The Quaker Ecosystem

02/23/201702/24/2017 · Martin Kelley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Predictions on the ‘new evangelical’ movement

03/24/201102/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

Readers over on QuakerQuaker.org will know I’ve been interested in the tempest surrounding evangelical pastor Rob Bell. A popular minister for the Youtube generation, controversy over his new book has revealed some deep fissures among younger Evangelical Christians. I’ve been fascinated by this since 2003, when I started realizing I had a lot of commonalities with mainstream Christian bloggers who I would have naturally dismissed out of hand. When they wrote about the authenticity of worship, decision-making in the church and the need to walk the talk and also to walk the line between truth and compassion, they spoke to my concerns (most of my reading since then has been blogs, pre-twentieth century Quaker writings and the Bible).

Today Jaime Johnson tweeted out a link to a new piece by Rachel Held Evans called “The Future of Evangelicalism.” She does a nice job parsing out the differences between the two camps squaring off over Rob Bell. On the one side is a centralized movement of neo-Calvinists she calls Young, Restless, Reformed after a 2006 Christianity Today article. I have little to no interest in this crowd except for mild academic curiosity. But the other side is what she’s dubbing “the new evangelicals”:

The second group — sometimes referred to as “the new evangelicals” or “emerging evangelicals” or “the evangelical left” is significantly less organized than the first, but continues to grow at a grassroots level. As Paul Markhan wrote in an excellent essay about the phenomenon, young people who identify with this movement have grown weary of evangelicalism’s allegiance to Republican politics, are interested in pursuing social reform and social justice, believe that the gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and are eager to be a part of inclusive, diverse, and authentic Christian communities. “Their broadening sense of social responsibility is pushing them to rethink many of the fundamental theological presuppositions characteristic of their evangelical traditions,” Markham noted.

This is the group that intrigues me. There’s a lot of cross-over here with some of what I’m seeing with Quakers. In an ideal world, the Religious Society of Friends would open its arms to this new wave of seekers, especially as they hit the limits of denominational tolerance. But in reality, many of the East Coast meetings I’m most familiar with wouldn’t know what to do with this crowd. In Philly if you’re interested in this conversation you go to Circle of Hope (previous posts), not any of the established Quaker meetings.

Evans makes some educated guesses about the future of the “new evangelical” movement. She thinks there will be more discussion about the role of the Bible, though I would say it’s more discussion fo the various Christian interpretations of it. She also foresees a loosening of labels and denominational affiliations. I’m seeing some of this happening among Friends, though it’s almost completely on the individual level, at least here on the East Coast. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years and whether it will bypass, engage with or siphon off the Society of Friends. In the meantime, Evans’ post and the links she embeds in it are well worth exploring.

Quakerism 101

08/10/200402/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

In Fall 2005 I led a six-week Quakerism 101 course at Medford (NJ) Monthly Meeting. It went very well. Medford has a lot of involved, weighty Friends (some of them past yearly meeting clerks!) and I think they appreciated a fresh take on an introductory course. The core question: how might we teach Quakerism today?

This is the proposal for the course. I started off with a long introduction on the history and philosophy of Quaker religious education and pedagogic acculturation and go on to outline a different sort curriculum for Quakerism 101.

I took extensive notes of each session and will try to work that feedback into a revised curriculum that other Meetings and Q101 leaders could use and adapt. In the meantime, if you want to know how specific sessions and rolesplays went, just email me and I’ll send you the unedited notes. If you’re on the Adult Religious Ed. committee of a South Jersey or Philadelphia area Meeting and want to bring me to teach it again, just let me know.

Thoughts on a Quakerism 101 Course

Over the last few years, there seems to be a real groundswell of interest in Quakers trying to understand who we are and where we came from. There’s a revival of interst in looking back at our roots, not for history or orthodoxy’s sake, but instead to trying to tease out the “Quaker Treasures” that we might want to reclaim. I’ve seen this conversation taking place in all of the branches of Friends and it’s very hopeful.

I assume at least some of the participants of the Quakerism 101 course will have gone through other introductory courses or will have read the standard texts. It would be fun to give them all something new – luckily there’s plenty to choose from! I also want to expose participants to the range of contemporary Quakerism. I’d like participants to understand why the other branches call themselves Friends and to recognize some of the pecularities our branch has unconsciously adopted.

Early Friends didn’t get involved in six-week courses. They were too busy climbing trees to shout the gospel further, inviting people to join the great movement. Later Quietist Friends had strong structures of recorded ministers and elders which served a pedagogic purpose for teaching Friends. When revivalism broke out and brought overwhelmingly large numbers of new attenders to meetings, this system broke down and many meetings hired ministers to teach Quakerism to the new people. Around the turn of the century, prominent Quaker educators introduced academic models, with courses and lecture series. Each of these approaches to religious education fiddles with Quakerism and each has major drawbacks. But these new models were instituted because of very real and ongoing problems Friends have with transmitting our faith to our youth and acculturating new seekers to our Quaker way.

The core contradiction of a course series is that the leader is expected to both impart knowledge and to invite participation. In practice, this easily leads to situations where the teacher is either too domineering _or_ too open to participation. The latter seems more common: Quakerism is presented as a least-common-denominator social grouping, formless, with membership defined simply by one’s comfortability in the group (see Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years.) One of the main goals of a introductory course should be to bring new attenders into Quaker culture, practice and ethics. There’s an implicit assumption that there is something called Quakerism to teach. Part of that job is teasing out the religious and cultural models that new attenders are bringing with them and to open up the question as to how they fit or don’t fit in with the “gestalt” of Quakerism (Grundy, Quaker Treasures and Wilson’s Essays on the Quaker Vision).

The greatest irony behind the Quakerism 101 class is that its seemingly-neutral educational model lulls proudly “unprogrammed” Friends into an obliviousness that they’ve just instituted a program led by a hireling minister. Arguments why Q101 teachers should be paid sounds identical to arguments why part-time FUM ministers should be paid. A Q101 leader in an unprogrammed meeting might well want to acknowledge this contradiction and pray for guidance and seek clearness about this. (For my Medford class, I decided to teach it as paid leader of a class as a way of disciplining myself to practice of my fellow Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Friends.)

The standard Quakerism 101 curriculum compartmentalizes everything into neat little boxes. History gets a box, testimonies get a box, faith and institutions get boxes. I want to break out of that. I can recommend good books on Quaker history and point participants to good websites advocating Quaker testimonies. But I want to present history as current events and the testimonies as ministry. The standard curriculum starts with some of the more controversial material about the different braches of Friends and only then goes into worship, the meeting life, etc. I want discussion of the latter to be informed by the earlier discussion of who we are and who we might be. The course will start off more structured, with me as leader and become more participatory in the later sections.

Curriculum:

What I want to do is have one solid overview book and supplement it with some of those fascinating (and coversation-sparking!) pamphlets. The overview book is Thomas Hamm’s Quakers in America. Published last year, it’s the best introduction to Quakerism in at least a generation. Hamm wrote this as part of a religions of America series and it’s meant as a general introduction to contemporary Quakerism. His later chapters on debates within Quakerism should be easy to adapt for a Q‑101 series.

Session I: Introductions

Worship
In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of Ohio Yearly Meeting sessions, p. 1), reflections. (maybe start this class 2?)
Introductions to one another.

Session II: What Are Our Models

Worship
In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of First Friends Church of Canton, p. 3), reflections.
What are our models? Roleplay of “What Would X Do?” with a given problem: JC, George Fox, Methodists, Non-denominational bible church, college. Also: the “natural breaking point” model of Quaker divisions.
Reading for this class: “Convinced Quakerism” by Ben Pink Dandelion

Session III: The Schisms

Worship
In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of Wilmington Yearly Meeting sessions, p. 5), reflections.
Reading for this class: Quakers in America chapter 3, “Their Separate Ways: American Friends Since 1800,” about the branches

Session IV: Role of our Institutions

Worship
In-class reading of two pages from Quakers in America (profile of Lake Erie Yearly Meeting, p. 7), reflections.
Reading for this class: “The Authority of Our Meetings…” by Paul Lacey

Session V: Controversies within Friends

Could pick any 2 – 3 controversies of Hamm’s: “Is Quakerism Christian?,” “Leadership,” “Authority,” “Sexuality,” “Identity,” “Unity and Diversity,” “Growth and Decline.” Early in the course I could poll the group to get a sense which ones they might want to grapple with. The idea is not to be thorough covering all the topics or even all the intricacies within each topic. I hope to just see if we can model ways of talking about these within Medford.
Reading for this class: Quakers in America chapter 5, “Contemporary Quaker Debates,” p. 120

Session VI: Role of worship, role of ministry, role of witnesses.

Focusing on Worship/Ministry (Witness)/MM Authority (Elders). If the calendar allows for eight sessions, this could easily be split apart or given two weeks.
Reading for this class: “Quaker Treasures” by Marty Paxton Grundy, which ties together Gospel Order, Ministries and the Testimonies.

Session VII: What kind of religious community do we want Medford MM to be?

This should be participatory, interactive. There should be some go-around sort of exercise to open up our visions of an ideal religious community and what we think Medford Meeting might be like in 5, 10, 25 years.
Reading for this class: “Building the Life of the Meeting” by Bill & Fran Taber (1994, $4). I’ve heard there’s something recent from John Punshon which might work better.
Also: something from the emergent church movement to point to a great people that might be gathered. Perhaps essays from Jordan Cooper & someone at Circle of Hope/Phila.

Books Used:

“Quakers in America” is Thomas Hamm’s excellent new introduction to Friends is a bit pricey ($40) but is adapting well to a Q101 course.
“Convinced Quakerism” by Ben Pink Dandelion mixes traditional Quaker understadings of convincement with Ben’s personal story and it sparked a good, wideranging discussion. $4.
“Quaker Treasures” by Marty Grundy. $4
“The Authority of Our Meetings…” by Paul Lacey. $4
“Building the Life of the Meeting” by Bill and Fran Taber. $4

Considered Using:

“Why Friends are Friends” by Jack Willcuts. $9.95. I like this book and think that much of it could be used for a Q101 in a liberal-branch Friends Meeting. Chapters: “The Wonder of Worship,” “Sacred Spiritual Sacraments,” “Called to Ministry,” “Letting Peace Prevail,” “Getting the Sense of the Meeting,” “On Being Powerful” – I find the middle chapters are the more interesting/Quaker ones).
Silence and Witness by Michael Birkel. I haven’t read through this yet, but in skimming the chapters it looks like Birkel shys away from challenging the Quaker status quo. Within that constraint, however, it looks like a good introduction to Quakerism. $16.
“Quaker Culture vs. Quaker Faith” by Samuel Caldwell.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Quakerism 101 curriculum. It’s not as bad as it could be but it’s too heavy on history and testimonies and too focused on the Jones/Brinton view of Quakerism which I think has played itself out. I’ve seen Q101 facilitators read directly out of the curriculum to the glazed eyes of the participants. I wanted something fresher and less course-like.

Peace and Twenty-Somethings

10/17/200309/05/2023 · Martin Kelley

Over on Nonviolence.org, I’ve posted something I originally started writing for my personal site: Where is the grassroots contemporary nonviolence movement? It asks why there’s no the kind of young, grassroots culture around peace like the networks that I see “elsewhere on the net.”

The piece speaks for itself but there is one point of context and a few observations to make. The first is that the grassroots culture I was thinking of when I wrote the piece was the “emergent church,” “young evangelical” movement. Thirty years ago the kids I’ve met at “Circle of Hope”, a Philadelphia “emergent church” loosely affiliated with the Brethren could easily have been at a Movement for New Society* training: the culture, the interests, the demographics are all strikingly similar.

(MNS was a national but West Philly-centered network of group houses, publications, and organizing that forged the identities of many of the twenty-somethings who participated; Nonviolence.org is arguably a third-generation descendant of MNS, via New Society Publishers where I worked for six years).

The observation for Friends is that retro-organizing like the relatively-new “Pendle Hill Peace Network” [website URL long since dropped & picked up by spammer] will have a really hard time acting as any sort of outreach project to twenty-somethings (a main goal according to a talk given my monthly meeting by its director). The grassroots peace-centric communities that were thriving when the Network sponsors were in their twenties don’t exist anymore. Rather predictably, the photographs of the next two dozen speakers for the Pendle Hill Peacebuilding Forum series show only one who might be under forty (maybe, and she’s from an exotic locale which is why she gets in). I’m glad that a generation of sixty-something Quaker activists are guaranteed steady employment, but don’t any Quaker institutions think there’s one American activist under forty worth listening to?

I think the best description of this phenomenon comes from the military. They call it “incestuous amplification” and define it as “a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lockstep agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.” I suspect that peace activists are so worried about their own relevancy that they have a hard time recognizing new peers or changed circumstances.

These numbers and the lack of speaker diversity explain why I rarely even bother with Quaker peace conferences anymore. I wouldn’t mind being overlooked in my peace ministry if I saw other activists my age being recognized. But I can’t take my invisibility as feedback since it’s clearly not about me or my work. The homogeneity of the speakers lists at most conferences sends a clear message that younger people aren’t wanted except as passive audience members clapping for the inspiring fifty- to seventy-somethings on stage. How much of current retro peace organizing is just self-stroking Boomer fantasy?

The in-group incestuousness has created a generation gap of relevancy. When institutions and movements become myopic, they become irrelevant to those locked outside. We have to go elsewhere to build our identities.

The internet is one place to go. From there it’s clear that the institutional projects don’t have the “buzz,” i.e., the support and excitment, that the Gen-X-led projects do. The internet alone won’t save us: there’s only so much culture one can build online and computer-mediated discussions favor argumentation, rationality, and ideological correctness. But it’s one of the few venues open to outsiders without cash or institutional clout.

But what about the content of a twenty-first century twenty-something peace movement?

Many of today’s twenty-something Quakers were raised up as secular peace activists. Our religious education programs often de-emphasize controversial issues of faith and belief to focus on the peace testimony as the unifying Quaker value. Going to protests is literally part of the curriculum of many Young Friends programs. Even more of a problem, older Friends are often afraid to share their faith plainly and fully with younger Friends on a one-on-one basis. The practice of personal and Meeting-based spritual mentorship that once transmitted Friends values between generations is very under-utilized today.

Almost all of these Friends stop participating in Quakerism as they enter their twenties, coming back only occasionally for reunion-type gatherings. Many of these lapsed Friends are out exploring alternative spiritual traditions that more clearly articulate a faith that can give meaning and purpose to social action. I have friends in this lost Quaker generation that are going to Buddhist temples, practicing yoga spirituality, building sweat lodges and joining evangelical or Roman Catholic churches. Will they really be won back with another lecture series? What would happen if we Friends started articulating the deep faith roots of our own peace testimony? What if we started testifying to one another about that great Power that’s taken away occasion for war, what if our testimony became a witness to our faith?

Why are a lot of the more thoughtful under-40s going to alternative churches and what are they hoping to find there?

Don’t get me wrong: I hope these new peace initiatives do well and help to build a thriving twenty-something activist scene again. It’s just that for fifteen years I’ve seen a sucession of projects aimed at twenty-somethings come and go, failing to ignite sustaining interest. I worry that things won’t change until sponsoring organizations seriously start including younger people in the decision-making process from their inception and start recognizing that our focus might be radically different.

Postscript
I share some observations about the different way institutional and outsider Friends use the internet in How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.

UPDATE: The Pendle Hill Peace Network was laid down in late 2005. The cited reason was “budgetary constraints,” an empty excuse that sidesteps any responsibility for examining vision, inclusion or implimentation. It’s forum is now an advertising stage for “free mature porn pics.” It’s very sad and there’s no joy in saying “I told you so.”

UPDATE: After twelve years I laid down Nonviolence.org and sold the domain. I never received any real support from Friends.

Jesus goes Lo-Fi

10/13/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Last night my wife Julie and I (and baby Theo) went to a service at Circle of Hope church at 10th and Locust. Very Gen‑X oriented, it goes to some trouble to not look or feel too churchy. It meets on Sunday night on folding chairs in a spartan room above a convenience store. The minister gave a low-key non-sermon, played a clip from a pop movie, gave out index cards with scripture verses for people to read aloud while music played. There are guitars and tamborines but it’s more lo-fi/punk than folksy twelve-string. The language is Christian but not churchy. It’s big into house-church “cells” as the small-scale community building block. Theology seemed secondary to community, which could also be described as the practice of living a Christian life.

The elements I found interesting were the same ones I would find worrisome were I to stay. Almost everyone was a twenty- and thirty-somethings and it had the feel of a “scene,” in that there was a dominant style and demographic to the participants. While I suspect there’s a little too much of a social component to the community, I have to admit to a certain intoxication to being in the midst of so many age peers. There was a definite sense that I could belong there and that my participation would be welcomed and encouraged. It was quite a change from the invisibility I often feel among Friends as a convinced thirty-something with a concern for traditional Quakerism.

While I have been in large gatherings of “young adult” Friends, they’ve tended to be dominated by non-practicing kids of Quakers who are there primarily to see their high-school-era friends. The group at Circle of Hope chose to be there and their primary identification with one another is through this worship group, which allows for deeper (and bolder) fellowship than the young adult Friends gatherings I’ve been to.
But could I belong at a place like Circle of Hope? Probably not. I’m too Quaker, crazy enough. I didn’t join in their communion since I don’t believe in outward sacraments. I wouldn’t like the idea of a prepared ministry, and the entertainment of showing video clips and playing music would grate on my beliefs. While I know there are many paths to the divine, I agree with Friends’ experience that the path least likely to become encumbered with false idols and barriers is the one that is most stripped of artifice and programming, the one that allows an unmediated direct experience and obeyance of Christ as manifested in the moment.

But am I too hung up on Quaker practice? Many local Friends meetings could be more accurately described as meditation groups, there being little common faith and many members who don’t believe in the possibility of the divine presence during worship. With Circle, I’m confronted with the one of the central dilemmas behind the last 150 years of Quakerism, namely: is it better to participate with:

the programmed (often younger) people boldly espousing faith who might be too socially oriented and flighty; or
the silent worshippers who threaten to replace faith with process , are tone-deaf to generational change and have trouble transmitting faith to their children or responsibility to their sucessors.

You can’t quite reduce all the splits between Hicksites, Gurneyites, Beanites, etc. to this dichotomy but it is a factor in most of the schisms. I suspect I would eventually be as frustrated by Circle as I currently am with cultural Quakerism but for entirely different reasons. Perhaps I should follow the advice of a current article in theooze and official take some time to “detox from the church.”

Should We (How Should We) Grow the Religious Society of Friends?

09/06/202409/08/2024 · Martin Kelley

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?

Growth for growth’s sake

Political and cultural observations in light of Quaker discipleship. Recurring themes: Russia, peace, evangelism, blues.

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A Racially Diverse Society of Friends?

01/02/2019 · Martin Kelley

The January issue of Friends Journal is online. I wrote the intro this month so I’ll just quote myself:

In recent years, a number of Black Friends Journal contributors have shared heartbreaking stories of not feeling welcome in Quaker circles. As we planned this issue, we self-consciously added a question mark to the end of its title — “A Racially Diverse Society of Friends?” The choice of punctuation hints at a certain weariness — are we really still asking this? — along with the suggestion that maybe many Friends are content enough with the status quo that they might simply answer “no” to a call for diversity.

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