In her September Friends Journal article, Young Friends Want What Early Quakers Had, Olivia Chalkley talks about the young Catholic traditionalist scene (aka “the tradddies”):

As a Twitter user, I have a front row seat to the bizarre wave of traditionalist Catholicism that’s sweeping New York’s Dimes Square arts scene and garnering media attention. In my own life, I have numerous friends and acquaintances who were raised with little to no religion and are now starting Bible study groups, attending church regularly, and even taking catechism classes.

What would this look like for Friends? Olivia says it would have progressive values (her 2020 QuakerSpeak interview is A Quaker Take on Liberation Theology). How could we do outreach to young adults who might want a more serious and nerdy Quakerism without alienating spiritual-but-not-religious seekers looking for a spiritually-neutral hour of silence? (See Pareto Curve outreach.) Also the big question: is this just a fever dream for a few of us stuck in a bubble? Is there really an opportunity for something widespread enough to call a movement? Youth-led Quaker movements have happened before: New Swarthmoor, Young Friends North America, and Movement for a New Society all created hip subcultures (albeit without overt spirituality in the latter’s case). On a smaller, decidedly less-hip fashion, networks like New Foundation Fellowship, QuakerSpring, Ohio YM’s outreach efforts, and School of the Spirit all continue to provide opportunities for nerdy Friends wanting to go deep into Quaker spirituality.

I’m a bit skeptical, to be honest, but some things in the wider spiritual culture have been changing the calculus:

• As Olivia points out, Generation Z is more unchurched than any in recent memory; some of its members are looking for something more substantial and directive;
• The internet continues to make non-mainstream movements ever easier to find and communities easier to organize;
• Online worship has made it easier for seekers to “shop around” for a non-local spiritual community that might better “speak to their condition,” to use the Quaker lingo.

These cultural changes aren’t limited to youth, of course. A regular Quaker Ranter reader emailed me a few weeks ago to say that she’s started attending online worship hundreds of miles away after her longtime meeting “become less and less a worshiping community and more and more a  collection of nice individuals.” The at-a-distance meeting “it is the spiritual home I had stopped looking for!” I’m kind of curious where these currents are going to be taking Friends of all generations.

Olivia and I talk about much of this in the latest FJ Author Chat.

What do Quakers believe? How do we practice our faith? The best place to look for the answers might be in a book of faith and practice. Here’s what they are and how they evolved over time.

http://quakerspeak.com/what-is-a-quaker-book-of-faith-and-practice/

Whitman absorbed deist principles from his father; he was equally influenced by his mother’s Quaker background. He embraced the Quaker emphasis on individual experience of the divine — what Friends call the “inner light” — as well as the concept of “that of God” existing within every person. Whitman’s poetry reflects Quakers’ radically egalitarian theology

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/31-may/features/features/walt-whitman-a-prophet-found-under-your-boot-soles

What choices do we have? The most obvious and most glib answer is: leave! Escape! In fact, after prayer and consultation and weighing options, that may end up being the best answer.

This seems like a very grounded look at some of the oft-recurrent dysfunctions in churches. Check out the list of problems. I suspect thet most seekers have run into at least a fee of these in congregations.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/03/trustworthy-part-three-choices.html

If you look back through Friends Journal archives, you’ll find warnings against competitive behavior. In 1955 Bess B. Lane of Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting wrote that schools should “Place emphasis on cooperation, sharing, rather than on competition” and wondered if “competition is being overstressed in our schools.” In 1972, Christopher H. Anderson, then a senior at Wilmington College, had stronger words. He contrasted his Quaker education with public schools, which he said “breed a social conformity, an intellectual blandness and a repugnant spirit of competition.”

If you know anyone who is interested in the topic, please forward this along!

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

There are 48 workshops to choose from this year, which is about the normal number for recent years. I used Archive.org to look back and the biggest year I could dig up was 2006, when 73 workshops were offered. Gathering attendance has dropped since then but I also suspect 73 selections were a bit ambitious. The current normal is more suited to the Gathering size. There are lots of familiar workshop leaders. Are there any that stand out for you? Fell free to drop recommendations (or promote your own workshop if you’re doing one!) in the comment section.

https://www.fgcquaker.org/connect/gathering/programs-and-events/workshops

My speculations, therefore, center around around what a Quaker Village might look like, understanding “village” to mean “small community” (hundreds or thousands, but not millions). How do these people live? How do they put their Christian values into practice?

Let’s say it’s a hundred years from now, when all of us are safely dead. Or maybe we’d like to accelerate the timeline?

For me, a hallmark of Quakerism is its egalitarianism and commitment to rotating roles. That’s not a feature of every branch I realize, and those who decry “outward forms” may consider Oversight, Property Management, Children’s Program etc., to be the opposite of “primitive” by definition. Perhaps such infrastructure seems too complicated, too much like everyday life. I realize we use our words differently.

I like the qualification to imagine this 100 years from now. It gives us a bit of time to sort out all of the inconvenient roadblocks of current apathy and resistance to change. One of the techniques Amazon is said to use is to start any new project ideas with a press release as a way to make sure the final product is focused on actual customer needs. Kirby’s piece reminds me of this. What would it look like to have a strong vision of the Quaker communities we’d like to live in someday?
http://www.quakerquaker.org/forum/topics/what-is-primitive-christianity

I very much like for example the determination that says somebody believes in peace and has the guts to say in a time of war, “No, I can’t fight. I can’t do that.” I think that takes a lot.

I think it had a lot to do with the people. There wasn’t really that hierarchy, where there was someone talking down to us, but we could really share ideas and we could all learn from each other, and I really appreciated those ideals.

http://quakerspeak.com/what-attracts-newcomers-to-quaker-meeting/