Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.

I appreciate her comments on invested readers. The number of people who were part of the “Quaker blogosphere” back in day was not that large but something about the crucible of the writing and debating meant that they developed ideas that have outsized influence today. The same sorts of conversations continue to happen today in corners of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord but there’s not the same sort of feeling of shared community.

Requiem for Early Blogging

As part of Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I…

Elizabeth Spiers

You can watch the full episode of my talk with R.E. and Jason and read their article, “Advices and Que[e]ries: Chosen Family and Chosen Ancestors.”

The October issue of Friends Journal is specifically about affinity groups: how and why and when we might break off into worship groups that specifically include and exclude Friends. October authors Vanessa Julye and Curtis Spence are interviewed as part of this month’s Quakers Today podcast episode, “Quakers & Affinity Spaces: Finding Wholeness in a Separated World.”

There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers’ virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don’t need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.

In my experience, a lot of incoming seekers really like it when we fess up to our past indiscretions and current struggles. Perhaps they’ve come from some church that was overly confident and unable to examine its flaws and so like our transparency. Nowadays the influencer class all talk about “emotional maturity” and I think part of that is appreciating ourselves for who we really are in a healthy way.

Maybe because I’m thinking about the upcoming Friends Journal issue of “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism” (there’s still ten days to write for it!) but I’m also thinking about the tone with which we approach outreach. In some circles there’s a panic that we somehow have to save Quakerism. That begs the question of “what is Quakerism”?

Is Quakerism a way of approaching our relationship with the living Christ and sharing that good news as we walk cheerfully over the world? Is it building communities that express our commitment to love of God and love of neighbor? If so, then nothing is ever going to destroy it. The whole point of the original Quaker movement is that it didn’t need a large infrastructure: no priests or pastors, no staff, no tithing. An empty barn and a small room of believers was enough. Here’s my naive side rising up: if we are faithful God, will continue to give us guidance and blessings.

When I dropped in for a day of the FGC Gathering this summer, I attended a workshop led by the most excellent Chiyo Moriuchi, titled “Letting our Light Shine: Governance & Friends.” The workshop wrote its own epistle, which FGC published on their website today with the title “A Call to Action.” Here’s part of its message:

Immediate action is required to address the fact of declining and aging membership. We have too few people available to do the “work,” and we are burning out too many of those who are. We feel that addressing the inadequate communication of who Quakers are is the most promising path to solve this problem.

This is all true, but it’s true of our institutions. It’s true of our infrastructure. The document has two calls to action: the first is for Quaker institutions to do some self-reflection on what makes them Quaker (sounds good to me!). The second is for Friends to hire outside marketing firms. I’ve seen big budgets poured into marketing firms before and sigh at what a proposal like this would likely give us: generic, feel-good copy that irons out all blemishes. Any spiritual language that might be deemed off-putting gets cut.  History is dropped except for a few past heroes who are turned into cartoons.¹

Decades of religion surveys have found that people aren’t looking for bland and generic. A lot of the fastest-growing denominations are opinionated and have high expectations of incoming members. The newcomers I see walking into my meeting seem to be searching for something real, something palpable, as indeed I myself was when I walked into Abington Meeting over three decades ago. We can be ourselves and share our blemishes. We don’t need to put on an act.

And finally, some optimism: Quaker marketing is doing great. Seriously. We’re more visible and accessible than we’ve been in our entire history. Friends Journal is a part of that, with the magazine free without paywall and the Quakerspeak interview series, Quakers Today podcast, and Quaker.org portal. But we’re just a piece of what’s happening. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast and the Daily Quaker email is super-visible. The Quakers sub-reddit and Discord server are very active. The slick Friends Library makes historic Quaker writings accessible by web, app, and audio (and the old-school Project Gutenberg, Christian Classics Etherial Library, Quaker Heritage Press are still around). It’s easy to find local meetings (FGC and FWCC have good resources, plus Google Maps does a great job). Any curious person wanting to know about Quakers can get up to speed in weeks. I know because I see these people walking into my own Cropwell Meeting.

So I don’t think our institutions necessarily need new marketing so much as new visioning. What kinds of support is needed for the new seekers and for local meetings? I think in some ways we need to step back and see with new eyes. What is it we want to market?

Growth for growth’s sake

Political and cultural observations in light of Quaker discipleship.

blog.canyoubelieve.me

My husband, Hal, stepped out of our apartment and into the hall just before 4:00 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. He began walking down the hall, playing on his harmonica a zippy version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” People had been waiting. Doors opened, and our neighbors stood in their doorways—well over the designated six‐feet apart—and began waving and greeting one another. This constituted our “call to worship,” and the beginning of a new pattern.

I thought it was so nice that I asked her to expand it. The result is a nice snapshot of how a Quaker-affiliated retirement community in Newberg, Oregon, is adapting to life under COVID-19 restrictions.

A Quaker Retirement Community Faces the Pandemic

Creativity and service flowers under quarantine.

Friends Journal

William Penn’s introduction to George Fox’s Journal (1691) speaks to something very like community:

“Besides these general doctrines, as the larger branches, there sprang forth several particular doctrines, that did exemplify and farther explain the truth and efficacy of the general doctrine before observed, in their lives and examples: as,

Communion and loving one another. This is anoted mark in the mouth of all sorts of people concerning them: They will meet, they will help and stick one to another. Whence it is common to hear some say: Look how the Quakers love and take care of one another. Others, less moderate, will say: The Quakers live none but themselves: and if loving one another. and having an intimate communion in religion, and constant care to meet to worship God, and help one another, be any mark of primitive Christianity, they had it, blessed be the Lord in ample manner.”

This certainly sounds like community to me.

I suspect a process may be at work similar to the one that has made “that of God in everyone” the putative foundation of all our testimonies: an unselfconscious thought-drift in a culture increasingly impatient with intellectual/theological rigor, or even attention of any serious kind, not to mention care for the testimony of integrity. These ideas arise somehow, somewhere, and then get picked up and disseminated because they sound nice, they meet some need, and they don’t demand much. They apparently don’t require discernment, anyway.

The “Testimony of Community”

While known as a traditionally quiet community within Christianity, in Kenya their gatherings are loud and proud. For some, being ‘noisy’ is the reason young people are still being attracted to the Church.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p072kcm0

So my questions for Quakers are: How do you ensure that adults are trusted to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that people are given opportunities to take responsibility without feeling that they must perform especially well because they are representing a whole demographic?

Here in the U.S., the trick to getting on national committees while young (at least when I was trying it in my 20s) was having a well-known mom. As someone who kept knocking and kept getting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous offspring complain how they were always being asked to serve on committees. But then I realized it was the same tokenizing phenomenon, just in reverse.

So our work isn’t just looking around a room and ticking off demographic boxes, but really digging deeper and seeing if we’re representative of multi-dimensional diversities. And if we’re not, the problem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diversity is a fine value in and of itself but ultimately just a crude tool) but that we have unexamined cultural practices and selection systems that are systematically turning away people from community participation and service.

Keeping cradle Quakers by making room to lean in?