Blogging among Friends is very important.  There are not a lot of Quakers.  We’re spread out across the world.  Blogging opens up dialogues that just wouldn’t happen otherwise.  While I laid down my blog, “The Quaker Dharma,” a few years ago, and my thinking on some issues has evolved since then, I’m clear that blogging is what allowed me to give voice to my call.  It helped open some of the doors that led me to work for Pendle Hill and, now by extension, FGC.  A lot of cutting edge Quaker thought is being shared through blogs.

I thought it might be useful to fill in a little bit of this story. If you go reading through the back comments on Barry’s blog you’ll see it’s a time machine into the early Quaker blogging community. I first posted about his blog in February of 2005 with Quaker Dharma: Let the Light Shine and I highlighted him regularly (March, April, June) until the proto-QuakerQuaker “Blog Watch” started running. There I featured him twice that June and twice more in August, the most active period of his blogging.

It’s nostalgic to look through the commenters: Joe G., Peterson Toscano, Mitchell Santine Gould, Dave Carl, Barbara Q, Robin M, Brandice (Quaker Monkey), Eric Muhr, Nancy A… There were some good discussions. Barry’s most exuberant post was Let’s Begin, and LizOpp and I especially labored with him to ground what was a very clear and obvious leading by hooking up with other Friends locally and nationally who were interested in these efforts. I offered my help in hooking him up with FGC  and he wrote back “If you know people at other Quaker organizations that you wish me to speak to and coordinate with or possibly work for, I will.”

And that’s what I did. My supervisor, FGC Development head Michael Wajda, was planning a trip to Texas and I started talking up Barry Crossno. I had a hunch they’d like each other. I told Michael that Barry had a lot of experience and a very clear leading but needed to spend some time growing as a Quaker–an incubation period, if you will, among grounded Friends. In the first part of the FGC interview he movingly talks about the grounding his time at Pendle Hill has given him.

In October 2006 he announced he was closing a blog that had become largely dormant. It’s worth quoting that first formal goodbye:

I want to thank those of you who chose to actively participate. I learned a lot through our exchanges and I think there were many people who benefited from many of the posts you left. On a purely personal note, I learned that it’s good to temper my need to GO DO NOW. Some of you really helped mentor me concerning effectively listening to guidance and helping me understand that acting locally may be better than trying to take on the whole world at once.

I also want to share that I met some people and made contacts through this process that have opened tremendous doors for me and my ability to put myself in service to others. For this I am deeply grateful. I feel sure that some of these ties will live on past the closing of the Quaker Dharma.

Those of you familiar with pieces like The Lost Quaker Generation and Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quakers Style know I’ve long been worried that we’ve not doing a good job identifying, supporting and retaining visionary new Friends. Around 2004 I stopped complaining (mostly) and just started looking for others who also held this concern. The online organizing has spilled over into real world conferences and workshops and is much bigger than one website or small group. Now we see “graduates” of this network starting to take on real-world responsibilities.

Barry’s a bright guy with a strong leading and a healthy ambition. He would have certainly made something of himself without the blogs and the “doors” opened up by myself and others. But it would have certainly taken him longer to crack the Philadelphia scene and I think it very likely that FGC would have announced a different General Secretary this week if it weren’t for the blogs.

QuakerQuaker almost certainly has more future General Secretaries in its membership rolls. But it would be a shame to focus on that or to imply that the pinnacle of a Quaker leading is moving to Philadelphia. Many parts of the Quaker world are already too enthralled by it’s staff lists. What we need is to extend a culture of everyday Friends ready to boldly exclaim the Good News–to love God and their neighbor and to leap with joy by the presence of the Inward Christ. Friends’ culture shouldn’t focus on staffing, flashy programs or fundraising hype.  At the end of the day, spiritual outreach is a one-on-one activity. It’s people spending the time to find one another, share their spiritual journey and share opportunities to grow in their faith.

QuakerQuaker has evolved a lot since 2005. It now has a team of editors, discussion boards, Facebook and Twitter streams, and the site itself reaches over 100,000 readers a year. But it’s still about finding each other and encouraging each other. I think we’ve proven that these overlapping, distributed, largely-unfunded online initiatives can play a critical outreach role for the Society of Friends. What would it look like for the “old style” Quaker organizations to start supporting independent Quaker social media? And how could our networks reinvigorate cash-strapped Quaker organizations with fresh faces and new models of communication? Those are questions for another post.

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.”