Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal

September 6, 2003

09/06/200309/05/2023 · Martin Kelley

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

I’m currently reading Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World, which examines the cultural and generational shifts happening within the Christian Evangelical movement. At the bottom of this page is a handy chart that outlines the generational differences in theology, ecclesiastical paradigm, church polity that he sees. When I first saw it I said “yes!” to almost each category, as it clearly hits at the generational forces hitting Quakerism.

Unfortunately many Friends in leadership positions don’t really understand the problems facing Quakerism. Or: they do, but they don’t understand the larger shifts behind them and think that they just need to redouble their efforts using the old methods and models. The Baby Boom generation in charge knows the challenge is to reach out to seekers in their twenties or thirties, but they do this by developing programs that would have appealed to them when they were that age. The current crop of outreach projects and peace initiatives are all very 1980 in style. There’s no recognition that the secular peace community that drew seekers in twenty years ago no longer exists and that today’s seekers are looking for something deeper, something more personal and more real.

When younger Friends are included in the surveys and committees, they tend to be either the uninvolved children of important Baby Boom generation Quakers, or those thirty-something Friends that culturally and philosophically fit into the older paradigms. It’s fine that these two types of Friends are around, but neither group challenges Baby Boomer group-think. Outspoken younger Friends often end up leaving the Society in frustration after a few years.

It’s a shame. In my ten years attending a downtown Philadelphia Friends meeting, I easily met a hundred young seekers. They mostly cycled through, attending for periods ranging from a few months to a few years. I would often ask them why they stopped coming. Sometimes they were just nice and said life was too busy, but of course that’s not a real answer: you make time for the things that are important and that feed you in some way. But others told me they found the meeting unwelcoming, or Friends too self-congratulatory or superficial, the community more social than spiritual. I went back to this meeting one First Day after a two year absence and it was depressing how it was all the same faces. This is not a knock on this particular meeting, since the same dynamics are at work in most of the liberal-leaning meetings I’ve attended, both in the FGC and FUM worlds – it’s a generational cultural phenomenon. I have never found the young Quaker seeker community I know is out there, though I’ve glimpsed its individual faces a hundred times: always just out of reach, never gelling into a movement.

I’m not sure what the answers are. Luckily it’s not my job to have answers: I leave that up to Christ and only concern myself with being as faithful a servant to the Spirit as I can be (this spirit-led leadership style is exactly one of the generational shifts Webber talks about). I’ve been given a clear message that my job is to stay with the Society of Friends, that I might be of use someday. But there are a few pieces that I think will come out:

A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends

What babies were thrown out with the bathwater by turn-of-the-century Friends who embraced modernism and rationalism and turned their back on traditional testimonies? This will require challenging some of the sacred myths of contemporary Quakerism. There are a lot that aren’t particularly Quaker and we need to start admitting to that. I’ve personally taken up plain dress and find the old statements on the peace testimony much deeper and more meaningful than contemporary ones. I’m a professional webmaster and run a prominent pacifist site, so it’s not like I’m stuck in the nineteenth century; instead, I just think these old testimonies actually speak to our condition in the twenty-first Century.

A Desire to Grow

Too many Friends are happy with their nice cozy meetings. The meetings serve as family and as a support group, and a real growth would disrupt our established patterns. If Quakerism grew tenfold over the next twenty years we’d have to build meetinghouses, have extra worship, reorganize our committees. Involved Friends wouldn’t know all the other involved Friends in their yearly meeting. With more members we’d have to become more rigorous and disciplined in our committee meetings. Quakerism would feel different if it were ten times larger: how many of us would just feel uncomfortable with that. Many of our Meetings are ripe for growth, being in booming suburbs or thriving urban centers, but year after year they stay small. Many simply neglect and screw up outreach or religious education efforts as a way of keeping the meeting at its current size and with its current character.

A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment

Religion in America has become yet another consumer choice, an entertainment option for Sunday morning, and this paradigm is true with Friends. We complain how much time our Quaker work takes up. We complain about clearness committees or visioning groups that might take up a Saturday afternoon. A more involved Quakerism would realize that the hour on First Day morning is in many ways the least important time to our Society. Younger seekers are looking for connections that are deeper and that will require time. We can’t build a Society on the cheap. It’s not money we need to invest, but our hearts and time.

I recently visited a Meeting that was setting up its first adult religious education program. When it came time to figure out the format, a weighty Friend declared that it couldn’t take place on the first Sunday of the month because that was when the finance committee met; the second Sunday was out because of the membership care committee; the third was out because of business meeting and so forth. It turned out that religious education could be squeezed into one 45-minute slot on the fourth Sunday of every month. Here was a small struggling meeting in the middle of an sympathetic urban neighborhood and they couldn’t spare even an hour a month on religious education or substantive outreach to new members. Modern Friends should not exist to meet in committees.

A renewal of discipline and oversight

These are taboo words for many modern Friends. But we’ve taken open-hearted tolerance so far that we’ve forgotten who we are. What does it mean to be a Quaker? Seekers are looking for answers. Friends have been able to provide them with answers in the past: both ways to conduct oneself in the world and ways to reach the divine. Many of us actually yearn for more care, attention and oversight in our religious lives and more connection with others.

A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries

Too much of Quaker culture is still rooted in elitist wealthy Philadelphia Main Line “Wasp” culture. For generations of Friends, the Society became an ethnic group you were born into. Too many Friends still care if your name is “Roberts,” “Jones,” “Lippencott,” “Thomas,” “Brinton.” A number of nineteenth-century Quaker leaders tried to make this a religion of family fiefdoms. There was a love of the world and an urge for to be respected by the outside world (the Episcopalians wouldn’t let you into the country clubs if you wore plain dress or got too excited about religion).

Today we too often confuse the culture of those families with Quakerism. The most obvious example to me is the oft-repeated phrase: “Friends don’t believe in proselytizing.” Wrong: we started off as great speakers of the Truth, gaining numbers in great quantities. It was the old Quaker families who started fretting about new blood in the Society, for they saw birthright membership as more important than baptism by the Holy Spirit. We’ve got a lot of baggage left over from this era, things we need to re-examine, including: our willingness to sacrifice Truth-telling in the name of politeness; an over-developed intellectualism that has become snobbery against those without advanced schooling; our taboo about being too loud or too “ethnic” in Meeting.

Note that I haven’t specifically mentioned racial diversity. This is a piece of the work we need to do and I’m happy that many Friends are working on it. But I think we’ll all agree that it will take more than a few African Americans with graduate degrees to bring true diversity. The Liberal branch of Friends spends a lot of time congratulating itself on being open, tolerant and self-examining and yet as far as I can tell we’re the least ethnically-diverse branch of American Quakers (I’m pretty sure, anyone with corroboration?). We need to re-examine and challenge the unwritten norms of Quaker culture that don’t arise from faith. When we have something to offer besides upper-class liberalism, we’ll find we can talk to a much wider selection of seekers.

Can we do it?

Can we do these re-examinations without ripping our Society apart? I don’t know. I don’t think the age of Quaker schisms is over, I just think we have a different discipline and church polity that let us pretend the splits aren’t there. We just self-select ourselves into different sub-groups. I’m not sure if this can continue indefinitely. Every week our Meetings for Worship bring together people of radically different beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of worship, we have individual meditation in a group setting, where everyone is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn’t Friends’ style and it’s not satisfying to many of us. I know this statement may seem like sacrilege to many Friends who value tolerance above all. But I don’t think I’m the only one who would rather worship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper religious fellowship than that found in most contemporary Meetings. Quakerism will change and Modernism isn’t the end of history.

How open will we all be to this process? How honest will we get? Where will our Society end up? We’re not the only religion in America that is facing these questions.

	Traditional Evangelicals 1950 – 1975	Pragmatic Evangelicals 1975 – 2000	Younger Evangelicals 2000-
Theological Commitment	Christianity as a rational worldview	Christianity as therapy Answers needs	Christianity as a community of faith. Ancient/Reformation
Apologetics Style	Evidential Foundational	Christianity as meaning-giver Experiential Personal Faith	Embrace the metanarrative Embodied apologetic Communal faith
Ecclesial Paradigm	Constantinian Church Civil Religion	Culturally sensitive church Market Driven	Missional Church Counter cultural
Church Style	Neighbourhood churches Rural	Megachuruch Suburban Market targeted	Small Church Back to cities Intercultural
Leadership Style	Pastor centred	Managerial Model CEO	Team ministry Priesthood of all
Youth Ministry	Church-centred programs	Outreach Programs Weekend fun retreats	Prayer, Bible Study, Worship, Social Action
Education	Sunday School Information centred	Target generational groups and needs	Intergenerational formation in community
Spirituality	Keep the rules	Prosperity and success	Authentic embodiment
Worship	Traditional	Contemporary	Convergence
Art	Restrained	Art as illustration	Incarnational embodiment
Evangelism	Mass evangelism	Seeker Service	Process evangelism
Activists	Beginnings of evangelical social action	Need-driving social action (divorce groups, drug rehab	Rebuild cities and neighborhoods

Elsewhere:

From Evangelical Friends Church Southwest comes an emergent church” church planting project called Simple Churches (since laid down, link is to archive). I love their intro: “As your peruse the links from this site please recognize that the Truth reflected in essays are often written with a ‘prophetic edge’, that is sharp, non compromising and sometimes radical perspective. We believe Truth can be received without ‘cursing the darkness’ and encourage you to reflect upon finding the ‘candle’ to light, personally, as you apply what you hear the Lord speaking to you.”
The emergent church movement hit the New York Times in February 2004. Here’s a link to the article and my thoughts about it.
“Orthodox Twenty-Somethings,” a great article from TheOoze (now lost to a site redesign of theirs), and my intro to the article Want to understand us?
The blogger Punkmonkey talks about what a missional community of faith would look like and it sounds a lot like what I dream of: “a missional community of faith is a living breathing transparent community of faith willing to get messy while reach out to, and bringing in, those outside the current community.”

Weapons? no. Program? no. Scientists? no. High School Calc? A‑ha!

September 5, 2003

09/05/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Okay, so the justification for the war on Iraq was the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had ready to use against the U.S.. The U.S. knew where the weapons were and a war would find them. Well, the war came and no weapons were found. So the story changed. The U.S. attacked Iraq because Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which he would then surely use against the U.S. The U.S. knew where the weapons were being developed and they would be uncovered any day now. But five months of inspectors combing Iraq have found nothing.

So now a new story. The U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control tells us that whether Hussein had the weapons “isn’t really the issue.” But the war is still justified because Saddam had scientists who might someday work on a weapons program that might someday build a weapon that might someday be used against the U.S. or one of its allies

Bolton said that Saddam kept “a coterie” of scientists he was preserving for the day when he could build nuclear weapons unhindered by international constraints.

I’m personally just waiting for the next level of Bush Administration retreat. Wait for Bolton to announce next month that it didn’t matter if Saddam didn’t actually have any trained nuclear scientists, as occupation inspectors had uncovered evidence that North Badgdad High taught calculus for its eleventh graders. “They might go on to work on a weapons program someday, we had to invade before Saddam could teach them Calc II.”

The excuses just get more pathetic as the truth becomes harder to ignore: the Bush Administration lied to the American people. The only winners in this war are the energy companies rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure with U.S. taxpayer dollars. It’s time to connect the dots, to stop paying investigators to comb Iraq for the non-existant weapons. The inspectors should be recalled to Washington to investigate the very real bamboozle (dare I say “conspiracy”?) that foisted a war on the American people. We’ve been played for chumps.

Pacifism and the Congo Dilemma

August 25, 2003

08/25/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

From the War Resisters League’s Judith Mahoney Pasternak, “an honest look at the challenge pacifism faces in places like the Congo”:www.warresisters.org/nva0703‑1.htm:
bq. There are those who challenge the pacifist position with such questions as, “A man with a gun is aiming it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What nonviolent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next question.” But at least once in every generation — more frequently, alas, in these violence-ridden years — the challenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer.
The answer of course is to stop wars before they start, by stopping the arms trade, the dictatorships, and the crushing economic reforms demanded by Western banks _before_ these forces all combine and erupt into war. Pasternak outlines four parts to a blueprint that could end much of the violence in the Congo.
I’ve always been impressed that the folks at War Resisters are willing to talk about the limits of nonviolence (see David McReynolds seven-part “Philosophy of Nonviolence”:www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php). While war is never the only option (and arguably never the best one), it’s much more effective to stop wars ten years before the bullets start flying. In each of the wars the U.S. has fought recently, we can see past U.S. policies setting up the conflict ten, twenty and thirty years ago.
The largest peace marches in the world can rarely prevent a war once the troops ships have set sail. If U.S. policy and aid hadn’t supported the “wrong” side in Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have fought these current wars. Pacifists and their kin need to start asking the tough questions about the current repressive regimes the U.S. is supporting – places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – and we need to demand that building democracy is our country’s number one goal in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations (yes, prioritize it _over_ security, so that we “don’t replace Saddam Hussein with equally repressive thugs”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php.

U.S. taking on Hussein Strongman Role

August 24, 2003

08/24/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

It shouldn’t be a surprise but it makes me sick anyway. The _Washington Post_ reports that the “U.S. occupation is hiring Saddam Hussein’s ex-spies”:www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37331-2003Aug23.html.
It must be a good job market for mid-level Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back in June, we learned that the U.S. had put “ex-Iraqi generals in charge of many Iraq cities”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000027.php (at the same time the U.S. canceled promised elections). The U.S. trumpets capture of big-name Iraqi leaders like “Chemical Ali”:www.msnbc.com/news/955391.asp?vts=082120030615 but then quietly hires their assistants. The majority of the new U.S. intelligence recruits come from Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat, an agency whose name is said to inspire dread among Iraqis.
The infrastructure of Saddam Hussein’s repression apparatus is being rebuilt as a U.S. repression apparatus. The statues of Saddam Hussein go down, the “playing card” Iraqi figureheads get caught, but not much changes.
The article says that the new spy hiring is “covert” but it’s apparently no secret in Iraq. even the Iraqi Governing Council, a dummy representative body handpicked by U.S. forces, has expressed “adamant objections” to the recruitment campaign:
bq. “We’ve always criticized the procedure of recruiting from the old regime’s officers. We think it is a mistake,” Mahdi said. “We’ve told them you have some bad people in your security apparatus.”
No, the “covert” audience is the U.S. public, who might start feeling quesy about the Iraq War if they knew how easily the U.S. was slipping into Saddam Hussein’s shoes.

Insuring Violence Never ends

August 22, 2003

08/22/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

“Bill Hobbs”:http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106139209827725521 challenged Nonviolence.org about the recent lack of condemnations of Palestinian violence. It’s a fair critique and a good question. For the record, Nonviolence.org agrees with you that bombing buses is wrong. Hamas should be condemned, thank you. Of course, Israelis building in the occupied territories is also wrong and should also be condemned. The zealots in the conflict there demand that everyone take sides, but to be pacifist means never taking the side of evil and always demanding that the third way of nonviolence be found.
The Israelis and Palestinians have so much in common. Both are a historically-persecuted people with contested claim to the land. The war between them has been largely funded and egged on by outside parties who seem to have a vested interest in the violence continuing ad infinitum. Both sides chronicle every bus bombed and bullet fired, using the outrage to rally the faithful to fresh atrocities. Blogs like Bill Hobbs’ and organizations like the International Solidarity Movement help insure that the bombings will never stop. Caught in the middle are a lot of naive kids: suicide bombers, soldiers, and activists who think just one more act of over-the-top bravery will stop the violence.
The war in Israel and Palestine will only stop when enough Israelis and Palestinians declare themselves traitors to the chants of nationalistic jingoism. We are all Israelis, we are all Palestinians. There but for the grace of God go all of us: our houses bulldozed, our loved ones killed on the way to work.
Once upon a time we in America could think that we were immune to it all; the idea that we’re all Israelis and Palestinians seemed a rhetorical stretch. But I was one of the millions who spent the night of 9/11/01 calling New York friends to see if they were safe (I was on my honeymoon and was so shaken that one of my calls was to an ex-girlfriend’s parents; my wife gracefully forgave me). On that day, we Americans were delivered the message that we too are complicit. We too must also declare ourselves traitors to our country’s war mythologies and start being honest about our historic complicity with war. As a people, Americans weren’t innocent victims at either Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center towers (though as individuals we were, which is the point of nonviolent outrage of nationalistic violence). every blog post commemorating a victimhood, whether in New York City or Tel Aviv, supports the cause of war. I will not condemn every act of violence but I will condemn the cause of violence and I will expose the mythologies of war.

Almost Famous

August 22, 2003

08/22/200305/31/2016 · Martin Kelley

Conservative godfather of the internet Instapundit almost linked to Nonviolence.org the other day. He didn’t like our take on the enola Gay exhibit, but instead of linking directly to us so his readers could see what we had to say, he linked to Bill Hobbs’ critique. I guess Instapundit alter ego Glen Reynolds must not think his readership can handle dissenting voices. Instapundit readers who cut and pasted to get here:

Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender.
Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a United States warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at Enola Gay and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.

Pentagon Movie- and Myth-Making

August 20, 2003

08/20/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

There’s an interesting conversation over at TalkLeft about the Pentagon’s vetting of movie scripts. One of the next movies they’re working on is a dramatization of the the already highly-embellished story of the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq (one’s tempted to ask whether a movie about her could even say “Based on a True Story”).

Celebrating nuclear terror with amnesia and techno-lust

August 19, 2003

08/19/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has “reassembled the enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945”:www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/national/19MUSe.html. Trying to avoid the controversy that accompanied a 1995 exhibition, the current museum director says this exhibit will:
bq. “focus on the technological achievements, because we are a technological museum… This plane was the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time.”
This continues the moral blindness that created the bloodiest century in human history. Instead of looking at how politics, war and technology intersected in an event that instantly killed 80,000 people, we shine up the metal and blabber on about technology. The bombing’s death count far overshadows the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center two years ago. If the sight of the towers collapsing is a horror we can never forget or minimize, then so too is Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud.
The only way militarism and nationalism survives is by abstracting war and ignoring the very real death, blood and tragedy. The Japanese people caught up in their country’s lust for war were victims as soon as the fighting started. Their participating in their country’s war was a result of propaganda and nationalistic fervor, the same mix that led so many Americans to support the war in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of people killed on August 8, 1945 were people who never fired a gun. They were simply trying to stay alive in a world full of human-made terror. They were ordinary people who watched as their country’s leaders plotted and warred. Most were afraid to say no to war, to unite with pacifists around the world, or to denounce militarism wherever it existed and with whatever excuse it gave for its horror.
The roots of World War II were oil and terror: Japanese leaders attacked its neighbors to gain control of the industrial resources the home islands didn’t have. American leaders (industrial and political) had waged war against Hawaii and the Philippines for control of Pacific shipping lanes. The plotting for war started long before Pearl Harbor and involved the leaders in both countries. In a very real way, the war in Iraq is just the latest chapter in the century-long war over oil.
But history, truth and morality will all be stripped out of the Smithsonian’s new exhibit, as spokespeople for the American Legion and Air Force have declared:
bq. “As long as the enola Gay is presented in the light that it was used — to end the war and save lives — that’s fine.”
bq. “We are satisfied that it is in historical context this time and does not make comments about U.S. aggression in the Pacific.”
No, schoolchildren visiting Washington won’t learn the truth about the bombing. Another generation will be spoon-fed propaganda about its country’s greatness and goodness. Another generation will not pause to consider its country’s old sins and tragic mistakes. A typical blog entry about the Smithsonian exhibit that claims “no single plane did more to save lives in World War II”:http://www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106130896137661056 . Abstract death and claim righteousness to your country, keep militarism going and keep peaceful people from uniting across national boundaries.

Quaker Ranter

A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley

Yearly Archives ⇒ 2003

Emergent Church Movement: The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal

September 6, 2003

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

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

Can we do it?

Theological
Commitment

See also:

Elsewhere:

Weapons? no. Program? no. Scientists? no. High School Calc? A‑ha!

September 5, 2003

Pacifism and the Congo Dilemma

August 25, 2003

U.S. taking on Hussein Strongman Role

August 24, 2003

Insuring Violence Never ends

August 22, 2003

Almost Famous

August 22, 2003

Pentagon Movie- and Myth-Making

August 20, 2003

Celebrating nuclear terror with amnesia and techno-lust

August 19, 2003

A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.

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

Can we do it?

Theological Commitment

See also:

Elsewhere:

Theological
Commitment