Tag Archives ⇒ blogs

Blogging for the Kingdom

March 3, 2010
· Martin Kelley

Warn­ing: this is a blog post about blogging.

It’s always fas­ci­nat­ing to watch the ebb and flow of my blog­ging. Quak­er­ran­ter, my “main” blog has been remark­ably qui­et. I’m still up to my eye­balls with blog­ging in gen­er­al: post­ing things to Quak­erQuak­er, giv­ing help­ful com­ments and tips, help­ing oth­ers set up blogs as part of my con­sult­ing busi­ness. My Tum­blr blog and Face­book and Twit­ter feeds all con­tin­ue to be rel­a­tive­ly active. But most of these is me giv­ing voice to oth­ers. For two decades now, I’ve zigzagged between writer and pub­lish­er; late­ly I’ve been focused on the latter.

When I start­ed blog­ging about Quak­er issues sev­en years ago, I was a low-level cler­i­cal employ­ee at an Quak­er orga­ni­za­tion. It was clear I was going nowhere career-wise, which gave me a cer­tain free­dom. More impor­tant­ly, blogs were a near­ly invis­i­ble medi­um, read by a self-selected group that also want­ed to talk open­ly and hon­est­ly about issues. I start­ed writ­ing about issues in among lib­er­al Friends and about missed out­reach oppor­tu­ni­ties. A lot of what I said was spot on and in hind­sight, the archives give me plen­ty of “told you so” cred­i­bil­i­ty. But where’s the joy in being right about what has­n’t worked?

Things have changed over the years. One is that I’ve resigned myself to those missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Lots of Quak­er mon­ey and human­ly activ­i­ty is going into projects that don’t have God as a cen­ter. No amount of rant­i­ng is going to dis­suade good peo­ple from putting their faith into one more staff reor­ga­ni­za­tion, mis­sion rewrite or clever program.It’s a dis­trac­tion to spend much time wor­ry­ing about them.

But the biggest change is that my heart is square­ly with God. I’m most inter­est­ed in shar­ing Jesus’s good news. I’m not a cheer­leader for any par­tic­u­lar human insti­tu­tion, no mat­ter how noble its inten­tions. When I talk about the good news, it’s in the con­text of 350 years of Friends’ under­stand­ing of it. But I’m well aware that there’s lots of peo­ple in our meet­ing­hous­es that don’t under­stand it this way any­more. And also aware that the seek­er want­i­ng to pur­sue the Quak­er way might find it more close­ly mod­eled in alter­na­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. There are peo­ple all over lis­ten­ing for God and I see many attempts at rein­vent­ing Quak­erism hap­pen­ing among non-Friends.

I know this obser­va­tion excites some peo­ple to indig­na­tion, but so be it: I’m trust­ing God on this one. I’m not sure why He’s­giv­en us a world why the com­mu­ni­ties we bring togeth­er to wor­ship Him keep get­ting dis­tract­ed, but that’s what we’ve got (and it’s what we’ve had for a long time). Every per­son of faith of every gen­er­a­tion has to remem­ber, re-experience and revive the mes­sage. That hap­pens in church build­ings, on street cor­ners, in liv­ing rooms, lunch lines and nowa­days on blogs and inter­net forums.We can’t get too hung up on all the ways the mes­sage is get­ting blocked. And we can’t get hung up by insist­ing on only one chan­nel of shar­ing that mes­sage. We must share the good news and trust that God will show us how to man­i­fest this in our world: his king­dom come and will be done on earth.

But what would this look like?

When I first start­ed blog­ging there weren’t a lot of Quak­er blogs and I spent a lot more time read­ing oth­er reli­gious blogs. This was back before the emer­gent church move­ment became a wholly-owned sub­sidiary of Zon­der­van and was­n’t dom­i­nat­ed by hype artists (sor­ry, a lot of big names set off my slime-o-meter these days). There are still great blog­gers out there talk­ing about faith and read­ers want­i­ng to engage in this dis­cus­sion. I’ve been intrigued by the his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of Thomas Clark­son, the Angli­can who wrote about Friends from a non-Quaker per­spec­tive using non-Quaker lan­guage. And some­times I geek out and explain some Quak­er point on a Quak­er blog and get thanked by the author, who often is an expe­ri­enced Friend who had nev­er been pre­sent­ed with a clas­sic Quak­er expla­na­tion on the point in ques­tion. My track­ing log shows seek­ers con­tin­ue to be fas­ci­nat­ed and drawn to us for our tra­di­tion­al tes­ti­monies, espe­cial­ly plainness.

I’ve put togeth­er top­ic lists and plans before but it’s a bit of work, maybe too much to put on top of what I do with Quak­erQuak­er (plus work, plus fam­i­ly). There’s also ques­tions about where to blog and whether to sim­pli­fy my blog­ging life a bit by com­bin­ing some of my blogs but that’s more logis­tics rather than vision.

Inter­est­ing stuff I’m read­ing that’s mak­ing me think about this:

Max Carter talk on introducing the Bible to younger Friends

November 17, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Max Carter gave a talk for the Bible Asso­ci­a­tion of Friends this past week­end at Moorestown (N.J.) Friends Meet­ing. Max is a long-time edu­ca­tor and cur­rent­ly heads the Quak­er Lead­er­ship Schol­ars Pro­gram at Guil­ford Col­lege, a pro­gram that has pro­duced a num­ber of active twenty-something Friends in recent years. The Bible Asso­ci­a­tion is one of those great Philadel­phia relics that some­how sur­vived a cou­ple of cen­turies of upheavals and still plugs along with a mis­sion more-or-less craft­ed at its found­ing in the ear­ly 1800s: it dis­trib­utes free Bibles to Friends, Friends schools, and any First-day School class that might answer their inquiries.

Max’s pro­gram at Guil­ford is one of the recip­i­ents of the Bible Asso­ci­a­tion’s efforts and he began by jok­ing that his sole qual­i­fi­ca­tion for speak­ing at their annu­al meet­ing was that he was one of their more active customers.

Many of the stu­dents going through Max’s pro­gram grew up in the big­ger East Coast year­ly meet­ings. In these set­tings, being an involved Quak­er teen means reg­u­lar­ly going to camps like Catoctin and Onas, doing the FGC Gath­er­ing every year, and hav­ing a par­ent on an impor­tant year­ly meet­ing com­mit­tee. “Quak­er” is a spe­cif­ic group of friends and a set of guide­lines about how to live in this sub­cul­ture. Know­ing the rules to Wink and being able to craft a sug­ges­tive ques­tion for Great Wind Blows is more impor­tant than even rudi­men­ta­ry Bible lit­er­a­cy, let alone Bar­clay’s Cat­e­chism. The knowl­edge of George Fox rarely extends much past the song (“with his shag­gy shag­gy locks”). So there’s a real cul­ture shock when they show up in Max’s class and he hands them a Bible. “I’ve nev­er touched one of these before” and “Why do we have to use this?” are non-uncommon responses.

None of this sur­prised me, of course. I’ve led high school work­shops at Gath­er­ing and for year­ly meet­ing teens. Great kids, all of them, but most of them have been real­ly short­changed in the con­text of their faith. The Guil­ford pro­gram is a good intro­duc­tion (“we grad­u­ate more Quak­ers than we bring in” was how Max put it) but do we real­ly want them to wait so long? And to have so rel­a­tive­ly few get this chance. Where’s the bal­ance between let­ting them choose for them­selves and giv­ing them the infor­ma­tion on which to make a choice?

There was a sort of built-in irony to the scene. Most of the thirty-five or so atten­dees at the Moorestown talk were half-a-century old­er than the stu­dents Max was pro­fil­ing. It’s pret­ty safe to say I was the youngest per­son there. It does­n’t seem healthy to have such sep­a­rat­ed worlds.

Con­ver­gent Friends

Max did talk for a few min­utes about Con­ver­gent Friends. I think we’ve shak­en hands a few times but he did­n’t rec­og­nize me so it was a rare fly-on-wall oppor­tu­ni­ty to see first­hand how we’re described. It was pos­i­tive (we “bear watch­ing!”) but there were a few minor mis-perceptions. The most wor­ri­some is that we’re a group of young adult Friends. At 42, I’ve grad­u­at­ed from even the most expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion of YAF and so have many of the oth­er Con­ver­gent Friends (on a Face­book thread LizOpp made the mis­take of list­ing all of the old­er Con­ver­gent Friends and touched off a lit­tle mock out­rage – I’m going to steer clear of that mis­take!). After the talk one attendee (a New Foun­da­tion Fel­low­ship reg­u­lar) came up and said that she had been think­ing of going to the “New Monas­tics and Con­ver­gent Friends” work­shop C Wess Daniels and I are co-leading next May but had second-thoughts hear­ing that CF’s were young adults. “That’s the first I’ve heard that” she said; “me too!” I replied and encour­aged her to come. We def­i­nite­ly need to con­tin­ue to talk about how C.F. rep­re­sents an atti­tude and includes many who were doing the work long before Robin Mohr’s Octo­ber 2006 Friends Jour­nal arti­cle brought it to wider attention.

Tech­niques for Teach­ing the Bible and Quakerism

The most use­ful part of Max’s talk was the end, where he shared what he thought were lessons of the Quak­er Lead­er­ship Schol­ars Pro­gram. He

  • Demys­ti­fy the Bible: a great per­cent­age of incom­ing stu­dents to the QLSP had nev­er touched it so it seemed foreign;
  • Make it fun: he has a newslet­ter col­umn called “Con­cor­dance Capers” that digs into the deriva­tion of pop cul­ture ref­er­ences of Bib­li­cal phras­es; he often shows Mon­ty Python’s “The Life of Bri­an” at the end of the class.
  • Make it rel­e­vant: Give inter­est­ed stu­dents the tools and guid­ance to start read­ing it.
  • Show the geneal­o­gy: Start with the parts that are most obvi­ous­ly Quak­er: John and the inner Light, the Ser­mon on the Mount, etc.
  • Con­tem­po­rary exam­ples: Link to con­tem­po­rary groups that are liv­ing a rad­i­cal Chris­t­ian wit­ness today. This past semes­ter they talked about the New Monas­tic move­ment, for exam­ple and they’ve pro­filed the Sim­ple Way and Atlanta’s Open Door.
  • The Bible as human con­di­tion: how is the Bible a sto­ry that we can be a part of, an inspi­ra­tion rather than a lit­er­al­ist authority.

Ran­dom Thoughts:

A cou­ple of thoughts have been churn­ing through my head since the talk: one is how to scale this up. How could we have more of this kind of work hap­pen­ing at the local year­ly meet­ing lev­el and start with younger Friends: mid­dle school or high school­ers? And what about bring­ing con­vinced Friends on board? Most QLSP stu­dents are born Quak­er and come from prominent-enough fam­i­lies to get meet­ing let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion to enter the pro­gram. Grad­u­ates of the QLSP are fun­neled into var­i­ous Quak­er posi­tions these days, leav­ing out con­vinced Friends (like me and like most of the cen­tral Con­ver­gent Friends fig­ures). I talked about this divide a lot back in the 1990s when I was try­ing to pull togeth­er the mostly-convinced Cen­tral Philadel­phia Meet­ing young adult com­mu­ni­ty with the mostly-birthright offi­cial year­ly meet­ing YAF group. I was con­vinced then and am even more con­vinced now that no renew­al will hap­pen unless we can get these com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tives and ener­gies work­ing together.

PS: Due to a con­flict between Feed­burn­er and Dis­qus, some of com­ments are here (Wess and Lizopp), here (Robin M) and here (Chris M). I think I’ve fixed it so that this odd spread won’t hap­pen again.

 
PPS: Max emailed on 2/10/10 to say that many QLSPers are first gen­er­a­tion or con­vinced them­selves. He says that quite a few came to Guil­ford as non-Quakers (“think­ing we had “gone the way of the T‑Rex”) and came in by con­vince­ment. Cool!

Exciting Philly Convergent Friends opportunity

March 8, 2009
· Martin Kelley

ppThe most excel­lent Peg­gy Sen­ger Par­sons of Ore­gon’s Free­dom Friends Church emailed me today say­ing she and the equal­ly excel­lent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a work­shop at the Philadel­phia area Pen­dle Hill Retreat Cen­ter from 3/27 – 29. These two were cross­ing the­o­log­i­cal bound­aries and pio­neer­ing the Con­ver­gent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twit­ter & Face­book. The work­shop is called “Are we still a dan­ger­ous peo­ple?” and as rock­ing as that sounds, I’d be will­ing to lis­ten to these two read the Salem, Ore­gon phone book for a week­end. If you have a pil­low stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for com­muters) then you should def­i­nite­ly try to make it (unfor­tu­nate­ly I don’t have a lumpy pil­low­case and can’t afford to take anoth­er three days off). 

Peg­gy wrote that she wants to make her­self “avail­able for the Sat­ur­day after­noon free time for a con­ver­sa­tion with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the par­ty.” That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some child­care sched­ules, I’ll try to make that. That would be Sat­ur­day the 28th from 1:00 – 3:30pm.

How and why we gather as Friends (in the 21st Century)

February 15, 2009
· Martin Kelley

On a recent evening I met up with Gath­er­ing in Light Wess, who was in Philadel­phia for a Quaker-sponsored peace con­fer­ence. Over the next few hours, six of us went out for a great din­ner, Wess and I test­ed some tes­ti­monies,
and a revolv­ing group of Friends end­ed up around a table in the
con­fer­ence’s hotel lob­by talk­ing late into the night (the links are
Wess’ reviews, these days you can reverse stalk him through his Yelp
account). 

Of all of the many peo­ple I spoke with, only one had any kind of
fea­tured role at the con­fer­ence. With­out excep­tion my conversation
part­ners were fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful about the issues that had
brought them to Philadel­phia, yet I sensed a per­vad­ing sense of missed
oppor­tu­ni­ty: hun­dreds of lives rearranged and thou­sands of air miles
flown most­ly to lis­ten to oth­ers talk. I spent my long com­mute home
won­der­ing what it would have been like to have spent the week­end in the
hotel lob­by record­ing ten minute Youtube inter­views with as many
con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants as I could. We would have end­ed up with a
snap­shot of faith-based peace orga­niz­ing cir­ca 2009.

Next week­end I’ll be burn­ing up more of the ozone lay­er by fly­ing to Cal­i­for­nia to co-lead a work­shop with Wess and Robin M. (details at Con​ver​gent​Friends​.org,
I’m sure we can squeeze more peo­ple in!) The par­tic­i­pant list looks
fab­u­lous. I don’t know every­one but there’s at least half a dozen
peo­ple com­ing who I would be thrilled to take work­shops from. I really
don’t want to spend the week­end hear­ing myself talk! I also know there
are plen­ty of peo­ple who can’t come because of com­mit­ments and costs.

So we’re going to try some exper­i­ments – they might work, they might not. On Quak­erQuak­er, there’s a new group for the event and a dis­cus­sion thread open to all QQ mem­bers (sign up is quick and pain­less). For those of you com­fort­able with the QQ tag­ging sys­tem, the Deli­cious tag for the event is “quaker.reclaiming2009”. Robin M has pro­posed using #con­ver­gent­friends as our Twit­ter hashtag. 

There’s all sorts of mad things we could try (Ustream video or live
blog­ging via Twit­ter, any­one?), wacky wacky stuff that would distract
us from what­ev­er mes­sage the Inward Christ might be try­ing to give us.
But behind all this is a real ques­tions about why and how we should
gath­er togeth­er as Friends. As the bank­ing sys­tem tanks, as the environment
strains, as com­mu­ni­ca­tions costs drop and we find our­selves in a curi­ous new econ­o­my, what chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties open up?

Advice to a new blogger

January 3, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Over the Quak­erQuak­er forum, a new blog­ger asked “I am new at blog­ging. Do you have any sug­ges­tions for my site?” I’ll cross-post my answer here.

I think the suc­cess to any kind of writ­ing is to first and fore­most write about what inter­ests you. Don’t wor­ry about whether there’s an audi­ence or not: with mil­lions of peo­ple on the inter­net every day there’s bound to be plen­ty of oth­ers who share your inter­ests. Don’t be afraid to be per­son­al, quirky and idio­syn­crat­ic, as peo­ple come to blogs look­ing for personality.

The most inter­est­ing blogs have an inti­ma­cy and hon­esty to them. My blog posts are the kind of dis­cus­sions I would have around my din­ing room table. Friends have a ten­den­cy to down­play our opin­ions in pub­lic set­tings. The Quak­er blogs have giv­en us a place to be respect­ful­ly hon­est, open and inquis­i­tive. That open­ness has led many of us into sur­pris­ing friendships.

I’d also rec­om­mend that you keep your blog open to devel­op­ment. I was four months into my Quak­er­Ran­ter blog before I had the first post that I would now con­sid­er a “typ­i­cal” Quak­er­Ran­ter piece. It often takes time to find a voice you’re com­fort­able in and many peo­ple find them­selves inter­est­ed in dif­fer­ent top­ics than they ini­tial­ly imag­ined. Blogs often end up being very dif­fer­ent than the one they thought they were start­ing! Most blogs last about two months and are aban­doned: if you’re blog­ging because you think you should be, then the moti­va­tion won’t be enough to sus­tain you over the long term.

Final­ly, blogs are social. They’re con­ver­sa­tion. Encour­age con­ver­sa­tion on your blog. Respond to com­ments, on the blog and also in direct emails if peo­ple have pro­vid­ed them. Sign up to blogs you like using an RSS Read­er like Google Read­er or Blog­lines and read them and com­ment on thought­ful posts. Get to know peo­ple and try to attend the events we’re now list­ing here on Quak­erQuak­er. About half of my Quak­erQuak­er time is actu­al­ly pri­vate emails and IM con­ver­sa­tions with Friends and the com­ments I leave on blogs (some Quak­er, some not) are often more involved than my blog posts. It’s a social medi­um and the pub­lic blog is just one piece of that.

I’d love to hear what advice oth­ers have, either here on Quak­er Ranter or over on the Forum post.

Invisible Quaker Misfits

October 21, 2008
· Martin Kelley

This week I received an email from a young seek­er in the Philadel­phia area who found my 2005 arti­cle “Wit­ness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings” pub­lished in FGCon­nec­tions. She’s a for­mer youth min­istries leader from a Pen­te­costal tra­di­tion, strong­ly attract­ed to Friends beliefs but not quite fit­ting in with the local meet­ings she’s been try­ing. Some­where she found my arti­cle and asks if I have any insights. 

The 2005 arti­cle was large­ly pes­simistic, focused on the “com­mit­ted, inter­est­ing and bold twenty-something Friends
I knew ten years ago” who had left Friends and blam­ing “an insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism that neglect­ed them and
its own future” but my hope para­graph was optimistic:

There is hope… A great peo­ple might pos­si­bly be gath­ered from
the emer­gent church move­ment and the inter­net is full of amaz­ing conversations
from new Friends and seek­ers. There are pock­ets in our branch of Quakerism
where old­er Friends have con­tin­ued to men­tor and encour­age mean­ing­ful and
inte­grat­ed youth lead­er­ship, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most
hope­ful­ly, there’s a whole new gen­er­a­tion of twenty- some­thing Friends
on the scene with strong gifts that could be nur­tured and harnessed. 

Hard to imag­ine that only three years ago I was an iso­lat­ed FGC staffer left to pur­sue out­reach and youth min­istry work on my own time by an insti­tu­tion indif­fer­ent to either pur­suit. Both func­tions have become major staff pro­grams, but I’m no longer involved, which is prob­a­bly just as well, as nei­ther pro­gram has decid­ed to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most inter­est­ing work is still large­ly invisible. 

Some of this work has been tak­en up by the new blog­gers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be con­geal­ing around all the blogs, Twit­ter net­works, Face­book friend­ships, inter­vis­i­ta­tions and IM chats. Many of us asso­ci­at­ed with Quak​erQuak​er​.org have some sort of reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dence or par­tic­i­pa­tion with the Emerg­ing Church move­ment, we reg­u­lar­ly high­light “amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tions” from new Friends and seek­ers and there’s a lot of inter-generational work going on. We’ve got a name for it in Con­ver­gent Friends, which reflects in part that “we” aren’t just the lib­er­al Friends I imag­ined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quak­er flavors.

But we end up with a prob­lem that’s become the cen­tral one for me and a lot of oth­ers: what can we tell a new seek­er who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but does­n’t fit? I could point this week’s cor­re­spon­dent to meet­ings and church­es hun­dreds of miles from her house, or encour­age her to start a blog, or com­pile a list of work­shops or gath­er­ings she might attend. But none of these are real­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry answers. 

Else­where:

Gath­er­ing in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advi­sor Ryan Bol­ger that talks about tribe-style lead­er­ship and a new kind of church iden­ti­ty that uses the instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools of the inter­net to forge a com­mu­ni­ty that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly lim­it­ed to local­i­ty. Bol­ger’s and his research part­ner report that they see “emerg­ing ini­tia­tives with­in tra­di­tion­al church­es as the next
hori­zon for the spread of emerg­ing church prac­tices in the Unit­ed States.” More links from Wess’ arti­cle on emerg­ing church­es and denom­i­na­tions.

Amy​Out​law​.com

May 6, 2008
· Martin Kelley

AmyOutlaw.orgThis is a fair­ly stan­dard Mov­able Type blog for a Friend (Quak­er) based in the West-Philly neigh­bor­hood of Philadel­phia, PA. The most unusu­al ele­ment is that the client want­ed two sep­a­rate blogs: one meant for dai­ly posts and the oth­er for more week­ly posts (it’s all set up in MT via cat­e­gories). This also shows the use of Sli­doo for a pho­to ban­ner head. The pic­tures are all pulled from a par­tic­u­lar set of her Flickr account. Vis­it site.

Burnt Ubers and Reluctant Ranters

April 18, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Inter­est­ing read­ing today about how our Quak­er struc­tures can choke the Spir­it and hem in our com­mu­ni­ties. Johan M is no stranger to Quak­er insti­tu­tions, but in “Clerk Please” he writes:

But who will see and pro­claim these things to new audi­ences if we are so busy try­ing to sort out our struc­tures, nom­i­na­tion process­es, and inter­per­son­al ani­mosi­ties that we don’t take the time to dis­cern and hon­or leadings?

Susanne K echos some of these themes in her lat­est post, “Quak­erism and Struc­ture”:

One of the key parts of George Fox’s rev­e­la­tion was that reli­gious struc­tures can kill the free move­ment of the Spir­it… My Ffriend R has advo­cat­ed the prac­tice of dis­band­ing the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends every 50 years. He believes that the spark of the ini­tial vision and pas­sion of reli­gious groups only sur­vives for about 50 years before devel­op­ing struc­tures start to choke the move­ment of the Spirit.

It’s been about eigh­teen months since I was side­lined from the pro­fes­sion­al Quak­er world (I work for some Quak­ers now, but on a con­tract basis and the rela­tion­ship is much dif­fer­ent). A year or two before this, my month­ly meet­ing melt­ed down and more or less devolved into a wor­ship group and while I’ve found a more active meet­ing to attend, it’s not par­tic­u­lar­ly close and I haven’t joined.

The result of these two changes is that I haven’t sat in a staff meet­ing for over a year; I don’t attend busi­ness meet­ings; I don’t belong to any com­mit­tees; I don’t rep­re­sent any group at con­fer­ences. After years of being what Evan Welkin called an uberQuak­er, I’m an unin­volved slack­er. Bad Mar­tin, right?

Except I’m not unin­volved of course. I feel I’m doing as much now to help peo­ple find and grow into Quak­erism than I did when I was paid to do this. I don’t spend much time with that 2% skim of Quak­er elite who attend all the same con­fer­ences and appoint each oth­er to all the same com­mit­tees, but then cater­ing to their needs was pret­ty high main­te­nance and was nev­er some­thing I thought of as the real mission.

Suzanne talks about the “Sab­bat­i­cal Year” meme, and of course lots of elec­trons fly about the blo­gos­phere about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the Emerg­ing Church move­ment. There’s a hunger for a dif­fer­ent way of being a Friend. I know one Quak­er who threat­ens to burn down the famous meet­ing­house he wor­ships in because he feels that the build­ing has become an emp­ty icon, a weight of bricks upon the Spir­it (I’ll leave him anony­mous in case some­thing mys­te­ri­ous hap­pens to the meet­ing­house tonight!). How trag­ic would it be, real­ly, if some of insti­tu­tion­al bag­gage was laid down and we had to find oth­er ways to con­firm and sup­port one anoth­er’s ministries?

I love teach­ing Quak­erism, I love help­ing Quak­ers use the inter­net for out­reach and I love reach­ing out to poten­tial Friends with my writ­ing. I’m doing all that with­out com­mit­tees or staff meet­ings. No bud­gets to fight over, no mis­sion state­ments to write.

Half a decade ago now I wrote about the “lost Quak­er gen­er­a­tion,” active and vision­ary Gen X Friends who seemed to be drop­ping out in droves. We’re all keep­ing in bet­ter touch now via Face­book but I haven’t noticed much jump­ing back into the fray. What I have noticed is a phe­nom­e­non where Friends half a gen­er­a­tion old­er are tak­ing on Quak­er respon­si­bil­i­ties only to drop away from active meet­ing involve­ment when their terms ended. 

If we could pull togeth­er all of the dropouts togeth­er and start meet­ings that focused on wor­ship, reli­gious edu­ca­tion and deep-community activ­i­ties, I think we’d see some­thing inter­est­ing. I envy those with less-musty, Gen‑X heavy meet­ings near­by (Robin M show­cased her meet­ing recent­ly). And don’t get me wrong: I also love the old Quak­er ide­al of the strong local Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty and the bonds of the com­mu­ni­ty on the indi­vid­ual, etc., etc. But I don’t see meet­ings like that any­where near­by and the only clear lead­ing I real­ly have is to con­tin­ue this “free­lance” teach­ing, writ­ing and orga­niz­ing. It’s not the sit­u­a­tion I want but it’s the sit­u­a­tion I have and at this point I have to just trust the lead­ings as they come step by step and have faith they’re going some­where. Boy though, I wish I knew where all this was head­ing sometimes!