Centering is always a welcome challenge, for, as one would expect, prison can be a noisy place and competing conversations can be overwhelming. What I do is draw myself into the pictures and focus upon the images and people therein. I have accompanying pictures of places visited by Friends and sent to me over the years with scenery that, for me as a person raised on the concrete pavements of New York City, gives me visions of natural beauty without the clutter of building structures and the like.

Never Having Set Foot in the Meetinghouse

When the meetinghouse is on the other side of state prison walls.

Friends Journal

Also, an early plug that the December Friends Journal will focus on Quakers and Christianity.

Quakerism without Jesus
byu/Enilorac89 inQuakers

“The Friends They Loathed” was defended in April 2018 and examined a chapter of Maryland history that had never been explored in detail before — the religious persecution against Quakers during the American Revolution. Despite being a historian of American Christianity, I hold no religious beliefs.

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by inQuakers

In economics, there’s a concept known as Pareto efficiency. It means that you ought to be able to eliminate any choice if another one dominates it along every dimension. The remaining choices sit along what’s called the Pareto frontier.

Silver then followed up with a real world example that speaks to my interest in food:

Imagine that in addition to White Castle and The French Laundry, there are two Italian restaurants in your neighborhood. One is the chain restaurant Olive Garden. You actually like Olive Garden perfectly well. But down the block is a local red-sauce joint called Giovanni’s. The food is a little better there than at Olive Garden (although not as good as at The French Laundry), and it’s a little cheaper than Olive Garden (although not as cheap as White Castle). So you can eliminate Olive Garden from your repertoire; it’s dominated along both dimensions by Giovanni’s.

These days we choose more than our dinner destinations. Spirituality has become a marketplace. While there have always been converts, it feels as if the pace of religious lane-changing has steadily quickened in recent times. Many people are choosing their religious affiliation rather than sticking with the faith traditions of their parents. For Quakers, this has been a net positive, as many of our meetinghouses are full of “convinced” Friends who came in to our religious society as adults.

Quakers are somewhat unique in our market potential. I would argue that we fall on two spots of the religious “pareto curve”:

• The first is a kind of mass-market entry point for the “spiritual but not religious” set that wants to dip its toe into an organized religion that’s neither very organized nor religious. Liberal Friends don’t have ministers or creeds, we don’t feel or sound too churchy, and we’re not particularly concerned about what new seekers believe. It’s a perfect fit for do-it-yourself seekers that are looking for non-judgmental spiritually-minded progressives.
• Our second pareto frontier beachhead is more grad-school level: we’re a good spot for people who have a strong religious convictions but seek a community with less restrictions. They’ve memorized whole sections of the Bible and might have theological training. They’re burned out by judgmentalism and spirit-less routine and are seeking out a more authentic religious community of religious peers open to discussion and growth.

It seems we often reach out to one or the other type of “pareto” seeker. I see that as part of the discussion around Micah Bales’s recent piece on Quaker church planting–do we focus on new, unaffiliated seekers or serious religious disciples looking for a different type of community. I’d be curious to hear if any Quaker outreach programs have tried to reach out to both simultaneously. Is it even possible to sucessfully market that kind of dual message?

The two-touch pareto nature of Friends and pop spiritual culture suggests that meetings could focus their internal work on being the bridge from what we might call the “pareto entrances.” Newcomers who have walked through the door because we’re not outwardly churchy could be welcomed into Quakerism 101 courses to be introduced to Quaker techniques for spiritual grounding and growth–and so they can determine whether formal membership is a good fit. Those who have come for the deep spiritual grounding can join as well, but also be given the opportunities for smaller-scale religious conversations and practice, through Bible study groups, regional extended worships and trips to regional opportunities.

After the initial excitements, I settled into a routine and discovered I had lost the “what to wear?!” angst of getting dressed in the mornings. Gone too was the “who am I?” drama that accompanied catalog browsing. As clothes wore out and were retired, I reduced my closet down to a small set of choices, all variations on one another. Now when I get dressed I don’t worry about who I will see that day, who I should impress, whether one pair of shoes goes with a certain sweater, etc.

Apparently, I share this practice with the forty-fourth president. In “Obama’s Way,” a wide-ranging profile in Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis shares the President’s attitude about clothes:

[He] was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence… You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

A few distracting caveats: we can assume Obama’s grey and blue suits are bespoke and cost upwards of a thousand dollars apiece. He probably has a closet full of them. He has staff that cleans them, stores them, and lays them out for him in the morning. You won’t find Barack wandering the aisles of the Capitol Hill Macy’s or the Langley Hill Men’s Warehouse. Michelle’s never running things to the dry cleaners, and Sasha and Malia aren’t pairing socks from the laundry bin after coming home from school. A President Romney’s closet would also feature gray and blue (though his underwear drawer would be more unconventional). When protocol calls for the commander-in-chief to deviate from suits–to don a tux perhaps–one appears. Presidential plainness is far from simple.

The Quaker movement started as an invitation to common sense. Everyone could join. Early Friends were minimalists on fire, fearless in abandoning anything that got in the way of spiritual truth. In a few short years they methodically worked their way to the same conclusions as a twenty-first century U.S. president: human decision-making resources are finite; our attention is at a premium. If we have a job to do (run a country, witness God’s Kingdom), then we should clear ourselves of unnecessary distractions to focus on the essentials. Those core experiential truths have lasting value. As Jefferson might say, they are self-evident, even if they still seem radically peculiar to the wider world.

Unfortunately the kind of plainness that Barack and I are talking about is a kind of mind-hack, its power largely strategic. I’d love to see a president take up the challenge of some hardcore Quaker values. How about the testimony against war? Eliza Gurney got pretty far in correspondence with Obama’s hero, honest Abe, but even he punted responsibility to divine will. The witness continues.

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.

A typical workload for a Facebook branding project is:

• Set up the Page;
• Coordinate with the client for a good profile graphic;
• Adding a number of photos and videos;
• Help set up a posting strategy;
• Provide phone support to answer questions on best practices;
• Give feedback on campaign (like Facebook’s “Insights” stats)

For Slim, we decided to rely on Facebook’s native apps as much as possible. This became especially important when Facebook shifted it’s feed layout (yet again) to focus less on user streams and more on an algorithmically-determined best posts. The more integrated your site is with Facebook, the better chance your pieces will have of showing up on Fan’s user streams.

We used Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to create custom Page tabs for integration with his existing online store and listing of tour dates. We would have liked to use FB’s Events application but it doesn’t allow for the volume of tour dates necessary to cover a busy entertainer like Slim Goodbody!

See it live: www.facebook.com/slimgoodbody