So my questions for Quakers are: How do you ensure that adults are trusted to be adults even if they are under 30? How do you make sure that people are given opportunities to take responsibility without feeling that they must perform especially well because they are representing a whole demographic?

Here in the U.S., the trick to getting on national committees while young (at least when I was trying it in my 20s) was having a well-known mom. As someone who kept knocking and kept getting turned away it blew me away when I heard Quaker-famous offspring complain how they were always being asked to serve on committees. But then I realized it was the same tokenizing phenomenon, just in reverse.

So our work isn’t just looking around a room and ticking off demographic boxes, but really digging deeper and seeing if we’re representative of multi-dimensional diversities. And if we’re not, the problem isn’t just that we aren’t diverse (diversity is a fine value in and of itself but ultimately just a crude tool) but that we have unexamined cultural practices and selection systems that are systematically turning away people from community participation and service.

Keeping cradle Quakers by making room to lean in?

This is a prediction for 2019 and beyond: The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free. The value comes not just what they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from and who gets to enjoy it.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/

Most yearly meetings recommend that everyone who works with young people should have a background check. Most local meetings I have been a part of resist this, saying that “But we know that person – they have belonged here for years!” Requiring a background check feels to some Friends like an invasion of privacy, or that it goes against the openness and trust which they value in a Quaker meeting.

I have personally known of three respected Friends who turned out to be serial child rapists. Two were pillars of their meeting. None of the people in the monthly meeting knew learned about it because of outside legal action and investigations.

There were times when these individuals were around my children, though I was near-enough nearby that I’m not worried anything happened. Still, one of the cases involved rapes in a camper in the perpetrator’s backyard and I remember my eldest thinking it looked cool and trying the door handle. We also had a close call with a Boy Scout leader and respected local historian whose file was published when an Oregon judge ordered the national BSA to release decades of secret pedophile records.

One the affected meetings in particular is near and dear to me heart and have some warm and faithful Friends. I know it was a shock and ongoing trauma for them that this happened in their community. I understand that we were all a bit naive about these matters 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. But we’ve all been educated about just how common this is and just how charming pedophiles can be.

Even recently, I’ve had people assure me their Friends meetings are safe and that they don’t need to do background checks. I make a mental note to avoid those meetings. We are not immune. And we are not magically better about discerning this stuff than any other faith community.

Straight talk on preventing child abuse

Standing up for peace means standing on the side of the oppressed, not throwing them into the lion’s mouth in the name of civility. And interrupting racist violence takes more than civil discourse: active disruption is needed in order for racism to be revealed and dismantled. What good is ineffective pacifism? My commitment to nonviolence is about saving lives.

I gave my take on Cadbury’s speech back in June. I was a little easier on Cadbury, mostly because I think we need to understand the Quaker worldview out of which he was speaking. It’s never good to lecture the oppressed on their oppression, but the classic Quaker idea of speaking truth to all sides still holds value and is something I think we miss sometimes nowadays.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

How we spend money is often a telling indicator of what values we really value. Money is not just a matter of financial statements and investment strategies. It’s children program. It’s local soup kitchens. It’s the town peace fair. It’s the accessible bathroom or hearing aid system. And how we discuss and discern and fight over money is often a test of our commitment to Quaker values.

Here’s some of the specific issues we’ve brainstormed for the issue.

Where does our money come from? A lot of Quaker wealth is locked up in endowments started by “dead Quaker money”—wealth bequeathed by Quakers of centuries past.

Much of our American Quaker fortunes trace back to a large land grant given in payment for war debt. For the first century or so, this wealth was augmented by slave labor. Later Quaker enterprises were augmented by capital from these initial wealth sources.

In times past, there were well-known Quaker family businesses and wealthy Quaker industrialists. But American capitalism has changed: families rarely own medium- or large-scale businesses; they own stocks in firms run by a professional managers. If the ability to run businesses based on Quaker values is over, is shareholder activism our closest analogue?

Many Friends now work in service fields. Family life has also changed, and the (largely female) free labor of one-income households is no longer available to support Quaker endeavors as readily. How have all of these changes affected the finances of our denomination and the ability to live out our values in the workplace?

How do we support our members? A personal anecdote: some years ago I unexpectedly lost my job. It was touch and go for awhile whether we’d be able to keep up with mortgage payments; losing our house was a real possibility. Members of a nearby non-Quaker church heard that there was a family in need and a few days later a stranger showed up on our back porch with a dozen bags of groceries and new winter coats for each of us. When my Friends meeting heard, I was told there was a committee that I could apply to that would consider whether it might help.

Where does the money go? A activist Friend of mine use to point to the nice furnishings in our meetinghouse and chuckle about how many good things we could fund in the community if we sold some of it off. Has your meeting liquidated any of its property for community service?

When we do find ourselves with extra funds from a bequest or windfall, where do we spend it? How do we balance our needs (such as meetinghouse renovations, scholarships for Quaker students), and when and how do we give it to others in our community?

What can we let go of? There are a lot of meetinghouses in more rural areas that are mostly empty these days, even on First Day. Could we ever decide we don’t need all of these spaces? Could we consolidate? Or could we go further and sell our properties and start meeting at a rented space like a firehall or library once a week?

Who gets the meetinghouse after a break-up? In the last few years we’ve seen three major yearly meetings split apart, prompting a whole mess of financial disentanglement. What happens to the properties and summer camps and endowments when this happens? How fiercely are we willing to fight fellow Friends over money?

What conversations aren’t we having? Where do we invest our corporate savings? Who decides how we spend money in our meetings?

Please feel free to share this with any Friend who might have interesting observations about Friends’ attitudes toward finances!

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

Losing yourself to anger is possible even with anger focused against injustice and cruelty. You can become so focused on the target of your rage. That you do not notice when you have lost sight of your goals and are only in it for the fight. Even following the Peace Testimony of Non-Violence we need to recognize when we are no longer being Non-Aggressive.

Like many convinced Friends, I came to the society through activism. I had met plenty of people who let righteous anger serve as cover for more visceral hatred. One eye-opening protest in the 90s was in a rural part of Pennsylvania. When one of the locals screamed the cliche of the era—“Go get a job!”—a protestor shouted back, “I’ve got a job and I make more than you.” It was true even as it was cruel and irrelevant and braggy.

I didn’t see this kind of behavior as much with the Friends I saw at various protests, which is largely why I started gravitating toward them whenever possible. I could see that there was something in the Quaker culture and value system that was able to navigate between righteous and personal anger and draw the line in difficult situations. I love Josh’s description of the “Craig Ferguson” method:

I ask myself. “Does this need to be said?” “Does this need to be said by me?” “Does this need to be said by me right now?” Doing this cuts down on moments of spontaneous anger.

This could also describe the Quaker discernment method for ministry. Maybe there’s something to the care we take (or at least aim for) in that process that gives us a little more self-discipline in the heat of protest or that helps us sort through thorny ethical issues that run through our own community.

https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/04/not-falling-into-fire-of-my-own-ire.html

Considering today’s emphasis on individuality, plurality, and personal psychology, I believe that returning to the metaphor of the Seed holds the most potential for fertile spiritual development and guidance in our own era.

I find the evolution of Quaker metaphors fascinating. Early Quaker sermons and epistles were packed with biblical allusions. I grew up relatively unchurched but I’ve tried to make up for it over the years. I’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover using the One Year Bible plan (like a lot of people I suspect, it took me a little over two years) and have been part of different denominational Bible study groups. I try to look up references. But even with that I don’t catch half the references early sermons packed in.

John Woolman lived a couple of generations after the first Friends. We Quaker remember his Journal for ministry of its anti-slavery sentiments, finally becoming a consensus among Friends by the time of its publication in 1774. But other religious folks have read it for its literary value. Open a random page and Woolman will have up to half a dozen metaphors for the Divine. It’s packed and rich and accessible. I find a kind of particular Quaker spiritual truth in Woolman’s rotation of metaphors: it implies that divinity is more than any specific words we try to stuff it into.

Lately Quaker metaphors have tended to become more sterile. I think we’re still worried about specifics but instead of expanding our language we contract it into a kind of impenetrable code. The “Light of Christ” becomes the “Inward Christ” then the “Inward Light” then “the Light” or “Spirit.” We’re still echoing the Light metaphors packed into the Book of John but doing so in such a way that seems particularly parochial to Friends and non-obvious to newcomers. A major New Testament theme is reduced to Quaker lingo.

Jnana Hodson’s problem with “the seed” as metaphor is interesting: “ ‘seed,’ as such, has far fewer Biblical citations than the corresponding complementary ‘light’ or ‘true’ and ‘truth’ do.” I’m not sure I ever noticed that. I like the seed, with its organic connotations and promise of future growth.  But apparently the few biblical allusions were rather sexist (spoiler: it often meant semen) and lacking in biological awareness. It feels like Friends are searching for neutral metaphors like “the seed” these days; we also have a lot of gatherings around “weaving.” I certainly don’t think we should be limited to first century images of divinity but I also don’t think we’ve quite figured out how we can talk about the guidance we receive from the Inward Teacher.

The Seed, initially, is the most problematic of the three central Quaker metaphors

Trump’s tweet came less than half an hour after the Chicago Tribune posted a few short quotes from the Boeing CEO saying they were concerned about the implications of trade with China under a Trump Administration. It was relatively tame stuff and of course a multinational with billions of dollars in China is going to be concerned. About a quarter of their aircrafts are built for the Chinese market.

But follow not the logic but the effect: if you criticize this president in public he will destroy your shareholder value. Boeing lost half a billion dollars in value following Trump’s 140 characters. Every CEO in America will now have to think twice before speaking to the press. It would be fiscally irresponsible to do otherwise. A few quotes in a paper isn’t worth that amount of shareholder value.

Free speech isn’t just court cases or a few lines in the Constitution. Even the CEOs of the largest corporations in America need to watch their tongues. Silencing has begun.