ic to a work­shop or some oth­er forum. It is wise to be sus­pi­cious of what is very easy, draws on your prac­ticed strengths and accom­plish­ments, and can be treat­ed as an every­day trans­ac­tion. (p. 149).

Good advice. Of course the role of min­istry is even more com­pli­cat­ed in that I was­n’t address­ing a Quak­er audi­ence: like the major­i­ty of Friends schools, few Penn Char­ter stu­dents actu­al­ly are Quak­er. I’m a pub­lic school kid, but it from the out­side it seems like Friends schools stress the ethos of Quak­erism (“here’s Penn Char­ter’s state­ment”). Again Dray­ton helped me think beyond nor­mal ideas of pros­e­ly­tiz­ing and out­reach when he talked about “pub­lic meetings”:

We are also called, I feel to invite oth­ers to share Christ direct­ly, not pri­mar­i­ly in order to intro­duce them to Quak­erism and bring them into our meet­ings, but to encour­age them to turn to the light and fol­low it” (p. 147).

What I shared with the stu­dents was some of the ways my inter­ac­tion with the Spir­it and my faith com­mu­ni­ty shapes my life. When we keep it real, this is a pro­found­ly uni­ver­sal­ist and wel­com­ing message.

I talked about the per­son­al aspect of blog­ging: in my opin­ion we’re at our best when we weave our the­ol­o­gy with with per­son­al sto­ries and tes­ti­monies of spe­cif­ic spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ences. The stu­dents remind­ed me that this is also real world les­son: their great­est excite­ment and ques­tion­ing came when we start­ed talk­ing about my father (I used to tell the sto­ry of my com­plete­ly messed-up child­hood fam­i­ly life a lot but have been out of the habit late­ly as it’s reced­ed into the past). The stu­dents real­ly want­ed to under­stand not just my sto­ry but how it’s shaped my Quak­erism and influ­enced my com­ing to Friends. They asked some hard ques­tions and I was stuck hav­ing to give them hard answers (in that they were non-sentimental). When we share of our­selves, we present a wit­ness that can reach out to others.

Lat­er on, one of the teach­ers pro­ject­ed my blogroll on a screen and asked me about the peo­ple on it. I start­ed telling sto­ries, relat­ing cool blog posts that had stuck out in my mind. Wow: this is a pret­ty amaz­ing group, with diver­si­ty of ages and Quak­erism. Review­ing the list real­ly remind­ed me of the amaz­ing com­mu­ni­ty that’s come togeth­er over the last few years.

One inter­est­ing lit­tle snip­pet for the Quak­er cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans out there: Penn Char­ter was the Gur­neyite school back in the day. When I got Michael’s email I was ini­tial­ly sur­prised they even had class­es on Quak­erism as it’s often thought of as one of the least Quak­er of the Philadelphia-area Quak­er schools. But think­ing on it, it made per­fect sense: the Gur­neyites loved edu­ca­tion; they brought Sun­day School (sor­ry, First Day School) into Quak­erism, along with Bible study and high­er edu­ca­tion. Of course the school that bears their lega­cy would teach Quak­erism. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, the his­tor­i­cal Ortho­dox school down the road aways recent­ly approached Penn Char­ter ask­ing about their Quak­er class­es; in true Wilbu­rite fash­ion, they’ve nev­er both­ered try­ing to teach Quak­erism. The offi­cial Philadel­phia Quak­er sto­ry is that branch­es were all fixed up nice and tidy back in 1955 but scratch the sur­face just about any­where and you’ll find Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry atti­tudes still shap­ing our insti­tu­tion­al cul­ture. It’s pret­ty fas­ci­nat­ing really.