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.
It is not uncommon for young people to leave the relgious orientation they in which they were raised or even turn atheist/agnostic for a while. Patience and perserverance in friendhip will bring them back. We all need a spiritual connection.
Hi Tim,
I agree with you – I’ve seen people leave for awhile and then come back to their faith. It seems like a normal (or at least common) path these days.
If I had to guess I’d say that few of the participants of the youth leadership program were actually very involved with Friends to begin with. And the program itself was probably devoid of much Quaker content – one prominent program focuses on gardening & volunteering at local social service agencies. Because we’re so afraid of alienating twenty-something “birthright” Friends, we present them with a very watered down version of Quakerism and even then rarely ask them to choose or not choose it.
The collorary is that at the same time that some are leaving, others are coming: young adults who have left their traditions and are now exploring about Quakerism. How do we welcome these twenty-somethings?
We dote on the children of prominent Friends, giving them opportunities like young adult leadership training, board memberships, etc., and we look the other way when they bring distinctly non-Quaker practices into the meetinghouses. I don’t think this is the way to keep the kids in Quakerism and I’m not surprised when they drift away. The interesting question: how do we prepare the Religious Society of Friends to welcome them back? And how do we welcome the thousands of twenty-something inquirers who often want a rigorous Quakerism?
The truly sad thing (or another truly sad thing) is that many boomer Quakers and others take YEARS (as in, many) to even notice that someone is no longer around. Or they simply fail to notice certain peoples’ absence at all. It is as if certain people are completely invisible. Often, these people have been invisible or wished by the dominant Quaker culture to be invisible the whole time. They are too loud, too boisterous, too full of righteous conviction, too religious, too whatever, and point out the elephants in the middle of the room everyone else pretends do not exist. And it is very often these people who Quakerism needs the most, because what Quakerism is left with is blandness, indifference, secularism, and mediocrity. Pardon me for not being among the polite.