Churches Retool Mission Trips — washingtonpost.com
A growing body of research questions the value of the trips abroad, which are supposed to bring hope and Christianity to the needy of the world, while offering American participants an opportunity to work in disadvantaged communities, develop relationships and charge up their faith. Critics scornfully call such trips “religious tourism” undertaken by “vacationaries.”
My brand of religious don’t do this kind of mission work but we are more and more enchanted with long-distance conferences. We now address every issue with a conference but do we ask any “research questions” about their effectiveness? The web is a great tool to extend the conference outward and yet, despite all the content that could be easily ported to the web, most conferences, consultations and gatherings barely exist online.
I know that real life has it’s own value – I was happy to have a visit from individual traveler Micah Bales this weekend, a Friend with a great talent for the good question that stays with you long after his bus departs. I just wish I saw more media coming out of these big events, more ways to bootstrap the volumes of content produced at these events into something we can use for outreach.
If anecdotal evidence is an indication, most of the people who have come to Friends in the last half-decade first encountered us on Beliefnet, a for-profit dot-com with no connection to any Friends body. It’s definitions of “Liberal Quakers” and “Orthodox Quakers” have become more important (de facto) than all of our books of Faith and Practice. Beliefnet, Wikipedia and a site called Religious Tolerance have become the definers of our faith to millions of seekers. Nothing we’re doing comes close to Beliefnet.
And this is part fo the reason I’ve been fascinated by a Youtube video that was made this weekend. It’s an introduction to “liberal Quakers” by someone who’s never been to Quaker worship. While this might sound presumptuous, the real crime is that hers is the only American liberal Quaker introduction on Youtube. What the hell are we doing, Friends? I’ve been corresponding with the Youtuber. She’s 22, a spiritual seeker who cobbled together a spirituality after following a couple of dead-end spiritual paths. She came across the Beliefnet quiz, came out a “liberal Quaker” and started looking for real world Friends. She tried the meeting in her home town but it looked deserted (!) and so started an email correspondence with a Friend she found on another meeting’s website. She did the Youtube video because she couldn’t find any American introductions and wanted to give back, especially to younger seekers that might not respond to a British Youtube series. Yes her video is awkward and a little sketchy on some points of liberal Quaker theology, but it’s honest and doesn’t contain any viewpoints you won’t hear around most meetinghouses.
PS: Since writing this I’ve come across the first video from the just-concluded FGC Gathering. I don’t know if it’ll help with outreach but it is really funny. Thanks Skip, I feel like I was there!
There’s no substitute for face-to-face meetings — I was pleased recently to have the opportunity to meet an American Quaker blogger in person while he was staying at Woodbrooke.
But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify all this travelling about, especially by plane, in the face of the threat from global climate change.
The most interesting conversation I had at Gathering included Micah Bales (and Eric Evans and Rex Sprouse).
So we’re mostly vegetarians? We’re having individual spiritual experiences?
Some of the experience I’ve had around outreach include a young Friend on facebook who wrote a profound note about her experience as a daughter of a transgendered parent. Her non-Quaker friends who saw it were amazed at how open Quakers are about those issues.
On Oprah’s website, I’ve been following a discussion of Eckhart Tolle’s book “A New Earth” and people were saying things like “I think Quakers do this stuff,” and I’ve posted some more accurate information. From that, several people have checked out Monthly Meetings and one person ordered several Quaker books from Quaker Books of FGC.
I think a lot of what we do in the blog world is talk to one another. Necessarily. And some of that chatter is being heard by those who are not Quaker. But I also can’t help but wonder, like you, where’s our Light into the world?
Some say it’s the service work we do, that we don’t evangelize. But as long as we refuse to evangelize, we’ll have others saying for us what we’re about!
Martin — If you hadn’t told me that the young woman in the video was an authentic seeker and that you’ve been corresponding with her, I would have thought you had created the funniest parody of what 21st Century Liberal Quakerism has become.
But your point is the right one: the bigger problem is that this is what people find when they look for Quakers on You Tube.
And thanks for the Gathering mealtime video — among the many people I recognized were Robin M and my own Lovely Wife.
@Paul: I think part of the disconnect is that she’s not speaking in Quakerese. She’s using different vocabularies to try to share her understanding of Friends. It sounds very foreign to our over-trained ears. But that begs the question of whether we can learn talk about Quakerism using modern mainstream spiritual language. And can we do so without losing something of the core of belief? More soon.
I missed Lovely Wife and Robin in that video. I guess I was focused on the food!
Martin,
Thank you for prompting me into action. I have been thinking about our New Media presence (or lack thereof) for quite a while. Consequently, I found your posting to be the push I needed to move on something that has poking around in my head for some time. It feels right for me to have done it, and now having watched it several times with hours between each, I still feel clear to post it.
It isn’t anything amazing, but it is my sense of things, and I can only hope that it prompts others into making there own responses. The more folks in the conversation the better.
You can see the video here:
What is Liberal Quakerism?
In the Light,
Callid Keefe-Perry
Rochester Monthly Meeting
New York Yearly Meeting
PS Just a reminder that I am not speaking on behalf on my Meeting, but merely as an individual Friend trying his best to faithfully present his understanding.
Hello Jeanne. It’s a small world. We’ve missed you over at the Tolle Message Boards on Oprah.com. I haven’t read any recent posts from Bridgebuilder lately either. Maybe she has gotten too involved in her Meeting.
Yes…I’m the guy who bought quite a few books from QuakerBooks of FGC. And as you can see, I have also subscribed to QuakerQuaker. I am really enjoying those books (The Quiet Rebels by Bacon, God Raising Us by Flanagan, Godless for God’s Sake by Boulton). Keep up the good work. You are an evangelist of sorts.
Wow!! I thought there were some heated discussions and disagreements on Oprah.com over Tolle’s book but they are nothing compared to what I have seen here in the QuakerQuaker universe: Heated debates over Quaker Sweat Lodges!?! Seemingly irreconcilable differences between “Christ-centered” and “Universal” Friends. And it seems to me there is so much over-intellectualizing (if that’s a word)… And more than just a tad of arrogance – actually– it seems to me– a whole lot of arrogance. The post above from Paul L really hurt my heart that someone would talk about another human being in that way. I sure hope that young girl doesn’t decide to check out this site like I did. I have to be honest when I read stuff like that I think: Who would WANT to go to a meeting with people who talk like that around? I think your normal, everyday working guy or gal would feel VERY uncomfortable indeed around uppity arrogant people.
I dunno…I guess I had hoped that kindness was the be-all and end-all of Quakerism. That there was nothing else more important! But I am finding so little evidence of this on the Internet. This, of course, is my problem…I know. Quakers don’t have to be any different from anyone else. But, I guess, I had hoped that they were.
Adios,
Dave
I just clicked that “Orthodox Friends” link, and…what? Young Earth Creationism? Now, I’ve heard everything.
Wait, a clickbait site has misinformation, how surprising.