The Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings

By Martin Kelley

What is it like to be a thirty-something Friend these days? Lonely and frustrating. At least half of the committed, interesting and bold twenty-something Friends I knew ten years ago have left Quakerism. This isn’t normal youthful church-hopping and it’s not some character flaw of “Generation X.” They’ve left because they were simply tired of slamming their heads against the wall of an institutional Quakerism that neglected them and its own future.

I can certainly relate. For the last decade, I’ve done ground-breaking work publicizing nonviolence online. I’ve been profiled in the New York Times and invited on national talk radio shows, but the clerk of the peace committee in my achingly-small monthly meeting always forgets that I have “some website” and I’ve never been asked to speak to Friends about my work. I wouldn’t mind being overlooked if I saw others my age being recognized, but most of the amazing ministries I’ve known have been just as invisible.

It’s like this even at the small-scale level. I’ve gone to countless committee meetings with ideas, enthusiasm and faithfulness, only to realize (too late, usually) that these are just the qualities these committees don’t want. Through repeated heartbreak I’ve finally learned that if I feel like I’m crashing a party when I try to get involved with some Quaker cause, then it’s a sign that it’s time to get out of there! I’ve been in so many meetinghouses where I’ve been the only person within ten years of my age in either direction that I’m genuinely startled when I’m in a roomful of twenty- and thirty-somethings.

I recently had lunch with one of the thirtysomething Friends who have left. He had been drawn to Friends because of their mysticism and their passion for nonviolent social change; he was still very committed to both. But after organizing actions for years, he concluded that the Friends in his meeting didn’t think the peace testimony could actually inspire us to a witness that was so bold.

I wrote about this lunch conversation on my website and before long another old Friend surfaced. Eight years ago a witness and action conference inspired him to help launch a national Quaker youth volunteer network. He put years of his life into this; his statements on the problems and promises facing Quaker youth are still right on the mark. But after early excitement his support evaporated and the project eventually fell apart in what he’s described as “a bitter and unsuccessful experience.”

The loss of Quaker peers has hit close to home for me. When one close Friend learned my wife had left Quakerism for another church after eleven years, all he could say was how pleased he was that she had finally found her spiritual home; others gave similar empty- sounding platitudes. I felt like saying to them “No, you dimwits, we’ve driven away yet another Friend!” Each of these three lost Friends remain deeply committed to the Spirit and are now involved in other religious societies.

Young adults haven’t always been as invisible or uninvolved as they are now. A whole group of the Quaker leaders currently in their fifties and sixties were given important jobs at Quaker organizations at very tender ages (often right out of college). Also, there’s historical precedent for this: George Fox was 24 when he began his public ministry; Samuel Bownas was 20 when he was roused out of his meetinghouse slumber to begin his remarkable ministry; even Margaret Fell was still in her thirties when she was convinced. When the first generation of Friends drew together a group of their most important elders and ministers to address one of their many crises, the average age of the gathering was 35. Younger Friends haven’t always been ghettoized into Young

Audlt Friends only dorms, programs, workshops or committees.

There is hope. Some have started noticing that young Friends who go into leadership training programs often disappear soon afterwards. The powers that be at Friends General Conference have finally started talking about “youth ministry.” (Welcome!). A great people might possibly be gathered from the emergent church movement and the internet is full of amazing conversations from new Friends and seekers. There are pockets in our branch of Quakerism where older Friends have continued to mentor and encourage meaningful and integrated youth leadership, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most hopefully, there’s a whole new generation of twenty- something Friends on the scene with strong gifts that could be nurtured and harnessed.

In the truest reality, our chronological ages melt away in the ever-refreshing currents of the Living Spirit; we are all as children to a loving God. Will Friends come together to remember this before our religious society loses another generation?

Martin Kelley is a member of Atlantic City Monthly Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. He works for FGC as the webmaster and bookstore secretary. This article is written from his experience.

One of the “stars” charts at the consultation

Being the information design geek, I converted the resultant votes to into qualities and colors and put them into a chart showing interest level. Projects that received no votes from a particular age range are labeled “none,” for no interest; 2–3 stars is “weak” interest and so forth, up to “HOT” which are projects which received over 7 stars from an age group.

As an example, take “develop spirituality.” Seven adult young Friends (aged 18–37) put a star down for this, indicating they thought it was something FGC should promote, hence “strong” (bright red) interest from this age group. No Friend over forty used one of their stars to indicate interest in this work, indicating that none of them thought FGC should be promoting spiritual development. Here are the results:

Things Younger Friends wanted more than Older Friends:
In order by AYF popularity:

• MENTORSHIP: The AYFs really want cross-generational mentoring relationships. When the questions were first posed, there only “mentoring by older Friends” and “mentoring to younger Friends.” Check the math and you’ll see that’s the same question (whoever put the questions together forgot that the Quaker understanding of eldership is not necessarily a function of age, hmm). I grabbed a pencil and added “mentoring to older Friends” and it was instantly popular. Even though the mentorship issue was spread over three questions, AYF’s voted “strongly” for each of them, showing terrific popular support. Almost no over-40 Friend voted for this. This is not something that can be forced onto disinterested older Friends, which means I think we young-in’s are going to have to rely on one another for mentorship.
• SUPPORT FOR AYF CONFERNCES: Younger Friends want to spend more time together. Note should be made that the voters were Friends attending a conference and that we were a selected and self-selected group who presumably like to attend conferences. Still, this is popular.
• TALKING ABOUT OUR FAITH: It’s sad that only two older Friends thought explaining the faith was worthwhile. At the same time it’s encouraging that 13 AYFs wanted this. It’s very clear that younger Friends aren’t as afraid of talking about serious faith issues as the Baby Boomers (it’s nice to see some of my essays confirmed!).

Things Older Friends wanted more than Younger Friends:

• TAPPING THE YOUTH: There was what I thought was a semi-obnoxious question about how to “tap the energy and passion” of younger Friends. This is very close to the all-too-common generational mindset that sees “values young people as a resource” (as a ad in heavy-rotation at NPR proclaims). We are not a resource for extraction. Young people are too often seen merely as a source of cheap labor for projects initiated, designed and run by older Friends; they are wanted as passive audience members for older Friends’ pontificating lectures; they are endlessly proclaimed a far-off “future” of Friends rather than the very much here-and-now present of Friends.While older Friends at the consultation felt strongly that young people should be tapped, Adult Young Friends had lukewarm interest in being tapped and high school Friends showed no interest whatsoever. While not all older Friends think of young Friends as “resources,” it’s a common-enough theme that we need to flag it as a part of the generational gap. I suspect that power issues will surface when Quaker institutions try to pull together projects that “tap” youth: twenty-something Friends are going to want more involvement in the design and operation of these projects than older Friends will be willing to give.Similarly, older Friends seem to be more interested that younger Friends attain “critical mass” at Quaker institutions like monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings. The phrasing of the question is a little ambiguous and I see two likely explanations. One is that younger Friends don’t feel they need critical mass to be involved in Quaker institutions and want integrated intergenerational participation rather than “AYF ghettos.” The other possibility (the scarier one) is that younger Friends simply aren’t as committed to Quaker institutions. I suspect the generational differences in responses are the result of both these factors, plus others perhaps.

Things no one particularly cared about:

• No one wants materials specifically designed for AYF. No one wants advertising programs. No one wants a database to help isolated Friends.
• An AYF traveling ministries was lukewarm, 4 YAF stars, 3 over-40. This surprises me.
• Any other patterns that should be lifted up?

Disclaimer
I should note that this was not a scientific survey. Though the organizers of the Consultation tried hard and the participants were surprisingly diverse for an collection like this, they weren’t representative. There were only four high school participants and I didn’t adjust their votes: “lukewarm” support from them should really be relabled “strong” support.

While this is a small sample size, this is one of the few recent surveys of it type in FGC Quakerism and it bears close study. It confirms a lot of what I’ve been saying all these years (yea!, I’m not crazy) and echoes what I hear a lot of high school and twenty-something Friends talking about. Take it for what its worth!

Related:

• I first wrote about the Youth Ministries Consulation in “It’s My Language Now”

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.

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.)