Tag Archives ⇒ outreach

Talking about Who We Believe In

December 11, 2025
· Martin Kelley

I talked with Tom Gates this week about the nature of belief. He has an arti­cle in the cur­rent Friends Jour­nal titled “Beyond What Words Can Utter.”

We agreed that a lot of Quak­er belief can only be expe­ri­enced, not described, which makes for dif­fi­cul­ties when doing out­reach. It’s easy to go into nuance once some­one has com­ing into the meet­ing­house and is par­tic­i­pat­ing in an edu­ca­tion pro­gram but how do we get them off the street in the first place. Tom said:

I’m com­fort­able with Christ lan­guage and the inward light of Christ. And I know there are friends who are not, and there are good rea­sons why they’re not. I’m not deny­ing that. in these new­com­er ses­sions a per­sis­tent ques­tion is: Are Quak­ers Chris­t­ian? And how do you under­stand that? And they’re most­ly com­ing from back­grounds and oth­er kind of more con­ser­v­a­tive churches.

And so that’s a live ques­tion for them because in some sense they all left those church­es because the fun­da­men­tal­ism was grat­ing on them. I always pull off this thing from my shelf, it’s the Reader’s Guide to George Fox’s Jour­nal by Joseph Pick­vance. And he makes a fas­ci­nat­ing state­ment: the com­mon­est cause of mis­un­der­stand­ing of Fox’s teach­ing today is a fail­ure to real­ize how wide and deep and func­tion­al is the mean­ing that quote Christ had for him. 

Our dis­cus­sion ranged quite a bit, from Art Larrabee’s “Nine Core Quak­er Beliefs” to Mar­cus Borg’s Heart of Chris­tian­i­ty and 1653’s Saul’s Errand to Dam­as­cus, by James Nayler and George Fox. I def­i­nite­ly need to do some more reading!

Full show notes and a tran­script are avail­able.

Tom has also writ­ten a follow-up post on Quak­er belief on his blog. 

What Do Quakers Believe?

December 1, 2025
· Martin Kelley

How’s the old joke go? Ask five Quak­ers what they believe and you’ll get ten answers. Undaunt­ed, Decem­ber’s Friends Jour­nal tries to give some answers to the ques­tion any­way. I very much hope that indi­vid­ual Friends will find view­points they real­ly like as well as ones they real­ly don’t like, or at least don’t agree with. That there are no pat answers is itself part of the answer to the question.

Bonus: we’ve been work­ing on expand­ing our inter­na­tion­al inclu­sion in the mag­a­zine and an arti­cle from Sal­vado­ran Jas­son Areva­lo on the role of Quak­er pas­tors is the first fruits of our new Latin Amer­i­can cor­re­spon­den­t’s out­reach efforts.

Cropwell hosts Halloween family outreach event again

October 30, 2024
· Martin Kelley

My meet­ing host­ed anoth­er Hal­loween event ear­li­er this week. When we did it in 2022 we arranged to have fly­ers dis­trib­uted by the home­own­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion of devel­op­ment behind us but we missed the Octo­ber mail­ing dead­line this time. So a few mem­bers fly­ered in the neigh­bor­hood and it worked! Some­one saw it and shared it on a par­ent chat for the near­by ele­men­tary school. A few further-off peo­ple came because of the Face­book event, which frankly sur­prised me.

Cropwell hosts Halloween family outreach event again - Cropwell Quakers
Crop­well hosts Hal­loween fam­i­ly out­reach event again — Crop­well Quakers 

This Sun­day, Crop­well Friends Meet­ing, a Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty in Marl­ton and Cher­ry Hill, N.J., host­ed a Hal­loween party…

Cropwell Quakers Crop­well Quakers 

The importance of Google listings

January 20, 2023
· Martin Kelley

The blog archives will show that I’ve long been inter­est­ed in Quak­er out­reach. As I’ve grown more involved at Crop­well Meet­ing in Marl­ton, N.J., this past year I’m learn­ing some prac­ti­cal lessons for hyper-local out­reach that I’ll share occasionally. 

Two non-regular vis­i­tors to Quak­er meet­ing this Sun­day, one a first-time enquir­er and the oth­er a Friend mak­ing a spe­cial vis­it. Both saw our Google Maps entry first. One said that all the pic­tures there made the meet­ing look espe­cial­ly active. Good to remem­ber that for a lot of poten­tial vis­i­tors this is our homepage.

When I was in my wandering-between-meetings phase, vis­it­ing dif­fer­ent meet­ings all the time, I’d often upload pho­tos to Google Maps and update con­tact details as I was sit­ting in the park­ing lot before I left. Some of the Crop­well pho­tos are from my first vis­it a year ago. Adding pic­tures is very easy and is a great way to help places we like look good to poten­tial visitors. 

At Crop­well we’ve also been post­ing events to Google (via Eventbrite, as I under­stand the process) and these also appear in Google Maps. 

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Generational strategies for Quaker outreach

August 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Emi­ly Provance:

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

Lifting up the vocabulary

May 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

This week’s fea­tured Friends Jour­nal arti­cle is Sell­ing Hope by Tom Hoopes. Hoopes is a teacher at George School, one of the two promi­nent Quak­er board­ing schools in the Philadel­phia area, and he talks about the brand­ing chal­lenges of “Quak­er val­ues” which his­toric Quak­er schools so often fall back on when describ­ing their mis­sion. We often describe these with the sim­plis­tic “SPICES” foru­mu­la­tion (Eric Moon wrote about the prob­lems over-emphasizing these). Hoopes encour­ages us to expand our language:

We can use any num­ber of descrip­tors that do not sound so haughty and near­sight­ed. I think we should con­tin­u­al­ly lift up some key pieces of vocab­u­lary that real­ly do make the Quak­er way dis­tinc­tive. Here is a brief list, to which I am sure Friends can add oth­ers: “that of God in every per­son”; “the Inner Light”; “con­tin­u­ing rev­e­la­tion”; “dis­cern­ment”; “sense of the meet­ing”; “right­ly led and right­ly ordered”; “Friend speaks my mind”; “the still, small voice with­in”; “way open­ing”; “clerk­ing”; “query”; “wor­ship shar­ing”; “expec­tant wait­ing”; “cen­ter­ing down”; “Quak­er deci­sion mak­ing”; “Quak­er tra­di­tion”; “faith and prac­tice”; “seek­ing clear­ness”; “Quak­er tes­ti­monies”; and of course, “meet­ing for worship.”

Long­time FJ read­ers will remem­ber a much-discussed 2008 arti­cle by Hoopes, “Young Fam­i­lies and Quak­erism: Will the Cen­ter Hold?” It cer­tain spoke to my con­di­tion as a par­ent strug­gling with fam­i­ly life among Friends:

Let’s look at some hard real­i­ties fac­ing many Quak­er par­ents of young chil­dren today. They are fre­quent­ly exhaust­ed and fraz­zled from attend­ing to their children’s needs in addi­tion to their own all week long. They des­per­ate­ly need a break from their own chil­dren, and they may feel guilty about that fact. They are often asked — or expect­ed — to serve as First-day school teach­ers or child­care providers. Hence, their expe­ri­ence of meet­ing is not one of replen­ish­ment, but of fur­ther depletion.

I wish I could report that Philadel­phia Friends took the 2008 arti­cle to heart.


Selling Quakerism - Friends Journal

Sell­ing Quak­erism — Friends Journal 

The Mis­sion – Mar­ket Ten­sion Inher­ent in Quak­er Values

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

Could Quakerism be the radical faith?

April 23, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Isaac Smith won­ders whether the title of Chris Ven­ables’s recent piece, “Could Quak­erism be the rad­i­cal faith that the mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion is look­ing for?,” is fol­low­ing Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

I’d put the dilem­ma of Quak­erism in the 21st cen­tu­ry this way: It’s not just that our trea­sures are in jars of clay, it’s that no one would even know the trea­sures were there, and it seems like they’re eas­i­er to find else­where. And how do we know that what we have are even treasures?

I gave my own skep­ti­cal take on Ven­ables’s arti­cle yes­ter­day. Smith hits on part of what wor­ries me when he says cur­rent reli­gious dis­en­gage­ment is of a kind to be immune to “bet­ter social media game or a more stream­lined church bureau­cra­cy.” These are the easy, value-free answers insti­tu­tions like to turn to.

I’m think­ing about these issues not only because of this arti­cle but also because Friends Jour­nal is seek­ing sub­mis­sions for thr August issue “Going Viral with Quak­erism.” A few weeks ago I wrote a post that referred back to Quak­er inter­net out­reach 25 years ago.

Could Quak­erism be the rad­i­cal faith that the mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion is look­ing for?