Last week I spoke with Friends Journal author Don McCormick. Don’s been a prolific writer for us in recent years. We talked of our experiences of community among modern Friends, especially in different types of meetings, as well as techniques for orienting and welcoming newcomers to Quaker meetings.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Yearly Archives ⇒ 2024
Nancy Bieber loves her meeting
September 13, 2024
Nancy has an article in the current issue of Friends Journal called “A Love Letter to My Meeting.” With a title like that, it could be overly sappy but I found it tender and deep, a reflection on her changing roles and relationships.
In the video interview we talk about navigating controversies—a fight over carpets in the past and struggling with wildly divergent attitudes around COVID policies more recently. I was most interested in how she’s changed over the years. How do you go from a newcomer still trying to understand Quaker lingo to a pillar of the meeting, the kind of person who steps in when something needs to be handled (the short answer is that this happens over time).
As an editor I often trim away bullet-point “listicles” in article. They often feel like they’re a remnant of the outline the author used to construct the story. Nothing is lost if I select them a delete. But Nancy’s list at the end really felt like the message I think many of us could take to heart when tempers run high:
- Stick around. It gets better, and you help make it happen.
- Love anyway, and forgive. It’s the only way.
- Nurture each other tenderly, and listen to each other. We are all carriers of Truth.
- Know that the Spirit is present and will transform us as we are open.
Epistle from Jordans Young Adult Friends Gathering 2024
September 6, 2024
Matt Rosen sent me the epistle from a recent YAF retreat at Jordans Meeting in the UK (pdf). They even tried to recreate the famous “Presence in the Midst” painting, which is pretty cool dorky.
Also, The Friend has a nice piece from Matt about traveling around Britain Yearly Meeting.
Should We (How Should We) Grow the Religious Society of Friends?
September 6, 2024
From Johan Maurer, a look at how we should think about growth and outreach. One part that stood out to me:
There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers’ virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don’t need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.
In my experience, a lot of incoming seekers really like it when we fess up to our past indiscretions and current struggles. Perhaps they’ve come from some church that was overly confident and unable to examine its flaws and so like our transparency. Nowadays the influencer class all talk about “emotional maturity” and I think part of that is appreciating ourselves for who we really are in a healthy way.
Maybe because I’m thinking about the upcoming Friends Journal issue of “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism” (there’s still ten days to write for it!) but I’m also thinking about the tone with which we approach outreach. In some circles there’s a panic that we somehow have to save Quakerism. That begs the question of “what is Quakerism”?
Is Quakerism a way of approaching our relationship with the living Christ and sharing that good news as we walk cheerfully over the world? Is it building communities that express our commitment to love of God and love of neighbor? If so, then nothing is ever going to destroy it. The whole point of the original Quaker movement is that it didn’t need a large infrastructure: no priests or pastors, no staff, no tithing. An empty barn and a small room of believers was enough. Here’s my naive side rising up: if we are faithful God, will continue to give us guidance and blessings.
When I dropped in for a day of the FGC Gathering this summer, I attended a workshop led by the most excellent Chiyo Moriuchi, titled “Letting our Light Shine: Governance & Friends.” The workshop wrote its own epistle, which FGC published on their website today with the title “A Call to Action.” Here’s part of its message:
Immediate action is required to address the fact of declining and aging membership. We have too few people available to do the “work,” and we are burning out too many of those who are. We feel that addressing the inadequate communication of who Quakers are is the most promising path to solve this problem.
This is all true, but it’s true of our institutions. It’s true of our infrastructure. The document has two calls to action: the first is for Quaker institutions to do some self-reflection on what makes them Quaker (sounds good to me!). The second is for Friends to hire outside marketing firms. I’ve seen big budgets poured into marketing firms before and sigh at what a proposal like this would likely give us: generic, feel-good copy that irons out all blemishes. Any spiritual language that might be deemed off-putting gets cut. History is dropped except for a few past heroes who are turned into cartoons.1
Decades of religion surveys have found that people aren’t looking for bland and generic. A lot of the fastest-growing denominations are opinionated and have high expectations of incoming members. The newcomers I see walking into my meeting seem to be searching for something real, something palpable, as indeed I myself was when I walked into Abington Meeting over three decades ago. We can be ourselves and share our blemishes. We don’t need to put on an act.
And finally, some optimism: Quaker marketing is doing great. Seriously. We’re more visible and accessible than we’ve been in our entire history. Friends Journal is a part of that, with the magazine free without paywall and the Quakerspeak interview series, Quakers Today podcast, and Quaker.org portal. But we’re just a piece of what’s happening. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast and the Daily Quaker email is super-visible. The Quakers sub-reddit and Discord server are very active. The slick Friends Library makes historic Quaker writings accessible by web, app, and audio (and the old-school Project Gutenberg, Christian Classics Etherial Library, Quaker Heritage Press are still around). It’s easy to find local meetings (FGC and FWCC have good resources, plus Google Maps does a great job). Any curious person wanting to know about Quakers can get up to speed in weeks. I know because I see these people walking into my own Cropwell Meeting.
So I don’t think our institutions necessarily need new marketing so much as new visioning. What kinds of support is needed for the new seekers and for local meetings? I think in some ways we need to step back and see with new eyes. What is it we want to market?
FJ looks at Relationships
September 6, 2024
The September issue of Friends Journal is online, with articles about Relationships. I hope you all like the selection! This Friday’s feature: True to Your Word, a really thoughtful look at non-monogamy. Also to check out: our report on Public Friends, a new ministry from Ashley Wilcox.
What is your Quaker meeting’s story?
August 16, 2024
I had a great video interview with Mike Huber on gaming and fun and community (I even got to bust out nineteenth century Books of Discipline to highlight past Quakers’ distrust of “gaming and diversions”). He has an article in the current FJ on Dungeons & Dragons and how his longtime play of it has shaped how he sees his Quaker communities.
One takeaway of our talk was the idea of a Quaker community as a kind of storytelling place. Do we have stories of who we are? Our they are stories or stories inherited from previous generations? Do we recognize our story arcs — the shifts, sometimes obvious and sometimes gradual — that change our character.
Mike pointed out that pastored meetings have rather obvious moments to stop and reflect on who we are and what we’re becoming, as a change in pastors requires an assessment as a new call for a pastor starts. In unprogrammed meetings, certainly generational changes creates story arcs, though perhaps not as consciously.
What is you meeting or church’s story?
Quakers and Gaming
August 5, 2024
Michael Huber explores a culture clash, but a rather fun one: the similarities between communities of Dungeons & Dragons players and Quakers. It’s only recently that he’s felt he could talk openly about this, but I’m so glad he has, as he’s brought over some D&D concepts that I think I might want to try with Friends at my meeting sometime soon. I’ve already had real-world conversations about this article!
Quaker Indian Board Schools get more research
July 31, 2024
From New England Friends, a very impressive research findings of the NEYM Quaker Indian Boarding School Research Group (PDF). The main document is 17 pages but with footnotes and maps and sources it stretches out to 62 pages. It’s going to take me awhile to go through this since it’s quite packed but this passage really stands out:
Friends of that era, the vocal ones at least, were unapologetic assimilationists even as they wrote to Congress to protest the brutal and unjust removals of Native People, the violation of treaties, and the greed and duplicity of White settlers and politicians.
One of the things we looked for and have not yet found are the voices of Friends who advocated that Indian Peoples should be allowed to live according to their values and traditions. What disagreements we came across were over how best to pursue assimilation (and the implicit cultural erasure). In Samuel Taylor’s conclusion to the 1856 report for the NEYM Committee on the Western Indian (CWI), assimilation “may be the only alternative left and the one most likely to save them from utter extinguishment,” we hear a foreshadowing of Richard Henry Pratt’s infamous description of his task at the Carlisle School, to “kill the Indian in him, to save the man.”
Nineteenth-century Quaker attitudes toward Natives Peoples is tragic, yes, but also just so perplexing. There are moments of great sympathy and kindness in the records — help with needed food and supplies, assistance when negotiating treaties — but also what I can only describe as a cluelessness about the need to maintain Native traditions and autonomy.
Also I hope we’re learning more about the “no about us without us” lesson in this. There are some Native-majority Quaker meetings and even a Native-majority yearly meeting and I’ve not seen them included in these re-evaluations of the relationship between Quakers and Native Peoples. These religious bodies are the result of missionary work and are often appreciative of at least some of the teachings of nineteenth-century Friends. These Friends are solidly Christian, as are the majority of Native Americans today. This shouldn’t surprise anyone: Jesus’s message has often been taken up by the oppressed, who have embraced and lived into its radical message of liberation. I’ve heard some anti-Christian messages in discussions around Quaker/Native history and while I understand the impulse to question all aspects of the colonial legacy, I don’t think majority-White religious bodies should be going about denouncing the spirituality of most modern Native Peoples. This indeed is a big part of what got us here in the first place. (Eden Grace wrote a story that touches on similar complexities among African Friends).
We need to be able to hold the complexities, ironies, and nuances and find a way to continue to listen to those who interpret cultural histories differently. I’m glad we have the work of the New England Yearly Meeting group to give us specific histories so that we might understand ongoing cultural elements of all this.