Updating QuakerQuaker

January 4, 2023

I just sent out a mes­sage on Quak­erQuak­er about retool­ing it for the mod­ern age:

I’m not one to make New Years res­o­lu­tions most of the time but it seems as if mod­ern­iz­ing Quak­erQuak­er should be one for 2023. While it still boasts over 3,700 mem­bers, it’s built on Ning, a long-outdated and semi-abandoned plat­form that has any num­ber of frus­trat­ing tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions. Quak­erQuak­er isn’t used as much as it should be, even by its members.

Reimag­in­ing Quak­erQuak­er and set­ting up the tools to make it work will cost some mon­ey. Please con­sid­er fund­ing Quak­erQuak­er and its evo­lu­tion for 2023, either as a month­ly dona­tion or a one-time gift. Also I’m open to emails with ideas about what you’d like to see (I’m imag­in­ing some­thing that’s more mod­est but also more used).

I had a much-longer orig­i­nal draft that detailed all the rea­sons why Ning is hope­less­ly inad­e­quate in 2023 but it was nixed by my Advance­ment Direc­tor (okay, my wife as she sits next to me at the table work­ing on home­school cur­ric­u­la). Suf­fice it to say that I’ve let Quak­erQuak­er stay in a kind of sta­sis because I did­n’t want to lose some great com­ment threads. The best ones could be eas­i­ly archived. I have a day job pro­duc­ing great Quak­er con­tent but there are still ways to reboot Quak­erQuak­er and make it a use­ful des­ti­na­tion for infor­ma­tion and con­ver­sa­tion that com­ple­ments oth­er Quak­er online spaces.

Quaker sing song ministry

January 4, 2023

Over on Mastodon (yes you should be there), Aus­tralian Friend Evan start­ed an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about Quak­er sing song. This is a form of deliv­er­ing min­istry that seems to date back to the begin­nings of our reli­gious soci­ety but which bare­ly exists any­more. To my untrained ears it sounds more like some­thing you’d hear in a small Catholic or Ortho­dox church. Many years ago Haver­ford Col­lege Library excerpt­ed a field record­ing on a page ded­i­cat­ed to Music and the Ear­ly Quak­ers:

Evan posts to a pas­sage on it from nineteenth-century Quak­er chron­i­cler Thomas Clark­son:

The Quak­ers, on the oth­er hand, nei­ther pre­pare their dis­cours­es, nor vary their voic­es pur­pose­ly accord­ing to the rules of art. The tone which comes out, and which appears dis­agree­able to those who are not used to it, is nev­er­the­less not unnat­ur­al. It is rather the mode of speak­ing which na- ture impos­es in any vio­lent exer­tion of the voice, to save the lungs. Hence per­sons who have their wares to cry, and this almost every oth­er minute in the streets, are oblig­ed to adopt a tone. Hence per­sons, with dis­or­dered lungs, can sing words with more ease to them­selves than they can utter th6m with a sim­i­lar pitch of the voice. Hence Quaker- women, when they preach, have gen­er­al­ly more of this tone than the Quaker-men, for the lungs of the female are gen­er­al­ly weak­er than those of the oth­er
sex.

I’ve always won­dered if lat­er oppo­si­tion to sing song might have been par­tial­ly moti­vat­ed by the fact that it was favored by women or sound­ed a bit too Catholic for Angli­cans like Clark­son or Quak­ers lean­ing that direction.

There’s a great 2011 post from the now-dormant Quak­er His­tor­i­cal Lex­i­con blog by Illi­nois Friend Peter Laser­sohn. The com­ments are also great.

Outreachiest Ever Redux

December 23, 2022

Talk­ing with some­one from anoth­er meet­ing out our respec­tive out­reach strate­gies I remem­bered my long ago blog post, The Biggest Most Vibran­ty Most Out­reachi­est Pro­gram Ever. I’m sure this must have been inspired by some grand announce­ment by Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing or Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence about some now-forgotten out­reach pro­gram with breath-taking goals. But as I work at out­reach in a local meet­ing lev­el again and talk with oth­ers doing the same, it real­ly does seem like it need­n’t be so complicated.

Caroling at Cropwell

December 19, 2022

I’ve writ­ten a wrap-up of a car­ol­ing event this Sun­day at Crop­well Meet­ing in Marl­ton, NJ. These write-ups aren’t real­ly writ­ten for prospec­tive vis­i­tors (they can get­ting FOMO jeal­ousy from the Face­book and Insta­gram feeds) but for oth­er Friends. Crop­well is a old meet­ing but almost died out and has been recon­sti­tut­ed over the last 15 months. Every­one seems espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in out­reach and these posts are a record of what we’re doing.

I’m cur­rent­ly in-process of for­mal­ly trans­fer­ring my mem­ber­ship from Atlantic City Area Meet­ing in Gal­loway, NJ, to Crop­well. ACAMM is a great meet­ing and seems to be doing well but Crop­well feels like a bet­ter fit for this phase of my Quak­er journey. 

25 years

December 14, 2022

How did I miss that last month was the 25th anniver­sary of my first blog­ging effort? Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront had a half-dozen posts a week and was tied to an email newslet­ter that went out every Fri­day (that’s pret­ty much the same for­mat as Quak­er Ranter in 2022!). This was before Dreamweaver, Blog­ger, Mov­able Type, Word­Press, etc. The word weblog was a few weeks from being coined. 

I put this all togeth­er using an absolute­ly ridicu­lous Microsoft Word macro that I had adapt­ed. I’d write a post in Word then hit a but­ton. A long string of search and replaces would start to run. For exam­ple, one search would look for bold­est text and put “<b>” and “</b>” around it. After half a minute or so it’d spit out an HTML file to my desk­top. I’d open an FTP pro­gram and upload the file to the serv­er. If I had an edit to make I’d have to go through the macro all over again. I was teach­ing myself HTML as I went along and it’s amaz­ing any of it dis­played properly. 

Still, it’s remark­able that while so much of back end has changed and changed again over the decades, the final for­mat is instant­ly rec­og­niz­able as a blog. The Quak­er Ranter archives now list over 1,300 articles.

Making a fetish of silence?

December 12, 2022

It’s not unusu­al to hear silent (Lib­er­al, unpro­grammed) Friends state rather assured­ly that our wor­ship is the tra­di­tion­al Quak­er for­mat. In their view, Friends who called their build­ings church­es and have hired min­is­ters are inno­va­tors who have lost some­thing impor­tant that the first Friends had.

Only it’s not exact­ly true. Mic­ah Bales answers a friend’s ques­tion about the dif­fer­ence in min­istry between pro­grammed and unpro­grammed Friends in his blog last week. As he points out, ear­ly Friends would typ­i­cal­ly min­is­ter for 20 to 90 min­utes. The semi-official birthing moment for Friends was a three-hour ser­mon by George Fox to 1000 seek­ers. They weren’t there to hear just him (he had just arrived in the area and was­n’t well known) but a whole gag­gle of preach­ers. I imag­ine it as a days-long Lol­la­palooza fes­ti­val with Fox elec­tri­fy­ing the crowd from the sec­ond stage. Silence was­n’t the goal. 

I don’t know a Lib­er­al Friends meet­ing any­where that would be com­fort­able with some­one min­is­ter­ing for 20 min­utes, much less three hours. As the Quak­er move­ment set­tled in, the ser­mons took on a dis­tinct form — explic­it­ly Chris­t­ian and bib­li­cal — and they were gen­er­al­ly giv­en by only by spe­cif­ic peo­ple rec­og­nized in the ministry.

Today, typ­i­cal­ly, any­one at all can stand in min­istry at a Lib­er­al Friends meet­ing. Two to five min­utes is the norm for a “mes­sage.” The top­ic cer­tain­ly can be Chris­t­ian but in many meet­ings that’s the excep­tion. At a Friends church, mean­while, the ser­mons are giv­en by spe­cif­ic peo­ple, will have Chris­t­ian con­tent, and will go on for an extend­ed peri­od of time. In those respects, the for­mat is clos­er to ear­ly Quak­er wor­ship. And this should­n’t be a sur­prise: they were respond­ing to changes in min­istry and expec­ta­tions just as we Lib­er­al Friends have done.

Mic­ah also talks about prepa­ra­tion and describes the idea of “rad­i­cal­ly extem­po­ra­ne­ous preach­ing” among Lib­er­al Friends as a kind of “fetish.” He might have a point. I love the sto­ry about a min­is­ter who would­n’t have a clue about what he was going to say until he rose to his feet1. For him, the obe­di­ence to Christ was to trust that words would come if he were only to faith­ful­ly stand up. It’s such a cool sto­ry, but that’s not how my min­istry has ever come.

About six months ago we had a total­ly silent wor­ship at the meet­ing I’ve been attend­ing. It was nice but at the end the clerk rose, affirmed it was nice, but then said wor­ship should always have min­istry. It’s struck me as true and the state­ment has stuck with me. 

I often have min­istry form­ing in my head in wor­ship but am per­haps over­ly con­scious and keep it to myself. There’s always a bal­anc­ing act of course and some Friends feel free to say what­ev­er when­ev­er they want. But I think I myself have per­haps both over-fetishized an antipa­thy to plan­ning and also set myself an over­ly high bar for speaking.

Ezra Klein on the Quaker Way

December 11, 2022

In a NYTimes opin­ion piece today, Ezra Klein teas­es: “The Quak­er way has a lot to teach us about social media.”

You have to scroll deep into the arti­cle to find the Quak­er con­nec­tion. Spoil­er: it comes from let­ting in silence and let­ting delib­er­a­tion be a slow­er process. He links to a Rex Ambler book on the Quaker​books​.org web­site (yea!) but it’s out of stock and not show­ing up (doh!) [Update: they got the link work­ing first thing Mon­day morn­ing after I gave them the heads-up, huzzah!] 

Klein also talked about Quak­ers in August, in a con­ver­sa­tion with William MacAskill on Effec­tive Altru­ism (a con­cept about which I’m extreme­ly skep­ti­cal), when they talked about Quak­er abo­li­tion­ist Ben­jamin Lay. He obvi­ous­ly has us on the mind. It’d be kind of cool if Klein went beyond talk­ing about Quak­ers to talk­ing with Quak­ers (my DMs are always open).