Tag Archives ⇒ google

Five Tips for Building a Self-Marketing Website

September 7, 2009
· Martin Kelley

A poten­tial client recent­ly came to me with an exist­ing site. It cer­tain­ly was slick: the home­page fea­tured a Flash ani­ma­tion of telegenic young pro­fes­sion­als culled from a stock pho­to ser­vice, psuedo-jazz tech­no music, and words sweep­ing in from all sides sell­ing you the com­pa­ny’s ser­vice. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the page had no use­ful con­tent, no call-to-action and no Google PageR­ank. It was an expen­sive design, but I did­n’t need to look at the track­ing stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynam­ic, some­thing that will attract cus­tomers and inter­act with them. Here’s five tips for build­ing a self-marketing website!

One: Use­ful Con­tent for your Tar­get Audience
Give vis­i­tors a rea­son to come to the site. Text-rich, chang­ing con­tent is essen­tial. In prac­ti­cal­i­ty, this means installing a blog and writ­ing posts every few weeks. You’ll see mea­sures like “key­word rel­e­van­cy” increase instant­ly as excerpt­ed text shows up on the home­page. Add videos and pho­tos if your com­pa­ny or team has that exper­tise, but remem­ber: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away some­thing valu­able or useful
Many smart mar­ket­ing sites fea­ture some free give­away right on the home­page: a use­ful quiz, pro­fes­sion­al analy­sis, a PDF how-to guide­book. A builder I worked with went to the trou­ble of post­ing dozens of floor plans & pic­tures to their web­site and com­pil­ing them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your con­tact infor­ma­tion to get it. Once the free mate­r­i­al has been com­piled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask your­self the Three User Questions!
It’s amaz­ing how focused the mind gets when you actu­al­ly sit down to define goals. Just about every web­site can ben­e­fit from this three-step exercise:

  1. Who is the tar­get audience?
  2. What would draw them to the site? 
  3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group togeth­er to through your web­site page by page these ques­tions. Brain­storm a list of changes you could make. You’ll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quan­tifi­able actions do you want vis­i­tors to take? It might well just be the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of a con­tact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again
Many small busi­ness­es now get a lot of their cus­tomers from their web­sites. Your web­site is an essen­tial piece of your mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­i­ty and you need to be smart about it. Com­pile togeth­er your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alter­nate designs incor­po­rat­ing the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Web­site Opti­miz­er to put the alter­na­tives through their paces. Which one “con­verts” bet­ter, i.e., which design gets you high­er per­cent­ages in the Defined Goals you’ve set? Once you’ve fin­ished a test, move on to the next brain­storm­ing idea and imple­ment it. Always be testing!

An exten­sive series of tests of one site I worked on dou­bled it’s con­ver­sion rate: imag­ine your com­pa­ny dou­bling its inter­net sales? It is com­plete­ly worth spend­ing the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don’t Be Afraid to Get Pro­fes­sion­al Help
If you need to hire a pro­fes­sion­al to help you through this process you’ll almost cer­tain­ly get your mon­ey’s worth! A recent projects cost the cus­tomer $6000 but I was able to doc­u­ment sav­ings of $100,000 per year in his pub­lic­i­ty costs! See my piece “What to Look For in SEO Con­sul­tants” for my insider-advice to how to pick a hon­est and com­pe­tent pro­fes­sion­al web pub­lic­i­ty consultant.

Impromput Hammonton area Friends worship

March 13, 2009
· Martin Kelley

My F/friend Raye Hodg­son is tak­ing a train from Con­necti­cut to South Jer­sey next week for a vis­it, and locals and would-be vis­i­tors are invit­ed to my house for some wor­ship! Raye’s involved with Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tive and New Eng­land Friends and seems to be doing a cool sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture project these days (which I did­n’t know except for Google!)

It’s next Thurs­day, the 19th at 7:30pm in Ham­mon­ton. If you want to join but don’t have my address just send me an email and I’ll pro­vide details. There’s also a Face­book event list­ing for this. If enough peo­ple are inter­est­ed we can have more occa­sion­al Conservative/Convergent/Emergent Quak­er­ly wor­ship in this part of South Jer­sey! If you can’t make it but are intrigued by the idea, let me know and I’ll keep you in the loop. 

UPDATE: The wor­ship went well, about half a dozen peo­ple showed up. If you want to be alert­ed to any follow-up wor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties in the Ham­mon­ton area send me an email and I’ll add you to my list. 

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.

Sorting Quaker peculiarities in the modern world

September 28, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Friends nev­er set out to start to their own reli­gion; what became seen as the more “pecu­liar” Quak­er prac­tices were sim­ply their inter­pre­ta­tion of the prop­er mode of chris­t­ian liv­ing. At some point some of these prac­tices became forms, things done because that’s what Quak­ers are sup­posed to do. The empti­ness of this ratio­nale led some of those in lat­er gen­er­a­tions to aban­don them alto­geth­er. Nei­ther path is very sat­is­fac­to­ry. Those of us inspired by the Quak­er tra­di­tion and have to sift through the half-remembered ancient forms to under­stand their ratio­nale and con­tin­ued relevancy.

When read­ing through Thomas Clark­son’s account of Friends cir­ca 1800, I was struck by the dif­fer­ing lengths of expla­na­tion need­ed for two cus­toms. read ear­li­er install­ments of my series you’ll know that Thomas Clark­son was a British Angli­can who  spent a lot of time with Friends around the turn of the 19th Cen­tu­ry and pub­lished an invalu­able multi-volumn apol­o­gy in 1806. “A Por­trai­ture of Quak­erism” explains con­tem­po­rary Friends prac­tices and defends them as legit­i­mate ways to lead a “chris­t­ian” life. 

The two prac­tices that struck me were 1: the Quak­er cus­tom of using “thee” in speech and, 2: of using num­bers for the names of days of the week and months of the year. Clark­son makes a good defense of the rea­sons behind the practices: 

Many of the expres­sions, then in use, appeared to him to con­tain gross flat­tery, oth­ers to be idol­a­trous, oth­ers to be false rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the ideas they were intend­ed to con­vey… Now he con­sid­ered that chris­tian­i­ty required truth, and he believed there­fore that he and his fol­low­ers, who prefessed to be chris­tians in word and deed, and to fol­low the chris­t­ian pat­tern in all things, as far as it could be found, were called upon to depart from all the cen­surable modes of seech, as much as they were from any of the cus­toms of the world, which chris­tian­i­ty had deemed obje­tion­able. (p. 275 – 6, my edi­tion, p. 199 in this edi­tion in Google Books).

Clark­son takes the next four pages to explain some gram­mat­i­cal his­to­ry. In Fox’s time, “thee” was still at the tail end of being replaced by the grammatically-incorrect “you” for the sec­ond per­son sin­gu­lar, a cul­tur­al change that was a “trick­le down” of the courtier’s desire to flat­ter so-called supe­ri­ors in church and state. To a band of reli­gious reform­ers large­ly drawn from rur­al North Eng­land, the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of “thee” was a bold cul­tur­al state­ment. It spoke to both a gram­mat­i­cal integri­ty and a desire to flat­ten social class­es in a rad­i­cal­ly ide­al­is­tic reli­gious society.

Fol­low­ing the his­to­ry les­son, Clark­son turns to names of the days of the week and months of the years. Most are pagan names. Good chris­tians seek­ing to hon­or the one true God and deny any false gods should­n’t spend their days invok­ing the Norse gods Tyr and Woden or the Roman gods Janus, Mars. Replac­ing them by Third Day, Fourth Day, First Month and Third Month strips them of their roots in non-christian cultures. 

As Clark­son well knew, the ques­tion 150 years lat­er (and now 350 years lat­er) is whether these old pecu­liar cus­toms car­ry any weight beyond a kind of 17th Cen­tu­ry Quak­er nos­tal­gia. As he writes:

There is great absur­di­ty, it is said, in sup­pos­ing, that per­sons pay any respect to hea­then idols, who retain the use of the ancient names of the divi­sions of time. How many thou­sands are there, who know noth­ing of their ori­gin? The com­mon peo­ple of the coun­try know none of the reasons.

When I look at old cus­toms I ask two questions:

  1. The Ele­va­tor rule: could I explain to my pecu­liar­i­ty to a non-Quaker “aver­age Joe” in under two minutes?
  2. The Chris­t­ian rule: could I make the argu­ment that this prac­tice is not just a Quak­er odd­i­ty but some­thing that every faith­ful and earnest Chris­t­ian should con­sid­er adopting?

In these cas­es, thee fails and num­bered days passes.

Let me explain: I can’t real­ly explain why I would use thee with­out going into a expla­na­tion of pre-17th Cen­tu­ry gram­mar, talk­ing about dif­fer­ent forms of sec­ond per­son sin­gu­lar in the his­to­ry of the Eng­lish lan­guage and the reten­tion of the sec­ond per­son sin­gu­lar in most romance lan­guages. By the time I’d be done I’d come off as an over-educated bore. 

In con­trast I can say “Wednes­day is named after the Norse god Woden, Thurs­day after Thor, Jan­u­ary after the Roman Janus, etc., and as a one-God Chris­t­ian I don’t want to spend my days invok­ing their names con­stant­ly.” A one-sentence expla­na­tion works even in mod­ern Amer­i­ca. I’ll still be seen as an odd duck (noth­ing wrong with that) but at least peo­ple will leave the con­ver­sa­tion know­ing there’s some­one who thinks we real­ly should be seri­ous about only wor­ship­ping one God: mis­sion accom­plished, really. 

I know faith­ful Friends who do use thee. I’m glad they do and don’t want to double-guess their lead­ings. But for me the test of keep­ing it real (which I think is a ancient Quak­er prin­ci­ple) means hold­ing onto odd­i­ties that still point to their origins.

A first look at the Google Chrome browser

September 2, 2008
· Martin Kelley

screen-shotMy Twit­ter fol­low­ers will know I’ve been slight­ly obsessed by Google’s new brows­er, Chrome, since word leaked that it was going to be released today (Tues, Sept 2). I’ve been hit­ting reload on the down­load site fair­ly obses­sive­ly. A few min­utes ago my per­sis­tence was reward­ed and I’m writ­ing to you all from the new brows­er (here’s the offi­cial release announce­ment).

Why a New Browser?!?
Before I begin, let me rec­om­mend the Google Chrome online com­ic book for those with tech inter­ests. Google does a good job explain­ing why they’ve joined the brows­er wars. At first glance it seems a need­less move: they already fund much of the devel­op­ment on the open source Fire­fox brows­er. But Fire­fox, like Microsoft Inter­net Explor­er and every oth­er brows­er, is built around cer­tain assump­tions about how browsers process appli­ca­tions. Google is start­ing from scratch and think­ing about the brows­er as an oper­at­ing sys­tem run­ning increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed appli­ca­tions (like Gmail). Chrome sep­a­rates mem­o­ry process and inter­net per­mis­sions in new ways.
Obvi­ous­ly, Google is going after Microsoft (the ini­tial release of Chrome is Win­dows only) – not just its brows­er but its Vista oper­at­ing sys­tem as well. With the expan­sion of high speed inter­net access and so-called “cloud com­put­ing,” func­tions that used to require stand-alone clients can now be han­dled inside the brows­er. Email has prob­a­bly become the most wide­ly adopt­ed brows­er appli­ca­tions but you can also do things pho­to edit­ing and video record­ing through the brows­er. Google knows that once an appli­ca­tion is run­ning inside a brows­er, the oper­at­ing sys­tem does­n’t mat­ter. Gmail works equal­ly fine from Vista, Mac OS X, or Lin­ux.
It is in Google’s strate­gic inter­est to advance the state of brows­er tech­nol­o­gy and they do that with Chrome. But it is in the inter­est that every­one have access to these lat­est inno­va­tions and that all browsers can run the most sophis­ti­cat­ed appli­ca­tions Google engi­neers can put togeth­er. So Chrome is open source and Google invites oth­er browsers to incor­po­rate many of its features. 
First Thoughts on the Product:
The down­load was quick and easy (of course).
I was sur­prised that when installing it only offered to import my MS Inter­net Explor­er book­marks. My most com­plete and up-to-date book­mark list is in Fire­fox (synced among my oper­at­ing sys­tems by the excel­lent Fox­marks exten­sion).
I went pret­ty imme­di­ate­ly to Gmail. Google says they’ve rewrit­ten a lot of the back­ground ren­der­ing code from scratch and I was expect­ing to see instan­ta­neous load­ing. Frankly, it seemed to load as quick­ly as it does in Fire­fox. Any appar­ent speed increase isn’t imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous (this is a tes­ta­ment to how fast they’ve man­aged to get it to load in all browsers).
speed-dialThe inter­face is very sim­pli­fied: few but­tons, tabs up top, no sta­tus bar. There’s a lot of sur­pris­es here, like an auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed page with thumb­nails of your most fre­quent­ly vis­it­ed sites (see image, right), an idea bor­rowed from Opera browser’s “Speed Dial” fea­ture (avail­able through to Fire­fox users through the Speed Dial exten­sion).
gmail-as-app
You can also “Cre­ate appli­ca­tion short­cuts” which turn ser­vices such as Gmail into client-like appli­ca­tions that sit on your desk­top (screen­shot right). Open them up from here and the nor­mal loca­tion bar and brows­er but­tons are gone.
There’s a lot more to explore here. It’s obvi­ous that Google has put a lot of thought into this. I’m not going to dis­miss any fea­ture or odd­i­ty too quick­ly. They helped a lot of us rethink how we orga­nize email using a sin­gle “Archive” fold­er instead of the elaborately-maintained fold­er hier­ar­chy. Google actu­al­ly have put out a num­ber of half-baked and under-supported ser­vices (Froogle and Google Check­out come most imme­di­ate­ly to mind) but it’s clear that the Google Chrome brows­er is a very seri­ous ini­tia­tive by the company.
Will I Use It?
The big ques­tion, right? Actu­al­ly, I won’t use it much for now. For one thing, I’m a Mac user. I have a Win­dows XP vir­tu­al machine run­ning most of the time cour­tesy of VMWare’s Fusion. I’m sure Google has set a high pri­or­i­ty to make Mac OS X and Lin­ux ver­sions of Chrome – they’re whole strat­e­gy rests on this being woven into the brows­er lin­gua fran­ca that keeps Microsoft­’s Vista at bay, remem­ber?, but until that time Chrome won’t be my nat­ur­al first choice.
But I’m also going to miss my Fire­fox exten­sions. I for­got that the web has lots of ads (Adblock Plus). And I don’t like the extra clut­ter of Gmail with­out Bet­ter Gmail 2 (just the “Folders4Gmail” fea­ture of the lat­ter saves my eye more scan­ning time than any speed tweak Chrome deliv­ers). And these days the Web Devel­op­ers Tool­bar, Last­pass, FireFTP exten­sions are pret­ty essen­tial to my work day.
But if a native Mac ver­sion was released? And if Fire­fox exten­sions start­ed being rewrit­ten for Chrome? I just flipped back to my reg­u­lar brows­er to check some­thing and even after an hour with Chrome, Fire­fox felt so heavy and clunky. It is pos­si­ble to see Chrome could a seri­ous con­tender for my attention. 

Focused blogs and side trips

November 23, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Over on Eileen Flana­gan’s Imper­fect Seren­i­ty, there’s an inter­est­ing post on blog pub­lic­i­ty, “Blog­ging dilem­mas,” inspired in part by Robin M“ ‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up inter­est­ing ques­tions about the role of blogs in com­mu­ni­ty build­ing and the loca­tion of that line that sep­a­rates good blog­ging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Read­ers will prob­a­bly be unsur­prised to learn that I use Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quak­er blo­gos­phere. I act as a kind of com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and my search­es are for inter­est­ing posts talk­ing about Quak­ers (until read­ing Eileen’s post I had­n’t check my Tech­no­rati “rank” in months). Many peo­ple’s first intro­duc­tion to Quak​erQuak​er​.org is get­ting linked from it, and I sus­pect I’ve acci­den­tal­ly out­ed a few begin­ning blog­gers who had­n’t told any­one of their new blog!

I have a pro­fes­sion­al blog on web design and ana­lyt­ics (with a some­what off-topic but sat­is­fy­ing post on top at the moment) and sep­a­rat­ing that out has allowed me to use this per­son­al blog, Quak­er­Ran­ter, for what­ev­er I like. Most reg­u­lar­ly read­ers would say it focus­es on Quak­erism and cute kid pic­tures and while those are the most com­mon posts, the most read posts are the minor fas­ci­na­tions I indulge myself with occa­sion­al­ly. Quak­er plain dress is some­thing I prac­tice but don’t think about most of the time (806 read­ers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfair­ly unpop­u­lar baby names (627 vis­its). I’ve also detailed some out­ings to semi-legendary South Jer­sey haunts (317) and score high on search­es to them.

The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would prob­a­bly say these off-topic posts are dis­tract­ing my core audi­ence. Per­haps, but they’re infre­quent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps peo­ple to know I’m not just obsessed with one top­ic. Being a part of a real com­mu­ni­ty means know­ing each oth­er in all of our quirks. I’m more ten­der and for­giv­ing of oth­er Quak­er blog­gers when I know more of their sto­ry: it puts what they say into a con­text that makes it sound more lived, less ide­o­log­i­cal. There’s cer­tain­ly good rea­sons for tightly-focused pro­fes­sion­al blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they start­ed post­ing kids pic­tures!), but as more peo­ple read posts through feeds and aggre­ga­tors I won­der if there’s going to be as much pres­sure for per­son­al, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus. 

We all have diverse, quirky inter­ests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pan­der to par­tic­u­lar audi­ences and boy, are they bor­ing! A cer­tain degree of idio­syn­crasy and sub­jec­tive orner­i­ness is prob­a­bly essen­tial. Per­son­al­i­ty is at least as impor­tant as focus.

PS: I’m also inter­est­ed in mak­ing sure I don’t loose the core audi­ence with all my side trips, hence the “lat­est Quak­er posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will even­tu­al­ly get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Read­er after Eileen’s is Avin­ish Kaushik’s Blog Met­rics: Six rec­om­men­da­tions for mea­sur­ing your suc­cess. Parts of it are prob­a­bly a bit tech­ni­cal for most QR read­ers but it’s use­ful for think­ing about blogs as outreach.

Christian revival among liberal Friends

August 15, 2007
· Martin Kelley

There’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion in the com­ments from my last post about “Con­ver­gent Friends and Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives” and one of the more inter­est­ing comes from a com­menter named Diane. My reply to her got longer and longer and filled with more and more links till it makes more sense to make it its own post. First, Diane’s question:

I don’t know if I’m “con­ver­gent,” (prob­a­bly not) but I have been involved with the emerg­ing church for sev­er­al years and with Quak­erism for a decade. I also am aware of the house church move­ment, but my expe­ri­ence of it is that is is very tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to Quak­erism. I real­ly, real­ly hope and pray that Chris­t­ian revival is com­ing to lib­er­al Friends, but per­son­al­ly I have not seen that phe­nom­e­nom. Where do you see it most? Do you see it more as com­mit­ment to Christ or as more peo­ple being Christ curi­ous, to use Robin’s phrase?

As I wrote recent­ly I think con­ver­gence is more of a trend than an iden­ti­ty and I’m not sure whether it makes sense to fuss about who’s con­ver­gent or not. As with any ques­tion involv­ing lib­er­al Friends, whether there’s “Chris­t­ian revival” going on depends on what what you mean by the term. I think more lib­er­al Friends have become com­fort­able label­ing them­selves as Christ curi­ous; it has become more accept­able to iden­ti­fy as Chris­t­ian than it was a decade or two ago; a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of younger Friends are very recep­tive to Chris­t­ian mes­sages, the Bible and tra­di­tion­al Quak­er tes­ti­monies than they were.

These are indi­vid­ual respons­es, how­ev­er. Turn­ing to col­lec­tive Quak­er bod­ies there are few if any beliefs or prac­tices left that lib­er­al Friends would­n’t allow under the Quak­er ban­ner if they came wrapped in Quak­erese from a well-connected Friend; the social tes­ti­monies stand in as the uni­fy­ing agent; it’s still con­sid­ered an argu­ment stop­per to say that any prof­fered def­i­n­i­tion would exclude someone.

I’d argue that lib­er­al Quak­erism is becom­ing ever more lib­er­al (and less dis­tinc­tive­ly Quak­er) at the same time that many of those in influ­ence are becom­ing more Chris­t­ian. It’s a very pro­scribed Chris­tian­i­ty: cod­ed, ten­ta­tive and most of all indi­vid­u­al­is­tic. It’s okay for a lib­er­al Friend to believe what­ev­er they want to believe as long as they don’t believe too much. Whether the qui­et influ­ence of the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of conservative-friendly lead­er­ship is enough to hold a Quak­er cen­ter in the cen­trifuge that is lib­er­al Quak­erism is the $60,000 ques­tion. I think the lead­er­ship has an inflat­ed sense of its own influ­ence but I’m watch­ing the exper­i­ment. I wish it well but I’m skep­ti­cal and wor­ry that it’s built on sand.

Some of the Christ-curious lib­er­al Friends are form­ing small wor­ship groups and some of these are seek­ing out recog­ni­tion from Con­ser­v­a­tive bod­ies. It’s an aching­ly small move­ment but it shows a desire to be cor­po­rate­ly Quak­er and not just indi­vid­u­al­is­ti­cal­ly Quak­er. With the inter­net tra­di­tion­al Quak­er view­points are only a Google search away; sites like Bill Samuel’s “Quakerinfo.com”:www.quakerinfo.com and blogs like Mar­shall Massey’s are break­ing down stereo­types and doing a lot of invalu­able edu­cat­ing (and I could name a lot more). It’s pos­si­ble to imag­ine all this cook­ing down to a third wave of tra­di­tion­al­ist renew­al. Ohio Year­ly Meeting-led ini­tia­tives like the Chris­t­ian Friends Con­fer­ence and All Con­ser­v­a­tive Gath­er­ings are steps in the right direc­tion but any real change is going to have to pull togeth­er mul­ti­ple trends, one of which might or might not be Convergence.

Our role in this future is not to be strate­gists play­ing Quak­er pol­i­tics but ser­vants ready to lay down our iden­ti­ties and pre­con­cep­tions to fol­low the prompt­ings of the Inward Christ into what­ev­er ter­ri­to­ry we’re called to:

From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his dis­ci­ples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suf­fer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, say­ing, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said Jesus unto his dis­ci­ples, If any man will come after me, let him deny him­self, and take up his cross, and fol­low me. Matthew 16:21 – 28.