Strangely enough, the Philadelphia Inquirer has published a front-page article on leadership in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, “Friends frustrate some of their flock, Quakers bogged down by process, two leaders say”. To me it comes off as an extended whine from the former PhYM General Secretary Thomas Jeavons. His critiques around Philadelphia Quaker culture are well-made (and well known among those who have seen his much-forwarded emails) but he doesn’t seem as insightful about his own failings as a leader, primarily his inability to forge consensus and build trust. He frequently came off as too ready to bypass rightly-ordered decision-making processes in the name of strong leadership. The more this happened, the more distrust the body felt toward him and the more intractible and politicized the situation became. He was the wrong leader for the wrong time. How is this worthy of the front-page newspaper status?
The “Making New Friends” outreach campaign is a central example in the article. It might have been more successful if it had been given more seasoning and if outsider Friends had been invited to participate. The campaign was kicked off by a survey that confirmed that the greatest threat to the future of the yearly meeting was “our greying membership” and that outreach campaigns “should target young adult seekers.” I attended the yearly meeting session where the survey was presented and the campaign approved and while every Friend under forty had their hands raised for comments, none were recognized by the clerk. “Making New Friends” was the perfect opportunity to tap younger Friends but the work seemed designed and undertaken by the usual suspects in yearly meeting.
Like a lot of Quaker organizations, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has spent the last fifteen years largely relying on a small pool of established leadership. There’s little attention to leadership development or tapping the large pool of talent that exists outside of the few dozen insiders. This Spring Jeavons had an article in PYM News that talked about younger Friends that were the “future” of PYM and put the cut-off line of youthfulness/relevance at fifty! The recent political battles within PYM seemed to be over who would be included in the insider’s club, while our real problems have been a lack of transparency, inclusion and patience in our decision making process.
Philadelphia Friends certainly have their leadership and authority problems and I understand Jeavons’ frustrations. Much of his analysis is right. I appreciated his regularly column in PYM News, which was often the only place Christ and faith was ever seriously discussed. But his approach was too heavy handed and corporate to fit yearly meeting culture and did little to address the long-term issues that are lapping up on the yearly meeting doorsteps.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard some very good things about the just-concluded yearly meeting sessions. I suspect the yearly meeting is actually beginning a kind of turn-around. That would be welcome.
Don’t miss:
- The Inquirer has an interesting comment thread on the article
- More blog chatter via these technorati links: Here and here (stupid blog-unfriendly Inquirer URL system)
This will sound self-serving, coming from a former leader in several Quaker groups, but so often when a leader criticizes the self-defeating aspects of the culture within which he or she is expected to operate, the response is “Well, they had some good points, but their failings were X, Y, Z, and Z1, Z2, Z3.…”
I tend to look at Philadelphia YM and similar groups from a systems perspective. Thom Jeavons was chosen by the YM for what role? Who agreed on that role, and what sources of disunity were tacitly set aside to obtain that agreement? What was attractive about him that ended up being an irritant? What about his predecessors? (What about his successors?! Will they too be defeated by the very traits that will have been initially attractive to some sectors of the YM?) Why weren’t Thom’s more decisive characteristics leveraged by the whole body as an advantage (within a culture of mutual accountability) rather than now serving as a rhetorical tool to marginalize him?
Another way of putting my concern: There is NOBODY in the world who will be absolutely ideal in every way. Every Quaker body I know wants someone in leadership who will be an inspiring Superman and a deferential Clark Kent simultaneously. We will not confront our systemic demons by citing our leaders’ faults. Assuming that we handle our personnel choices with prayerful care and don’t choose total blockheads for our prime leadership positions, the main issues will not be the leaders’ varying lists of strengths and weaknesses, it will be the body’s intention to follow its LORD, and its willingness to engage in the systemic diagnosis, and if necessary, systemic exorcism, that God might require.
No leader can communicate in the right way and the right order with the right people all the time. It is impossible. Most of the complaints I’ve heard about Thom say as much about the culture from which the complaints emerge as they do about Thom. That is not said to get our individual leaders off the hook, but to ask us to sharpen our analysis: were their “failings” a result of unforeseen weaknesses, deliberate mischief, etc., or were they more about a lack of alignment with the larger body (and within that body) that must be attended to urgently regardless of who the leader is?
Hi Johan,
Not self-serving at all, I’m glad you’re weighing in. I agree that the complaints about Jeavons reveal more about the yearly meeting than him in particular. My own observations are my familiar frustrations with Philadelphia’s insider culture. While I didn’t see Thom effectively addressing this issue, he certainly didn’t create it and it’s been maintained over the years by any number of yearly meeting Friends.
One pet theory I have about Quaker leadership, whether as staff or clerk, is that no individual can affect more than about 10% of the larger culture. A great clerk with an undisciplined group (I’m thinking of the young adult Friends communities I’ve known) will only be able to help pull them so far in discerning God’s will. A terrible clerk with a very seasoned group will only be able to do so much damage before the group steps in to clerk itself. Over time, good leadership and God’s grace can turn a group around but it’s a slow process that relies on the faithfulness of many Friends, not just a General Secretary.
I wouldn’t have talked about Jeavon’s leadership if he hadn’t planted that _Inquirer_ article. Still, he does represent a certain recent style of strong-willed Philadelphia leadership that hasn’t worked. Jeavons was very concerned about the future of the yearly meeting and he was one of the few people looking out at the long-term demographic trends. It was quite possible that his concerns and vision might have unexpectedly outlasted his tenure and influenced the yearly meeting more than anyone might have ever acknowledged, but self-serving stunts like the _Inquirer_ article unnecessarily burn bridges. It’s a shame.
It’s no coincidence that FGC’s General Secretary Bruce Birchard wasn’t interviewed for the article. I’m not always in perfect agreement with Bruce (especially around issues of employee compensation, _ahem_) but FGC is a surprisingly functional body. We too can clunk along with decisions but we get where we need to go. Bruce’s “Dilemmas of Organizational Leadership in the RSOF”:http://www.fgcquaker.org/library/fosteringmeetings/0402.html, written eons ago, is still well worth a read. Kudos not just to him, of course, but to faithful clerks and staff and God smiling on us. _(For those who think I’m just sucking up to the bosses, rest assured that the only FGC staffperson who regularly seemed to read this blog is gone (Liz, we miss you!))_
In looking through the PYM Powerpoint presentation to which you link, it struck me that it include the Hartford Seminary Study Correlates of Growth. The strongest was “Clarity of purpose and mission.” The strongest reason for PYM Friends attending Friends was “Openness to wide range of belief.”
A blunt, somewhat exaggerated way of putting that is that clearly standing for something provides the strongest correlation for growth, but for PYM Friends not clearly standing for something was the most important thing for them. Is it strange that PYM Friends don’t seem to grow?
This is closely tied to leadership. Having clear mission and purpose provides a good context for leadership. Where there is no clarity on mission and purpose, and strong resistance to attaining such clarity, no one is going to be able to lead effectively.
I love the fact that a major newspaper took notice. (I take it for granted that newspapers will get it wrong sometimes, that they will reflect one point of view or one agenda more than others, and that even the most blatantly one-sided article is not the end of the world. I’ve been there.) One of my pet theories is that we Quakers would behave a lot better if we were under more journalistic scrutiny. Our near-invisibility allows a lot of dysfunction, elitism, and complacency to fester.
Why should getting one’s point of view in the paper constitute bridge-burning? Especially if the group one’s no longer pandering to is on a terminal path to irrelevance, despite its own opinion of itself? Being a people-pleaser hasn’t worked, either. There is a life outside the tiny circles of Friends who are either too full of themselves or too fragile to stand criticism. By the way, you yourself have been pretty sharp in your criticisms. Does a more public platform make it worse? If “insider culture” is part of the problem, then a public airing might be at least a bit of the cure. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought Thom’s comments were relatively restrained. If there is not a sense of crisis in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, with its membership a tiny fraction of what it should be after three centuries of prime location and political safety, then people must believe that being a Friend is either for very, very special people or is no longer worth cherishing at all.
Thanks for the hospitality of your site for my cranky views. Just wait and see how defensive I can get when FUM is criticized!
Hi Bill: You’re preaching to the choir, bro’. I hear you. No one reading official PhYM documents would even get much of a sense that we were religious. We utter tedious platitudes about “community” to paper over our fear of talking about God, faith, conviction. See my proposed “testimony against community”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/testimonies_for_twentiethfirst_century_a_testimony_against_community.php (which didn’t make it onto this year’s yearly meeting agenda) for more.
As Bill well knows, Thom was one of the few PhYM leaders to use taboo words like “Christ” in print. That public identification makes his actions even more subject to scrutiny. I know of at least one universalist Friend who’s conflated his anger at this article with Thom’s Christian profession, which is sad.
Johan: I hear ya too. The Inky talks about (usually against) Catholics all the time and all the papers in the land go wild whenever one of the mainstream Protestant denominations elect someone controversial or make some big statement. Putting aside our pathetically small numbers, why shouldn’t Friends make the “big time”?
Time will tell what this tempest in a teapot might produce but right now it’s hard to see what Jeavons was thinking. He’s used up his “leadership capital” as General Secretary and needs to step back and let go. We need to trust the Holy Spirit’s work amongst us, even when it seems fruitless. Why pick a fresh fight? If he’s been faithful then he’s planted many seeds with his witness and vision. Might now be a good time to go about quietly tending to the seedlings?
Our challenge in North Pacific Yearly Meeting is not a closely held leadership that resists expansion of its circle but a gradual devolving of leadership into fewer and fewer hands because fewer and fewer Friends “have time” to devote to participation in the life of the (monthly/quarterly/yearly) meeting.
(Query: whose time is it? Who gave it to us? For what purposes?)
This is manifest on the Yearly Meeting in level in NPYm by the resort to an “executive committee” to make decisions in lieu of our “steering committee.” This latter institution/framework, is functionally a representative body of the constituent meetings. It aspires to meet and be led as a group but the truth is that those involved do not know one another well enough, and have not seasoned business well enough, to actually function, very often, as a community in the sense we use (or used to use) that word. The Steering Committee, as it functions in NPYM, is less like a Meeting for Sufferings and more like the form that comes from the world of non profits and other corporations.
At least, however, the Steering Committee form is a seasoned enough form (which is not to say that it is actually effective) that it is mentioned in our Faith and Practice. This new expedient, the “Executive Committee,” has been called into being more or less sua sponte by the clerk, more or less in despair to get some business done.
Very little actual business is done by the Yearly Meeting, at its Annual Session. One of the founding principles of this YM – when it was set off from Pacific Yearly Meeting – was that it existed for the purpose of fellowship among Friends, and not the “doing of business.” Manifesting a lack of charity, I suppose, some – myself included – have come to characterize our Annual Session gathering as “the party.” Many Friends find it has no usefulness to them (“I’m just not a Yearly Meeting Friend,” I hear said) and those who attend care little how it is put together or who does the work, so long as it’s ready for them when they show up. Often they do not register in advance, perhaps for “lack of time” to do it or perhaps because there is always the chance that something more appealing to do will present itself at the last minute.
I may be open to question about further manifestation of lack of charity for this last remark except that I have heard it said, in so many words, by people who compained about “rigid deadlines” to register. At the same time I have heard complaints about the inability to muster a children’s program for toddlers and babies by people who would never think to volunteer to help provide one.
The NPYM is currently embarked upon a “vision and structure” process, with a committee writing a mission statement (again, sounding more in corporation than corporate in the Quaker sense) and, it is hoped, from this mission statement, structural reform will grow.
I wonder whether the problem is in the idea that Friends do not “have time” to participate in the life of the meeting. If more Friends spent more time participating in the processes that are familiar to Friends there might be less of a problem with business being seasoned and Friends having enough familiarity with one another (on all levels) to succeed in finding God’s will together.
I also query how familiar many Friends are with Friends manner of doing business. It seems to me that in NPYM many have not been substantially oriented through the membership process or through other teaching and so, as the number of such Friends grows, among us, there is more and more resort to the kinds of democratic/ corporation type decision making forms that such Friends learned to use prior to coming to the Society. These forms are not centered on finding unity in God’s will and so each decision, to a large or small extent, leaves disunity in its wake – the distinction between unity and consensus being glossed over, the different results in terms of reconcilliation being not largely seen by individuals but definately felt by the body.
sigh.
Hi Martin. I miss you guys too. Sometimes. And for what it’s worth, I think your commentary is right on.
Johan’s initial comments on this post resonated strongly with my own feelings. “Every Quaker body I know wants someone in leadership who will be an inspiring Superman and a deferential Clark Kent simultaneously. We will not confront our systemic demons by citing our leaders’ faults.” Very nicely put.
My own poor take on the matter? I think no Friends body can function as a community unless its members are truly committed to uphold one another, to the point of making meaningful daily sacrifices of time and love on one another’s behalf.
If they are at that point of commitment, then it is guaranteeable that they will also be looking at one another in terms of accountability instead of in terms of “inclusiveness”. And at that point they are ready to confront their systemic failings.
And at that point, too — when they are accustomed to making sacrifices for one another’s welfare, and to being accountable to one another and requiring accountability from one another — then meaningful leadership at last becomes possible.
Even then, it will not be leadership in the worldly sense, because it cannot compel anyone to do anything. (Membership in our Society is strictly voluntary, after all.) But it will be meaningful leadership, because the community has chosen the leader, and is committed to sacrifice for the community (which includes for the activities that the community has selected the leader to lead in), and because the community has methods of accountability in place which can keep the leader and her/his proposals satisfactory in its eyes.