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It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper's blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber's The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young'ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.

My post, originally titled  "The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,"  (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:

• A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
• A desire to grow
• A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
• A renewal of discipline and oversight
• A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

When I wrote this, there wasn't much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on "quakers" and "emerging church" nothing much came up. It's not surprising that there wasn't much of an initial response.

It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it's fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here's Robin M's account of first reading it) and it's follow-up We're All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We're getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we're asked to lead worships and we've got a catchy name in "Convergent Friends."

And yet?

All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can't think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I've drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn't have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.

My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, Development made clear it didn't want me around anymore. The most exciting outreach programs I worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends. It was quietly dropped a few months after I left (why not, the final donor report had been filed). The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)

So where do we go?

I'm really sad to say we're still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I've recently crossed my life's halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in "Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers". Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work--in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don't see one convinced young Friend profiled and it's post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occassional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren't anyone's target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).

A number of interesting "Covergent" minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won't blow your cover guys!). I've seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it's not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.

What do we need to do:

• We need to be public figures;
• We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
• We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.

Here's my to-do list:

• CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the "convergent" theme next month. I'll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
  
• LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC's isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we'll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you're interested;
• LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
• PUBLIC FIGURES: I've let my blog deteriorate into too much of a "life stream," all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You'll notice it's been redesigned. The right bar has the "life stream" stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I'll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.

I want to stress that I don't want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I'm just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God's call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.

Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn't talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don't exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn't do much work in the temple and didn't spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the "bad" elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let's see where we can all get in the next five years!

Over on Friends Journal site, some recent stats on Friends mostly in the US and Canada. Written by Margaret Fraser, the head of FWCC, a group that tries to unite the different bodies of Friends, it's a bit of cold water for most of us. Official numbers are down in most places despite whatever official optimism might exist. Favorite line: "Perhaps those who leave are noticed less." I'm sure P.R. hacks in various Quaker organizations are burning the midnight oil writing response letters to the editor spinning the numbers to say things are looking up.

She points to a sad decline both in yearly meetings affiliated with Friends United Meeting and in those affiliated with Friends General Conference. A curiosity is that this decline is not seen in three of the four yearly meetings that are dual affiliated. These blended yearly meetings are going through various degrees of identity crisis and hand-wringing over their status and yet their own membership numbers are strong. Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

The big news is in the south: "Hispanic Friends Churches" in Mexico and Central America are booming, with spillover in el Norte as workers move north to get jobs. There's surprisingly little interaction between these newly-arrived Spanish-speaking Friends and the the old Main Line Quaker establishment (maybe not surprising really, but still sad). I'll leave you with a challenge Margaret gives readers:

One question that often puzzles me is why so many Hispanic Friends congregations are meeting in churches belonging to other denominations. I would love to see established Friends meetings with their own property sharing space with Hispanic Friends. It would be an opportunity to share growth and challenges together.

There's an interesting discussion in the comments from my last post about Convergent Friends and Ohio Conservatives. and one of the more interesting comes from a commenter named Diane. My reply to her got longer and longer and filled with more and more links till it makes more sense to make it its own post. First, Diane's question:

I don’t know if I’m “convergent,” (probably not) but I have been involved with the emerging church for several years and with Quakerism for a decade. I also am aware of the house church movement, but my experience of it is that is is very tangentially related to Quakerism.

I really, really hope and pray that Christian revival is coming to liberal Friends, but personally I have not seen that phenomenom. Where do you see it most? Do you see it more as commitment to Christ or as more people being Christ curious, to use Robin’s phrase?

As I wrote recently I think convergence is more of a trend than an identity and I'm not sure whether it makes sense to fuss about who's convergent or not. As with any question involving liberal Friends, whether there's "Christian revival" going on depends on what what you mean by the term. I think more liberal Friends have become comfortable labeling themselves as Christ curious; it has become more acceptable to identify as Christian than it was a decade or two ago; a significant number of younger Friends are very receptive to Christian messages, the Bible and traditional Quaker testimonies than they were.

These are individual responses, however. Turning to collective Quaker bodies there are few if any beliefs or practices left that liberal Friends wouldn't allow under the Quaker banner if they came wrapped in Quakerese from a well-connected Friend; the social testimonies stand in as the unifying agent; it's still considered an argument stopper to say that any proffered definition would exclude someone.

I'd argue that liberal Quakerism is becoming ever more liberal (and less distinctively Quaker) at the same time that many of those in influence are becoming more Christian. It's a very proscribed Christianity: coded, tentative and most of all individualistic. It's okay for a liberal Friend to believe whatever they want to believe as long as they don't believe too much. Whether the quiet influence of the rising generation of conservative-friendly leadership is enough to hold a Quaker center in the centrifuge that is liberal Quakerism is the $60,000 question. I think the leadership has an inflated sense of its own influence but I'm watching the experiment. I wish it well but I'm skeptical and worry that it's built on sand.

Some of the Christ-curious liberal Friends are forming small worship groups and some of these are seeking out recognition from Conservative bodies. It's an achingly small movement but it shows a desire to be corporately Quaker and not just individualistically Quaker. With the internet traditional Quaker viewpoints are only a Google search away; sites like Bill Samuel's Quakerinfo.com and blogs like Marshall Massey's are breaking down stereotypes and doing a lot of invaluable educating (and I could name a lot more). It's possible to imagine all this cooking down to a third wave of traditionalist renewal. Ohio Yearly Meeting-led initiatives like the Christian Friends Conference and All Conservative Gatherings are steps in the right direction but any real change is going to have to pull together multiple trends, one of which might or might not be Convergence.

Our role in this future is not to be strategists playing Quaker politics but servants ready to lay down our identities and preconceptions to follow the promptings of the Inward Christ into whatever territory we're called to:

From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. Matthew 16:21-28.

It's chilly to see the breaking headlines about the shooting at Virginia Tech, already being billed as the "deadliest campus shooting in American history." This has been the site of two recent FGC Gatherings and the campus' unique architecture is instantly recognizable for those of us who have spent a cumulative two weeks on the campus. How horrible, how sad and tragic.

Over on Nontheist Friends website, there's an article looking back at ten years of FGC Gathering workshops on their concern. There was also a post somewhere on the blogosphere (sorry I don't remember where) by a Pagan Friend excited that this year's Gathering would have a workshop focused on their concerns.

It's kind of interesting to look at the process by which new theologies are being added into Liberal Quakerism at an ever-increasing rate.

• Membership of individuals in meetings. There are hundreds of meetings in liberal Quakerism that range all over the theological map. Add to that the widespread agreement that theological unity with the meeting is not required and just about anyone believing anything could be admitted somewhere (or "grandfathered in" as a birthright member).

• A workshop at the Friends General Conference Gathering and especially a regular workshop at successive Gatherings. Yet as the very informed comments on a post a few years ago showed, theology is not something the planning workshop committee is allowed to look at and at least one proponent of a new theology has gotten themselves on the deciding committee. The Gathering is essentially built on the nondenominational Chautaqua model and FGC is perfectly happy to sponsor workshops that are in apparent conflict with its own mission statement.

• An article published in Friends Journal. When the the Quaker Sweat Lodge was struggling to claim legitimacy it all but changed its name to the "Quaker Sweat Lodge as featured in the February 2002 Friends Journal." It's a good magazine's job to publish articles that make people think and a smart magazine will know that articles that provoke a little controversy is good for circulation. I very much doubt the editorial team at the Journal considers its agreement to publish to be an inoculation against critique.

• A website and listserv. Fifteen dollars at GoDaddy.com and you've got the web address of your dreams. Yahoo Group is free.

There are probably other mechanisms of legitimacy. My point is not to give comprehensive guidelines to would-be campaigners. I simply want to note that none of the actors in these decisions is consciously thinking "hey, I think I'll expand the definition of liberal Quaker theology today." In fact I expect they're mostly passing the buck, thinking "hey, who am I to decide anything like that."

None of these decision-making processes are meant to serve as tools to dismiss opposition. The organizations involved are not handing out Imprimaturs and would be quite horrified if they realized their agreements were being seen that way. Amy Clark, a commenter on my last post, on this summer's reunion and camp for the once-young members of Young Friends North America, had a very interesting comment:

I agree that YFNA has become FGC: those previously involved in YFNA have taken leadership with FGC … with both positive and negative results. Well … now we have a chance to look at the legacy we are creating: do we like it?

I have the feeling that the current generation of liberal Quaker leadership doesn't quite believe it's leading liberal Quakerism. By "leadership" I don't mean the small skim of the professional Quaker bureaucracy (whose members can get too self-inflated on the leadership issue) but the committees, clerks and volunteers that get most of the work done from the local to national levels. We are the inheritors of a proud and sometimes foolish tradition and our actions are shaping its future but I don't think we really know that. I have no clever solution to the issues I've outlined here but I think becoming conscious that we're creating our own legacy is an important first step.

In the news front, I'm no longer working at FGC. Reasons are complicated, as is often the case. In eight years I did some good work with some great people. I'll be missing the hard-working and faithful colleagues and committee members I got to serve with over the years. I'll be working on building my tech career and look forward to new challenges. Transitions are always a bit scary, so hold us in your prayers in this time.

Last night LizOpp, Robin M and myself hosted our FGC Gathering interest group. The title was "On Fire!: Renewing Quakerism through a Convergence of Friends." All morning long we've had Friends grabbing our arms to tell us how powerful and important it was for them. One well-traveled Friend went so far as to say the spontaneous worship that occurred halfway through was the deepest he's experienced in twenty years of Quakerism. The obvious challenge for us hosts is keeping our egos securely tamed from all this praise.

The work wasn't ours. We simply set the stage. My first impulse is to say we helped create an environment where the Spirit could break into the event, but that's not really it. We tried to create a space where participants would recognize when the Spirit knocked on the door.

Food for Fire participants. Bloggers at the workshop pose for a goofy attacking-one-another photo.

What happened last night felt similar to what happened in last February's Powell House Food for the Fire workshop. While I took notes and journaled a lot about it I never gave a followup blog post. It was powerful and I needed to digest it. Luckily participants Rob, Amanda and Zach and Claire all shared about it or its themes in the weeks afterwards.

I'd like to share something about the assumptions and preparation that went into these two events. There's no way to create a cookie-cutter agenda to force a deep spiritual high. In fact part of what's needed is to move beyond predictability. Both times I've had a clear sense that a point came when I was no longer facilitating, where Spirit was actively guiding us and participants were actively responding to that process, even eldering us past the control of facilitation.

When I came to Powell House I had a workshop description and a keen interest in the topic. What I didn't bring was an agenda. I'm trying to experiment with not being too prepared.* Early Friends held open meetings and while they often bore concerns and had themes that frequently reoccurred in their ministry. Friends today rely very much on models borrowed from higher education: we have workshops that expect agendas, we give talks that expect pre-printed speeches. These are often the opportunities we get for teaching ministries, yet they are very programmed. The challenge is to figure out how to subvert them to allow for unprogrammed surprise.

At Powell House I spent time before each session walking around the grounds in prayer for guidance on what to do next. I had brainstormed ideas beforehand but my main preparation had been a lot of Quaker reading and prayer in the weeks preceeding the event. I wanted the sessions to connect to the spiritual condition of the participants, as individuals and as a group. There were a few moments I thought I was nuts. For example, walking around before the Powell House Saturday afternoon session it seemed like reading a chapter of Samuel Bownas's Description of the Qualifications would be a good idea, but by mid-afternoon I could see the sleepy faces. We did it anyway and faces and spirit lit up. People wanted to engage with Bownas. As it turns out we read all of chapter three, "Advice to Ministers in a State of Infancy." It was so cool.

The real inbreaking happened a little later. The group was tired, dinner was nearing. I started to recommend we go into a circle to break up. One Friend interrupted, looked at another across the room and said “you have something to say, don’t you.” The second Friend said yes, then challenged us that we hadn’t actually answered our queries at all. The main question was still on the table. “What are we called to do?” There was a release. I knew I was not in control of the workshop anymore. We came into a prayer circle and started to talk about some of this. One Friend said something about naming who it is that call us. A theme came out that it wasn't enough for us to find some sort of personal salvation and comfort in our Quaker meetings: we needed to bring all the world into this if it was to be meaningful. It truly felt like the Holy Spirit was in the room. It wasn't necessarily so comfortable and it somehow seemed like not enough, but it pointed to the work we needed to do afterwards.

Blogging participants of On Fire! workshop pose together. About fifty people total came out for the Monday night interest group. Click photo for names and links. Lots of discussions happened at the rise of the worship. The semi-impromptu post-discussion group. (Thanks for FGC's Emily for taking & posting this!) FGC Gathering photos on Flickr and Technorati

Last night, at the FGC interest group, something similar happened. Robin, Liz and I had planned out the first half of the meeting. The most important piece: coming early to sit in prayer and holding it well past the time the interest group was supposed to start. The work of Friends needs to be rooted in worship. We need to be still enough to hear the Holy Spirit. If the medium is the message, our message was about the need to not pack ourselves in with agendas. We started predicatbly enough by asking the fifty-or-so participants to give their names and to name a spiritual practice that gives them joy. We asked for space in between speakers to keep worship at the fore and we were blessed by a self-faciliating group; Friends did hold the spaces in between.

Then the three of us told our stories of starting spiritually-focused blogs and coming to find a fellowship that extended beyond our traditional Quaker branches (hence the term "Convergence of Friends"). I went first and explained that I trying to be careful not to do this to lift myself up. My story is simple and like those of many Friends. I was giving testimony. The idea of testimony rang throughout the evening. Robin's story in particular was very grounded and coming last it took us into the unprogrammed agenda-less time we had left free. Friends rose to give testimony of other "convergent" experiences, for example particpation in the Northwest Women's Theological Conferences, events of the Western branch of the Christian Friends Fellowship.

At some point a woman I didn't know stood up without being recognized and she had a pose of supplication. My first though, "oh no!" Then I noticed another Friend, worshipful in spirit, who pointed her to us. She said she was going to sing a song. "Oh no again!" I thought. But this was the facilitation coming off our shoulders. This was a Friend rising to name what we needed and another Friend pointing that we needed to go this direction. It was like the two Powell House Friends: one recognizing in the other a need to share ministry and being willing to break through "proper" group process. At the interest group the song was powerful, it brought us to a place where we could be low and thankful. We were now spontaneously in worship. Liz, Robin and I had planned some closing worship but this wasn't the time yet. But it was the time and the suceeding ministry was heartfelt and largely from the Source.

The only funny aside was that we felt we couldn't let the group go on past our 8:45 end time, for the simple reason that childcare ended then and we needed to let parents go. We mentioned this around 8:30 but twenty minutes later the worship was continuing. Just then the cellphone of the Friend giving ministry went off: it was his daughter calling to ask where he was! He turned off the phone but it gave us the excuse to close the meeting and invite an extended meeting to continue outside. This was wonderful as there were a number of other similarly-themed interest groups (one on youth ministries, the other on the World Gathering of Young Friends) and participants from all three groups met outside and continued the sharing for another two hours.

Lessons? Simply to ground workshop events in worship, let the agenda be empty enough for the Spirit to intervene (having backup exercises just in case it doesn't is fine!). I don't think this is a foolproof method. A lot depends on the participants and how willing they are to share in the faciliation and worship. A lot also depends on Friends breaking into the agenda, for both times that was what turned the event from a workshop to a gathered meeting.

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• For me the danger is a personal style that has long relied on a last-minute miracles (I was the kind of college student who read all the material through the semester but didn't actually start writing anything until the night before an assignment was due). I don't want my theology to be an excuse for my procrastination and I try to test this regularly.

Related posts:

Lots of folks have been talking about the Gathering and the Monday night interest group.

• Co-faciliator LizOpp also details some of the process of the Interest Group and of the semi-impromptu multi-generational interest group afterwards. She's also written about the visits from Freedom Friends Church.
• Co-facilitator RobinM has the first of a handful of promised posts where she emphasizes the importance of grounding and starting the session in worship.
• ChrisM describes how he couldn't sleep after the Interest Group.
• Dave T has a quick check-in and description.
• Paul L felt a real covering of the meeting halfway through the Interest Group.
• Both AJ Schwanz and Gregg Koskela have posts about a post-Gathering meet-up of some Friends around a picnic table in Oregon.

I'm sure more reaction posts are up there and I'll link to them as I find them. I suspect that in addition to being the biggest group Quaker blogger photo to date (sorry Gregg!), this will end up being the most blogged about Quaker event yet, at least till Wess gathers West Coasters together next month. I counted at least 20 Quaker bloggers at the Gathering.

Those Quaker Ranters readers who are coming to the FGC Gathering but haven't lost internet access yet might be interested in some of the events the Advancement & Outreach committee is sponsoring over the week. There will be a flyer in the registration packets (all these events will take place in Admin 203). For those not coming, I suspect I'll have some sort of Gathering round-up post at some point after it's all done. I'm also co-hosting a Monday night interest group with LizOpp and Robin: "On Fire! Renewing Quakerism through a Convergence of Friends." For details, see Liz's post or Robin's post.

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The FGC Advancement and Outreach committee is sponsoring afternoon events during four days of Gathering. Come share your outreach ideas, learn about FGC and support the growth of Quakerism!

All Friends Welcome, 1:30-3:00

Monday: "What Do Quakers Believe?" Come talk about the range of Quaker beliefs, from Robert Barclay to the present day, and explore what binds us together as Friends. Convened by Deborah Haines.

Wednesday: A special welcome to Friends from Pacific, North Pacific and Intermountain Yearly Meetings. Come talk about the spirit, concerns, and Quaker ways of these three independent yearly meetings.

Thursday: Visitors from Freedom Friends Church will join us to talk about the witness of this unique independent evangelical Friends Church.

Outreach Hours, 3:15-4:15

Sunday: Visibility. Interested in publicizing your meeting and getting the Quaker message out into your community? Friends are invited to come share their stories and questions and pick up a free copy of our "Inreach-Outreach Packet for Small Meetings." Jane Berger will host.

Monday: Isolated Friends & New Worship Groups. Learn about FGC's new service for Friends and seekers who live far from any meeting or worship group. Are you interested in helping to nurture new worship groups? Come find out what resources are available from the FGC Advancement Committee, and share your stories and ideas.

Wednesday: Friends interested in affiliation. FGC is an association of 14 yearly meetings and regional groups and 9 directly affiliated monthly meetings. A&O clerk Deborah Haines will talk about the work of FGC and the benefits of affiliation.

Thursday: Spiritual Hospitality. It's easy to feel isolated even within a local meeting. A&O coordinator Martin Kelley will talk about some strategies to overcome the isolations of age, theology, race, lifestyle, etc. What can meetings do to help these Friends not feel isolated?

Today was the day we we loaded up a truckload of books, children's toys and this's and that's and sent them on their way to Tacoma. The Gathering starts in eight days!

Over on the photo sharing service Flickr, I'm noticing a bunch of photos from this week's Britain Yearly Meeting session. One contributor has tagged (labelled) all her photos with "britainyearlymeeting06" which means they're all available on one page. Cool, but what would be even cooler is if every Flickr user at the event used the same tag. We'd then have a nearly real-time group photo essay of the yearly meeting sessions.

So this year I'm going to tag all my personal photos from next month's Friends General Conference Gathering of Friends as "FGCgathering06". I invite any other Flickr-using attenders to do the same. While I do work at FGC, please note this is not any sort of official FGC decision, it's just my own idea to share photos and to see how we can use these online networks to share and promote Quakerism. In a few weeks you'll start seeing entries via flickr and technorati. I'll probably start with a few pictures of the bookstore truck being loaded for its cross-country trek.

Blog posts:
If your blogging system doesn't support the use of tags, then simply add this line in the bottom of each of your Gathering-related posts:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/FGCgathering06" rel="tag">FGCgathering06</a>

The program for this year's FGC Gathering of Friends went online at midnight yesterday--I stayed up late to flip the switches to make it live right as Third Month started--right on schedule. By 12:10am EST four visitors had already come to the site! There's a lot of interest in the Gathering, the first one on the West Coast.

Students of late-20th Century Quaker history can see the progression of Friends General Conference from a very Philadelphia-centric, provincial body that had its annual gathering at a South Jersey beach town to one that really does try to serve Friends across the country. There's losses in the changes (alumni of the Cape May Gatherings all speak of them with misty eyes) but overall it's been a needed shift in focus. In recent years, a disproportionate number of Gathering workshop leaders have come from the "independent" unaffiliated yearly meetings of the West. It's nice.

Joe G has been sending me emails about his selection process (it's almost real-time as he weighs each one!). It's helpful as it saves me the trouble of sorting through them. It's usually tough to find a workshop I want to take. A lot of Friends I really respect have told me they've stopped going to the Gathering after awhile because it just doesn't feed them.

It's a shame when these Friends stop coming. The Gathering is one of the most exciting annual coming-together of Quakers in North America. It's very important for new and/or isolated Friends and it helps pull all its attenders into a wider Fellowship. Intervisitation has always been one of the most important tools for knitting together Friends and the Gathering has been filling much of that need for liberal Friends for the last hundred years.

I've been having this sense that Gathering needs something more. I don't know what that something is, only that I long to connect more with other Friends. My best conversations have invariably taken place when I stopped to talk with someone while running across campus late to some event. These Opportunities have been precious but they're always so frantic. The Traveling Ministries Program often has a wonderful evening interest group but by the time we've gone around sharing our names, stories and conditions, it's time to break. I'm not looking for a new program (don't worry Liz P!, wait it's not you who has to worry!), just a way to have more conversations with the QuakerQuaker Convergent Friends--which in this context I think boils down to those with something of a call to ministry and an interest in Quaker vision & renewal. Let's all find a way of connecting more this year, yes?

For those interested I've signed up for these workshops: Blessed Community in James’ Epistle (led by Max Hansen of Berkeley Friends Church), Deepening the Silence, Inviting Vital Ministry (20), and Finding Ourselves in the Bible (22).

Related Entries Elsewhere:

• Robin
• LizOpp

Theo and I on the old bike this summer. More photos

Last Thursday my Francis-inspired paternity leave ended--two weeks paid for by my employer, two weeks or so of vacation time. It was good to have off though I must admit I spent more time corralling two-year old Theo than I did gazing into newborn Francis's eyes. I heartily recommend taking Septembers off. One of my more enjoyable tasks was the almost-daily bicycle rides with Theo. Sometimes we went across town to the lake and it's playground, Theo going up and down the slides over and over again until nighttime threatened and I had to insist on coming home. Other times we took long rides to local attractions such as last post's Blue Hole. The bike so symbolized our special time together that it seems almost proper that it was stolen from the train station on that first day of commuting, apparently the latest victim of my South Jersey town's bike theft ring. When I walked in the door that evening, Theo came running yelling "diya-di-cal!" but there was nothing I could do. Summer's over kid.

Over on Beppeblog Joe dreams of daily web coverage of the FGC Gathering. Well, FGC's not paying its webmaster (me, for now) for such service but I'll try to sneak in a few posts between bookstore customers. The bookstore set-up was remarkably easy. There was no truck crisis, no computer crisis, no getting lost on highways.

As regular readers will know, I'm leading a workshop called Strangers to the Covenant with Zachary Moon and this morning was the first workshop. Although it was billed as a workshop for high school students and adult young Friend (so 15-35 years old), though almost all of the participants are high schoolers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fifteen minutes early to center in worship; two of the attenders came in the room and sat with me and one by one everyone came in and joined the worship. I had to wonder if a group of older Friends would have been able to resist the temptation to ask about each other's jewelry, complain about the air conditioning, etc.

Julie reports that the cafeteria food is good. We've also been happy patrons of Gillie's and Bollo's Cafe.

The offices of Friends General Conference are across the street from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which is this week hosting a biotech convention. The streets outside are hosting a bit of a counter-convention led by a group named BioDemocracy 2005. Here are some shots from a melee outside our front door a few minutes ago.

Update: apparently one of the police officers at the center of this scuffle suffered a heart attack and has since died. I'm not even sure how to comment on that. From my vantage point it certainly seemed like the police officers were using undue violence. But while I was ten feet away I don't know who threw the first punch and what exactly happened in that sea of bodies. Whatever happened, it's quite appropriate to hold him and his family in our prayers.

Summer visitations got an early start last month when the Northeast US Quaker blogroll converged in my back yard with no agenda to follow and no epistle to write.Front row: James, Jeffrey and visitation ringleader Amanda. Back: Ryan, Rob, Me, Theo and poor blogless Christina.

Well since Kwakersaur is inaugurating the I don't have anything to post meme, I'll chime in that I don't either. Actually I've written two and half essays but realized they're both really for myself. This is how it happens sometimes. I've long noticed this phenomenon in fully-formed verbal ministry that I know I'm not supposed to deliver and it feels as if such restraint is sometimes healthy on the blog. The message will reappear in other forums I'm sure, most likely next month's Gathering workshop with Zachary Moon.

In the meantime, there's been fresh talk about plain language and dress this week by Johan Maurer, Claire Reddy and the Livejournal Quakers. Russ Nelson's started a Planet Quaker blog aggregator (which includes Quaker Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about field testing her upcoming Quaker identity Gathering workshop at Northern Yearly Meeting sessions and Kiara's talked about being field tested by Liz at this year's NYM sessions (how cool is that?!).

I've been geeking out on Del.icio.us, the "social bookmarking" system and on the esoteric concepts of tags, the semantic web and folksonomies. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neologisms but I'm beginning to see that there's something in all this. The only outward form the regulars will see is a more accurate "Related Entries" selection at the bottom of posts (thanks to Adam Kalsey) and better visibility in selected Technorati entries (which will get less me-centric as I finish tagging my own back posts).

And of course we're tilling the field, planting a garden, putting up laundry lines and otherwise thoroughly enjoying the first Spring in our new house. It's bedtime, off to read the radically folksonomic adventures of Sam and My Car (it's pure tags: "My name is Sam." "This is my car." "I love my car." I'd worry that not-so-baby Theo is getting too excited by combusion engines if he weren't even more excited by "dia-di-calschht" aka the "bicycle" Papa rides off to work on.)

Thank you to everyone who refrained from commenting after 9pm last night. I finally slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gathering program online in my role as FGC webmaster. Whoo-whee! For those who don't know, the Gathering is a week-long conference held at different locations each summer: this year's takes place Seventh Month 2-9 in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Now I guess it's time to think about workshops. Zach Moon and I are offering up one called Strangers to the Covenant but then you know that already. Liz Oppenheimer aka the The Good Raised Up is leading one called Quaker Identity: Yearning, Forming, Deepening that I suspect will be informed by her own experience of stepping into a Quaker identity. There's also an exciting history workshop being led by Betsy Cazden, Dilemmas from Our Quaker Past (I have to admit when I saw the listing I wondered if I should Zach up and assure him he'd be fine doing the Strangers workshop on his own so I could take Betsy's). Other mentions: Julie really liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh workshop she took a few years ago.

As always there are workshops whose leaders I know to be more solid and grounded than the workshop they're proposing; conversely, there are workshops that sound more interesting than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plenty whose appeal and/or relevance to Quakerism I just don't comprehend at all, but that's the Gathering.

Any recommendations from the peanut gallery? I should say that I'd like to refrain from ridiculing all of the workshops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detraction. We will only get to Kingdom by modeling Christian charity and wearing our love on our sleeves.

This past weekend I took part in a "Youth Ministries Consultation" sponsored by Friends General Conference. Thirty Friends, most under the age of 35, came together to talk about their experience of Quakerism.

This fall Zachary Moon and I put together a workshop proposal for the 2005 Gathering, which has been approved: Strangers to the Covenant is the title and here's the short description:

This is for young Friends who want to break into the power of Quakerism: it's the stuff you didn't get in First Day School. We'll connect with historical Quakers whose powerful ministry came in their teens and twenties and we'll look at how Friends wove God, covenants and gospel order together to build a movement that rocked the world. We'll mine Quaker history to reclaim the power of our tradition, to explore the living power of the testimonies and our witness in the world.

How did Liberal Friends get to the place where many of our our younger members consider the sweat lodge ceremony to be the high point of their Quaker experience? The sweat lodge has given a generation of younger Friends an opportunity to commune with the divine in a way that their meetings do not. It has given them mentorship and leadership experiences which they do not receive from the older Friends establishment. I want to get to the point where younger Friends look at the sweat and wonder why they'd want to spend a week at a Quaker event playing Indian when they could be diving deeper into their own faith tradition.

As we got onto the campus of UMass Amherst to help set up for this year's FGC Gathering, Julie & I realized that this is the first time we've been to this venue since we started plain dressing (last year we stayed home since Julie was very pregnant). FGC Friends tend to turn to the Lands End catalog for sartorial inspiration. Hippie culture is another font, both directly as tie-die shirts and in muted form as the tasteful fair-trade clothes that many older Friends prefer. Because the Gathering takes place in July and in sporadically air-conditioned buildings, people also dress for summer camp--khaki shorts & once colorful faded t-shirts are the de facto Gathering uniform. In this setting, just wearing long pants is cause for comment ("aren't you hot like that?!") Try broadfalls and a long-sleeve collarless shirt, or a long dress!

Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as "QUIP", is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the "ministry of the written word." I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It's also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time, it's has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.

One of the pieces I helped put online in my role of FGC webmaster is FGC Religious Education: Lessons for the 21st Century, by Beckey Phipps. It's definitely worth a read. It's comprised of interviews of three Friends:

Ernie Buscemi: "It is the most amazing thing, all the kids that I know that have gone into [Quaker] leadership programs--they've disappeared. I see the same thing [happening] as a woman and person of color, we are doing something wrong."

Marty Grundy: "Our branch [of Friends] has discarded the tools by which earlier Friends' practices were formed. We've lost our understanding of what it is that we are about."

Arthur Larrabee: "We need to tap into God's energy and God's joy. Early Friends had that energy, they had a vision, they had the connection with the inward Christ, a source of infinite energy power and joy."

While I wish this could be extended a bit (e.g., why not ask the 'kids' themselves where they've gone), at least these are the right questions.

Tough question in the bookstore today: a customer called asking for books about the connection between Friends and Anabaptists. Remarkably, we couldn’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be interactive here, readers! What books did I forget about? And what’s this phenomena of denying Quaker/Anabaptist common roots and cross-pollination?