Friends United Meeting (FUM) is the largest Quaker membership organization in the world. Simplifying quite a bit, it grew out of the Gurneyites, the more churchy branch of Quakers who often adopted ministry and international missions. Those missions are the reason why there are so many Quakers in places like East Africa and Bolivia. Most of the worldwide body of Friends are part of that movement and many are formal members of FUM.

Theologically, today’s FUM is a “big tent” association that tries to hold together a wildly divergent set of beliefs and cultural norms, with gender and sexuality being the most common lightning point. There’s always corners of FUM threatening to leave or threatening to withhold membership dues. There was serious talk in the 1990s of a “realignment” that would split up FUM along evangelical and universalist lines but somehow that’s never quite happened and the tent has held. To its credit the big tent approach means that FUM has been a key facilitator of cross-branch dialogue among North American Friends.

The financial problem is pretty straightforward, a story as old as nonprofits:

Our audits have not been done in a timely fashion, internal financial controls have been missing, and we did not ensure that good accounting practices were being followed. We have not been careful enough in reviewing financial information given to us or in developing the ability of new board members to understand FUM’s complex financial structure.

I’m genuinely surprised that FUM leadership was this asleep at the wheel but I sympathize. A nonprofit I worked for in the 1990s went through a similar crisis when a few years of backlogged audits came back and showed us we were in far worse shape than we had imagined. The other major U.S. Quaker association, Friends General Conference, went though something similar in the 1980s; the story I’ve heard is that the lawyers told them they were broke to go bankrupt and they figured their way out of the financial hold.

Many nonprofits go through boom and bust cycles but this sounds more than just that. I do hope Friends United Meeting can pull through.

Letter Regarding FUM Finances

Dear Friends, we will put the bad news first: at our current income and expenditure rate, FUM will…

mailchi.mp

This has been happening for awhile. Then-dean of Earlham School of Religion Matt Hisrich warned us about some of this back in late 2020 when he revealed that Earlham College was raiding what had always been treated as ESR’s endowment. By all accounts the current EC president is doing his best after inheriting a mess but cutting programs and reducing staff isn’t goin to help turn it around.

Unfortunately, this spiral is becoming ever more common with small liberal arts colleges. The pandemic hit hard and a current drop in students (a baby bust that started in the 2008 recession) is just going to make things that much harder for these kinds of schools.

I appreciate Hardie writing this. Back in 2013 I got to know him as a fellow panelist at an ESR leadership conference and we’ve kept in touch over the years. In recent years he’s been on a task almost as quixotic as saving small colleges: he bought a paper, the Western Wayne News (publisher of this article), and has been trying to build a model of a sustainable local paper. I shared his great manifesto in defense of the open internet a few years ago and try to keep up with his blog. I’m glad to see Friends are sharing today’s article pretty widely on Facebook.

Earlham College has long been an invaluable part of the Quaker institutional landscape and Earlham School of Religion fills a need that no other school comes close to. Seeing these on the edge is worrisome for the whole Society of Friends. Guilford College in North Carolina has been having a rough go of it as well, though champions like my friend Wess Daniels have been passionate at drumming up support.

Earlham hopes big cuts foster long-term survival — Western Wayne News

Hoping to continue its acclaimed liberal arts education offerings well into the future, Earlham College in Richmond is…

Western Wayne News

The design is all original. We went through six rounds of the concept design mockups made up on Adobe Fireworks. Because the site is built on WordPress used as a CMS, Earlham College staff was able to add and arrange content even before the design coding began. The site uses the excellent Thematic theme, a blank template that allows for quite sophisticated designs using Action Hooks and complete CSS markup.

The most exciting element of the site is the “Discern-o-Matic” quiz, which takes users through a series of questions. At the end the questions are reorganized and presented to the user to help them understand what it is they want to do. The quiz is powered using the open-source LimeSurvey. Results are outputted via a custom PHP script that polls the LimeSurvey database and outputs in a nicely-worded and formatted WordPress results page. The templates for Lime Survey were altered to mimick the look of the rest of the site; the average user won’t notice the pass-off from WordPress to Lime Survey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, individual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invited to share their results page via Facebook.

Visit Site: http://www.discoverthyself.org

Yesterday my old friend Chris Parker posted a comment to “The Lost Quaker Generation” essay where he wondered if “the Quaker community has lost its vitality” (scroll down to third entry). I first met Chris at a 1997 conference in Burlington NJ for “Quaker Volunteer Service, Training, & Witness.” I had been excited by the prospect of a group of people deepening and exploring the roots of Quaker witness and wasn’t disappointed with the conversations and new friendships. Chris had a recent MDiv from the Earlham School of Religion and was working at the American Friends Service Committee; he left the conference passionate about helping to create something new. While working with AFSC, he started pulling together a national Quaker network of volunteer opportunities. This was a ministry, pure and simple, from one of the more active, visionary, and hardworking twenty-something Friends I’ve known. But frustrations mounted and support evaporated. As I remember even his monthly meeting couldn’t unify around supporting this ministry. The project eventually fell apart as our email correspondence grew sketchy.

A month or so ago I got an email from Chris with his new address, a yoga retreat center in New England. I responded back with personal news but also with regrets that Quakerism had apparently lost him. Part of his comments from yesterday:

Well, I’m one of these thirty somethings that has drifted away. I’m sure each of us has our own story. I did try to help organize, but that turned out to be a bitter and unsuccessful experience. A long story for another time. But the spirit flows in many directions and if the Quaker community has lost it’s vitality or doesn’t work for some people, there are other places there. Holding on too tightly to Quakerism is to hold on to a human creation.

I am now living and working at Kripalu yoga center, a place that many call a spiritual home. We have 60,000 people on our mailing list, of whom about 68% have come here as a guest. There are about 30,000 unprogrammed Quakers.

He’s right of course: Kripalu undoubtedly touches more spiritual lives than unprogrammed Quakerism. But the real lesson is that Kripalu knows what a gem they have in Chris: they’ve given him the kind of responsibilities and encouragement that Quakers didn’t.

Chris was one of those involved Friends I had hoped to grow old with. I had imagined us running into each other in half a dozen committees over the next fifty years. We could have gone on backpacking trips together, invited each other to our kids’ weddings, had catch-up lunches at Quaker conferences, consoled each other through grief, thought about how to “transmit our faith” to the next generation of Friends. Chris Parker was worth more to Quakerism than any number of outreach initiatives or peace networks. Chris was the real deal: a committed, impassioned Friend. And now he’s one of Quakerism’s scarred and rusted statues, tributes to what could have been.

He put his story up on a website way back when. I’m just going to extensively quote it here:

I feel an urgency about this project because it has come to me that Quakers are about to be needed by the larger culture. Underneath the ills we face as a nation is a spiritual problem of violence and dominance over other people and life. Friends have a tradition that presents an alternative. The essential gem of Quakerism is the knowledge that each person is part of the divine, that we need to treat everybody as equal and sacred. While I am comfortable with more witness than Friends usually muster, I do believe that faith is more easily caught than taught. Service has been an experience where many are exposed to Quakers, with the opportunity to inspire and bring transformations.

But the Society of Friends is not in great shape. Friends are unfocused and tired. Often young adult Friends are missing. I have listened jealously to an ear-lier generation tell how AFSC workcamps formed them and taught them how to be leaders. While Quakerism is very good for seekers, my generation seems to need an experience given to them, which is a different energy. My friends from Brethren Volunteer Service were inspired and equipped for a life of commitment they probably wouldn’t have otherwise choosen.

My inspirations have assembled slowly over the last six years. I went to Earlham School of Religion to prepare to be of service. There I was inspired by friends who had participated in Brethern Volunteer Service. At the same time I worked as Assistant Director of a peer counseling program where I watched the teens blossom and transform when trusted with the opportunity to help others and have a real impact.

Can Quakerism survive if we can’t keep Friends like this?