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North American Quaker statistics 1937 – 2017

September 17, 2018
· Martin Kelley

These are num­bers of Friends in Cana­da and the Unit­ed States (includ­ing Alas­ka, which was tal­lied sep­a­rate­ly pri­or to state­hood) com­piled from Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion. I dug up these num­bers from three sources:

  • 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quak­ers World Wide: A His­to­ry of FWCC by Her­bert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWC­C’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the rel­e­vant chart).
  • 1972, 1992 from Earl­ham School of Reli­gion’s The Present State of Quak­erism, 1995, archived here.
  • 2002 on from FWCC direct­ly. Note: Cur­rent 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

  • 1937: 114,924
  • 1957: 122,663
  • 1967: 122,780
  • 1972: 121,380
  • 1977: 119,160
  • 1987: 109,732
  • 1992: 101,255
  • 2002: 92,786
  • 2012: 77,660
  • 2017: 81,392

Friends in Amer­i­c­as (North, Mid­dle South):

  • 1937: 122,166
  • 1957: 131,000
  • 1967: 129,200
  • 1977: 132,300
  • 1987: 139,200
  • 2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these num­bers do and don’t mean. The most glar­ing omis­sion is that they don’t show the geo­graph­ic or the­o­log­i­cal shifts that took place over time. Mid­west­ern Friends have tak­en a dis­pro­por­tion­ate hit, for exam­ple, and many Philadelphia-area meet­ings are much small­er than they were a cen­tu­ry ago, while inde­pen­dent meet­ings in the West and/or adja­cent to col­leges grew like wild­flow­ers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reuni­fi­ca­tion work of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry gave Quak­ers a sol­id iden­ti­ty and coher­ent struc­ture. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remark­ably con­fi­dent doc­u­ment. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry reli­gious move­ment that was attrac­tive to peo­ple tired of more creedal for­mu­la­tions; mixed-religious par­ents came look­ing for First-day school com­mu­ni­ty for their chil­dren. Quak­ers’ social jus­tice work was very vis­i­ble and attract­ed a num­ber of new peo­ple dur­ing the anti­war 1960s1 and the alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ty groundswell of the 1970s. These var­i­ous new­com­ers off­set the decline of what we might call “eth­nic” Friends in rur­al meet­ings through this period.

That mag­ic bal­ance of Quak­er cul­ture match­ing the zeit­geist of reli­gious seek­ers dis­ap­peared some­where back in the 1980s. We aren’t on fore­front of any cur­rent spir­i­tu­al trends. While there are bright spots and excep­tions 2, we’ve large­ly strug­gled with retain­ing new­com­ers in recent years. We’re los­ing our elders more quick­ly than we’re bring­ing in new peo­ple, hence the forty per­cent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign3 or it may be a sta­tis­ti­cal phan­tom.4 I’ll be curi­ous to see what the next cen­sus brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some num­bers in my orig­i­nal 2018 post and have cor­rect­ed them above.

Peterson Toscano is a reluctant minister

July 12, 2018
· Martin Kelley

This week’s fea­tured arti­cle over at Friends Jour­nal is Peter­son Toscano’s “A Reluc­tant Min­is­ter.”

Satire and irony, espe­cial­ly when it is sub­tle, done in char­ac­ter, or relies on tone can be mis­un­der­stood when tak­en lit­er­al­ly. Friends can get so caught up in the words that we miss the point. It is nev­er fun explain­ing a joke to a Friend, but even that inter­ac­tion is part of the work of pre­sent­ing per­for­mance art for Quak­ers. We are com­mit­ted to fair­ness and love. Com­e­dy can be used to hurt oth­ers or to make light of seri­ous issues. Unpack­ing a joke can lead to rich dis­cus­sion. I seek to use com­e­dy to shed light on impor­tant issues. Still, some Friends pre­fer the straight­for­ward mes­sage over the com­ic performance. 

I real­ly appre­ci­ate the care and hon­esty that Peter­son has put into defin­ing his work. It would be so easy for him to label his per­for­mance art as min­istry and wear it as a cloak of respectabil­i­ty. Much of his work does indeed act as min­istry and he uses a clear­ness com­mit­tee as a Quak­er dis­cern­ment tool. But he wants to keep a space open for what you might call artis­tic con­fu­sion and so describes him­self as a “the­atri­cal per­for­mance activist.”

When the pen­du­lum began trend toward re-embracing the ideas of min­istry with­in Lib­er­al Quak­erism some years back, many forms of pub­lic work start­ed being labeled min­istry. It might be a sign of the incom­plete­ness of our follow-through that few of the peo­ple com­ing for­ward with min­istries felt com­fort­able call­ing them­selves min­is­ters. I like the idea of keep­ing middle-ground spaces that we don’t try to arti­fi­cial­ly kludge into clas­sic Quak­er models. 


A Reluctant Minister

A Reluc­tant Minister 

Reflec­tions on per­for­mance art among Friends.

Friends Journal Friends Journal 

The birth of soul

March 4, 2016
· Martin Kelley
Via Wikipedia
Via Wikipedia

I recent­ly lis­tened to Solomon Burke’s 196 album Rock ‘n’ Soul. Def­i­nite­ly worth a lis­ten if like me he’s been off your musi­cal radar. I espe­cial­ly like Wikipedi­a’s account of how con­flicts over brand­ing and church pro­pri­ety led Burke and his record label Atlantic to coin the term “soul music.”

Almost imme­di­ate­ly after sign­ing to Atlantic, Wexler and Burke clashed over his brand­ing and the songs that he would record. Accord­ing to Burke, “Their idea was, we have anoth­er young kid to sing gospel, and we’re going to put him in the blues bag.“As Burke had strug­gled from an ear­ly age with “his attrac­tion to sec­u­lar music on the one hand and his alle­giance to the church on the oth­er,” when he was signed to Atlantic Records he “refused to be clas­si­fied as a rhythm-and-blues singer” due to a per­ceived “stig­ma of pro­fan­i­ty” by the church, and R&B’s rep­u­ta­tion as “the dev­il’s music.”

Burke indi­cat­ed in 2005: “I told them about my spir­i­tu­al back­ground, and what I felt was nec­es­sary, and that I was con­cerned about being labeled rhythm & blues. What kind of songs would they be giv­ing me to sing? Because of my age, and my posi­tion in the church, I was con­cerned about say­ing things that were not prop­er, or that sent the wrong mes­sage. That angered Jer­ry Wexler a lit­tle bit. He said, ‘We’re the great­est blues label in the world! You should be hon­ored to be on this label, and we’ll do every­thing we can – but you have to work with us.’”

To mol­li­fy Burke, it was decid­ed to mar­ket him as a singer of “soul music” after he had con­sult­ed his church brethren and won approval for the term. When a Philadel­phia DJ said to Burke, “You’re singing from your soul and you don’t want to be an R&B singer, so what kind of singer are you going to be?”, Burke shot back: “I want to be a soul singer.” Burke’s sound, which was espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the South, was described there as “riv­er deep coun­try fried but­ter­cream soul.” Burke is cred­it­ed with coin­ing the term “soul music,” which he con­firmed in a 1996 interview.

Convergent Friends, a long definition

July 25, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Robin M posts this week about two Con­ver­gent Events hap­pen­ing in Cal­i­for­nia in the next month or two. And she also tries out a sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion of Con­ver­gent Friends:

peo­ple who are engaged in the renew­al move­ment with­in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, across all the branch­es of Friends.

It sounds good but what does it mean? Specif­i­cal­ly: who isn’t for renew­al, at least on a the­o­ret­i­cal lev­el? There are lots of faith­ful, smart and lov­ing Friends out there advo­cat­ing renew­al who don’t fit my def­i­n­i­tion of Con­ver­gent (which is fine, I don’t think the whole RSoF should be Con­ver­gent, it’s a move­ment in the riv­er, not a dam).

When Robin coined the term at the start of 2006 it seemed to refer to gen­er­al trends in the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends and the larg­er Chris­t­ian world, but it was also refer­ring to a spe­cif­ic (online) com­mu­ni­ty that had had a year or two of con­ver­sa­tion to shape itself and mod­el trust and account­abil­i­ty. Most impor­tant­ly we each were going out of our way to engage with Friends from oth­er Quak­er tra­di­tions and were each called on our own cul­tur­al assumptions.
The coined term implied an expe­ri­ence of sort. “Con­ver­gent” explic­it­ly ref­er­ences Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends (“Con-”) and the Emer­gent Church move­ment (“-ver­gent”). It seems to me like one needs to look at those two phe­nom­e­non and their rela­tion to one’s own under­stand­ing and expe­ri­ence of Quak­er life and com­mu­ni­ty before real­ly under­stand­ing what all the fuss has been about. That’s hap­pen­ing lots of places and it is not sim­ply a blog phenomenon.

Nowa­days I’m notic­ing a lot of Friends declar­ing them­selves Con­ver­gent after read­ing a blog post or two or attend­ing a work­shop. It’s becom­ing the term du jour for Friends who want to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves from business-as-usual, Quakerism-as-usual. This fits Robin’s sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion. But if that’s all it is and it becomes all-inclusive for inclu­siv­i­ty’s sake, then “Con­ver­gent” will drift away away from the roots of the con­ver­sa­tion that spawned it and turn into anoth­er buzz­word for “lib­er­al Quak­er.” This is start­ing to happen.

The term “Con­ver­gent Friends” is being picked up by Friends out­side the dozen or two blogs that spawned it and mov­ing into the wild – that’s great, but also means it’s def­i­n­i­tion is becom­ing a mov­ing tar­get. Peo­ple are grab­bing onto it to sum up their dreams, visions and frus­tra­tions but we’re almost cer­tain­ly not mean­ing the same thing by it. “Con­ver­gent Friends” implies that we’ve all arrived some­where togeth­er. I’ve often won­dered whether we should­n’t be talk­ing about “Con­verg­ing Friends,” a term that implies a par­al­lel set of move­ments and puts the rather impor­tant ele­phant square on the table: con­verg­ing toward what? What we mean by con­ver­gence depends on our start­ing point. My attempt at a label was the rather clunky conservative-leaning lib­er­al Friend, which is prob­a­bly what most of us in the lib­er­al Quak­er tra­di­tion are mean­ing by “Con­ver­gent.”

I start­ed map­ping out a lib­er­al plan for Con­ver­gent Friends a cou­ple of years before the term was coined and it still sum­ma­rizes many of my hopes and con­cerns. The only thing I might add now is a para­graph about how we’ll have to work both inside and out­side of nor­mal Quak­er chan­nels to effect this change (Johan Mau­r­er recent­ly wrote an inter­est­ing post that includ­ed the won­der­ful descrip­tion of “the love­ly sub­ver­sives who ignore struc­tures and com­mu­ni­cate on a pure­ly per­son­al basis between the camps via blogs, vis­i­ta­tion, and oth­er means” and com­pared us to SCUBA divers (“ScubaQuake​.org” anyone?).

Robin’s inclu­sive def­i­n­i­tion of “renew­al” def­i­nite­ly speaks to some­thing. Infor­mal renew­al net­works are spring­ing up all over North Amer­i­ca. Many branch­es of Friends are involved. There are themes I’m see­ing in lots of these places: a strong youth or next-generation focus; a reliance on the inter­net; a curios­i­ty about “oth­er” Friends tra­di­tions; a desire to get back to roots in the sim­ple min­istry of Jesus. What­ev­er label or labels this new revival might take on is less impor­tant than the Spir­it behind it.

But is every hope for renew­al “Con­ver­gent”? I don’t think so. At the end of the day the path for us is nar­row and is giv­en, not cho­sen. At the end of day — and begin­ning and mid­dle — the work is to fol­low the Holy Spir­it’s guid­ance in “real time.” Def­i­n­i­tions and care­ful­ly select­ed words slough away as mere notions. The newest mes­sage is just the old­est mes­sage repack­aged. Let’s not get too caught up in our own hip verbage, lec­ture invi­ta­tions and glo­ri­ous atten­tion that we for­get that there there is one, even Christ Jesus who can speak to our con­di­tion, that He Him­self has come to teach, and that our mes­sage is to share the good news he’s giv­en us. The Tempter is ready to dis­tract us, to puff us up so we think we are the mes­sage, that we own the mes­sage, or that the mes­sage depends on our flow­ery words deliv­ered from podi­ums. We must stay on guard, hum­bled, low and pray­ing to be kept from the temp­ta­tions that sur­round even the most well-meaning renew­al attempts. It is our faith­ful­ness to the free gospel min­istry that will ulti­mate­ly deter­mine the fate of our work.