As an East Coast unprogrammed Friend, Quaker mission work is still a bit exotic. We’re used to reading of well-meaning nineteenth century Friends whose attitudes shock us today. But here’s a story of some Midwest mission work with the Shawnee in the 1970s and 80s.
Their “mission” work consists of farming, teaching, music and woodworking and language translating, lots of transporting children and teens. It also involves preaching each week, and participation in funerals, weddings, and other traditional pastoral duties, all aimed at introducing people to Jesus.
Their “mission” work consists of farming, teaching, music and woodworking and language translating, lots of transporting children and teens. It also involves preaching each week, and participation in funerals, weddings, and other traditional pastoral duties, all aimed at introducing people to Jesus.
We’re extending the deadline for the August issue on Quaker Spaces. We’ve got some really interest articles coming in – especially geeky things in architecture and the theology of our classic meetinghouses.
So far our prospective pieces are weighted toward East Coast and classic meetinghouse architecture. I’d love to see pieces on non-traditional worship spaces. I know there newly purpose-built meetinghouses, adaptations of pre-existing structures, and new takes on the Quaker impulse to not be churchy. And worship is where we’re gathered, not necessarily where we’re mortgaged: tell us about your the rented library room, the chairs set up on the beach, the room in the prison worship group…
Readers over on QuakerQuaker.org will know I’ve been interested in the tempest surrounding evangelical pastor Rob Bell. A popular minister for the Youtube generation, controversy over his new book has revealed some deep fissures among younger Evangelical Christians. I’ve been fascinated by this since 2003, when I started realizing I had a lot of commonalities with mainstream Christian bloggers who I would have naturally dismissed out of hand. When they wrote about the authenticity of worship, decision-making in the church and the need to walk the talk and also to walk the line between truth and compassion, they spoke to my concerns (most of my reading since then has been blogs, pre-twentieth century Quaker writings and the Bible).
Today Jaime Johnson tweeted out a link to a new piece by Rachel Held Evans called “The Future of Evangelicalism.” She does a nice job parsing out the differences between the two camps squaring off over Rob Bell. On the one side is a centralized movement of neo-Calvinists she calls Young, Restless, Reformed after a 2006 Christianity Today article. I have little to no interest in this crowd except for mild academic curiosity. But the other side is what she’s dubbing “the new evangelicals”:
The second group — sometimes referred to as “the new evangelicals” or “emerging evangelicals” or “the evangelical left” is significantly less organized than the first, but continues to grow at a grassroots level. As Paul Markhan wrote in an excellent essay about the phenomenon, young people who identify with this movement have grown weary of evangelicalism’s allegiance to Republican politics, are interested in pursuing social reform and social justice, believe that the gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and are eager to be a part of inclusive, diverse, and authentic Christian communities. “Their broadening sense of social responsibility is pushing them to rethink many of the fundamental theological presuppositions characteristic of their evangelical traditions,” Markham noted.
This is the group that intrigues me. There’s a lot of cross-over here with some of what I’m seeing with Quakers. In an ideal world, the Religious Society of Friends would open its arms to this new wave of seekers, especially as they hit the limits of denominational tolerance. But in reality, many of the East Coast meetings I’m most familiar with wouldn’t know what to do with this crowd. In Philly if you’re interested in this conversation you go to Circle of Hope (previous posts), not any of the established Quaker meetings.
Evans makes some educated guesses about the future of the “new evangelical” movement. She thinks there will be more discussion about the role of the Bible, though I would say it’s more discussion fo the various Christian interpretations of it. She also foresees a loosening of labels and denominational affiliations. I’m seeing some of this happening among Friends, though it’s almost completely on the individual level, at least here on the East Coast. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years and whether it will bypass, engage with or siphon off the Society of Friends. In the meantime, Evans’ post and the links she embeds in it are well worth exploring.
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!
And yet? All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can’t think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. I’m really sad to say we’re still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I’ve recently crossed my life’s halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change. How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in “Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers”. Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work – in 2008?!?
A poster to an obscure discussion board recently described typing a particular search phrase into Google and finding nothing but bad information. Reproducing the search I determined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actually quite accurate. I’ve been hearing an increasing number of stories like this. “Cause Googling,” a variation on “vanity googling,” is suddenly becoming quite popular. But the interesting thing is that these new searchers don’t actually seem curious about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?
Published 10/2/2004 in The Quaker Ranter.
TEN’ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again This piece is about the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia (Wikipedia). It’s strange to see I was feeling war fatigue even before 9/11 and the “real” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There’s a great danger in all this. A danger to the soul of America. This is the fourth country the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becoming routine. It is sandwiched between the soap operas and the sitcoms, between the traffic and weather reports. Intense cruise missile bombardments are carried out but have no effect on the psyche or even imagination of the U.S. citizens.
It’s as if war itself has become another consumer good. Another event to be packaged for commercial television. Given a theme song. We’re at war with a country we don’t know over a region we don’t really care about. I’m not be facetious, I’m simply stating a fact. The United States can and should play an active peacemaking role in the region, but only after we’ve done our homework and have basic knowledge of the players and situation. Isolationism is dangerous, yes, but not nearly as dangerous as the emerging culture of these dilettante made-for-TV wars.
It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool new movement I had been reading about. It would have been Jordan Cooper’s blog that turned me onto Robert E Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals, a look at generational shifts among American Evangelicals. I found it simultaneously disorienting and shocking that I actually identified with most of the trends Webber outlined. Here I was, still a young’ish Friend attending one of the most liberal Friends meetings in the country (Central Philadelphia) and working for the very organization whose initials (FGC) are international shorthand for hippy-dippy liberal Quakerism, yet I was nodding my head and laughing out loud at just about everything Webber said. Although he most likely never walked into a meetinghouse, he clearly explained the generational dynamics running through Quaker culture and I finished the book with a better understanding of why so much of our youth organizing and outreach was floundering on issues of tokenism and feel-good-ism.
A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
A desire to grow
A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
A renewal of discipline and oversight
A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries
When I wrote this, there wasn’t much you could call Quaker blogging (Lynn Gazis-Sachs was an exception), and when I googled variations on “quakers” and “emerging church” nothing much came up. It’s not surprising that there wasn’t much of an initial response.
It took about two years for the post to find its audience and responses started coming from both liberal and evangelical Quaker circles. In retrospect, it’s fair to say that the QuakerQuaker community gathered around this essay (here’s Robin M’s account of first reading it) and it’s follow-up We’re All Ranters Now (Wess talking about it). Five years after I postd it, we have a cadre of bloggers and readers who regularly gather around the QuakerQuaker water cooler to talk about Quaker vision. We’re getting pieces published in all the major Quaker publications, we’re asked to lead worships and we’ve got a catchy name in “Convergent Friends.”
And yet?
All of this is still a small demographic scattered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull session about the future of Friends at some local coffeeshop this afternoon, I can’t think of anyone even vaguely local who I could call up. A few years ago I started commuting pretty regularly to a meeting that did a good job at the Christian/Friends-awareness/roots stuff but not the discipline/oversight or desire-to-grow end of things. I’ve drifted away the last few months because I realized I didn’t have any personal friends there and it was mostly an hour-drive, hour-worship, hour-drive back home kind of experience.
My main cadre five years ago were fellow staffers at FGC. A few years ago FGC commissioned surveys indicated that potential donors would respond favorably to talk about youth, outreach and race stereotyping and even though these were some of the concerns I had been awkwardly raising for years, it was very clear I wasn’t welcome in quickly-changing staff structure and I found myself out of a job. The most exciting outreach programs I had worked on was a database that would collect the names and addresses of isolated Friends, but It was quietly dropped a few months after I left. The new muchly-hyped $100,000 program for outreach has this for its seekers page and follows the typical FGC pattern, which is to sprinkle a few rotating tokens in with a retreat center full of potential donors to talk about Important Topics. (For those who care, I would have continued building the isolated Friends database, mapped it for hot spots and coordinated with the youth ministry committee to send teams for extended stays to help plant worship groups. How cool would that be? Another opportunity lost.)
So where do we go?
I’m really sad to say we’re still largely on our own. According to actuarial tables, I’ve recently crossed my life’s halfway point and here I am still referencing generational change.
How I wish I could honestly say that I could get involved with any committee in my yearly meeting and get to work on the issues raised in “Younger Evangelicals and Younger Quakers.” Someone recently sent me an email thread between members of an outreach committee for another large East Coast yearly meeting and they were debating whether the internet was an appropriate place to do outreach work – in 2008?!? Britain Yearly Meeting has a beautifully produced new outreach website but I don’t see one convinced young Friend profiled and it’s post-faith emphasis is downright depressing (an involved youngish American Friend looked at it and reminded me that despite occasional attention, smart young seekers serious about Quakerism aren’t anyone’s target audience, here in the US or apparently in Britain).
A number of interesting “Covergent” minded Friends have an insider/outsider relationship with institutional Quakerism. Independent worship groups popping up and more are being talked about (I won’t blow your cover guys!). I’ve seen Friends try to be more officially involved and it’s not always good: a bunch of younger Quaker bloggers have disappeared after getting named onto Important Committees, their online presence reduced to inside jokes on Facebook with their other newly-insider pals.
What do we need to do:
We need to be public figures;
We need to reach real people and connect ourselves;
We need to stress the whole package: Quaker roots, outreach, personal involvement and not let ourselves get too distracted by hyped projects that only promise one piece of the puzzle.
Here’s my to-do list:
CONVERGENT OCTOBER: Wess Daniels has talked about everyone doing some outreach and networking around the “convergent” theme next month. I’ll try to arrange some Philly area meet-up and talk about some practical organizing issues on my blog.
LOCAL MEETUPS: I still think that FGC’s isolated Friends registry was one of its better ideas. Screw them, we’ll start one ourselves. I commit to making one. Email me if you’re interested;
LOCAL FRIENDS: I commit to finding half a dozen serious Quaker buddies in the drivable area to ground myself enough to be able to tip my toe back into the institutional miasma when led (thanks to Micah B who stressed some of this in a recent visit).
PUBLIC FIGURES: I’ve let my blog deteriorate into too much of a “life stream,” all the pictures and twitter messages all clogging up the more Quaker material. You’ll notice it’s been redesigned. The right bar has the “life stream” stuff, which can be bettered viewed and commented on on my Tumbler page, Tumbld Rants. I’ll try to keep the main blog (and its RSS feed) more seriously minded.
I want to stress that I don’t want anyone to quit their meeting or anything. I’m just finding myself that I need a lot more than business-as-usual. I need people I can call lower-case friends, I need personal accountability, I need people willing to really look at what we need to do to be responsive to God’s call. Some day maybe there will be an established local meeting somewhere where I can find all of that. Until then we need to build up our networks.
Like a lot of my big idea vision essays, I see this one doesn’t talk much about God. Let me stress that coming under His direction is what this is all about. Meetings don’t exist for us. They faciliate our work in becoming a people of God. Most of the inward-focused work that make up most of Quaker work is self-defeating. Jesus didn’t do much work in the temple and didn’t spend much time at the rabbi conventions. He was out on the street, hanging out with the “bad” elements, sharing the good news one person at a time. We have to find ways to support one another in a new wave of grounded evangelism. Let’s see where we can all get in the next five years!
Shortly after finishing my second year at Guilford College, I set out to understand what brought me there. During the stressful process of deciding which college to attend, I felt a strong but slightly mysterious urge to explore Quakerism in my undergraduate years. Two years later, this same urge led me to buy a motorcycle, learn to ride it, and set out in a spiritual journey up the Eastern seaboard visiting Quaker meetings. While Guilford had excited and even irritated my curiosity about the workings of Quakerism, I knew little about how Quakers were over a large area of the country. I wanted to find out how Quakers worked as a group across a wide area of the country, and if I could learn how to be a leader within that community.
“…the development of constructive and enriching spiritual dialogue between all branches of the Quaker community. I plan to travel from South to North, speaking with meetings about how (or whether) they feel their regional culture affects their theological beliefs with the intent of gaining a greater understanding of the ‘spiritual state’ of individual meetings.“
I was very committed to keeping this vision open-ended in order to identify common threads within conversations I would have with Friends. I hoped in the discussions I might identify whether there was some aspect of “regional flavor” to a Quaker meeting in South Carolina versus one in New Jersey, for example. I hoped to identify what these differences might be and somehow look for a common Quaker thread that ran beneath them I could address with all Friends. In addition, I planned to take pictures of meetinghouses along the way to see if what people said about their meetings was at all reflected in their meetinghouse architecture. In all honesty, however, I was most interested in simply gaining a greater understanding of how Quakerism is practiced over a very large area of the US. As a Quaker myself, I wanted to know what it meant to truly own up to and understand this part of my identity and to strengthen my spiritual being and hopefully inspire others.
My initial plans for this project were to purchase a motorcycle, learn to ride it and drive from Key West in Florida to Maine visiting Quakers along the way. I wanted to stay near the coast, if for no other reason than to have some kind of geographical continuity from the Atlantic to ground me along my way. The actual implementation of my plan differed slightly in it’s physical manifestation, but I still found it to be a spiritually and intellectually challenging endeavor. I traveled along the route indicated on the attached map, covering roughly 4,200 miles over the course of the trip. I began in Greensboro, North Carolina and traveled south to St. Petersburg, Florida. From St. Petersburg, I traveled all the way along the Eastern Seaboard more or less to New York City. From there, I returned to the South by way of Greensboro to finish in Nashville Tennessee.
The Route: I visited roughly 29 meetings houses and Quaker places of worship on my trip and met with groups from 15 of them. In a couple of instances, I only met with individuals from various meetings.
The preparation for my project was significant, most notably in respect to my transportation. Before my decision to take on this project, I had only once ridden a motorcycle, and my hazy memory of the occasion makes me think it was just a brief ride on the back. Purchasing, insuring, licensing and learning how to drive a motorcycle was a very involved undertaking that required a considerable amount of commitment to overcoming my fear. The process helped me become mentally prepared for the trip, though, by testing my physical self so greatly. In addition, I wrote to over 50 Quaker meetings all along the East coast introducing myself and asking them to consider meeting with me. As meetings responded, I gave them an idea of when I might be in their area and we set up tentative visiting dates. The purpose of the trip as outlined in that letter changed over the course of my project, but I will return to that. In addition to these two most time-consuming aspects of my project, there were quite a number of other smaller details to be taken care of that are inherent to any major travel. Purchasing gear, tuning up and preparing my motorcycle for long distance touring, discussing details with my home meeting about the trip, etc. were some of the other tasks to be completed. For the most part, I did all of this alone. While I had Max Carter to help with some of the preliminary envisioning and last minute contact possibilities, I took on most everything myself. My home meeting was far away and could practically offer very little in terms of coordinating efforts from that distance. I was not sure how to prepare for the trip spiritually but left with an open heart and a strong commitment to be as open as possible. I was presented with quite a number of challenges on my trip, and it appeared that those obstacles came either in the form of spiritual or practical trials along my way. Some of my practical challenges were the theft of my camera early in the trip, the matter of food and lodging and the sheer effort of traveling over very great distances day after day. The camera was significant loss because it made the process of gathering pictures for presentation much more difficult. I had to rely on the poor quality and much slower processing of a disposable camera for most of my trip. In general, I had a sense of who I would stay with city by city along my route, but it was difficult to not know any of these people in advance beyond letters and to rely on them so much for their generosity. I realize that this demanded quite a degree of flexibility both on my part and theirs; this, like my stolen camera, helped me learn to adapt and try to be as gracious as possible. The physical strain and mental alertness I needed to travel long distances was very taxing, resulting in my decision to not go as far as I had originally planned.
A practical issue that did affect the outcome of my project was which meetings ended up responding to my letter of introduction. I only received any word back from about half of the meetings I wrote to. Of those, I was disappointed that despite the fact I wrote to a large number of Quakers both programmed and unprogrammed, I received a much smaller number of responses from programmed meetings and of those I did, a number ‘disappeared’ after the initial contact. This may have been entirely by chance, but none the less I found my experiences with programmed Friends to be disproportionately enriching for their being so few and I regretted their brevity. Therefore, most of my observations were among unprogrammed Friends and I shy away from making comparisons between “unprogrammed” and “programmed” Friends in this report because I simply didn’t feel like I met with enough unprogrammed Friends to tell.
In addition, the internal challenge all these practical challenges brought on made it difficult to remain spiritually centered. Constant spiritual discussion left me struggling to be lighthearted. I can’t tell if this made my later disheartenment with group conversations greater or whether the discussions themselves disheartened me. As time went on though, my frustrations with the dynamics I witnessed in meetings right from the beginning of my trip onwards increasingly affected my openness. I relied more and more on a regimented conversation format, limiting opportunities for spontaneity of spirit. By the end I felt like a slightly strange gentleman who rises every week at about the same time in meeting for worship with a message that seems unfortunately similar to the same thing he said the week before.
With the goal of creating “enriching spiritual dialogue” so prominently placed as my goal for this trip, I spent a significant amount of time figuring out what this meant and how it might be achieved. If I were able to create this dialogue on my trip, I somehow felt that this would be immediately beneficial to both Quakers and Quaker institutions by creating a greater sense of vitality and unity within them. I began to realize how subjective unity and vitality are. A distinction I failed to recognize in my idealized conception was the difference between unity of individuals, such as a good conversation between myself and a host, and unity of meetings, such as a group meeting and sharing conversation. As time went on, I began to become frustrated in group discussions and to try to “argue” my interpretation of unity and vitality in much the same way I saw other Friends doing. I had hoped Friends themselves would suggest points of unity within Quakerism, but often I just heard folks talk about what they believed in to the exclusion of other beliefs. For instance, I asked many meetings what they might do as a group if someone rose in meeting and brought a very evangelical Christian message to worship. While at first many spoke about “trying to accept that message” as equal to any other, it seemed that in essence many felt threatened by the question and that I should ask it at all. It seemed that few meetings had any established process of “eldering” or holding individuals accountable for the group. I am certainly not evangelical nor am I sure I am Christian, but I somehow felt accused of being both in these conversations and therefore felt less welcome. There were several points on my trip where I struggled to find any hope Quakers could be lead to unite amongst each other, and it was the distinction between individuals and groups that made all the difference.
Observing group dynamics and looking for continuity or unity within Friends Meetings as a whole along my journey was very hard for me. There were several notable exceptions, but as I finished my trip I found myself terribly disheartened in general by much of the group behavior I witnessed within the meetings I visited. In meetings were I felt most successful and useful the members appeared not only to care deeply about each other and the vitality of their individual meetings, but were strong enough to work outside their own communities to engage corporately in the wider body of Quakerism and the world at large. They had clear ways of holding individuals accountable to the group as a whole and did so. I did not feel I found this sense in many of the meetings I visited though, however briefly, and could not tell how beneficial my visit might be to them. I was surprised to be so disheartened after seeing folks so quickly, but often it appeared very obviously in group conversations full of Friends interrupting or contradicting each other or from side comments I heard from individuals later.
I struggle to write these words because I felt cared for and looked after by folks from all the meetings I visited, but I still could not help but feel sad when visiting meetings who steadily lost members, struggled to take care of basic business or suffered from internal feuds. Many meetings in Florida were in the process of building new meetinghouses, and while the common cause of such a large order of business seemed to bring them together, many Friends in these meetings expressed concern that it was only a temporary fix. In fairness, many of the meetings I visited along the way were in fact worship groups and not fully meetings, but rather than this being a stepping stone to a more established order, it seemed that many of these worship groups struggled to keep the few members they had and seemed to not feel terribly connected as a group.
What appeared to be the main causes of this disunity, however, was the unfortunate fact that it seems many Friends are Quaker for selfish reasons. I’m sorry to say it, but that was my impression of why so many meeting groups struggle to find an effective group process. In many of the meetings I visited it appeared that Friends not only expected complete acceptance of their personal spiritual path, but also their political, ideological and cultural ones as well. Like in the case of the evangelical message question, it appeared that an evangelical person was not simply threatening to individuals in their spiritual beliefs, but also in their inferred political leanings and culture. This seemed to show me that the meeting was not actually for embracing people in a group atmosphere as advertised but more a cultural, ideological and political support group for like-minded individuals. “Quakers couldn’t be Republican. I can’t stand Republicans” . This is where the realm of the individual butted up against the corporate in my eyes.
The beauty of silent worship, as many Friends agreed, was it’s ability to speak to so many different Friend’s conditions while still being such a crucially group-centered act. In the early days of Quakerism, it appeared that this act of worship was a cornerstone for the connection that could be felt between individuals in a group setting in business meeting, community dinners or the world at large. From what I saw on my trip, the gratification and fulfillment of the individual appears more and more accentuated as Quakerism progresses rather than fulfillment of the whole meeting. When faced with a confusing or chaotic business process, for instance, it seems in many cases that every person wants to revert to the way THEY make decisions best as the ideal way for the group. I would hasten to add that I did not even attend one business meeting along my trip, and that my concern for the issue of business specifically comes from many, many direct comments from individuals frustrated by their group’s business meetings. I saw on my own that many Friends have so many different interests and such completely busy lives outside meeting, it appears the most they can do to attended worship.
So perhaps the paradox of the individual and group within a universal spirit is what Quakerism can benefit from exploring today. I found my attention so often turned to the great folks I found along my way who spoke directly to my condition. I met so many incredibly interesting, thought-provoking, eccentric, kind and inspired people on my trip, I cannot help but be awed and impressed. I certainly found a kind of unity between them and myself. While I cannot be sure my actions benefited Friend meetings in totality, I know that my conversations with Friends were both inspiring to me and the people I found along the way. I believe I brightened some folks’ days and gave them a chance to tell their stories. The faith required to get on the road each day, not knowing where I would end up by nightfall was awesome and it stretched me considerably in a way that I think Friends appreciated. I am sure that I will continue to be in contact with Friends I met along the way and will continue to think about these issues with them.
In terms of this trip as a foundation for Quaker leadership, I must say I was a put at a bit of a loss at what that might mean. Someone mentioned it might be like “herding cats.” One leadership role I did see often, which worried me, was that of the “überQuakers,” as we at Guilford like to call them. It appeared that in many instances, I ended up staying with the members of meetings who were the “movers and shakers” of their meetings for their dogged dedication to the meeting as a whole. Sadly, in many instances these folks seemed to bear a disproportionate amount of responsibility for the affairs of their meetings, spiritually, logistically and energetically. They did not resent this role, but it appeared to me that they were rarely consciously chosen for that ministry by the group but instead had the position thrust upon them. These folks were complimented by an unfortunately large segment of Friends, often pleading busy schedules, who appeared to be unable to commit to the meeting beyond the catharsis of meeting for worship. Part of witnessing this left me questioning my commitment to Quakerism by the end of my trip. If this is how Quakerism works, why should I even bother developing ‘leadership’ to become an “überQuaker”? While it may not have burnt out those who I stayed with along the way, why would I purposely stick my neck out for the benefit of the group as a whole when it seems that few others are actually interested in anyone but themselves at the end of the day? It is not that I begrudge selflessness by any means, but Quakerism cannot survive on the selflessness of some and dependence of many. Or at least it should not in my eyes.
Perhaps what worries me is that with the amount of time and effort I put into this trip, I am already falling into the “überQuaker” mindset. “Well, if things aren’t going right I’ll just have to do something myself and decide how they can be fixed.” This is my great fear. This is not the thinking of a vital, post-authoritarian religious society. I imagine a vital Quaker community that is full of folks with various commitments, but all with a shared desire not only to come to worship together but to do business together, reach out and make sacrifices to bring in new members and actively take on projects as a meeting that all can agree are the Spirit’s will. I would like to see a much greater sense of group intentionality, but I know that is not something one individual can force. I have learned that I have a great deal of personal growth to go through before I am ready to contribute as I would like to the Quaker community. I think in many ways this trip made me feel more inexperienced and apprehensive with Quakerism but I strive for that place of faith and confidence. I am beginning a book about my experiences on this trip, in addition to creating a digital presentation featuring the meetinghouse pictures I took.
I wish I could say I knew this trip was God’s will, but the rhetoric with which many people have invoked God’s name in my life has blurred the lines between spiritual surrender and egotistical manipulation. As one particularly astute Friend put it “As with so much else in life, implementing our intentions should allow for the possibility of being self conceited.” Much of what I found along my trip reflected struggles within others about the will of God in their lives, some of which started early in Friend’s lives and some that only began when they took Quakerism as their own. Ironically, it appears that the difference I was looking for in geographic distribution was actually surprisingly absent over such a large area. All the Friends I talked to were in some way struggling with the issue of how they fit into the larger group, a community of the Spirit and of Quaker business. As I sought to find parallels in my conversations with Friends, I was constantly reminded of the push and pull of the individual will versus the will of the whole. In many Friends eyes, this struggle is fundamentally a dance between the individual and answering to the Spirit that is within us all.
Some Queries I made up for myself along my trip were:
How do I remain secure and non-threatened in my own faith to be open to others?
What are my blindnesses or biases from my Quaker roots?
What is selflessness and is it ideal?
How do I know what is my will and what is the will of God?
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