There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers’ virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don’t need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.

In my experience, a lot of incoming seekers really like it when we fess up to our past indiscretions and current struggles. Perhaps they’ve come from some church that was overly confident and unable to examine its flaws and so like our transparency. Nowadays the influencer class all talk about “emotional maturity” and I think part of that is appreciating ourselves for who we really are in a healthy way.

Maybe because I’m thinking about the upcoming Friends Journal issue of “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism” (there’s still ten days to write for it!) but I’m also thinking about the tone with which we approach outreach. In some circles there’s a panic that we somehow have to save Quakerism. That begs the question of “what is Quakerism”?

Is Quakerism a way of approaching our relationship with the living Christ and sharing that good news as we walk cheerfully over the world? Is it building communities that express our commitment to love of God and love of neighbor? If so, then nothing is ever going to destroy it. The whole point of the original Quaker movement is that it didn’t need a large infrastructure: no priests or pastors, no staff, no tithing. An empty barn and a small room of believers was enough. Here’s my naive side rising up: if we are faithful God, will continue to give us guidance and blessings.

When I dropped in for a day of the FGC Gathering this summer, I attended a workshop led by the most excellent Chiyo Moriuchi, titled “Letting our Light Shine: Governance & Friends.” The workshop wrote its own epistle, which FGC published on their website today with the title “A Call to Action.” Here’s part of its message:

Immediate action is required to address the fact of declining and aging membership. We have too few people available to do the “work,” and we are burning out too many of those who are. We feel that addressing the inadequate communication of who Quakers are is the most promising path to solve this problem.

This is all true, but it’s true of our institutions. It’s true of our infrastructure. The document has two calls to action: the first is for Quaker institutions to do some self-reflection on what makes them Quaker (sounds good to me!). The second is for Friends to hire outside marketing firms. I’ve seen big budgets poured into marketing firms before and sigh at what a proposal like this would likely give us: generic, feel-good copy that irons out all blemishes. Any spiritual language that might be deemed off-putting gets cut.  History is dropped except for a few past heroes who are turned into cartoons.¹

Decades of religion surveys have found that people aren’t looking for bland and generic. A lot of the fastest-growing denominations are opinionated and have high expectations of incoming members. The newcomers I see walking into my meeting seem to be searching for something real, something palpable, as indeed I myself was when I walked into Abington Meeting over three decades ago. We can be ourselves and share our blemishes. We don’t need to put on an act.

And finally, some optimism: Quaker marketing is doing great. Seriously. We’re more visible and accessible than we’ve been in our entire history. Friends Journal is a part of that, with the magazine free without paywall and the Quakerspeak interview series, Quakers Today podcast, and Quaker.org portal. But we’re just a piece of what’s happening. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast and the Daily Quaker email is super-visible. The Quakers sub-reddit and Discord server are very active. The slick Friends Library makes historic Quaker writings accessible by web, app, and audio (and the old-school Project Gutenberg, Christian Classics Etherial Library, Quaker Heritage Press are still around). It’s easy to find local meetings (FGC and FWCC have good resources, plus Google Maps does a great job). Any curious person wanting to know about Quakers can get up to speed in weeks. I know because I see these people walking into my own Cropwell Meeting.

So I don’t think our institutions necessarily need new marketing so much as new visioning. What kinds of support is needed for the new seekers and for local meetings? I think in some ways we need to step back and see with new eyes. What is it we want to market?

Growth for growth’s sake

Political and cultural observations in light of Quaker discipleship.

blog.canyoubelieve.me

YFGM aims to be a welcoming and accessible space for people of all gender identities where people feel included and oppressive behaviour is not accepted. We recognise we have further work to do including some more immediate changes, and creating space to nurture deeper cultural changes within both YFGM and the wider Society of Friends.

http://yfgm.quaker.org.uk/docs/trans-and-non-binary-statement/

Society’s values are so often in opposition to God’s purposes. Slavery used to be legal. Love between two people of the same sex was illegal in our lifetimes. Our economic system is based on greed and pays no heed to God’s creation. Nation states exist and act for their own enrichment rather than loyalties lying with the Kingdom of Heaven and working for the enrichment of all humanity. When being loyal to God’s purposes runs counter to what society expects it can get pretty rough. There may be persecution, though it varies a lot: from tutting, telling you off for being vegetarian, being given white feathers, right through to imprisonment, jails and the lions of the Colosseum.

Putting the protest back in Protestant

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is “a new Quakerism,” and oddly enough, I’ve been hearing other Friends unknowingly echo this phrase back to me. It seems to me that many Friends, even those who consider themselves “convinced,” are hungry for more than what the Society has to offer.

Of course it’s part of our tradition that it needs to be forever reborn. You can’t recycle sermons or use the prop of your university learning as a crutch. We are never to know what might happen when worship starts, since the idea is that it’s directly led in the moment by Christ. It’s also a part of our tradition that forms are forever calcifying and that we need to remember why we’re here and who’s brought us together. Glad to see the work continue.

A New Quakerism

Since Benson’s time, denominational-mindedness has gained ground among Quakers, and a diversity of philosophies is now seen as valid not only for those outside of the Society but for those within. A tightening conformity to the doctrine of individualism has accelerated the proliferation of ideologies within the Society. Resisted by most is the observation that human nature is intrinsic and universal, the same in every time and place, and that Jesus Christ speaks to this universal condition.

https://patradallmann.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/introduction-to-the-christian-universalism-of-george-fox/

On its face, the decision by the Society of Friends to censure a flagrant arms merchant in its ranks may not seem surprising. Pacifist principles were central to Quaker ideology, as was opposition to slavery. Guns fueled not just war but the slave trade. Yet Mr. Galton’s father, and his father before him — and indeed many other Quakers who long dominated Birmingham’s arms industry — had been unapologetic gunmakers for 70 years without attracting rebuke. What had changed in the interim, in ways that are deeply interrelated, were society and the guns themselves.

Today the debate on guns in the U.S. is focused on assault weapons being used by individuals but the Galton debate is more about the role of a Quaker-produced product in war. Britain of course was an empire, an empire held together by force of weapons. Some percentage of the industrial revolution in Britain was financed by war and its products often were employed overseas in the maintenance and extension of the empire (I’m thinking for example of trains).

When I first read John Woolman I was struck by his calling slavery a product of war. I usually think of it as a human rights and dignity issue (and of course it was and Woolman was particularly sensitive to the human dimension) but it was also a type of highly organized warfare. Seeing the systemic nature of the trade as a whole let Friends better see the unacceptability of slavery—and imperial weapons manufacturing.

Review: ‘Empire of Guns’ Challenges the Role of War in Industrialization (Published 2018)

In her new book, Professor Priya Satia aims to overturn the conventional wisdom about the role of guns…

www.nytimes.com

“The mission of early Friends was to turn people to the light in the conscience, which would first of all show them where they’d missed the mark. If Friends today would turn our Society around, we must first turn ourselves around inwardly.” [Source]

Perhaps as a response to these feelings, we sometimes get rather pedantic that whatever way we’ve first encountered is the Quaker way. The current fashion of vocal ministry in the Philadelphia area is for short messages, often about world events, often confessional in nature. What I wanted to leave Abington with was the radically different ways unprogrammed Friends have worshipped over time and how some of our practices outside worship were developed to help nurture Spirit-led ministry.

(written this a.m. but only posted to limited circles, cut and pasted when I saw the mix-up)

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