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.

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.

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.

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

Who tells our story in this time?  In today’s world of immediate news, and social media, and everyone having a twitter account and an opinion – there’s a lot of misinformation out there.  Some of it might be damaging and outright manipulative.  Some of it might just be misinformed people, who are confusing Quakers (for example) with Amish folks, or Shakers.

One of the reasons I’ve been so involved in Quaker media is my longtime concern that we’re in increasing danger of being defined by outsiders. A mainstream site with a page on Quakers can easily show up higher in search results than pages we create.  For a long time back in the day, an entry on Quakers written by some Unitarians on Religioustolerance.com was a top hit. Google and Facebook have long had more say in defining Quaker beliefs than any of our national organizations. Even when real-life Quakers are involved— in Facebook groups, Wikipedia editing, blogging, and the original Quaker.org—there was none of the kind of formal Quaker process (for better and worse) that historically characterized Quaker publishing.

One happy irony is that Kathleen herself came in through a channel with no Quaker involvement. She writes: ” I had never heard of Quakers until I took an internet quiz in my mid- thirties.” This is almost certainly the “Belief-o-Matic” Beliefnet quiz (confirmed in comments). The site was founded as a venture-capital-fueled  attempt to win the advertising religion market in the heady years of what we retrospectively call the dot-com bubble. The original quiz dates further back to a still-going site called SelectSmart, which hosts dozens of quizzes (“Which Bond Villain Are You?,” “What Pizza Topping Are You?,” “Pink Floyd Album Selector”), one of the most popular of which is “Belief System Selector.” The site is Curt and Lori Anderson, a husband-and-wife team; he was the techie who programmed the quizzes; she hunted for content. She used online sources and her local library to coming up with questions for him to plug in for the belief quiz (read some of the story here and also here). Beliefnet started hosting it independently, giving it a UI refresh and renaming it Belief-o-Matic. For whatever reasons of wonky algorithms huge percentages of people who took the test came out as “Liberal Quaker” or “Orthodox Quaker.” No Friends were involved in the quiz, hence the archaic names (few Friends have identified as Orthodox for generations).

In the 2000s, this quiz was inadvertently far more successful in outreach than any program conceived by Friends (sorry PYM/FGC/Pendle Hill donors). I think we’ve all become better at media and telling our own story but Kathleen’s question—who tells our story in this time?—is still a key one. After all, Lori Anderson’s checklist of beliefs (on SelectSmart and Beliefnet) are probably one of the most-read definitions of Liberal Quakerism.

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quakerkathleen.org

Updated July 2018

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

The Mission–Market Tension Inherent in Quaker Values

Friends Journal

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?