Talking with someone from another meeting out our respective outreach strategies I remembered my long ago blog post, The Biggest Most Vibranty Most Outreachiest Program Ever. I’m sure this must have been inspired by some grand announcement by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting or Friends General Conference about some now-forgotten outreach program with breath-taking goals. But as I work at outreach in a local meeting level again and talk with others doing the same, it really does seem like it needn’t be so complicated.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Yearly Archives ⇒ 2022
Caroling at Cropwell
December 19, 2022
I’ve written a wrap-up of a caroling event this Sunday at Cropwell Meeting in Marlton, NJ. These write-ups aren’t really written for prospective visitors (they can getting FOMO jealousy from the Facebook and Instagram feeds) but for other Friends. Cropwell is a old meeting but almost died out and has been reconstituted over the last 15 months. Everyone seems especially interested in outreach and these posts are a record of what we’re doing.
I’m currently in-process of formally transferring my membership from Atlantic City Area Meeting in Galloway, NJ, to Cropwell. ACAMM is a great meeting and seems to be doing well but Cropwell feels like a better fit for this phase of my Quaker journey.
25 years
December 14, 2022
How did I miss that last month was the 25th anniversary of my first blogging effort? Nonviolence Web Upfront had a half-dozen posts a week and was tied to an email newsletter that went out every Friday (that’s pretty much the same format as Quaker Ranter in 2022!). This was before Dreamweaver, Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, etc. The word weblog was a few weeks from being coined.
I put this all together using an absolutely ridiculous Microsoft Word macro that I had adapted. I’d write a post in Word then hit a button. A long string of search and replaces would start to run. For example, one search would look for boldest text and put “<b>” and “</b>” around it. After half a minute or so it’d spit out an HTML file to my desktop. I’d open an FTP program and upload the file to the server. If I had an edit to make I’d have to go through the macro all over again. I was teaching myself HTML as I went along and it’s amazing any of it displayed properly.
Still, it’s remarkable that while so much of back end has changed and changed again over the decades, the final format is instantly recognizable as a blog. The Quaker Ranter archives now list over 1,300 articles.
Quaker Ranter Making a fetish of silence?
December 12, 2022
It’s not unusual to hear silent (Liberal, unprogrammed) Friends state rather assuredly that our worship is the traditional Quaker format. In their view, Friends who called their buildings churches and have hired ministers are innovators who have lost something important that the first Friends had.
Only it’s not exactly true. Micah Bales answers a friend’s question about the difference in ministry between programmed and unprogrammed Friends in his blog last week. As he points out, early Friends would typically minister for 20 to 90 minutes. The semi-official birthing moment for Friends was a three-hour sermon by George Fox to 1000 seekers. They weren’t there to hear just him (he had just arrived in the area and wasn’t well known) but a whole gaggle of preachers. I imagine it as a days-long Lollapalooza festival with Fox electrifying the crowd from the second stage. Silence wasn’t the goal.
I don’t know a Liberal Friends meeting anywhere that would be comfortable with someone ministering for 20 minutes, much less three hours. As the Quaker movement settled in, the sermons took on a distinct form — explicitly Christian and biblical — and they were generally given by only by specific people recognized in the ministry.
Today, typically, anyone at all can stand in ministry at a Liberal Friends meeting. Two to five minutes is the norm for a “message.” The topic certainly can be Christian but in many meetings that’s the exception. At a Friends church, meanwhile, the sermons are given by specific people, will have Christian content, and will go on for an extended period of time. In those respects, the format is closer to early Quaker worship. And this shouldn’t be a surprise: they were responding to changes in ministry and expectations just as we Liberal Friends have done.
Micah also talks about preparation and describes the idea of “radically extemporaneous preaching” among Liberal Friends as a kind of “fetish.” He might have a point. I love the story about a minister who wouldn’t have a clue about what he was going to say until he rose to his feet1. For him, the obedience to Christ was to trust that words would come if he were only to faithfully stand up. It’s such a cool story, but that’s not how my ministry has ever come.
About six months ago we had a totally silent worship at the meeting I’ve been attending. It was nice but at the end the clerk rose, affirmed it was nice, but then said worship should always have ministry. It’s struck me as true and the statement has stuck with me.
I often have ministry forming in my head in worship but am perhaps overly conscious and keep it to myself. There’s always a balancing act of course and some Friends feel free to say whatever whenever they want. But I think I myself have perhaps both over-fetishized an antipathy to planning and also set myself an overly high bar for speaking.
Ezra Klein on the Quaker Way
December 11, 2022
In a NYTimes opinion piece today, Ezra Klein teases: “The Quaker way has a lot to teach us about social media.”
You have to scroll deep into the article to find the Quaker connection. Spoiler: it comes from letting in silence and letting deliberation be a slower process. He links to a Rex Ambler book on the Quakerbooks.org website (yea!) but it’s out of stock and not showing up (doh!) [Update: they got the link working first thing Monday morning after I gave them the heads-up, huzzah!]
Klein also talked about Quakers in August, in a conversation with William MacAskill on Effective Altruism (a concept about which I’m extremely skeptical), when they talked about Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay. He obviously has us on the mind. It’d be kind of cool if Klein went beyond talking about Quakers to talking with Quakers (my DMs are always open).
What does redemption mean to you?
December 6, 2022
Episode 2 of the Quakers Today podcast comes out in a week. The topic is “What does redemption mean to you?” Leave a voicemail with your answer to the question with your name and the town where you live before midnight (ET) Sunday, Dec. 11., and you might get on the podcast!
The number to call is 317-QUAKERS (+1 outside U.S.)
Becoming one in worship
December 1, 2022
An excerpt from my introduction to the December Friends Journal issue on Atonement:
When I first sit down on a meetinghouse bench on a Sunday morning, I’m anything but focused. My mind is aswirl in family and work to-dos, scenes from books I’ve read or shows I’ve watched, extended family dramas, bills, or crises. If I’ve forgotten to turn off my phone, a stream of vibrations will nag me, each buzz demanding my attention.
If I consciously work to settle down — and am lucky or blessed — I can sink into the imperfect silence and feel at-one with the gathering worship. The sounds draw me closer: the rustling of Friends shifting softly in their seats, the crackling of the fireplace on cool mornings, the wind outside blowing leaves against the porch door. If we’re fortunate, the offered ministry that morning will speak to our conditions and bring us deeper still, to the feet of the divine Teacher and Comforter. We may not get there every week, but when we do, we feel at-one with one another and with a higher power.
A shifting effectiveness for people power?
November 30, 2022
Interesting to see Erica Chenoweth’s recent research referenced in a NYTimes in an article by Max Fisher on protests in China. Nonviolence activists (including many Quakers) loved the conclusions of her initial research, which implied that nonviolent, people-power protests were not just morally superior but also pragmatically more effective — suggesting that Gandhi and King and the pantheon of peace activists were right all along.
For years, a stinging criticism of nonviolence strategy has been that it’s rooted in comfortable elite communities and has spent too much time lecturing resistance movements that turn to violence. Chenoweth’s hard numbers and academic rigor gave us a bit of cover: See!, nonviolence works more often than not! Her more recent research makes that pragmatic argument more complicated.
Activists have also tried to apply the data to very different types of social action. Chenoweth’s data was looking at regime change – overthrowing dictators or an occupied territory. How it does and doesn’t apply to reform movements is an open question (hat tip Mackenzian for a great convo on this and this link).
The next part of the Times’ article references Zeynep Tufekci’s theory that the last decade’s era of social-media protests can create instant, large-scale challenges to government power that are dramatic but essentially leaderless and don’t come out of strategic, long-term visioning. These are more likely to fizzle out. I’m reminded of a 2010 blog post of mine, Gladwell and strong tie social media networks, where I talked about the organizing that needs to go on in the background of a social network to make it more effective.
While this article focuses on China, the elephant for nonviolence activists today is the war in Ukraine. People power wasn’t going to stop Russian tanks headed toward Kiev in February. The best one could hope for is Ukrainians gumming up the system – employing strategies like blowing up bridges during the invasion and slow-walking Russian orders afterwards. But without a military defense, there was almost certainly going to be a long (perhaps decades long) period of occupation and repression. Activists can still support relief work and conscientious objectors, etc., but I honestly don’t know what tools we had to offer in regards to the invasion itself.