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(Too) Silent Worship and Whithered Meetings

April 27, 2008
· Martin Kelley

One of the things I liked about my old Quak­er job is that I occa­sion­al­ly had a moment in between all of the staff meet­ings (and meet­ings about staff meet­ings, and meet­ings about meet­ings about staff meet­ings, I kid you not) to take inter­est­ing calls and emails from Friends want­i­ng to talk about the state of Friends in their area: how to start a wor­ship group if no Friends exist­ed, how to revi­tal­ize a local Meet­ing, how to work through some grow­ing pains or cul­tur­al con­flicts. I’ve thought about repli­cat­ing that on the blog, and halfway through respond­ing to one of tonight’s emails I real­ized I was prac­ti­cal­ly writ­ing a blog post. So here it is. Please feel free to add your own respons­es to this Friend in the comments.

Dear Mar­tin
I have read that Meet­ings that are
silent for long peri­ods of time often with­er away. But I can’t remem­ber where I
read that, or if the obser­va­tion has facts to back it up. Do you know of any
source where I can look this up?
Thanks, 
CC

Dear CC,
I
can’t think of any spe­cif­ic source for that obser­va­tion. It is
some­times used as an argu­ment against wait­ing wor­ship, a pre­lude to the
intro­duc­tion of some sort of pro­gram­ming. While it’s true that too much
silence can be a warn­ing sign, I sus­pect that Meet­ings that talk too
much are prob­a­bly also just as like­ly to with­er away (at least to
Inward Christ that often seems to speak in whis­pers). I think the
deter­min­ing fac­tor is less deci­bel lev­el but atten­tion to the workings
of the Holy Spirit. 

One of the main roles of min­istry is to teach. Anoth­er is to remind
us to keep turn­ing to God. Anoth­er is to remind us that we live by
high­er stan­dards than the default required by the sec­u­lar world in
which we live. If the Friends com­mu­ni­ty is ful­fill­ing these functions
through some oth­er chan­nel than min­istry in meet­ing for wor­ship then
the Meet­ing’s prob­a­bly healthy even if it is quiet. 

Unfor­tu­nate­ly there are plen­ty of Meet­ings are too silent on all
fronts. This means that the young and the new­com­ers will have a hard
time get­ting brought into the spir­i­tu­al life of Friends. Once upon a
time the Meet­ing annu­al­ly reviewed the state of its min­istry as part of
its queries to Quar­ter­ly and Year­ly Meet­ings, which gave neighboring
Friends oppor­tu­ni­ties to pro­vide assis­tance, advise or even ministers.
The prac­tice of writ­ten answers to queries have been dropped by most
Friends but the pos­si­bil­i­ty of appeal­ing to oth­er Quak­er bod­ies is
still a def­i­nite possibility.
Your Friend, Martin

Now Available: Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators

April 15, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Long in the works, my O’Reil­ly Media-pub­lished “Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggre­ga­tors” is avail­able. The title could sort of be boiled down to “hey this Quak​erQuak​er​.org thing has become kind of neat” but it’s more than that. I wax lyri­cal about the dif­fer­ent kind of aggre­ga­tor com­mu­ni­ty sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media are­na: “folk­so­nom­ic den­si­ty” (Google it now kids and you’ll see the only ref­er­ences are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the tech­nos­phere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ush­ered in the sec­ond phase of the Age of Aquar­ius, yada yada).

A hun­dred thank you’s to my fine and patient edi­tor S. (don’t know if you want to be out­ed here). I’ve been an edi­tor myself in one capac­i­ty or anoth­er for fif­teen years (I’ve some­times even been paid for it) so it was edu­ca­tion­al to expe­ri­ence the rela­tion­ship from the oth­er side. I wrote this while liv­ing an insane sched­ule and it’s amaz­ing I found any time at get all this down. 

As luck would have it I’ve just got­ten my design site at Mar​tinKel​ley​.com up and run­ning ful­ly again, so I hope to do some posts relat­ed to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the mean­time, below is the mar­ket­ing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggre­ga­tors. It is avail­able for $9.99 from the O’Reil­ly web­site.

Web aggre­ga­tors select and present con­tent culled from multiple
sources, play­ing an impor­tant taste-making and pro­mo­tion­al role. Larger
aggre­ga­tors are start­ing to com­pete with main­stream news sources but a
new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggre­ga­tors are orga­niz­ing around
spe­cif­ic inter­ests. Niche aggre­ga­tors har­ness the pow­er of the internet
to build com­mu­ni­ties pre­vi­ous­ly sep­a­rat­ed by geog­ra­phy or institutional
iner­tia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role.
Under­stand­ing their oper­a­tion is crit­i­cal for those want­i­ng to
under­stand or pre­dict cul­tur­al change and for those who want to harness
the pow­er of the long tail by cater­ing to niches. 

Reading John Woolman 1: The Public Life of a Private Man

August 7, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read­ing John Wool­man Series:
1: The Pub­lic Life of a Pri­vate Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Iso­lat­ed Saint

I’ve final­ly done it. I’ve read John Woolman’s Jour­nal. Here I’ve been an activist among Quak­ers for almost two decades and I’ve read one of our Big Books.

I have tried before. Many’s the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton’s edi­tion to set­tle myself down. Chap­ter one read, chap­ter two read. Then to chap­ter three, open­ing with:

About this time, believ­ing it good for me to set­tle, and think­ing seri­ous­ly about a com­pan­ion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wis­dom to pro­ceed there­in agree­ably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was mar­ried the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.

And that’s it. One run-on sen­tence about court­ing and mar­ry­ing his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a book­mark in with all good inten­tions of con­tin­u­ing after din­ner. But the book sits on the cof­fee table till a week or so goes by, where­upon it’s moved to the library area for a month or so until it’s final­ly reshelved. The book­marks stays put until a year or two pass­es and I re-start the Jour­nal with renewed determination.

I know why the sen­tence stops me. Through­out my twen­ties and ear­ly thir­ties a lot of my emo­tion­al ener­gy was drained in the (most­ly Quak­er) dat­ing scene. In the­o­ry I thought it a good time “for me to set­tle” and would have been quite con­tent with a “well-inclined damsel.” But the chaos of my per­son­al fam­i­ly his­to­ry com­bined with the casu­al dat­ing cul­ture com­bined to keep me dis­tract­ed with the largely-manufactured dra­ma of rela­tion­ship roller-coasters. For bet­ter or worse, if and when I ever write a jour­nal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dat­ing era both fed and stunt­ed my spir­i­tu­al growth.

One of the les­son I learned back in the ear­ly 90s when I was edi­tor at New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers was that I should pay atten­tion when I put a man­u­script or book down. The temp­ta­tion is to chalk it up to tired­ness or a busy life but I found there was usu­al­ly some­thing going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the man­u­script back up and re-read the pas­sages on either side of my aban­doned book­mark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weak­ened the book.

I appre­ci­ate that Quak­er jour­nals are not racy mem­oirs; they have a spe­cif­ic reli­gious edu­ca­tion pur­pose. But I think it’s nat­ur­al to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bow­nas talks a bit about his engage­ment and David Fer­ris turns meet­ing his future wife into quite a humor­ous sto­ry. Per­haps Wool­man was such a saint­ly aes­thete that Sarah was sim­ply pre­sent­ed to him with no futher ques­tions. But still, there’s a lev­el of pri­va­cy in Woolman’s writ­ings that sep­a­rates him from us; I’ll return to this is part three.

Before I go: so how did I get through the jour­nal this time? Two things are dif­fer­ent now: first, my five year wed­ding anniver­sary is only a few weeks away; and sec­ond: Woolman’s Jour­nal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (cour­tesy the Chris­t­ian Clas­sics Ethe­r­i­al Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train with­out read­ing mate­r­i­al and start­ed reading!

Next Time: Wrap­ping our­selves in the flag of Woolman

Trip to the Blue Hole

September 12, 2005
· Martin Kelley

A few days ago my two-year old Theo and I took a mean­der­ing bike trip that brought us to the charmingly-named Piney Hol­low Road (alas, not quite as rus­tic as it sounds). We stopped on the unas­sum­ing bridge over the Great Egg Har­bor Riv­er and I looked for a trail into the woods. We found one about a hun­dred feet north of the riv­er, hiked in anoth­er hun­dred feet and pic­nicked along the riv­er. When I got back home I start­ed Googling around and dis­cov­ered that our sand trail was the Blue Anchor Fire­line Road and that we were on one of the main paths in to the famed Blue Hole.

The best sto­ries on Winslow’s Blue Hole come from Hen­ry Charl­ton Beck, whose folk his­to­ries of South Jer­sey are must-haves for any local’s library. He wrote news­pa­per columns pro­fil­ing old-timey local char­ac­ters on the back roads and deep woods of the area and his accounts have been col­lect­ed in vol­umes such as For­got­ten Towns of South Jer­sey and Jer­sey Gen­e­sis: The Sto­ry of the Mul­li­ca Riv­er. He wrote about the Blue Hole leg­ends in More For­got­ten Towns of South Jer­sey and one help­ful fel­low has bro­ken copy­right laws to scan in the rel­e­vant pages.

Entrance to Blue Anchor Fire­line Road from Piney Hol­low Rd.

Today my two-year old and I set out again for the Blue Hole (well, I did: he actu­al­ly napped half the way there). We start­ed on Piney Hol­low Road in Winslow Town­ship. About 100 feet north of the very unas­sum­ing Great Egg Har­bor Riv­er bridge is what the maps call the Blue Anchor Fire­line Road. The pic­ture on the left show the trail­head from Piney Hol­low Road.

blank

We went into the woods along this sandy road. It curves right, par­al­lels Piney Hol­low Road for awhile, then curves left back into the woods. There are weird met­al bunker open­ings marked “con­fined space entry” in day-glow orange every so often: some water-related thing I sup­pose (though the conspiracy-minded might beg to dif­fer). About a mile in there’s an inter­sec­tion with the equally-sandy Inskeep Road (those want­i­ng an alter­na­tive path could take Inskeep from Piney Hol­low: it’s entry is about a half-mile north of the Great Egg Har­bor Riv­er bridge).

Make a left onto Inskeep and go left when it forks. With­in a quar­ter mile you’ll see a creek with the remains of a bridge. This is the Great Egg Har­bor Riv­er. Some of the trip reports I’ve seen end here with the sad report that the washed-out bridge pre­vent­ed the creek from being ford­ed (“Since the stream was too deep and too fast mov­ing to ford, we were forced to retreat. The Devil’s Hole was only 100 yards away, but it might as well have been 100 miles.”). Bah: it’s three feet deep in Sep­tem­ber, quit yap­ping and get your feet wet, okay? Just up the path on the oth­er side is the famed Blue Hole itself.

It’s always fun to retrace Hen­ry Charl­ton Beck’s foot­steps but the Blue Hole itself isn’t all that excit­ing. Yes, the water is kind of blue, under­neath the pond scum. It does look deep and it’s cer­tain­ly not a nor­mal geo­log­i­cal fea­ture. Some have won­dered if it’s an aster­oid hit, which is as good a the­o­ry as any oth­er. Here’s a close-up of the hole in all its blue’ness:

blank

No, I didn’t see the Jer­sey Dev­il (wasn’t real­ly look­ing folks) but some sort of giant heron or crane did cir­cle the hole over­head twice when I got there. One the­o­ry of the Jer­sey Dev­il leg­end is that it was inspired by sight­ings of the Sand­hill Crane so our companion’s pres­ence was appro­pri­ate. I didn’t swim into the hole to test out the Dev­il leg-pulling reports, bot­tom­less depth or remark­able cold. I’ll leave that to more intre­pid souls.

View Blue Hole, Winslow NJ in a larg­er map

Mordichai Vanunu about to be released from prison (sort of)

April 20, 2004
· Martin Kelley

From the “Mordechai Vanunu”:/vanunu site:
bq.. “PEACE HERO” MORDECHAI VANUNU, LEAVING PRISON IN HOURS, WILL BE GREETED BY WHITE DOVES, FLOWERS… AND YET MORE PUNISHMENT
In less than twelve hours, Israel’s cap­tive Mordechai Vanunu is to walk out of Shik­ma Prison, where his home was a cell for the last 18 years. Over 100 inter­na­tion­al anti-nuclear, peace and human rights activists, and at least as many Israeli sup­port­ers of the nuclear whistle­blow­er will assem­ble out­side the prison gate at 8:00 am Wednes­day morning
Then the leash stiff­ens, and the col­lar tight­ens. Although his full sen­tence has been served and all his secrets have been told, Mordechai Vanunu’s next pun­ish­ment is to shun all con­tact with for­eign­ers and most mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions while con­fined to the city of Jaf­fa for one year. He is denied his pass­port and is for­bid­den to enter embassies or approach bor­ders and air­ports. He may not talk to Israelis about his work at the nuclear weapons fac­to­ry in Dimona, nor even recite his pub­lished rev­e­la­tions from the pages of the Lon­don Sun­day Times in Octo­ber, 1986.

Emerging Church Movement hits New York Times

February 18, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Today’s New York Times has an arti­cle called “Hip New Church­es Pray to a Dif­fer­ent Drum­mer” about post­mod­ern and emer­gent church­es. The arti­cle has some good obser­va­tions and inter­views many of the right peo­ple, but the pre­sen­ta­tion is skewed: there on the front cov­er of the print edi­tion are some New Agey hip­sters hold­ing their ears and hearts in some sort of mock-Medieval prayer, sit­ting in big chairs over the head­line about the “dif­fer­ent drum­mer.” Egads.

The pho­to reminds me of my New York Times moment, when the pho­tog­ra­ph­er insist­ed on a few shots of me hold­ing a gui­tar, which made it onto the “Cyber­Times” cov­er, but the para­graph describ­ing the move­ment is a good, con­cise one:

Called “emerg­ing” or “post­mod­ern” church­es, they are diverse in the­ol­o­gy and method, linked loose­ly by Inter­net sites, Web logs, con­fer­ences and a grow­ing stack of hip-looking paper­backs. Some reli­gious his­to­ri­ans believe the church­es rep­re­sent the next wave of evan­gel­i­cal wor­ship, after the boom in megachurch­es in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Still, much of the arti­cle talks about the super­fi­cial stuff, what Jor­dan Coop­er calls the “can­dles and cof­fee” super­fi­cial­i­ty of some of a form-only emer­gent church style. There cer­tain­ly is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Julie read the arti­cle and was real­ly turned off to the dumb side of the emer­gent church:

Hon­ey, I just can’t get with it. I empathize some­what, but I’m a tra­di­tion­al­ist, so I can’t say I don’t take just as much offense at “bor­row­ing” Catholic and Ortho­dox spir­i­tu­al prac­tices as I do at the import­ing of the sweat­lodge ripped off from Native Amer­i­cans. I’m not say­ing that all Emerg­ing Church groups do rip off, they’re try­ing to find some­thing legit­i­mate, I can see that. It’s just that they are set­tling for part of the truth with­out look­ing at the whole pic­ture. Lec­tio Div­ina is part of a larg­er Catholic the­ol­o­gy and real­ly should­n’t be divorced from it, etc. I empathize with the unchurched and the unfriend­li­ness of tra­di­tion­al church­es to the com­plete­ly unchurched. I don’t know what the answer is, but this move­ment just strikes me as bizarre. Of course, again, I’m com­ing from a tra­di­tion­al Catholic per­spec­tive here, so “church” to me means some­thing utter­ly dif­fer­ent than to many, espe­cial­ly the unchurched and evan­gel­i­cals, for exam­ple, who see wor­ship as more open and dynam­ic and involv­ing the heart, not so much about form. I guess in the end, it’s just that some of this Emerg­ing Church stuff is just too “cool.” I’m glad that it puts some peo­ple in touch with God, and that’s a good thing. But church should nev­er be too cool or too com­fy or too sen­ti­men­tal. It should chal­lenge too. What I’d like to hear in one of these arti­cles is how these new forms and this new move­ment actu­al­ly chal­lenge peo­ple to com­mit to Christ and to change their lives. Hmmm.

So true, so true. What I’ve won­dered is whether tra­di­tion­al Quak­erism has a thresh­ing func­tion to offer the emergent-church seek­ers: we have the inti­mate meet­ings (part­ly by design, part­ly because our meet­ings are half-empty), the lan­guage of the direct expe­ri­ence with God, the warn­ing against super­fi­cial­i­ty. I can hear Julie laugh­ing at me say­ing this, as Friends have large­ly lost the abil­i­ty to chal­lenge or artic­u­late our faith, which is the oth­er half of the equa­tion. But I’d like to believe we’re due for some gen­er­a­tional renewals our­selves, which might bring us to the right place at the right time to engage with the emer­gent churchers and once more gath­er a new people.

It’s hard not to make the connection.

June 21, 2003
· Martin Kelley

In Iraq, U.S. sol­diers are blar­ing the sound­tract to ‘Apoc­a­lypse Now’ to psych them­selves up to war:

“With Wag­n­er’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ring­ing in their ears and the clat­ter of heli­copters over­head, sol­diers rammed vehi­cles into met­al gates and hun­dreds of troops raid­ed hous­es in the west­ern city of Ramadi”

Mean­while in my home­town of Philadel­phia four teenagers lis­tened to the Bea­t­les’ ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ over forty times before attack­ing and beat­ing to death one of their friends.

Hor­rif­ic as both sto­ries are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ and most of the music on ‘Apoc­alpse Now’ were writ­ten in the late 1960 and ear­ly 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers pick­ing the music of their par­ents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radio­head or Linkin Park? Could­n’t the Philly kids have shown some home­town pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seri­ous­ly, there have been some topsy-turvy gen­er­a­tional sur­pris­es in the sup­port and oppo­si­tion to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?

History of Non​vi​o​lence​.org, 1995 – 2008

October 13, 1995
· Martin Kelley

Non​vi​o​lence​.Org was found­ed by Mar­tin Kel­ley out of a home office way back in 1995. Over the 13 or so years of its exis­tence, it won acco­lades and atten­tion from the main­stream media and mil­lions of vis­i­tors. It’s arti­cles have been reprint­ed in count­less move­ment jour­nals and even in a fea­tured USAToday edi­to­r­i­al.

From 2006:

The past eleven years have seen count­less inter­net projects burst on the scene only to with­er away. Yet Non​vi​o​lence​.org con­tin­ues with­out any fund­ing, attract­ing a larg­er audi­ence every year. As the years have gone by and I’ve found the strength to con­tin­ue it, I’ve real­ized more and more that this is a min­istry. As a mem­ber of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends I’m com­mit­ted to spread­ing the good news that war is unnec­es­sary. In my per­son­al life this is a mat­ter of faith in the “pow­er that takes away occas­sion for all war.” In my work with Non​vi​o​lence​.org I also draw on all the prac­ti­cal and prag­mat­ic rea­sons why war is wrong. For more per­son­al moti­va­tions you can see at Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org, my per­son­al blog.

A Non​vi​o​lence​.org Timeline

Screenshot from 1996 via Archive.org
Screen­shot from 1996 via Archive​.org

In 1995 I was edi­tor at an activist pub­lish­er strug­gling to adapt to a rapid­ly chang­ing book world. Many of the inde­pen­dent book­stores that had always sup­port­ed us were clos­ing just as print­ing costs were ris­ing. The need to re-invent activist orga­niz­ing and pub­lish­ing for the 1990’s became obvi­ous and I saw the inter­net as a place to do that. One of the ear­li­est man­i­festos and intro­duc­tions to the Non­vi­o­lence Web was an essay called The Rev­o­lu­tion Will be Online.

I began by approached lead­ing U.S. peace groups with a crazy pro­pos­al: if they gave me their mate­r­i­al I would put it up on the web for them for free. My goal was to live off of sav­ings until I could raise the oper­at­ing funds from foun­da­tions. “Free type­set­ting for the move­ment by the move­ment” was the ral­ly­ing cry and I quick­ly brought a who’s-who of Amer­i­can peace groups over to Non​vi​o​lence​.org. I knew that there was lots of great peace writ­ing that was­n’t get­ting the dis­tri­b­u­tion it deserved and with the inter­net I could get it out faster and more wide­ly than with tra­di­tion­al media. For three years I lived off of sav­ings, very part-time jobs and occa­sion­al small grants.

Non​vi​o​lence​.org devel­oped into a web por­tal for non­vi­o­lence. We would fea­ture the most provoca­tive and time­ly pieces from the NVWeb mem­ber groups on the newly-redesigned home­page, dubbed “Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront.” A online mag­a­zine for­mat loose­ly mod­eled on Slate and the now-defunct Feed mag­a­zine, it also con­tained orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al and links to inter­est­ing threads on the inte­grat­ed dis­cus­sion board. With these pop­u­lar fea­tures, Non​vi​o​lence​.org attract­ed a grow­ing num­ber of reg­u­lar vis­i­tors. The com­bined vis­i­bil­i­ty for mem­ber groups was much greater than any­one could obtain alone and we earned plen­ty of awards and links. Some media high­lights of the era includ­ed a New York Times tech pro­file, a fea­tured guest Op/Ed in USA Today, and an inter­view on Oliv­er North’s nation­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed radio show.

But this mod­el could­n’t last. A big prob­lem was mon­ey: there’s were too few phil­an­thropists for this sort of work, and estab­lished foun­da­tions did­n’t even know the right ques­tions to ask in eval­u­at­ing an inter­net project. Non​vi​o​lence​.org was kept afloat by my own dwin­dling per­son­al sav­ings, and I nev­er did find the sort of mon­ey that could pay even pover­ty wages. I took more and more part-time jobs till they became the full-time ones I have today. At the same time, inter­net pub­lish­ing was also chang­ing. With the addi­tion of blog­ging fea­tures and open-source bul­letin board soft­ware, Non​vi​o​lence​.org con­tin­ued to evolve and stay relevant.

Through the ear­ly 2000s, Non​vi​o​lence​.org con­tin­ued to be one of the most highly-visible and vis­it­ed peace web­sites, being high­ly ranked through the first Gulf War II, the biggest U.S. mil­i­tary action since the web began. This mod­el of inde­pen­dent activist web pub­lish­ing was still crit­i­cal. The Non​vi​o​lence​.org mis­sion of fea­tur­ing the best writ­ing and analy­sis con­tin­ued until 2008 when Mar­tin final­ly moth­balled the Non​vi​o​lence​.org project and sold the domain.