The QuakerQuaker social media site has been offline for a few months but is somewhat back now. I made an archive of the old Ning-powered site and put it up. There have been a lot of important conversations there since 2006, including much of the discussion that became the “Convergent Friends” discourse, so I’ve wanted it preserved. Eventually Google will successfully re-index the site and there won’t be so many page-not-found errors.
The second phase will be putting a new social media site up. It’s going to be built on WordPress, so this version of QuakerQuaker should stay useful for a while. It will retain the “Primitive Christianity Revived, Again” tagline and I will try to replicate some of the discussion groups. I need to purchase some plug-ins for this to work; the initial cost will be $228. If anyone can help out with that with a donation, that would be wonderful; there’s also ongoing monthly server bills so if multiple people help out it will all go to good use.
In The Friend, Geoffrey Durham recounts the “religious white-knuckle ride” of his first Quaker worship experience—and what led him to come back again and again. Funny and profound, glad they made it a free article.
Twenty-two years ago I was on my honeymoon, whale watching off the coast of Maine, oblivious to the world. My wife and I had stopped in a cute little market when a few snippets of words broke through my consciousness from the radio playing in the background. I first noticed the hushed solemnity of the NPR hosts, then disjointed words: plane, crashed, towers.
Like everyone, we quickly pieced together the horror happening in real time: second plane, jumpers, collapsed. I was publishing Nonviolence.org then, a peace portal, and felt I had to say something, anything, so I rushed to the public computer at the local library. There was a queue of worried patrons wanting to message loved ones. In a few moments I typed out some rushed words:
Today’s terrorist attacks are simply horrendous, thousands of innocents might well lose their lives. Most important now is to sit patiently, to pray and to not call for massive indiscriminant attacks that might only kill thousands more. Our character as a nation is being tested now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, global injustice
We know how that turned out. Three thousand dead in New York and Western Pennsylvania, followed by hundreds of thousands in Western Asia. Decades of wars in Afghanistan. A second war in Iraq prompted by the flimsiest and most unlikely of excuses. Today, after all the blood, those countries are hostile and unstable. Yet two of the countries co-responsible were U.S. allies, are still U.S. allies. The 9/11 attacks was planned and largely executed by Saudis; Osama bin Laden was finally found living out in the open in Pakistan in an upper class compound a short walk from the gates of the country’s military academy. I’m glad we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan but it makes one wonder what the other wars were meant to accomplish.
This week many people are gathering to remember 9/11, as they should. It was a horrific attack. It struck our sense of safety and fueled nightmares and tears. But when do we as U.S. citizens gather to think about how we reacted? When do we remember hundreds of thousands who have died since 9/11 in the name of retribution and a fearful revenge we’ve called freedom?
I can relate to Kathleen Wooten’s metaphor about searching for the perfect pencil that would make her efficient enough to do everything she wanted (for what it’s worth, Kathleen always seems to be accomplishing a lot regardless of magic tools).
The massive digitalization of old newspapers in recent years has allowed historians to determine the source of the “Underground Railroad” name.
Twenty years ago this week I wrote one of my most widely shared blog posts, “The Younger Evangelicals and Quaker Renewal.”
I was on fire that summer, making connections with a bubbling up, grassroots “emergent church” movement and finding oh-so-many unexpected similarities between these frustrated, authenticity-seeking younger Evangelicals and my super-Liberal East Coast Quaker world. A lot of the problems were clearly generational and I was lapping up new posts by Canadian blogger Jordan Cooper. One day he shared a chart from theologian Robert E. Webber’s new book, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World, that showed the “differences between the moderns (traditional and pragmatic evangelicals) and the postmodern (the younger evangelicals).”
The chart was like a secret decoder ring for me. Webber might have been thinking of more traditional churches, but with a little translation it lot of it sure explained a lot of what I was seeing in Quakerism. Older Friends wanted youth ministry that was a “Church-centred program” while I and my disaffected cohorts wanted “prayer, Bible study, worship, social action.” Older Friends thought of Christianity as a “rational worldview” or a form of “therapy” whereas I longed for a “community of faith.”
Not much happened after I clicked post. Facebook and Twitter weren’t around to promote it. My blog was more-or-less me talking to myself. But over the course of the next few years people found it. They must have been asking similar questions and seeing what Google turned up. The comments have some future Quaker bloggers (was this the first post Chris Mohr found and fan-emailed me about?). Even more remarkable, it includes some very unlikely Evangelical Friends, like the then-youth pastor at First Friends Canton and the then-general secretary of Iowa Yearly Meeting. At the time I was answering the bookstore phone at Friends General Conference, the most Liberal institution bastion of U.S. Quakers. To find common cause across this theological spectrum was quite unusual then (and alas, probably now).
What’s changed after twenty years? Well, after a number of false starts there are programs to train younger Friends and bring them into institutional Quakerism (Quaker Voluntary Service, Pendle Hill’s Continuing Revolution conference, and the 1992-founded Guilford College’s Quaker Studies Program deserve special shoutouts). Blogs and later social media have created forums for disparate Friends to talk together in informal conversations. I’m continually amazed that Friends Journal magazine (of which I’m senior editor) and QuakerSpeak videos can be accessed anywhere without paywall, making our stories widely accessible. But some things haven’t changed. We’ve had rounds of Quaker schisms, especially in Northwest, Indiana, and North Carolina Yearly Meetings.
And how much has changed for individual young adult Friends? The September issue of Friends Journal is devoted to younger Friends and one breakout article is Olivia Chalkley’s “Young Adults Want What Early Friends Had.” Olivia came to Friends as a teen and has had the advantages of the newer youth programs — attending Guilford QLSP and working at a Quaker Voluntary Service fellow — yet so much of her article felt like topics I discussed on Quaker Ranter back before my temples went gray. For example:
We often don’t think about the potential Friends who slip through the cracks because there’s not much to grab hold of: those who don’t know where to turn in the silence, not having a solid foundation in Scripture, Christian ethics and social teachings, or even Quaker history; those who feel alienated by the meetings in which Friends cringe if you talk about Jesus Christ, or even about God; and those who simply can’t figure out if we are Christian or not, due to mixed messaging and lack of conviction among members of their meetings. These obstacles must be recognized and addressed as part of our efforts to present accessible pathways to entry, not only for the young adults hungry for religious community but also for the poor and working classes among which religious belief tends to be high, according to recent Pew studies.
I guess it’s some progress that this article is published by Friends Journal and not sitting barely read on a personal blog. But as I look back at this twenty-year anniversary I find it a little sad we’re still struggling with identity and messaging. Maybe this is a perennial, never-answerable issue for a denomination, especially one as decentralized as ours. Or maybe it’s something we can continue to figure out. Mid-twentieth century Friends were able to work out a modern vision of Quakerism that was powerful enough to reunite and regalvanize a dwindling Quaker movement; what would our vision look like?
The Black Quaker Project seems to publish its best stuff on its email list (if you visit its homepage you’ll see a form to sign up). This week’s tackles the uncomfortable question, “Why Are There So Few African American Quakers.” They break the answers down into six answers (e.g., “Skepticism of Non-Violence” and “Dissatisfaction with the Quaker Process.”)
Whoa, the part of Indiana Yearly Meeting that retained the name after the 2013 schism is leaving Friends United Meeting. At one point Indiana was the largest yearly meeting in the world, second only to Philadelphia in its influence on American Quakerism but repeated schisms and depopulation of the rural Midwest has hit it hard.
The 2013 split created two bodies: the Evangelicals who retained “Indiana” as their name and the Liberals who became the New Association of Friends. At the time I was pleasantly surprised that both sides remained part of the Friends United Meeting, the international umbrella organization of what you might call churchy Friends. I thought it might be a sign that we had outgrown the kind of nineteenth century attitudes that forced everyone pick sides in splits like these. Apparently not.
Some Evangelical Friends have been dreaming about a “realignment” of FUM since the 1980s, a concept that would split FUM down the middle between Evangelicals and Liberals, pushing everyone to decide between their respective national conferences, Evangelical Friends International and Friends General Conference respectively.1 Somehow FUM’s been able to resist the centrifugal forces and maintain a big tent approach that’s frustrated many2 but somehow held together. What happens to this balance if the center of gravity for FUM American Friends pivots more toward its liberal end?
FUM is an international organization and Africa’s the wild card. The largest population of Friends are there, with most of its yearly meetings affiliated with FUM. Even the decamping Indiana Yearly Meeting wants to find an arrangement with FUM to keep those ties going (met with guffaws in some quarters).
I don’t hear anyone talking about realignment much these days. But in the U.S. context there’s an increasing number of FUM Friends and FGC Friends3 who aren’t so very different anymore. This presumably is Indiana YM’s argument for leaving, but it’s a chicken-or-egg scenario: the result of splits is often that each side shifts to fit the stereotype the other side accused it of being all along. In the meantime there are a lot of Friends with deep family and childhood ties to Indiana Yearly Meeting who are grieving right now.
We struggled with ‘s’s that looked like ‘f’s, ‘y’es that actually were ‘the’s. Capital letters were more art than standard writing, and tired clerks that would write the first few letters of a name and then throw a little letter in the air and figure we would know the rest. We kept a running list of all that we saw in order to keep a consistent practice.
Some of the offenses Dartmouth Friends were disowned for are listed. Some seem quite harmless„ like the brothers who were forced to apologize in 1746 for allowing “fiddling and dancing in their Houses.” Other offenses are shocking in their cruelty, like Friend Abigail Allen, who beat an enslaved African “so unmercyfully” in 1711 that he subsequently died from the wounds. Disownment was not a life sentence: someone could repent and be let back in. Incredibly, only three years later Abigail convinced the meeting that she was sorry for her manslaughter.
Quaker Ranter