A look at the generational shifts facing Friends.
I’m currently reading Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World, which examines the cultural and generational shifts happening within the Christian Evangelical movement. At the bottom of this page is a handy chart that outlines the generational differences in theology, ecclesiastical paradigm, church polity that he sees. When I first saw it I said “yes!” to almost each category, as it clearly hits at the generational forces hitting Quakerism.
Unfortunately many Friends in leadership positions don’t really understand the problems facing Quakerism. Or: they do, but they don’t understand the larger shifts behind them and think that they just need to redouble their efforts using the old methods and models. The Baby Boom generation in charge knows the challenge is to reach out to seekers in their twenties or thirties, but they do this by developing programs that would have appealed to them when they were that age. The current crop of outreach projects and peace initiatives are all very 1980 in style. There’s no recognition that the secular peace community that drew seekers in twenty years ago no longer exists and that today’s seekers are looking for something deeper, something more personal and more real.
When younger Friends are included in the surveys and committees, they tend to be either the uninvolved children of important Baby Boom generation Quakers, or those thirty-something Friends that culturally and philosophically fit into the older paradigms. It’s fine that these two types of Friends are around, but neither group challenges Baby Boomer group-think. Outspoken younger Friends often end up leaving the Society in frustration after a few years.
It’s a shame. In my ten years attending a downtown Philadelphia Friends meeting, I easily met a hundred young seekers. They mostly cycled through, attending for periods ranging from a few months to a few years. I would often ask them why they stopped coming. Sometimes they were just nice and said life was too busy, but of course that’s not a real answer: you make time for the things that are important and that feed you in some way. But others told me they found the meeting unwelcoming, or Friends too self-congratulatory or superficial, the community more social than spiritual. I went back to this meeting one First Day after a two year absence and it was depressing how it was all the same faces. This is not a knock on this particular meeting, since the same dynamics are at work in most of the liberal-leaning meetings I’ve attended, both in the FGC and FUM worlds – it’s a generational cultural phenomenon. I have never found the young Quaker seeker community I know is out there, though I’ve glimpsed its individual faces a hundred times: always just out of reach, never gelling into a movement.
I’m not sure what the answers are. Luckily it’s not my job to have answers: I leave that up to Christ and only concern myself with being as faithful a servant to the Spirit as I can be (this spirit-led leadership style is exactly one of the generational shifts Webber talks about). I’ve been given a clear message that my job is to stay with the Society of Friends, that I might be of use someday. But there are a few pieces that I think will come out:
A re-examination of our roots, as Christians and as Friends
What babies were thrown out with the bathwater by turn-of-the-century Friends who embraced modernism and rationalism and turned their back on traditional testimonies? This will require challenging some of the sacred myths of contemporary Quakerism. There are a lot that aren’t particularly Quaker and we need to start admitting to that. I’ve personally taken up plain dress and find the old statements on the peace testimony much deeper and more meaningful than contemporary ones. I’m a professional webmaster and run a prominent pacifist site, so it’s not like I’m stuck in the nineteenth century; instead, I just think these old testimonies actually speak to our condition in the twenty-first Century.
A Desire to Grow
Too many Friends are happy with their nice cozy meetings. The meetings serve as family and as a support group, and a real growth would disrupt our established patterns. If Quakerism grew tenfold over the next twenty years we’d have to build meetinghouses, have extra worship, reorganize our committees. Involved Friends wouldn’t know all the other involved Friends in their yearly meeting. With more members we’d have to become more rigorous and disciplined in our committee meetings. Quakerism would feel different if it were ten times larger: how many of us would just feel uncomfortable with that. Many of our Meetings are ripe for growth, being in booming suburbs or thriving urban centers, but year after year they stay small. Many simply neglect and screw up outreach or religious education efforts as a way of keeping the meeting at its current size and with its current character.
A more personally-involved, time-consuming commitment
Religion in America has become yet another consumer choice, an entertainment option for Sunday morning, and this paradigm is true with Friends. We complain how much time our Quaker work takes up. We complain about clearness committees or visioning groups that might take up a Saturday afternoon. A more involved Quakerism would realize that the hour on First Day morning is in many ways the least important time to our Society. Younger seekers are looking for connections that are deeper and that will require time. We can’t build a Society on the cheap. It’s not money we need to invest, but our hearts and time.
I recently visited a Meeting that was setting up its first adult religious education program. When it came time to figure out the format, a weighty Friend declared that it couldn’t take place on the first Sunday of the month because that was when the finance committee met; the second Sunday was out because of the membership care committee; the third was out because of business meeting and so forth. It turned out that religious education could be squeezed into one 45-minute slot on the fourth Sunday of every month. Here was a small struggling meeting in the middle of an sympathetic urban neighborhood and they couldn’t spare even an hour a month on religious education or substantive outreach to new members. Modern Friends should not exist to meet in committees.
A renewal of discipline and oversight
These are taboo words for many modern Friends. But we’ve taken open-hearted tolerance so far that we’ve forgotten who we are. What does it mean to be a Quaker? Seekers are looking for answers. Friends have been able to provide them with answers in the past: both ways to conduct oneself in the world and ways to reach the divine. Many of us actually yearn for more care, attention and oversight in our religious lives and more connection with others.
A confrontation of our ethnic and cultural bigotries
Too much of Quaker culture is still rooted in elitist wealthy Philadelphia Main Line “Wasp” culture. For generations of Friends, the Society became an ethnic group you were born into. Too many Friends still care if your name is “Roberts,” “Jones,” “Lippencott,” “Thomas,” “Brinton.” A number of nineteenth-century Quaker leaders tried to make this a religion of family fiefdoms. There was a love of the world and an urge for to be respected by the outside world (the Episcopalians wouldn’t let you into the country clubs if you wore plain dress or got too excited about religion).
Today we too often confuse the culture of those families with Quakerism. The most obvious example to me is the oft-repeated phrase: “Friends don’t believe in proselytizing.” Wrong: we started off as great speakers of the Truth, gaining numbers in great quantities. It was the old Quaker families who started fretting about new blood in the Society, for they saw birthright membership as more important than baptism by the Holy Spirit. We’ve got a lot of baggage left over from this era, things we need to re-examine, including: our willingness to sacrifice Truth-telling in the name of politeness; an over-developed intellectualism that has become snobbery against those without advanced schooling; our taboo about being too loud or too “ethnic” in Meeting.
Note that I haven’t specifically mentioned racial diversity. This is a piece of the work we need to do and I’m happy that many Friends are working on it. But I think we’ll all agree that it will take more than a few African Americans with graduate degrees to bring true diversity. The Liberal branch of Friends spends a lot of time congratulating itself on being open, tolerant and self-examining and yet as far as I can tell we’re the least ethnically-diverse branch of American Quakers (I’m pretty sure, anyone with corroboration?). We need to re-examine and challenge the unwritten norms of Quaker culture that don’t arise from faith. When we have something to offer besides upper-class liberalism, we’ll find we can talk to a much wider selection of seekers.
Can we do it?
Can we do these re-examinations without ripping our Society apart? I don’t know. I don’t think the age of Quaker schisms is over, I just think we have a different discipline and church polity that let us pretend the splits aren’t there. We just self-select ourselves into different sub-groups. I’m not sure if this can continue indefinitely. Every week our Meetings for Worship bring together people of radically different beliefs and non-beliefs. Instead of worship, we have individual meditation in a group setting, where everyone is free to believe what they want to believe. This isn’t Friends’ style and it’s not satisfying to many of us. I know this statement may seem like sacrilege to many Friends who value tolerance above all. But I don’t think I’m the only one who would rather worship God than Silence, who longs for a deeper religious fellowship than that found in most contemporary Meetings. Quakerism will change and Modernism isn’t the end of history.
How open will we all be to this process? How honest will we get? Where will our Society end up? We’re not the only religion in America that is facing these questions.
Traditional | Pragmatic | Younger | |
Theological | Christianity as a rational worldview | Christianity as therapy Answers needs | Christianity as a community of faith. Ancient/Reformation |
| Apologetics Style | Evidential Foundational | Christianity as meaning-giver Experiential Personal Faith | Embrace the metanarrative Embodied apologetic Communal faith |
| Ecclesial Paradigm | Constantinian Church Civil Religion | Culturally sensitive church Market Driven | Missional Church Counter cultural |
| Church Style | Neighbourhood churches Rural | Megachuruch Suburban Market targeted | Small Church Back to cities Intercultural |
| Leadership Style | Pastor centred | Managerial Model CEO | Team ministry Priesthood of all |
| Youth Ministry | Church-centred programs | Outreach Programs Weekend fun retreats | Prayer, Bible Study, Worship, Social Action |
| Education | Sunday School Information centred | Target generational groups and needs | Intergenerational formation in community |
| Spirituality | Keep the rules | Prosperity and success | Authentic embodiment |
| Worship | Traditional | Contemporary | Convergence |
| Art | Restrained | Art as illustration | Incarnational embodiment |
| Evangelism | Mass evangelism | Seeker Service | Process evangelism |
| Activists | Beginnings of evangelical social action | Need-driving social action (divorce groups, drug rehab | Rebuild cities and neighborhoods |
See also:
On Quaker Ranter:
- It Will Be There in Decline Our Entire Lives. There’s a generation of young Christians disillusioned by modern church institutionalism who are writing and blogging under the “post-modern” “emergent church” labels. Do Friends have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism?
- Post-Liberals & Post-Evangelicals?, my observations from the November 2003 “Indie Allies” meet-up.
- Sodium-Free Friends, a post of mine urging Friends to actively engage with our tradition and not just selectively edit out a few words which makes Fox sound like a seventeen century Thich Nhat Hanh. “We poor humans are looking for ways to transcend the crappiness of our war- and consumer-obsessed world and Quakerism has something to say about that.”
- Peace and Twenty-Somethings: are the Emergent Church seekers creating the kinds of youth-led intentional communities that the peace movement inspired in the 1970s?
Elsewhere:
- From Evangelical Friends Church Southwest comes an emergent church” church planting project called Simple Churches (since laid down, link is to archive). I love their intro: “As your peruse the links from this site please recognize that the Truth reflected in essays are often written with a ‘prophetic edge’, that is sharp, non compromising and sometimes radical perspective. We believe Truth can be received without ‘cursing the darkness’ and encourage you to reflect upon finding the ‘candle’ to light, personally, as you apply what you hear the Lord speaking to you.”
- The emergent church movement hit the New York Times in February 2004. Here’s a link to the article and my thoughts about it.
- “Orthodox Twenty-Somethings,” a great article from TheOoze (now lost to a site redesign of theirs), and my intro to the article Want to understand us?
- The blogger Punkmonkey talks about what a missional community of faith would look like and it sounds a lot like what I dream of: “a missional community of faith is a living breathing transparent community of faith willing to get messy while reach out to, and bringing in, those outside the current community.”