I asked him what Quakers bring to protests:

One of the important things that we bring is our way of worship. And our way of worship helps to bring the temperature down. I think what the current regime wants is a violent movement opposing them. That plays out what they want (and certainly the assassination of Charlie Kirk plays into that scenario). What Quakers bring is a commitment to peaceful protest. And when we’re around, we can be that strong, committed, peaceful presence. And that’s important.

I also asked him a follow-up question of what we need to do to get out of the way and accept the leadership of others in social change. You can listen to his answers or read them in the show notes. 

An under-45 communications strategy, in contrast, would mostly involve social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, possibly Tumblr or Pinterest). Articles would be short and would contain mostly content directly relevant to the reader—or, if the content were not directly relevant, it would be single-story narratives with an emphasis on personal impact. Announcements would come out through messenger apps or text messages, with a strong element of user control about which announcements to receive and which not. Photos and videos would be used frequently.

I’m always a bit wary of generational determinism. I think generational ideas are more like underlying trends that get more or less traction over time. And Quaker digital outreach in particular has been a thing for a quarter century now. But the underlying message—that some people need to be reached digitally while others are still best served by print—is a sound one and I’m glad Emily’s bringing it up.

But it’s still kind of sad that we still need to make this kind of argument. I remember having these discussions around an FGC outreach committee table fifteen years ago: surely we’re all on board about the need for digital outreach in 2018?

The 45-Yard Line

This website is part of a informal emerging network of Friends that are reaching across our institutional boundaries to engage with our faith and with each other. The “ministry of the written word” has often sparked generational renewal among Friends and there’s something afoot in all these comments and linkbacks. There are lots of potential projects that can be launched over the new few years (books, workshops, conferences, etc) so if you like the direction of this site and the questions it’s asking, please consider a donation to the nonviolence.org site.

I was curious to return to Interim Meeting, a group I served on about half a decade ago. As I sat in the meeting, I kept seeing glimpses of issues that I planned to address afterwards in my talk: how to talk afresh about faith; how to publicize our activity and communicate both among ourselves and with the outside world; how to engage new and younger members in our work.

Turns out I didn’t get the chance. Only half a dozen or so members of Interim Meeting stuck around for my presentation. No announcement was made at the end of sessions. None of the senior staff were there and no one from the long table full of clerks, alternate clerks and alternate alternate clerks came. Eleven people were at the talk (including some who hadn’t been at Interim Meeting). The intimacy was nice but it was hardly the “take it to the estabishment” kind of event I had imagined.

The talk itself went well, despite or maybe because of its intimacy. I had asked Seth H (aka Chronicler) along for spiritual support and he wrote a nice review on QuakerQuaker. Steve T, an old friend of mine from Central Philly days, took some pictures which I’ve included here. I videoed the event, though it will need some work to tighten it down to something anyone would want to watch online. The people who attended wanted to attend and asked great questions. It was good working with Stephen Dotson again in the planning. I would wish that more Philadelphia Friends had more interest in these issues but as individuals, all we can do is lead a horse to water. In the end, the yearly meeting is in God’s hands.

Below are observations from Interim Meeting and how the Convergent Friends movement might address some of the issues raised. Let me stress that I offer these in love and in the hope that some honest talk might help. I’ve served on Interim Meeting and have given a lot of time toward PYM over the last twenty years. This list was forwarded by email to senior staff and I present them here for others who might be concerned about these dynamics.

GENERATIONAL FAIL:

There were about seventy-five people in the room for Interim Meeting sessions. I was probably the third or fourth youngest. By U.S. census definitions I’m in my eighth year of middle age, so that’s really sad. That’s two whole generations that are largely missing from PYM leadership. I know I shouldn’t be surprised; it’s not a new phenomenon. But if you had told me twenty years ago that I’d be able to walk into Interim Meeting in 2010 and still be among the youngest, well… Well, frankly I would have uttered a choice epithet and kicked the Quaker dust from my shoes (most of my friends did). I know many Friends bodies struggle with age diversity but this is particularly extreme.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: About 33% of QuakerQuaker’s audience is GenX and 22% are Millenials. If Interim Meeting were as diverse as QuakerQuaker there would have been 16 YAFs (18–35 year olds) and 25 Friends 35 and 49 years of age. I would have been about the 29th youngest in the room–middle aged, just where I should be! QuakerQuaker has an age diversity that most East Coast Friends Meetings would die for. If you want to know the interests and passions of younger Friends, Quaker blogs are an excellent place to learn. There are some very different organizational and style differences at play (my post seven years ago, a post from Micah Bales this past week).

DECISION-MAKING

The first part of the sessions was run with what’s called a “Consent Agenda,” a legislative measure where multiple agenda items are approved en masse. It rests on the idealistic notion that all seventy-five attendees has come to sessions having read everything in the quarter-inch packet mailed to them (I’ll wait till you stop laughing). Interim Meeting lumped thirteen items together in this manner. I suspect most Friends left the meeting having forgotten what they had approved. Most educators would say you have to reinforce reading with live interaction but we bypassed all of that in the name of efficiency.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Quaker blogs are wonderfully rich sources of discussion. Comments are often more interesting than the original posts. Many of us have written first drafts of published articles on our blogs and then polished them with feedback received in the comments. This kind of communication feedback is powerful and doesn’t take away from live meeting-time. There’s a ton of possibilities for sharing information in a meaningful way outside of meetings.

MINUTES OF WITNESS

Two “minutes” (a kind of Quaker statement/press release) were brought to sessions. Both were vetted through a lengthy process where they were approved first by monthly and then quarterly meetings before coming before Interim Meeting. A minute on Afghanistan was nine months old, a response to a troop level announcement made last December; one against Marcellus Shale drilling in Pennsylvania was undated but it’s a topic that peaked in mainstream media five months ago. I would have more appreciation of this cumbersome process if the minutes were more “seasoned” (well-written, with care taken in the discernment behind them) but there was little in either that explained how the issue connected with Quaker faith and why we were lifting it up now as concern. A senior staffer in a small group I was part of lamented how the minutes didn’t give him much guidance as to how he might explain our concern with the news media. So here we were, approving two out-of-date, hard-to-communicate statements that many IM reps probably never read.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Blogging gives us practice in talking about spirituality. Commenters challenge us when we take rhetorical shortcuts or make assumptions or trade on stereotypes. Most Quaker bloggers would tell you they’re better writers now than when they started their blog. Spiritual writing is like a muscle which needs to be exercised. To be bluntly honest, two or three bloggers could have gotten onto Skype, opened a shared Google Doc and hammered out better statements in less than an hour. If we’re going to be approving these kinds of thing we need to practice and increase our spiritual literacy.

THE ROLE OF COMMITTEES

The second part was Interim Meeting looking at itself. We broke into small groups and asking three questions: “What is the work of Interim Meeting,” “Are we satisfied with how we do this now?” and “If we were to make changes, what would they be?.” I thought to myself that the reason I ever go to events like this is to see dear Friends and to see what sparks of life are happening in the yearly meeting. As our small group went around, and as small groups shared afterwards, I realized that many of the people in the room seemed to agree: we were hungry for the all-to-brief moments where the Spirit broke into the regimented Quaker process.

One startling testimonial came from a member of the outreach committee. She explained that her committee, like many in PYM, is an administrative one that’s not supposed to do any outreach itself–it’s all supposed to stay very “meta.” They recently decided to have a picnic with no business scheduled and there found themselves “going rogue” and talking about outreach. Her spirit rose and voice quickened as she told us how they spent hours dreaming up outreach projects. Of course the outreach committee wants to do outreach! And with state PYM is in, can we really have a dozen people sequestered away talking about talking about outreach. Shouldn’t we declare “All hands on deck!” and start doing work? It would have been time well spent to let her share their ideas for the next thirty minutes but of course we had to keep moving. She finished quickly and the excitement leaked back out of the room.

FOLLOW-UP THOUGHTS AND THE FUTURE OF THE YEARLY MEETING

Now I need to stress some things. I had some great one-on-one conversations in the breaks. A lot of people were very nice to me and gave me hugs and asked about family. These are a committed, hopeful group of people. There was a lot of faith in that room! People work hard and serve faithfully. But it feels like we’re trapped by the system we ourselves created. I wanted to share the excitement and directness of the Quaker blogging world. I wanted to share the robustness of communication techniques we’re using and the power of distributed publishing. I wanted to share the new spirit of ecumenticalism and cross-branch work that’s happening.

I’ve been visiting local Friends Meetings that have half the attendance they did ten years ago. Some have trouble breaking into the double-digits for Sunday morning worship and I’m often the youngest in the room, bringing the only small kids. I know there are a handful of thriving meetings, but I’m worried that most are going to have close their doors in the next ten to twenty years.

I had hoped to show how new communication structures, the rise of Convergent Friends and the seekers of the Emerging Church movement could signal new possibilities for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Toward the end of Interim Meeting, some Friends bemoaned our lack of resources and clerk Thomas Swain reminded them that with God there is no limitation and nothing is impossible. Some of the things I’m seeing online are the impossible come to life. Look at QuakerQuaker: an unstaffed online magazine running off of a $50/month budget and getting 10,000 visits a month. It’s not anything I’ve done, but this community that God has brought together and the technological infrastructure that has allowed us to coordinate so easily. It’s far from the only neat project out there and there are a lot more on the drawing boad. Some yearly meetings are engaging with these new possibilites. But mine apparently can’t even stay around for a talk.

I don’t know enough of the details of their lives to write the obituary (a Wikipedia page was started this morning) but I will say they always seemed to me like the Forrest Gumps of peace activists—at the center of every cool peace witness since 1950. You squint to look at the photos and there’s George and Lil, always there. Or maybe pop music would give us the better analogy: you know how there are entire b‑rate bands that carve an entire career around endlessly rehashing a particular Beatles song? Well, there are whole activist organizations that are built around particular campaigns that the Willoughbys championed. Like: in 1958 George was a crew member of the Golden Rule (profiled a bit here), a boatload of crazy activists who sailed into a Pacific nuclear bomb test to disrupt it. Twelve years later some Vancouver activists stage a copycat boat sailing, an act which spawned Greenpeace. Lillian was concerned about rising violence against women and started one of the first Take Back the Night marches. If you’ve ever sat in an activist meeting where everyone’s using consensus, then you’ve been influenced by the Willoughbys!

For many years I lived deeply embedded in communities co-founded by the Willoughbys. There’s a recent interview with George Lakey about the founding of Movement for a New Society that he and they helped create. In the 1990s I liked to say how I lived “in its ruins,” working at its publishing house, living in one of its land-trusted houses, and getting my food from the coop, all institutions that grew out of MNS. I got to know the Willoughbys through Central Philadelphia meeting but also as friends. It was a treat to visit their house in Deptford, N.J.—it adjoined a wildlife sanctuary they helped protect against the strip-mall sprawl that is the rest of that town. I last saw George a few months ago, and while he had a bit of trouble remembering who I was, that irrepressible smile and spirit were very strong!

When news of George’s passing started buzzing around the net I got a nice email from Howard Clark, who’s been very involved with War Resisters International for many years. It was a real blast-from-the-past and reminded me how little I’m involved with all this these days. The Philadelphia office of New Society Publishers went under in 1995 and a few years ago I finally dropped the Nonviolence.org project that I had started to keep the organizing going.

I’ve written before that one of the closest modern-day successor to the Movement for a New Society is the so-called New Monastic movement–explicitly Christian but focused on love and charity and often very Quaker’ish. Our culture of secular Quakerism has kept Friends from getting involved and sharing our decades of experience. Now that Shane Claiborne is being invited to seemingly every liberal Quaker venue, maybe it’s a good opportunity to look back on our own legacy. Friends like George and Lillian helped invent this form.

I miss the strong sense of community I once felt. Is there a way we can combine MNS & the “New Monastic” movement into something explicitly religious and public that might help spread the good news of the Inward Christ and inspire a new wave of lefty peacenik activism more in line with Jesus’ teachings than the xenophobic crap that gets spewed by so many “Christian” activists? With that, another plug for the workshop Wess Daniels and I are doing in May at Pendle Hill: “New Monastics and Covergent Friends.” If money’s a problem there’s still time to ask your meeting to help get you there. If that doesn’t work or distance is a problem, I’m sure we’ll be talking about it more here in the comments and blogs.

2010 update: David Alpert posted a nice remembrance of George.

August 2013 updates from the pages of Friends Journal: The Golden Rule Shall Sail Again and Expanding Old Pine Farm.

Betsy is a graduate of the Quaker program at Guilford (so she was a
good followup for Max Carter’s talk this weekend) and she helped
organize the World Gathering of Young Friends a few years ago. The talk was recorded and should be up on the Pendle Hill shortly (I’ll add a link when it is) so I’ll not try to be comprehensive but just share a few of my impressions.

Betsy is the kind of person that can just come under the radar. She starts telling stories, funny and poignant by turn, each one a Betsy story that you take on its own merits. It’s only at the end of the hour that you fully realize she’s been testifying to the presence of Jesus in her life in all this time. Real-life sightings, comforting hands on shoulders family tragedy, intellectual doubts and expanded spiritual connections all come together like different sides of the elephant.

One theme that came up a few times in the question-and-answer section is the feeling of a kind of spiritual tiredness–a fatigue from running the same old debates over and over. It’s an exhaustion that squelches curiosity about other Friends and sometimes moves us to follow the easy path in times of conflict rather than the time-consuming & difficult path that might be the one we need to be on.

The last time I was in the Pendle Hill barn it was to listen to Shane Claiborne. I’m one of those odd people that don’t think he’s a very good speaker for liberal Quakers. He downplays the religious instruction he received as a child to emphasize the progressive spiritual smörgåsbord of his adulthood without ever quite realizing (I think) that this early education gave him the language and vocabulary to ground his current spiritual travels. Those who grow up in liberal Quaker meetings generally start with the dabbling; their challenge is to find a way to go deeper into a specific spiritual practice, something that can’t be done on weekend trips to cool spiritual destinations.

Betsy brought an appreciation for her grounded Christian upbringing that I thought was a more powerful message. She talked about how her mom was raised in a tradition that could talk of darkness. When a family member died and doubt of God naturally followed, her mother was able to remind her that God had healed the beloved sister, only “not in the way we wanted.” Powerful stuff.

The sounds at Pendle Hill were fascinating: the sound of knitting needles was a gentle click-clack through the time. And one annoying speaker rose at one point with an annoying sermonette that I realized was a modern-day version of Quaker singsong (liberal Friend edition), complete with dramatic pauses and over-melodious delivery. Funny to realize it exists in such an unlikely place!

And a plug that the Tuesday night speaker’s series continues with some great Friends coming up, with North Carolina’s Lloyd Lee Wilson at bat for next week. Hey, and I’ll be there with Wess Daniels this May to lead a workshop on “The New Monastics and Convergent Friends.”