My “Editor’s Desk” post announcing the upcoming June/July issue of Friends Journal on #Quaker leadership.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Category Archives ⇒ Quaker
As the blog name implies, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, known colloquially as Quakers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our society and its interactions with the larger world. I generally only include my own posts in this list. I share many many Quaker links in my Links Blog category and on QuakerQuaker.
Important Posts:
The Lost Quaker Generation (2003)
Peace and Twenty-Somethings (2003)
We’re All Ranters Now (2003)
Passing the Faith, Planet of the Quaker Style (2004)
Quaker Testimonies (2004)
Hey, Who Am I To Decide Anything? (2007)
The Biggest Most Vibranty Most Outreachiest Program Ever (2010)
Getting a Horse to Drink (on Philadelphia YM) (2010)
Tell Them All This But Don’t Expect Them to Listen (2010)
Friends Journal Following the money in a downsizing Quaker meeting
January 20, 2023
From Adria Gulizia’s series on dying meetings:
Finally, we might see dying meetings disinvest from their First Day School programs, as the needs of parents and children are tacitly acknowledged to be in competition with those of settled older adults. Those with power and longevity in the community ensure that their needs keep getting met, while increasingly neglecting those they are called to serve — children, those new to our faith, people in prison, people with disabilities and people who are struggling financially.
Friends instead spend their dwindling resources on internal priorities and the expenses associated with keeping a meetinghouse well-warmed, well-lit and well cared-for — even if there’s nobody in it.
When doing outreach, you have to focus less about the people in the meetinghouse and more on the people who would be joining if they knew we existed and were welcomed in. So too, I think, for our priorities in a shrinking meeting. It’s easy to turn inward and just keep the status-quo rolling. I see meetings in well-populated areas that are shrinking and not doing what they need to do to be more visible in their local community.
The importance of Google listings
January 20, 2023
The blog archives will show that I’ve long been interested in Quaker outreach. As I’ve grown more involved at Cropwell Meeting in Marlton, N.J., this past year I’m learning some practical lessons for hyper-local outreach that I’ll share occasionally.
Two non-regular visitors to Quaker meeting this Sunday, one a first-time enquirer and the other a Friend making a special visit. Both saw our Google Maps entry first. One said that all the pictures there made the meeting look especially active. Good to remember that for a lot of potential visitors this is our homepage.
When I was in my wandering-between-meetings phase, visiting different meetings all the time, I’d often upload photos to Google Maps and update contact details as I was sitting in the parking lot before I left. Some of the Cropwell photos are from my first visit a year ago. Adding pictures is very easy and is a great way to help places we like look good to potential visitors.
At Cropwell we’ve also been posting events to Google (via Eventbrite, as I understand the process) and these also appear in Google Maps.
Autopsy for Quaker Meetings?
January 6, 2023
From Adria Gulitzia, in Autopsy of a Deceased Church: Quaker Edition:
Think about that: since 2010, nearly one in four Quaker meetings or churches has closed its doors. The topic of dying congregations, and how to save them, feels urgent to me, and I’ve been unable to write much of anything since I read these devastating numbers.
These are preliminary U.S. number from Friends World Committee for Consultation, which does a periodic census. We need the usual disclaimer that membership numbers are always more a little dodgy (which FWCC readily admits) and that the picture is different outside the United States, especially in Evangelical Africa. But, however you slice it, these are concerning numbers.
Adria promises a whole series of posts. I’ll be tuned in.
In the Shadow of Babylon Update: a new post has dropped, Worshiping the Past, Abandoning the Future:
When congregations die, it’s usually after a slow erosion rather than a cataclysmic event. During that process, there are several points when they could change directions. The decline is seldom irreversible. But instead of facing reality and responding accordingly, people use some high point in their past to justify why they should not change now. And so they die.
I like Adria’s questions at the end about focusing on the peripheries of our community. It was something of a personal revelation for me many years ago when I realized I should focus my outreach efforts on the people who would be Quaker if only they knew about us (and if only we were accommodating and welcoming) rather than the folks already on the benches.
Originally published 1/3, updated 1/6
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.
Quakers and Reparations
January 3, 2023
The January issue of Friends Journal is out and the theme is “Reparations.” It’s a particularly strong list of articles.
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.