An upcoming theme of Friends Journal is one I’m particularly interested in. It’s called “Reimagining the Quaker Ecosystem” and addresses countless conversations I think many of us have had over the years. Here’s the description:

Many of our traditional decision-making structures are under tremendous stress these days. There are few nominating committees that don’t bemoan the difficulties finding volunteer leadership. In the face of this, a wave of questioning and creativity is emerging as Friends reinvent and regenerate Quaker structures. Previously unasked questions about power and decision-making models are on the agenda again.

I think this begs the question of the whole why and how of our organizing as a religious society. One of the most read posts on my blog in 2003 was a based on a review of a book by Robert E. Webber called The Younger Evangelicals. Webber was talking about mainstream Evangelicals, who he divided into three generational phases,

• Traditional Evangelicals 1950–1975
• Pragmatic Evangelicals 1975–2000
• Younger Evangelicals 2000-

I was working at Friends General Conference back in 2003 and Webber’s descriptions felt surprisingly familiar despite the very different context of liberal Quakerism.

Take for example youth ministry: Webber says Pragmatic Evangelicals tend to prefer “outreach programs and weekend fun retreats,” which is what the eventual FGC Youth Ministries Program mostly morphed into (before going into permanent hiatus). Webber suggests that the Younger Evangelicals cohort sought “prayer, Bible study, worship, social action” and sure enough many progressive spiritual types in Philly left meetinghouses for the alternative Circle of Hope church. Quakerism lost a lot of momentum at that time (Betsy Blake see also: Betsy Blake’s account). It took the creation of a whole new organization, Quaker Voluntary Service, to get a lively and sustainable youth ministries running (you can read QVS’s Ross Hennesy’s journey from the 2013 FJ to see Webber’s chart come to life).

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think many Quaker orgs are stuck in a rut trying everything they can to make the Pragmatic Evangelical model work. There’s a hope that just one more reorganization will solve their systemic longterm problems—new people will come into committee service, meetinghouses will start filling, etc. But the more we try to hold onto the old framework, the more creative energy dissipates and Friends get lost or leave.

My personal hunch is that structure (almost) doesn’t matter. What we need is a shift in attention. How can we back up and ask the big questions: Why are we here? What is our prophetic role and how do we encourage and support that in our members? How do we care for our church community and still reach beyond the meetinghouse walls to serve as healers in the world?

A few years ago I dropped in on part of my yearly meeting sessions. In one room, mostly-older members were revising some arcane subsection of Faith and Practice while across the hall mostly-younger members were expressing heartbreak about a badly-decided policy on trans youth. The disconnect between the spirit in the rooms was beyond obvious.

I think we need to be able to stop and give attention to direct leadings of needed ministry. I often return to the Good Samaritan story. In my mind’s eye the Levite is the Friend who can’t stop because they’re late for a committee meeting. If we could figure out a way to get more Friends to pivot into Good Samaritan mode, I suspect we’d find new life in our religious society. Perennial questions would transform.

Signs of new life are abundant but unevenly distributed. How do you imagine the ecosystem in 10, 20, or 50 years? Submission due date 3/6 officially though we may have a chance to review later pieces.

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The informal network of younger Evangelical Christians centered around websites like theooze.com and JordanCooper.sk.ca has started sponsoring a monthly Indie Allies Meetup of “Independent Christian Thinkers.” Unlike previous months, there were enough people signed up for the October meeting in the Philadelphia area to hold a “meetup,” so two days ago Julie & I found ourselves in a Center City pizza shop with five other “Indie Allies.”

According to Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals, I fall pretty squarely into the “Post Liberal” category, a la Stanley Hauerwas. While it’s always dangerous labeling others, I think at least some of the other participants would be comfortable enough with the “Post Evangelical” label (the one pastor among us said that if I read Webber’s book I’d know where he’s coming from). One participant was from the Circle church Julie & I attended last First Day.

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it’s safe to say we are all “post” something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren’t working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There’s something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it’s finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we’re more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

The conversation was really interesting. After all my Quaker work, it’s always amazing to find other people my age who actually think hard about faith and who are willing to build their life around it. There were times where I think we needed to translate ourselves and times where we tried to map out shared connections (i.e., Richard Foster was the known famous Quaker, I should read him if only to be able to discuss his relationship to Conservative and Liberal Friends).

It was really good to get outside of Quakerism and to hear the language and issues of others. One important lesson is that some of the strong opinions I’ve developed in response to Quaker culture need to be unlearned. The best example was social action. As I’ve written before on the website, I think the Friends peace testimony has become largely secularized and that social action has become a substitute for expressed and lived communal faith. Yet my Meetup cohorts were excited to become involved in social action. Their Evangelical background had dismissed good works as unnecessary–faith being the be-all–and now they wanted to get involved in the world. But I very much suspect that their good works would be rooted in faith to a degree that a lot of contemporary Quaker activist projects aren’t. I need to remind myself that social witness (even my own) can be fine if truly spirit-led.

Committed religious people switching churches often bring with them the baggage of their frustrations with the first church and this unresolved anger often gets in the way of keeping true to God’s call. Even though I’m not leaving Quakerism I have to identify and name my own frustrations so that they don’t get in the way. Hanging out with other “Independent Christian Thinkers” is a way of keeping some perspective, of remembering that Post-Liberal is not exactly anti-Liberal.

Recommended I check out: N.T. Wright, at allelon.net. I just saw him referenced as a personal friend of some of the Republican party leadership in Congress, so this should be interesting.