Helen Drewery, Head of Witness and Worship for Quakers in Britain, welcoming all to Friends House, said, “We are pleased to be hosting an event which honours all those – including Quakers who put the Kindertransport into effect. Their endeavours are being echoed today by nearly 100 Quaker meetings across Britain which have identified themselves as Sanctuary Meetings and are supporting people who have fled from danger in their home countries. We are glad that these Meetings and the people they are supporting are represented at today’s event. We join them in pressing for more safe passages.”

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/27200

The reports gathered from the Jewish community in Germany by Quakers were of influence when Quakers accompanied the Jewish delegation who went to see Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare to plead the case for allowing immigration of children into Britain without the usual visa restrictions. They swayed the government and this planned immigration of German and Austrian Jewish children became known as the Kindertransport. Around 10,000 children were evacuated from Germany and Austria to Britain between 1938 and 1939.

What I find most fascinating is the detail that the Friends library in London doesnt have a lot of records of this work. It was so much in line with other refugee assistance Friends were doing in Europe that they evidently considered it just another day on the job, so to speak. I shared a piece on the related Quakerspeisungen a few days ago.

Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, and help for refugees

The nature of religion has changed, within Quakers we have seen the numbers of young people engaging in our community fall as the effects of economic insecurity have taken hold. And perhaps more importantly, because ‘young adults’ have no time for institutions that often seem arcane and irrelevant, and which have failed to engage with the realities of life for the vast majority of people in our society.

I wish I could share more of his enthusiasm. I’m not seeing anything particularly game-changing in his article. Half of it is generic cliches about millennial preference with extrapolation that they should align with decontextualized Quaker values. He cites a few happening young adult Quaker scenes in the UK and a promising Young Quakers podcast five episodes old; he’s fond of American Emily Provance’s blog. Good stuff to be sure, but you could pick pretty much any year in recent memory and point to similar evidence and imagine an imminent surge. It’s 2018 and we’re still saying “hey this could happen!” It could but it hasn’t so why hasn’t it and what can we do about it?

Also in these contexts “radical faith” sometimes sounds like buzzwords for non-faith. Is the Quaker meetinghouse just a quiet empty room for participants to BYOF (bring your own faith)?

Could Quakerism be the radical faith that the millennial generation is looking for?

After a year of working with young adult Quakers, Chris Venables shares three ways to welcome in young…

Quakers

Update: Chris chimed in via Twitter to add that his piece’s observations aren’t just from the year of working with BrYM Friends:

Ah, I’ll take a read of yours too — but those thoughts come from my experience of being around Quakers over the last 8 years, inc setting up a new young adult group (Westminster!), visiting Qs across Britain, and interviewing many of our community over the last year!

It’s written for a tech audience and leans a bit on the dichotomy between old (“It still looks much the same as it did in 1670”) and modern communication but there are some insights that we Friends sometimes take too much for granted:

Social media tends towards the shallow and boastful. That’s not an intuitive fit for the meticulous work of ecumenical accompaniment, nor for a faith that values authenticity and depth. However, Teresa and her team know they need to do more — not despite their beliefs, but because of them.

I also appreciate the comparison between Quaker organization and principles of decentralization found in networks.

Just as in tech, decentralisation — building a more networked approach — is high on Quakers’ agenda. But that journey is perhaps easier for a faith fundamentally opposed to hierarchy. Now, rather than try to hang onto old models, Quakers in Britain are actively (and continuously) checking their power and privilege.

Friends Journal ran a whole issue on Quakers and Social Media back in November 2016. One of my favorite FJ tech pieces however was in November 2015, when we interviewed Sue Gardiner to understand why Wikimedia was so interesting in Quaker process.

Just a moment…

medium.com

• Steven Davision: The gospel of Jesus as an economic message

  The good news is that the gospel of Jesus is, at its very heart, an economic message. Jesus defined his role as “the Christ” in specifically economic terms.

  tags: quaker quaker.witness quaker.philadelphia

• Luis Pizarro: Sharing the Good News in Spain

  Our project to create a Quaker Christian worship group in Seville, Spain, has emerged in this complex context.

  tags: quaker quaker.europe quaker.conservative

• Rick Seifert: My Quaker elevator talk

  Quakers realize that most people don’t have a clue about Quakers. What they know often begins and ends with the guy in the funny hat on the oat meal carton.

  tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.outreach

• [Western Friend] Quaker Bloggers in the West

  This special issue of Western Friend focuses on lifting up the written ministry of Quaker bloggers in the West!

  tags: quaker quaker.blogs quaker.bayarea quaker.oregon quaker.seattle

• Micah Bales: Preparing for the Harvest

  In both the revivalism of the late 1800s and the New Meetings Movement of the mid-1900s, we see cases in which growth outran the capacity of seasoned ministry, eldership and oversight to care for newly convinced Friends and Meetings. As a result, the tradition was radically, decisively altered in very short periods of time…

  tags: quaker quaker.conservative quaker.liberal quaker.outreach quaker.baltimore quaker.youth

• Ashley W: Jesus and Me

  It was scary, because I knew the answers were not the “right” ones.  But they were real.

  tags: quaker quaker.christianity quaker.oregon quaker.youth

• Emerging Diane looks at a story from Woolman’s Journal

  I think his purpose from the very beginning was more than to tell a confessional story. With this tale, he establishes from the outset a theme that runs throughout the entire journal and pertains to all creation: Once you or I start doing even one evil thing, we create a chain reaction. It’s never just one thing, period.

  tags: quaker quaker.witness

• LizOpp: Taking up the Cross

  Taking up the Cross means choosing to be obedient to the will of God, to be willing to sacrifice at a time when we greatly and intensely don’t wish to.

  tags: quaker quaker.uppermidwest quaker.christianity quaker.conservative

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My post, originally titled  “The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,”  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn’t much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on “quakers” and “emerging church” nothing much came up. It’s not surprising that there wasn’t much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it’s fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here’s Robin M’s account of first reading it) and it’s follow-up We’re All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We’re getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we’re asked to lead worships and we’ve got a catchy name in “Convergent Friends.”

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can’t think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I’ve drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn’t have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago FGC commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, it was very clear I wasn’t welcome in quickly-changing staff structure and I found myself out of a job. The most exciting outreach programs I had worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends, but It was quietly dropped a few months after I left. The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I’m really sad to say we’re still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I’ve recently crossed my life’s halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change.

How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in “Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers.” Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work–in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don’t see one convinced young Friend profiled and it’s post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occasional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren’t anyone’s target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting “Covergent” minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won’t blow your cover guys!). I’ve seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it’s not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here’s my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the “convergent” theme next month. I’ll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC’s isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we’ll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you’re interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I’ve let my blog deteriorate into too much of a “life stream,” all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You’ll notice it’s been redesigned. The right bar has the “life stream” stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I’ll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don’t want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I’m just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God’s call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn’t talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don’t exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn’t do much work in the temple and didn’t spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the “bad” elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let’s see where we can all get in the next five years!

On September 15, 2007, FUM dedicated the space once used as the Quaker Hill Bookstore as the new FUM Welcome Center. The Welcome Center contains Quaker books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of during business hours. Tables and chairs to comfortably accommodate 50 people make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meetings, anniversary/birthday parties, etc. Reduced prices are available for churches.

Most Quaker publishers and booksellers have closed or been greatly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pendle Hill bookstore and publishing operation, the AFSC Bookstore in Southern California, Barclay Press in Oregon. The veritable Friends Bookshop in London farmed out its mail order business a few years ago and has seen part of its space taken over by a coffeebar: popular and cool I’m sure, but does London really needs another place to buy coffee? Rumor has it that Britain’s publications committee has been laid down. The official spin is usually that the work continues in a different form but only Barclay Press has been reborn as something really cool. One of the few remaining booksellers is my old pals at FGC’s QuakerBooks: still selling good books but I’m worried that so much of Quaker publishing is now in one basket and I’d be more confident if their website showed more signs of activity.

The boards making these decisions to scale back or close are probably unaware that they’re part of a larger trend. They probably think they’re responding to unique situations (the peer group Quakers Uniting in Publications sends internal emails around but hasn’t done much to publicize this story outside of its membership). It’s sad to see that so many Quaker decision-making bodies have independently decided that publishing is not an essential part of their mission.