The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers

September 14, 2008

09/14/200805/31/2016 · Martin Kelley

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper’s blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young’ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled “The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,” (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
A desire to grow
A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
A renewal of discipline and oversight
A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn’t much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on “quakers” and “emerging church” nothing much came up. It’s not surprising that there wasn’t much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it’s fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here’s Robin M’s account of first reading it) and it’s follow-up We’re All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We’re getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we’re asked to lead worships and we’ve got a catchy name in “Convergent Friends.”

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can’t think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I’ve drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn’t have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago FGC commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, it was very clear I wasn’t welcome in quickly-changing staff structure and I found myself out of a job. The most exciting outreach programs I had worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends, but It was quietly dropped a few months after I left. The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I’m really sad to say we’re still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I’ve recently crossed my life’s halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change.

How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in “Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers.” Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work – in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don’t see one convinced young Friend profiled and it’s post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occasional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren’t anyone’s target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting “Covergent” minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won’t blow your cover guys!). I’ve seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it’s not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

We need to be public figures;
We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here’s my to-do list:

CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the “convergent” theme next month. I’ll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC’s isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we’ll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you’re interested;
LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
PUBLIC FIGURES: I’ve let my blog deteriorate into too much of a “life stream,” all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You’ll notice it’s been redesigned. The right bar has the “life stream” stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I’ll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don’t want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I’m just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God’s call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn’t talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don’t exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn’t do much work in the temple and didn’t spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the “bad” elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let’s see where we can all get in the next five years!

Convergent Friends, a long definition

July 25, 2007

07/25/200703/28/2017 · Martin Kelley

Robin M posts this week about two Convergent Events happening in California in the next month or two. And she also tries out a simplified definition of Convergent Friends:

people who are engaged in the renewal movement within the Religious Society of Friends, across all the branches of Friends.

It sounds good but what does it mean? Specifically: who isn’t for renewal, at least on a theoretical level? There are lots of faithful, smart and loving Friends out there advocating renewal who don’t fit my definition of Convergent (which is fine, I don’t think the whole RSoF should be Convergent, it’s a movement in the river, not a dam).

When Robin coined the term at the start of 2006 it seemed to refer to general trends in the Religious Society of Friends and the larger Christian world, but it was also referring to a specific (online) community that had had a year or two of conversation to shape itself and model trust and accountability. Most importantly we each were going out of our way to engage with Friends from other Quaker traditions and were each called on our own cultural assumptions.
The coined term implied an experience of sort. “Convergent” explicitly references Conservative Friends (“Con-”) and the Emergent Church movement (“-vergent”). It seems to me like one needs to look at those two phenomenon and their relation to one’s own understanding and experience of Quaker life and community before really understanding what all the fuss has been about. That’s happening lots of places and it is not simply a blog phenomenon.

Nowadays I’m noticing a lot of Friends declaring themselves Convergent after reading a blog post or two or attending a workshop. It’s becoming the term du jour for Friends who want to differentiate themselves from business-as-usual, Quakerism-as-usual. This fits Robin’s simplified definition. But if that’s all it is and it becomes all-inclusive for inclusivity’s sake, then “Convergent” will drift away away from the roots of the conversation that spawned it and turn into another buzzword for “liberal Quaker.” This is starting to happen.

The term “Convergent Friends” is being picked up by Friends outside the dozen or two blogs that spawned it and moving into the wild – that’s great, but also means it’s definition is becoming a moving target. People are grabbing onto it to sum up their dreams, visions and frustrations but we’re almost certainly not meaning the same thing by it. “Convergent Friends” implies that we’ve all arrived somewhere together. I’ve often wondered whether we shouldn’t be talking about “Converging Friends,” a term that implies a parallel set of movements and puts the rather important elephant square on the table: converging toward what? What we mean by convergence depends on our starting point. My attempt at a label was the rather clunky conservative-leaning liberal Friend, which is probably what most of us in the liberal Quaker tradition are meaning by “Convergent.”

I started mapping out a liberal plan for Convergent Friends a couple of years before the term was coined and it still summarizes many of my hopes and concerns. The only thing I might add now is a paragraph about how we’ll have to work both inside and outside of normal Quaker channels to effect this change (Johan Maurer recently wrote an interesting post that included the wonderful description of “the lovely subversives who ignore structures and communicate on a purely personal basis between the camps via blogs, visitation, and other means” and compared us to SCUBA divers (“ScubaQuake.org” anyone?).

Robin’s inclusive definition of “renewal” definitely speaks to something. Informal renewal networks are springing up all over North America. Many branches of Friends are involved. There are themes I’m seeing in lots of these places: a strong youth or next-generation focus; a reliance on the internet; a curiosity about “other” Friends traditions; a desire to get back to roots in the simple ministry of Jesus. Whatever label or labels this new revival might take on is less important than the Spirit behind it.

But is every hope for renewal “Convergent”? I don’t think so. At the end of the day the path for us is narrow and is given, not chosen. At the end of day — and beginning and middle — the work is to follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance in “real time.” Definitions and carefully selected words slough away as mere notions. The newest message is just the oldest message repackaged. Let’s not get too caught up in our own hip verbage, lecture invitations and glorious attention that we forget that there there is one, even Christ Jesus who can speak to our condition, that He Himself has come to teach, and that our message is to share the good news he’s given us. The Tempter is ready to distract us, to puff us up so we think we are the message, that we own the message, or that the message depends on our flowery words delivered from podiums. We must stay on guard, humbled, low and praying to be kept from the temptations that surround even the most well-meaning renewal attempts. It is our faithfulness to the free gospel ministry that will ultimately determine the fate of our work.

Hey who am I to decide anything

April 9, 2007

04/09/200702/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

Over on Nontheist Friends website, there’s an article looking back at ten years of FGC Gathering workshops on their concern. There was also a post somewhere on the blogosphere (sorry I don’t remember where) by a Pagan Friend excited that this year’s Gathering would have a workshop focused on their concerns.

It’s kind of interesting to look at the process by which new theologies are being added into Liberal Quakerism at an ever-increasing rate.

Membership of individuals in meetings. There are hundreds of meetings in liberal Quakerism that range all over the theological map. Add to that the widespread agreement that theological unity with the meeting is not required and just about anyone believing anything could be admitted somewhere (or “grandfathered in” as a birthright member).
A workshop at the Friends General Conference Gathering and especially a regular workshop at successive Gatherings. Yet as the very informed comments on a post a few years ago showed, theology is not something the planning workshop committee is allowed to look at and at least one proponent of a new theology has gotten themselves on the deciding committee. The Gathering is essentially built on the nondenominational Chautaqua model and FGC is perfectly happy to sponsor workshops that are in apparent conflict with its own mission statement.
An article published in Friends Journal. When the the Quaker Sweat Lodge was struggling to claim legitimacy it all but changed its name to the “Quaker Sweat Lodge as featured in the February 2002 Friends Journal.” It’s a good magazine’s job to publish articles that make people think and a smart magazine will know that articles that provoke a little controversy is good for circulation. I very much doubt the editorial team at the Journal considers its agreement to publish to be an inoculation against critique.
A website and listserv. Fifteen dollars at GoDaddy.com and you’ve got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are probably other mechanisms of legitimacy. My point is not to give comprehensive guidelines to would-be campaigners. I simply want to note that none of the actors in these decisions is consciously thinking “hey, I think I’ll expand the definition of liberal Quaker theology today.” In fact I expect they’re mostly passing the buck, thinking “hey, who am I to decide anything like that.”

None of these decision-making processes are meant to serve as tools to dismiss opposition. The organizations involved are not handing out Imprimaturs and would be quite horrified if they realized their agreements were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a commenter on my last post, on this summer’s reunion and camp for the once-young members of Young Friends North America, had a very interesting comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those previously involved in YFNA have taken leadership with FGC … with both positive and negative results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the legacy we are creating: do we like it?

I have the feeling that the current generation of liberal Quaker leadership doesn’t quite believe it’s leading liberal Quakerism. By “leadership” I don’t mean the small skim of the professional Quaker bureaucracy (whose members can get _too_ self-inflated on the leadership issue) but the committees, clerks and volunteers that get most of the work done from the local to national levels. We are the inheritors of a proud and sometimes foolish tradition and our actions are shaping its future but I don’t think we really know that. I have no clever solution to the issues I’ve outlined here but I think becoming conscious that we’re creating our own legacy is an important first step.

“Food for Fire” workshop at Powell House

December 27, 2005

12/27/200510/11/2023 · Martin Kelley

In early February I’m leading a young adult workshop up at New York Yearly Meeting’sPowell House. I don’t have any desire to get into the “spiritual workshop circuit,” but I was asked and it seemed like an opportunity to gather some interesting folks to talk about what we hunger for. The workshop is called “Food for Fire: Breaking into the Power of Quakerism” (already regretting the “breaking in” metaphor – shouldn’t it be “broken in by?”).

I hope that some of the extended Quaker Ranter family will be able to make it out. This could be a kind of Mid-Atlantic/New England gathering of whatever this of informal movement/network is. Because this is a workshop model I am expected to impart knowledge but while I’ll come with an worked-out agenda, I’m happy to loosen and/or toss it aside if needed. The workshop description:

Many of the classic themes of Quakerism speak to the condition of a world wracked by consumerism, war, bigotry and environmental disregard. Friends have a history of uniting truth and love and turning it into action. We’ll reach into the Quaker attic to dust off gospel order, plain living, traveling ministry, prophetic witness; we’ll try them on and see how they fit into our experiences of the living Spirit. There will be plenty of time to share stories in small groups and together. How are our monthly meetings doing recognizing the gifts of ministry and service among younger Friends? How are Friends doing spreading the good news of the Quaker way? There is a great people to be gathered still but how can we enter into the faithfulness required? Jesus came up the fishermen and said “Come, follow me;” what would we do if we got that call? Like any programmed Quaker event the workshop is really an excuse to assemble Friends together in prayer and faithfulness to God. The most important thing we could do this weekend is build friendships: friendships of support, mutual accountability, and peer mentorship. Friends from all branches of Quakerism welcome, as are the newest of seekers.

The price is $180 for the weekend but if that’s a burden then try to get your meeting to pay – I suspect they’ll be happy to see that you’re showing an interest in Quakerism. I’ll be driving up from South Jersey and will probably be able to pick up folks from Philly & New York. Email me if you have or need a ride from other points and I’ll try to connect you with other travelers.

If you’re too old or too impatient to wait for Second Month to roll around, pick up Brian Drayton’s new book On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry and read that instead. Yes, I plugged it five days ago and yes, my paycheck comes from the publisher – but I’ve now now read the first chapter and it really is that good. Reading it feels like putting that soon-to-be-favorite pop album on the turntable for the first time. Where were you when you first heard Sgt Peppers? (for the YAFs in the audience: yes I’m being silly with the Beatles reference; if you remember first putting that album on a turntable in 1967 then this isn’t your workshop!).

Youth Ministry, Yearly Meeting Style

March 18, 2005

03/18/200504/10/2012 · Martin Kelley

One has to applaud the sheer honesty of the group of leading Quakers who have recently proposed turning the grounds of Philadelphia’s historic Arch Street Meetinghouse into a retirement home. It makes perfect sense. Arch Street is the host for our annual sessions, where the average age is surely over 70. Why not institutionalize the yearly meeting reality?

The Arch Street Meetinghouse grounds are also a cemetery. In about ten years time we can raze the meetinghouse for more headstones and in about twenty years time we can have a big party where we cash out the yearly meeting funds and just burn them in a big bonfire (there’s a fire station across the street), formally laying down Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The fifteen of us who are left can go attach ourselves to some other yearly meeting.

This year’s annual sessions continue their tradition of self-parody: the featured speakers are the umpteenth gray-hair professional Quaker talking about the peace testimony and a psychologist who appears on NPR. It’s safe to assume neither will stray beyond the mildest communities of faith talk to mention God, gospel order or naming of gifts, and that neither will ask why there’s almost no one under forty involved in the yearly meeting. The last time I went to a nominating committee workshop at annual sessions, members openly explained to me why Friends under forty couldn’t serve on committees. Later during that session we learned the average new attender was in their thirties yet the yearly meeting clerk didn’t think it was appropriate than any Friend under fifty comment on that (about 40 older Friends were recognized to share their thoughts, natch).

The generational freefall is coming to the yearly meeting. Arch Street Meeting is smack in the middle of one of the premier hip young neighborhoods of Philadelphia yet they’ve been resistant to doing any serious outreach or adult religious ed (I could tell stories: don’t get me started). This weekend I learned that the other downtown meeting, Central Philadelphia, continues its practice – almost policy – of not supporting emerging ministry in long-time young attenders (I could really tell stories). I wouldn’t be surprised if Philadelphia has the lowest per-capita yearly meeting attendance.

So why not just admit that the yearly meeting is irrelevant to younger Friends? Why not turn our meetinghouses into retirement homes?

PS: How I wish I weren’t so cynical about the yearly meeting. I don’t want to feel like it’s a state of all-out generational warfare. I’ve tried, really I have. I’m even willing to try again. But no where have I found a space to have these discussions, at yearly meeting or anywhere else. Other Phila. YM Friends concerned with these issues are welcome to email me – maybe we can figure out some forum for this either inside or outside of the official structures.
PPS: There are a lot of wonderful Friends involved with the yearly meeting. They have good ideas and sincerely try to make it a more welcoming place. The best part of the yearly meeting sessions I’ve attended have been the unexpected conversations. It’s the institution I am frustrated with: the sense that it’s bigger and dumber than all of us.
PPPS: What if I took my own words to heart and considered a PhYM renewal as part of the fifty-year plan? If I just stopped complaining and just attended patiently and faithfully year after year for those “teachable moments” that might inch it forward?

Selling Quakerism to The Kids

November 23, 2004

11/23/200410/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

A few weeks ago I got a bulk email from a prominent sixty-something Friend, who wrote that a programmed New Age practice popular in our branch of Quakerism over the last few years has been a “crucial spiritual experience for a great many of the best of our young adult Friends to whom [Liberal Friends] must look for its future” and that they represented the “rising generation of dedicated young adult Friends.” Really? I thought I’d share a sampling of emails and posts I’ve gotten over just the last couple of days.

Continue reading →

We Quakers should be cooler than the Sweat Lodge

July 5, 2004

07/05/200403/06/2014 · Martin Kelley

I have just come back from a “Meeting for Listening for Sweat Lodge Concerns,” described as “an opportunity for persons to express their feelings in a worshipful manner about the cancellation of the FGC Gathering sweat lodge workshop this year.” Non-Quakers reading this blog might be surprised to hear that Friends General Conference holds sweat lodges, but it has and they’ve been increasingly controversial. This year’s workshop was cancelled after FGC received a very strongly worded complaint from the Wampanoag Native American tribe. Today’s meeting intended to listen to the feelings and concerns of all FGC Friends involved and was clerked by the very-able Arthur Larrabee. There was powerful ministry, some predictable “ministry” and one stunning message from a white Friend who dismissed the very existance of racism in the world (it’s just a illusion, the people responsible for it are those who perceive it).

I’ve had my own run-in’s with the sweat lodge, most unforgettably when I was the co-planning clerk of the 2002 Adult Young Friends program at FGC (a few of us thought it was inappropriate to transfer a portion of the rather small AYF budget to the sweat lodge workshop, a request made with the argument that so many high-school and twenty-something Friends were attending it). But I find myself increasingly unconcerned about the lodge. It’s clear to me now that it part of another tradition than I am. It is not the kind of Quaker I am. The question remaining is whether an organization that will sponsor it is a different tradition.

How did Liberal Friends get to the place where most our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. It has given them a sense of identity and purpose which they don’t get from their meeting “community.”

I don’t care about banning the workshop. That doesn’t address the real problems. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they’d want to spend a week with some white Quaker guy who wonders aloud in public whether he’s “a Quaker or an Indian” (could we have a third choice?). I’ve always thought this was just rather embarrassing. I want the sweat lodge to wither away in recognition of it’s inherent ridiculousness. I want younger Friends to get a taste of the divine love and charity that Friends have found for 350 years. We’re simply cooler than the sweat lodge.

* * * *
And what really is the sweat lodge all about? I don’t really buy the cultural appropriation critique (the official party line for canceling it argues that it’s racist). Read founder George Price’s Friends Journal article on the sweat lodge and you’ll see that he’s part of a long-standing tradition. For two hundred years, Native Americans have been used as mythic cover for thinly disguised European-American philosophies. The Boston protesters who staged the famous tea party all dressed up as Indians, playing out an emerging mythology of the American rebels as spiritual heirs to Indians (long driven out of the Boston area by that time). In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper turned that myth into one of the first pieces of classic American literature with a story about the “Last” of the Mohicans. At the turn of the twentieth century, the new boy scout movement claimed that their fitness and socialization system was really a re-application of Native American training and initiation rites. Quakers got into the game too: the South Jersey and Bucks County summer camps they founded in the nineteen-teens were full of Native American motifs, with cabins and lakes named after different tribes and the children encouraged to play along.

Set in this context, George Price is clearly just the latest white guy to claim that only the spirit of purer Native Americans will save us from our Old World European stodginess. Yes, it’s appropriation I guess, but it’s so transparent and classically American that our favorite song “Yankee Doodle” is a British wartime send-up of the impulse. We’ve been sticking feathers in our caps since forever.

In the Friends Journal article, it’s clear the Quaker sweat lodge owes more to the European psychotherapy of Karl Jung than Chief Ockanickon. It’s all about “liminality” and initiation into mythic archetypes, featuring cribbed language from Victor Turner, the anthropologist who was very popular circa 1974. Price is clear but never explicit about his work: his sweat lodge is Jungian psychology overlaid onto the outward form of a Native American sweatlodge. In retrospect it’s no surprise that a birthright Philadelphia Friend in a tired yearly meeting would try to combine trendy European pop psychology with Quaker summer camp theming. What is a surprise (or should be a surprise) is that Friends would sponsor and publish articles about a “Quaker Sweat Lodges” without challenging the author to spell out the Quaker contribution to a programmed ritual conducted in a consecrated teepee steeplehouse.

(Push the influences a little more, and you’ll find that Victor Turner’s anthropological findings among obscure African tribes arguably owes as much to his Catholicism than it does the facts on the ground. More than one Quaker wit has compared the sweat lodge to Catholic mass; well: Turner’s your missing philosophical link.)

* * * *
Yesterday I had some good conversation about generational issues in Quakerism. I’m certainly not the only thirty-something that feels invisible in the bulldozer of baby boomer assumptions about our spirituality. I’m also not the only one getting to the point where we’re just going to be Quaker despite the Quaker institutions and culture. I think the question we’re all grappling with now is how we relate to the institutions that ignore us and dismiss our cries of alarm for what we Friends have become.

Yearly Meeting Blues

March 25, 2004

03/25/200410/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Went to the opening of “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s”:http://www.pym.org annual sessions yesterday. It’s hard to get too excited about it. It was the same people talking about the same issues. I really like and respect so many in the yearly meeting, but try as I might, I can never imagine this group on _fire._ What would it mean for us to scrap our plans and agendas to follow His?