My wife Julie heard that the Rowan University geography club was having an open hike at one of our favorite local spots, historic Batsto Village. Our kids are all geography nerds and we’ve been wondering if our 12yo Theo in particular might be interested in a geography degree come college so we came along. It was a grey, bleak, late winter day largely void of color so I leeched what tiny bits of green and red that remained to take black and white shots.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ local
Crows Woods in Haddonfield NJ
May 31, 2015
The blogger behind South Jersey Trails organized a “dads’ hike” today in a small preserve along the upper reaches of the Cooper River.
The preserve is remarkably interesting despite its relatively small size and positioning between soccer fields and train lines. There’s lots of hills ands wetlands. We saw two turtles fighting and a snake of some sort swirling around an eddy in brackish iron-filled bog water. There was a lot of flowering mountain laurel, one of my favorite woodland flowers.
Many local trails in deep woods are on land that has seen waves of development over the past two hundred years but a check of the 1930 New Jersey aerial survey shows that this same patch was deep woods then.
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What Do You Teach the Kids, Nones?
March 18, 2015
From Religion in the News, an interesting study on what “spiritual but not religious” parents (the “nones”) are looking for:
Many of [the nones] are nonetheless reluctant to impose their skepticism on their children, and will often outsource religious education by sending their children to a Protestant Sunday school or Catholic CCD or Jewish Hebrew School. But while, like other Americans, Nones “agree that everybody should be able to choose,” Manning said, “Nones won’t allow children to choose just anything.”
What I find interesting is parents’ willingness to outsource religious education to local institutions that have stronger beliefs that they themselves do — as long as the school program is relatively non-judgemental.
This actually rings true for me personally. Although I’m Quaker and my wife Catholic, the most regular outside-the-home religious ed my kids get is from the Presbyterian Sunday School in our town. We’ve picked it because it’s hyper-local, the teachers are nice and down to earth, and — well, they only focus on cross-denominational Bible stories and crafts.
In the Philadelphia area, Quaker schools are known as the go-to place for parents that want (and can afford) a progressive, ethical education that has a spiritual component but isn’t religious. If “nones” are looking for safe religious education on Sunday morning, it seems like it would be theoretically possible to extend that known “Quaker school” brand and reputation over to our First-day schools. It would be a tremenous outreach tool.
Alas, this is just idle speculation. I don’t see many local meetings that are able (willing?) to take on a big project like this. Some meetings would get consumed over internal disagreements on what to even teach. And then, well, I wonder if we have a deep enough bench of experience. A few years ago Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s sessions overlapped with the Vacation Bible School at my local Presbyterian church. This is one small church in one small town and yet their VBS attendance was not that much less than the elementary/middle-school youth program at PhYM sessions. It was sobering to realize just how small we Friends sometimes are.
Expanding our concepts of pacifism
October 17, 2013
My blogging pal Wess Daniels wrote a provocative piece this week called When Peace Preserves Violence. It’s a great read and blows some much-needed holes in the self-satisfaction so many of us carry with us. But I’d argue that there’s a part two needed that does a side-step back to the source…
Eric Moon wrote something that’s stuck with me in his June/July Friends Journal piece, “Categorically Not the Testimonies.” His article focuses on the way we’ve so codified the “Quaker Testimonies” that they’ve become ossified and taken for granted. One danger he sees in this is that we’ll not recognize clear leadings of conscience that don’t fit the modern-day mold.
Moon tells the anecdote of a Friend who “guiltily lament[ed] that he couldn’t attend protest marches because he was busy all day at a center for teens at risk for dropping out of school, a program he had established and invested his own savings in.” Here was a Friend doing real one-on-one work changing lives but feeling guilty because he couldn’t participate in the largely-symbolic act of standing on a street corner.
I don’t think that we need to give up the peace testimony to acknowledge the entanglement of our lives and the hypocrisy that lies all-too-shallowly below the surface of most of our lifestyles. What we need to do is rethink its boundaries.
A model for this is our much-quoted but much-ignored “Quaker saint” John Woolman. While a sense of the equality of humans is there in his journal as a source of his compassion, much of his argumentation against slavery is based in Friends by-then well-established testimony against war (yes, against war, not for peace). Slavery is indeed a state of war and it is on so many levels – from the individuals treating each other horribly, to societal norms constructed to make this seem normal, to the economies of nation states built on the trade.
Woolman’s conceptual leap was to say that the peace testimony applied to slavery. If we as Friends don’t participate in war, then we similarly can’t participate in the slave trade or enjoy the ill-gotten fruits of that trade – the war profit of cottons, dyes, rum, etc.
Today, what else is war? I think we have it harder than Woolman. In the seventeenth century a high percentage of one’s consumables came from a tight geographic radius. You were likely to know the labor that produced it. Now almost nothing comes locally. If it’s cheaper to grow garlic in China and ship it halfway around the world than it is to pay local farmers, then our local grocer will sell Chinese garlic (mine does). Books and magazines are supplanted by electronics built in locked-down Far Eastern sweatshops.
But I think we can find ways to disengage. It’s a never-ending process but we can take steps and support others taking steps. We’ve gotten it stuck in our imagination that war is a protest sign outside Dunkin Donuts. What about those tutoring programs? What about reducing our clothing consumptions and finding ways to reduce natural resource consumption (best done by limiting ourselves to lifestyles that cause us to need less resources).
And Yoder? Wess is disheartened by the sexual misconduct of Mennonite pacifist John Howard Yoder (short story: he regularly groped and sexually pressured women). But what of him? Of course he’s a failure. In a way, that’s the point, even the plan: human heroes will fail us. Cocks will crow and will we stay silent (why the denomination kept it hush-hush for 15 years after his death is another whole WTF, of course). But why do I call it the plan? Because we need to be taught to rely first and second and always on the Spirit of Jesus. George Fox figured that out:
And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do; then, oh! then I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’: and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. …and this I knew experimentally. My desires after the Lord grew stronger, and zeal in the pure knowledge of God, and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing.
If young Fox had found a human hero that actually walked the talk, he might have short-circuited the search for Jesus. He needed to experience the disheartened failure of human knowledge to be low enough to be ready for his great spiritual opening.
We all use identity to prop ourselves up and isolate ourselves from critique. I think that’s just part of the human condition. The path toward the divine is not one of retrenchment or disavowal, but rather focus on that one who might even now be preparing us for new light on the conditions of the human condition and church universal.
The Biggest Most Vibranty Most Outreachiest Program Ever
September 21, 2010
In my twenty-plus years with Friends, I’ve seen Big Outreach Projects come and go. I’m afraid I can’t even remember most of the Great Names they had. Is there a repository for their Bold Mission Statements? Videos from their Important Conferences? You’d think with all this talk of Community and Vibrance and Roots and Newness that the Society of Friends would be busting out at the seams. Well, I thought I’d get into the act, throw my hat in the ring if you will and give you the Biggest Newiest Outreachiest Program Ever:
When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch.
I’ll leave the details up to you. Your place, a local restaurant, sandwiches at the meetinghouse, doesn’t matter. Total newcomer, someone from another meeting, a old regular who hasn’t shown up in awhile, doesn’t matter. When someone you didn’t expect shows up for worship on First Day Morning, say hi and invite them to a meal. What’s that? You missed it?
When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch.
I warn you, you might be venturing into Quaker Uncomfort Zones:
- You’ll have to talk with someone you didn’t meet decades ago (GASP!)
- You’ll have to practice clearly talking about your faith, not just the how’s and the who’s but the why’s (AHHHH!)
- You’ll have learn what the current generation of seekers are actually seeking (UH-OH!)
Now I realize this proposal is HERESY! It’s a complete violation of QUAKER PRINCIPLES! Cost of the program: nothing. Number of committees needed to oversee it: zero. Mission statement: twelve words, already written (Review with me: “When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch“). Planning consultations: none. Amount of airfare transporting Important Friends hither and yon: zero. Presentations at yearly meetings: none. Staff support: none. Grant proposals: none. Oh but don’t get me wrong, THERE ARE HUGE COSTS! You might have to schedule that committee meeting for another day!!! You might have to have that Important Conversation with a fellow committee member by PHONE later in the afternoon!!! You might have one hour less on First Day for all of the Critically Important Things You Have to Do. Your Facebook friends won’t be particularly impressed when you update to say you had lunch with someone they’ve NEVER EVEN HEARD OF!
Random capitalization aside for a moment, I realize that there are Friends with a gift of hospitality. And some of us can come out of our shells if we make a bit of effort (it’s not the most natural thing for me either). I’ve seen a few meetings and yearly meetings that seem to have a talent for hospitality so I know it’s possible. But I visit a lot of meetings these days and have to report that I rarely have the opportunity for more than ten minutes of idle chit-chat after worship before everyone’s jumped in their cars. I’ve seen Friends so involved with committee-work that they don’t notice new people or notice when regulars stop coming. Newcomers typically look around with a mix of hopefulness and anxiety at the rise of worship. Handshakes and introductions are helpful; welcome tables, brochure racks and name tags are all very good. But depending on personality, shy visitors will only stick around for a few minutes if no one engages them any further. Like all of us, they’re looking for a personal connection and want more than just a few questions answered Wikipedia-style. Not everyone will take us up on our offer of lunch but they’ll remember we offered and will be that much more likely to return a second time.
So, one more time, in case missed it, the most outreachiest program ever:
When a newcomer shows up at meeting, invite them out for lunch.
Now go off and outreach. I hear the blueberry waffles down the street are really yummy.
Cornerstone Fellowship
July 28, 2009
Cornerstone is a relatively new church plant in Smithville, Atlantic County, New Jersey. They’re site is a simple design built in Movable Type using off-the-shelf templates to keep the budget down. The most exciting part of the site is the podcast sermons and the ability to ask Bible questions and make prayer requests from the homepage. I’m most happy to see the church using the site and updating it regularly!
Pastor Fred Schwenger also has a new local connection: he and a partner have just opened Superior Automotive here in Hammonton at 880 S White Horse Pike!
Conflict in meeting and the role of heartbreak and testing
September 16, 2008
A few weeks ago a newsletter brought written reports about the latest round of conflict at a local meeting that’s been fighting for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit underwhelmed by the accounts of the newest conflict resolution attempts. The mediators seemed more worried about alienating a few long-term disruptive characters than about preserving the spiritual vitality of the meeting. It’s a phenomena I’ve seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.
Call it the FDR Principle after Franklin D Roosevelt, who supposedly defended his support of one of Nicaragua’s most brutal dictators by saying “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Even casual historians of Latin American history will know this only led to fifty years of wars with reverberations across the world with the Iran/Contra scandal. The FDR Principle didn’t make for good U.S. foreign policy and, if I may, I’d suggest it doesn’t make for good Quaker policy either. Any discussion board moderator or popular blogger knows that to keep an online discussion’s integrity you need to know when to cut a disruptive trouble-maker off – politely and succintly, but also firmly. If you don’t, the people there to actually discuss your issues – the people you want – will leave.
I didn’t know how to talk about this until a post called Conflict in Meeting came through Livejournal this past First Day. The poster, jandrewm, wrote in part:
Yet my recognition of all that doesn’t negate the painful feelings that arise when hostility enters the meeting room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spoken. After a few months of regular attendance at my meeting, I came close to abandoning this “experiment” with Quakerism because some Friends were so consistently rancorous, divisive, disruptive. I had to ask myself: “Do I need this negativity in my life right now?”
I commented about the need to take the testimonies seriously:
I’ve been in that situation. A lot of Friends aren’t very good at putting their foot down on flagrantly disruptive behavior. I wish I could buy the “it eventually sorts out” argument but it often doesn’t. I’ve seen meetings where all the sane people are driven out, leaving the disruptive folks and armchair therapists. It’s a symbiotic relationship, perhaps, but doesn’t make for a healthy spiritual community.
The unpopular solution is for us to take our testimonies seriously. And I mean those more specific testimonies buried deep in copies in Faith & Practice that act as a kind of collective wisdom for Quaker community life. Testimonies against detraction and for rightly ordered decision making, etc. If someone’s actions tear apart the meeting they should be counseled; if they continue to disrupt then their decision-making input should be disregarded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of disowning (which allowed continued attendance at worship and life in the community but stopped business participation). Limiting input like this makes sense to me.
The trouble that if your meeting is in this kind of spiral there might not be much you can do by yourself. People take some sort of weird comfort in these predictable fights and if you start talking testimonies you might become very unpopular very quickly. Participating in the bickering isn’t helpful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Distancing yourself for a time might be helpful. Getting involved in other Quaker venues. It’s a shame. Monthly meeting is supposed to be the center of our Quaker spiritual life. But sometimes it can’t be. I try to draw lessons from these circumstances. I certainly understand the value and need for the Quaker testimonies better simply because I’ve seen the problems meetings face when they haven’t. But that doesn’t make it any easier for you.
But all of this begs an awkward question: are we really building Christ’s kingdom by dropping out? It’s an age-old tension between purity and participation at all costs. Timothy asked a similar question of me in a comment to my last post. Before we answer, we should recognize that there are indeed many people who have “abandoned” their “Quaker experiment” because we’re not living up to our own ideals.
Maybe I’m more aware of this drop-out class than others. It sometimes seems like an email correspondence with the “Quaker Ranter” has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get messages from seekers newly convinced of Quaker principles but unable to connect locally because of the divergent practices or juvenile behavior of their local Friends meeting or church. A typical email last week asked me why the plain Quakers weren’t evangelical and why evangelical Quakers weren’t conservative and asked “Is there a place in the quakers for a Plain Dressing, Bible Thumping, Gospel Preaching, Evangelical, Conservative, Spirit Led, Charismatic family?” (Anyone want to suggest their local meeting?)
We should be more worried about the people of integrity we’re losing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embedded in some of our meetings. If someone is consistently disruptive, is clearly breaking specific Quaker testimonies we’ve lumped under community and intergrity, and stubbornly immune to any council then read them out of business meeting. If the people you want in your meeting are leaving because of the people you really don’t want, then it’s time to do something. Our Quaker toolbox provides us tool for that action – ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tradition gives us access to hundreds of years of experience, both mistakes and successes, and can be a more useful guide than contemporary pop psychology or plain old head-burying.
Not all meetings have these problems. But enough do that we’re losing people. And the dynamics get more acute when there’s a visionary project on the table and/or someone younger is at the center of them. While our meetings sort out their issues, the internet is providing one type of support lifeline.
Blogger jandrewm was able to seek advice and consolation on Livejournal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 “Lost Quaker Generation” series of posts are now lurking away on my Facebook friends list. Maybe we can stop the full departure of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engaging their local meeting. They can be reading and discussing testimonies (“detraction” is a wonderful place to start) so they can spot and explain behavior. We can use the web to coordinate workshops, online discussions, local meet-ups, new workship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thousands of miles away can help give us clarity and strength.
I think (I hope) we’re helping to forge a group of Friends with a clear understanding of the work to be done and the techniques of Quaker discernment. It’s no wonder that Quaker bodies sometimes fail to live up to their ideals: the journals of olde tyme Quaker ministers are full of disappointing stories and Christian tradition is rich with tales of the roadblocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to center in the Lord when our meetings become too political or disfunctional (I think I should start looking harder at Anabaptist non-resistance theory). This is the work, Friends, and it’s always been the work. Through whatever comes we need to trust that any testing and heartbreak has a purpose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suffering will be productive to His purpose if we can keep low and listening for follow-up instructions.
The Not-Quite-So Young Quakers
September 14, 2008
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.
My post, originally titled “The Younger Evangelicals and the Younger Quakers,” (here it is in its original context) started off as a book review but quickly became a Quaker vision manifesto. The section heads alone ticked off the work to be done:
- 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!