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Listening in on our Quaker conversations

May 28, 2015
· Martin Kelley

On Twit­ter ear­li­er today, Jay T asked “Did­n’t u or some­one once write about how Q’s behave on blogs & oth­er soc. media? Can’t find it on Qran­ter or via Google. Thx!” Jay sub­se­quent­ly found a great piece from Robin Mohr cir­ca 2008 but I kept remem­ber­ing an descrip­tion of blog­ging I had writ­ten in the ear­li­est days of the blo­gos­phere. It did­n’t show up on my blog or via a Google search and then I hit up the won­der­ful Inter­net Archive​.org Way­back Machine. The orig­i­nal two para­graph descrip­tion of Quak­erQuak­er is not eas­i­ly acces­si­ble out­side of Archive​.org but it’s nice to uncov­er it again and give it a lit­tle sunlight:

Quak­erism is an expe­ri­en­tial reli­gion: we believe we should “let our lives speak” and we stay away from creeds and doc­tri­nal state­ments. The best way to learn what Quak­ers believe is through lis­ten­ing in on our conversations.

In the last few years, dozens of Quak­ers have begun shar­ing sto­ries, frus­tra­tions, hopes and dreams for our reli­gious soci­ety through blogs. The con­ver­sa­tions have been amaz­ing. There’s a pal­pa­ble sense of renew­al and excite­ment. Quak­erQuak­er is a dai­ly index to that conversation.

I still like it as a dis­tinct­ly Quak­er phi­los­o­phy of outreach.

Share my offendedness (pleeeaaase)

June 20, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Some­times I see blog posts that make me real­ly sad at the state of jour­nal­ism. Phi­ly­Mag is the lat­est but you have the fol­low the daisy-chain of ramped-up hyper­bole back just to make see how ridicu­lous it is.

The restau­rant chain Red Robin recent­ly made a fifteen-second TV ad whose joke is that its veggie-burgers are per­fect for cus­tomers whose teenage daugh­ters are “going through a phase.” It’s had rather lim­it­ed air­play (it’s the 450th or so most run ad in the past 30 days) but still, Busi­ness Insid­er ran a piece on it which claimed that “the chain man­aged to insult all poten­tial veg­e­tar­i­an and veg­an cus­tomers” with the ad. For evi­dence, it cit­ed three mild com­ments on Red Robin’s Face­book page. Fair enough.

But then the page-view-whores at Huff­in­g­ton Post saw the BI piece and wrote that Red Robin is “under fire for diss­ing veg­e­tar­i­ans,” still cit­ing just those Face­book com­ments. Under fire? For three comments?

Sens­ing fresh (veg­gie?) meat, Philly­mag links to Huff­Post to claim that ”veg­e­tar­i­ans and veg­ans far and wide are freak­ing out” and that a boy­cott has been declared. The author tells us that “‘Offend­ed’ gets tossed around so rapid­ly” and it must be true, right?, as she uses it three more times just in her open­ing para­graph. It’s a pity that none of the three Face­book com­menters were con­sid­er­ate enough to actu­al­ly use the words “out­rage” or “boy­cott.” One described the ad as “dis­ap­point­ing” (ouch!). Anoth­er used the word “dis­sat­is­fied” (zing!), though he was speak­ing not about the ad per se but rather a recent vis­it to the restaurant.

Seems like if there is an epi­dem­ic of offended-ness going on, we might take a look at the des­per­a­tion of what pass­es for mod­ern jour­nal­ism these days. Offended-ness must get page views, so why not be offend­ed at being offend­ed? (I imag­ine some hack fur­ther down the pageview food chain is right now read­ing the Philly­mag piece and typ­ing out a head­line about the world­wide veg­an army issu­ing a fat­wa on the teenage daugh­ters of Red Roof exec­u­tives.) Is this real­ly the kind of crap that peo­ple like to share on Face­book? Do Inter­net users just not fol­low links back­ward to judge if there’s any truth to out­rage posts on out­rage? I usu­al­ly ignore this kind of junk even to read past the ridicu­lous head­line. But the phe­nom­e­non is all too ubiq­ui­tous on the inter­webs these days and is real­ly so unnec­es­sar­i­ly divi­sive and stereotype-perpetuating.

Invisible Quaker Misfits

October 21, 2008
· Martin Kelley

This week I received an email from a young seek­er in the Philadel­phia area who found my 2005 arti­cle “Wit­ness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings” pub­lished in FGCon­nec­tions. She’s a for­mer youth min­istries leader from a Pen­te­costal tra­di­tion, strong­ly attract­ed to Friends beliefs but not quite fit­ting in with the local meet­ings she’s been try­ing. Some­where she found my arti­cle and asks if I have any insights. 

The 2005 arti­cle was large­ly pes­simistic, focused on the “com­mit­ted, inter­est­ing and bold twenty-something Friends
I knew ten years ago” who had left Friends and blam­ing “an insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism that neglect­ed them and
its own future” but my hope para­graph was optimistic:

There is hope… A great peo­ple might pos­si­bly be gath­ered from
the emer­gent church move­ment and the inter­net is full of amaz­ing conversations
from new Friends and seek­ers. There are pock­ets in our branch of Quakerism
where old­er Friends have con­tin­ued to men­tor and encour­age mean­ing­ful and
inte­grat­ed youth lead­er­ship, and some of my peers have hung on with me. Most
hope­ful­ly, there’s a whole new gen­er­a­tion of twenty- some­thing Friends
on the scene with strong gifts that could be nur­tured and harnessed. 

Hard to imag­ine that only three years ago I was an iso­lat­ed FGC staffer left to pur­sue out­reach and youth min­istry work on my own time by an insti­tu­tion indif­fer­ent to either pur­suit. Both func­tions have become major staff pro­grams, but I’m no longer involved, which is prob­a­bly just as well, as nei­ther pro­gram has decid­ed to focus on the kind of work I had hoped it might. The more things change the more they stay the same, right? The most inter­est­ing work is still large­ly invisible. 

Some of this work has been tak­en up by the new blog­gers and by some sort of alt-network that seems to be con­geal­ing around all the blogs, Twit­ter net­works, Face­book friend­ships, inter­vis­i­ta­tions and IM chats. Many of us asso­ci­at­ed with Quak​erQuak​er​.org have some sort of reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dence or par­tic­i­pa­tion with the Emerg­ing Church move­ment, we reg­u­lar­ly high­light “amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tions” from new Friends and seek­ers and there’s a lot of inter-generational work going on. We’ve got a name for it in Con­ver­gent Friends, which reflects in part that “we” aren’t just the lib­er­al Friends I imag­ined in 2005, but a wide swath of Friends from all the Quak­er flavors.

But we end up with a prob­lem that’s become the cen­tral one for me and a lot of oth­ers: what can we tell a new seek­er who should be able to find a home in real-world Friends but does­n’t fit? I could point this week’s cor­re­spon­dent to meet­ings and church­es hun­dreds of miles from her house, or encour­age her to start a blog, or com­pile a list of work­shops or gath­er­ings she might attend. But none of these are real­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry answers. 

Else­where:

Gath­er­ing in Light Wess sent an email around last night about a book review done by his PhD advi­sor Ryan Bol­ger that talks about tribe-style lead­er­ship and a new kind of church iden­ti­ty that uses the instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools of the inter­net to forge a com­mu­ni­ty that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly lim­it­ed to local­i­ty. Bol­ger’s and his research part­ner report that they see “emerg­ing ini­tia­tives with­in tra­di­tion­al church­es as the next
hori­zon for the spread of emerg­ing church prac­tices in the Unit­ed States.” More links from Wess’ arti­cle on emerg­ing church­es and denom­i­na­tions.

Emerging Church Movement hits New York Times

February 18, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Today’s New York Times has an arti­cle called “Hip New Church­es Pray to a Dif­fer­ent Drum­mer” about post­mod­ern and emer­gent church­es. The arti­cle has some good obser­va­tions and inter­views many of the right peo­ple, but the pre­sen­ta­tion is skewed: there on the front cov­er of the print edi­tion are some New Agey hip­sters hold­ing their ears and hearts in some sort of mock-Medieval prayer, sit­ting in big chairs over the head­line about the “dif­fer­ent drum­mer.” Egads.

The pho­to reminds me of my New York Times moment, when the pho­tog­ra­ph­er insist­ed on a few shots of me hold­ing a gui­tar, which made it onto the “Cyber­Times” cov­er, but the para­graph describ­ing the move­ment is a good, con­cise one:

Called “emerg­ing” or “post­mod­ern” church­es, they are diverse in the­ol­o­gy and method, linked loose­ly by Inter­net sites, Web logs, con­fer­ences and a grow­ing stack of hip-looking paper­backs. Some reli­gious his­to­ri­ans believe the church­es rep­re­sent the next wave of evan­gel­i­cal wor­ship, after the boom in megachurch­es in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Still, much of the arti­cle talks about the super­fi­cial stuff, what Jor­dan Coop­er calls the “can­dles and cof­fee” super­fi­cial­i­ty of some of a form-only emer­gent church style. There cer­tain­ly is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Julie read the arti­cle and was real­ly turned off to the dumb side of the emer­gent church:

Hon­ey, I just can’t get with it. I empathize some­what, but I’m a tra­di­tion­al­ist, so I can’t say I don’t take just as much offense at “bor­row­ing” Catholic and Ortho­dox spir­i­tu­al prac­tices as I do at the import­ing of the sweat­lodge ripped off from Native Amer­i­cans. I’m not say­ing that all Emerg­ing Church groups do rip off, they’re try­ing to find some­thing legit­i­mate, I can see that. It’s just that they are set­tling for part of the truth with­out look­ing at the whole pic­ture. Lec­tio Div­ina is part of a larg­er Catholic the­ol­o­gy and real­ly should­n’t be divorced from it, etc. I empathize with the unchurched and the unfriend­li­ness of tra­di­tion­al church­es to the com­plete­ly unchurched. I don’t know what the answer is, but this move­ment just strikes me as bizarre. Of course, again, I’m com­ing from a tra­di­tion­al Catholic per­spec­tive here, so “church” to me means some­thing utter­ly dif­fer­ent than to many, espe­cial­ly the unchurched and evan­gel­i­cals, for exam­ple, who see wor­ship as more open and dynam­ic and involv­ing the heart, not so much about form. I guess in the end, it’s just that some of this Emerg­ing Church stuff is just too “cool.” I’m glad that it puts some peo­ple in touch with God, and that’s a good thing. But church should nev­er be too cool or too com­fy or too sen­ti­men­tal. It should chal­lenge too. What I’d like to hear in one of these arti­cles is how these new forms and this new move­ment actu­al­ly chal­lenge peo­ple to com­mit to Christ and to change their lives. Hmmm.

So true, so true. What I’ve won­dered is whether tra­di­tion­al Quak­erism has a thresh­ing func­tion to offer the emergent-church seek­ers: we have the inti­mate meet­ings (part­ly by design, part­ly because our meet­ings are half-empty), the lan­guage of the direct expe­ri­ence with God, the warn­ing against super­fi­cial­i­ty. I can hear Julie laugh­ing at me say­ing this, as Friends have large­ly lost the abil­i­ty to chal­lenge or artic­u­late our faith, which is the oth­er half of the equa­tion. But I’d like to believe we’re due for some gen­er­a­tional renewals our­selves, which might bring us to the right place at the right time to engage with the emer­gent churchers and once more gath­er a new people.

Visioning the Future of Young Adult Friends (1997)

March 21, 1997
· Martin Kelley

This is a vision­ing essay I wrote in March of 1997, for Friends Insti­tute (FI), the Philadelphia-area Young Adult Friends (YAF, rough­ly 18 – 35 year olds) group I was very involved with at the time. I repost it now because many of these same issues con­tin­u­al­ly come up in Quak­er groups. See the bot­tom for the sto­ry on this essay, includ­ing the con­tro­ver­sy it kicked up.

I think the YAF/FI chal­lenges can be rough­ly divid­ed into three cat­e­gories. They are intro­duced in the next para­graph, then elab­o­rat­ed on in turn. They are:

  • *Account­abil­i­ty*. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and group process with­in YAF/FI has nev­er been very good. We can change that, revi­tal­iz­ing the role of Busi­ness Meet­ing as set­ter of the vision and forum for sub­com­mit­tee feed­back and pol­i­cy setting.
  • *Out­reach*. Who Do We Serve? YAF/FI has done no out­reach to newly-convinced Friends and the plan­ning of events has shown an insen­si­tiv­i­ty to the needs of this group.
  • *Activ­i­ties*. We’ve had a lot of con­fer­ences with mediocre pro­grams that have lit­tle spir­i­tu­al or Quak­er focus. We can set year­ly themes as a group in advance, giv­ing Steer­ing Com­mit­tee guid­ance for par­tic­u­lar programs.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

PYM/FI has not been an orga­ni­za­tion with good com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, group process or account­abil­i­ty. Busi­ness meet­ings have been thought of as a nec­es­sary and begrudged task where half the par­tic­i­pants fall asleep.

Busi­ness Meet­ings should have clear, advance agen­da. The YAF clerk should call for agen­da items by email two weeks before the meet­ing (phon­ing promi­nent mem­bers who don’t have access to email), and send out a draft agen­da the week before. Basic agen­da items should include vari­a­tion on the fol­low­ing (my facil­i­ta­tion expe­ri­ence comes from Quaker-inspired but not Quak­er process, so some of these tasks might need to be turned into Quakerese):

  • silent wor­ship;
  • agen­da review;
  • reports from all sub­com­mit­tees (treasurer’s report, steer­ing com­mit­tee report, dis­tri­b­u­tion com­mit­tee report, email/web report);
  • two sub­stan­tive issues;
  • set­ting next date;
  • eval­u­a­tion of meeting;

All reports should be writ­ten (ide­al­ly dis­trib­uted by email before­hand and with a dozen copies at the meet­ing) and should include activ­i­ty, fis­cal activ­i­ty, pol­i­cy ques­tions need­ing busi­ness meet­ing input, approval of future tasks. Every deci­sion should have spe­cif­ic peo­ple as liaisons for follow-up, and part of the next Busi­ness Meet­ing should be review­ing progress on these tasks.

OUTREACH: WHO DO WE SERVE?

I have a very large con­cern that the offi­cial YAF/FI orga­ni­za­tion does not do exten­sive out­reach and that it hasn’t always been sen­si­tive to the needs of all YAFs.

As a con­vinced Friend who first ven­tured forth to a Quak­er Meet­ing at age 20, I spent years look­ing for YAFs and not find­ing them. The only out­reach that YAF/FI does is to grad­u­at­ing Young Friends (the high school pro­gram). Our out­reach to new­ly con­vince Friends has been nonexistent.

Oth­er under­rep­re­sent­ed YAFs: the Cen­tral Phi­la. MM group, thirty-something YAFs, YAFs of col­or, les/bi/gay YAFs (our Pres­i­dent Day’s gath­er­ing con­flicts with the pop­u­lar mid-winter FLGC gath­er­ing, an unfor­tu­nate mes­sage we’re send­ing), YAFs with children.

Some of the out­reach chal­lenges for YAF/FI include:

  • Cliquish­ness. Many plugged-in YAFs know each oth­er from high school days and it can be intim­i­dat­ing to jump into such a group. There’s also a reluc­tance to review assump­tions brought down from the Young Friends (high school) program;
  • The poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion in YAF/FI keeps many dis­en­fran­chised YAFs from hav­ing a forum in which to express their con­cerns and needs. We can reach out to under-represented YAFs and ask them what a age-fellowship could pro­vide them;
  • Single-type events: the week­end gath­er­ings keep away many YAFs with respon­si­bil­i­ty. The tenor of YAF/FI events often keeps away the more mature YAFs. I doubt one type of event could sat­is­fy all types of YAFs. We should be open to sup­port the lead­er­ship of dis­en­fran­chised YAFs by pro­vid­ing them the mon­ey, resources and insti­tu­tion­al sup­port to address their com­mu­ni­ties’ need (keep­ing in mind YAF events should be open to all).

ACTIVITIES

YAF events have had their prob­lems. The­mat­i­cal­ly, they usu­al­ly have not had Quak­er themes, they have not been geared toward spir­i­tu­al growth (usu­al­ly First Day’s Meet­ing for Wor­ship is the only spir­i­tu­al com­po­nent). They have fol­lowed the pat­terns of Young Friends events (3 day gath­er­ings), even though this for­mat excludes many (most?) YAFs.

We could eas­i­ly have more of a mix of events. Some could be the tra­di­tion­al week­end events, some could be day events, like the suc­cess­ful apple-picking expe­di­tion and Swarth­more gath­er­ing a few years ago orga­nized by Friends Center-employed YAFs.

As far as I’ve known, there has nev­er been any Busi­ness Meet­ing brain­storm­ing for themes, and each event has been orga­nized in an ad hoc man­ner by a small group of peo­ple with­out feed­back from the gen­er­al YAF pop­u­la­tion. This is part­ly a result of the need for con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers to have a con­fer­ence planned long in advance.

I pro­pose that we set Year-Long Themes, a process that some groups employ to inter­est­ing effect. In the fall, there could be a Busi­ness Meet­ing to decide the next cal­en­dar year’s theme; Steer­ing Com­mit­tee could then orga­nize all of the pro­gram­mat­ic events around this top­ic. This would give large YAF input into the selec­tion process and also pro­vide an inter­est­ing uni­ty to top­ics. Each top­ic should be broad enough to allow for an inter­est­ing mix of pro­grams and each top­ic should have a spe­cif­ic Quak­er focus. One ped­a­gog­i­cal moti­va­tion behind these events should be to intro­duce and rein­force Friends’ his­to­ry and culture.

Themes that I’d love to see:

  • Spir­i­tu­al and his­tor­i­cal roots of Quak­erism. (Bec­ca Grunko, Mar­garet Hope Bacon, Peg­gy Mor­sheck might be good resource peo­ple). Events could include a look at the fiery birth of Quak­erism and an his­tor­i­cal explo­ration of Friends Insti­tute itself (found­ed in the 1880s, FI played a role in uni­fy­ing the Hicksite/Orthodox schism in PYM and pro­vid­ed key assis­tance to the ear­ly AFSC; Gen­nyfer Dav­en­port is hot on the trail of this history!).
  • Quak­ers in the world. a look at vol­un­teerism, and wit­ness and min­istry. An obvi­ous event would be to par­tic­i­pate in a week- or weekend-long PYM workcamp.
  • Neat Quak­er fig­ures (maybe even neat PYM fig­ures!). Con­fer­ences that look at the his­to­ry of folks like John Wool­man, William Penn, Lucre­tia Mott, per­haps cur­rent fig­ures like the Willoughby’s.
  • Quak­er Lifestyle and the Tes­ti­monies. Egads, we could read Faith and Prac­tice! For those of you who haven’t, it’s real­ly an inter­est­ing book. Not all events should be the­mat­ic, of course. The ear­ly Decem­ber Christ­mas gath­er­ing doesn’t need to be; nei­ther does some of the day long events (i.e., the apple-picking expe­di­tion was a fun theme in itelf!).

This essay writ­ten Third Month 21, 1997 by Mar­tin Kelley

 

The Sto­ry of this essay (writ­ten fall of 2003)

I wrote for Friends Insti­tute, the Philadelphia-area young adult Friends group, back in March of 1997. I was very involved with the group at the time, serv­ing for­mal­ly as trea­sur­er and web­mas­ter and infor­mal­ly as the de-facto out­reach coor­di­na­tor. We had a vision­ing retreat com­ing up in a few months and I wrote this as a strengths / weak­ness­es / oppor­tu­ni­ties piece to get the ideas rolling. I thought we had some work to do around the issues of cliquish­ness, and I also thought we could become more thought­ful and spiritually-focused but I tried to find a sen­si­tive way to talk about this issues.

I got a lot of reac­tions to this essay. Some peo­ple real­ly real­ly loved it, espe­cial­ly those out­side the Philadel­phia insid­ers group: “Thanks for the insight­ful analy­sis! You real­ly did a won­der­ful job of objec­tive­ly explain­ing the frus­tra­tions that some PYM YAF’s (myself includ­ed) have with FI” and “I was so inspired by your essay ‘YAF vision for future’ that we are hop­ing bring it for­ward and cir­cu­late it here in among Aus­tralian YAF.”

But some of the insid­ers felt chal­lenged. One did­n’t even like me talk­ing about cliques: “I think that as a group we have all been aware for some time of the prob­lems plagu­ing Friends Insti­tute… I don’t like the word clique because it makes me think of an exclu­sion­ary snob­bish group of peo­ple that looks down on oth­ers.” (of course this was my point).

As if to prove my analy­sis cor­rect, the insid­ers imme­di­ate­ly start­ed talk­ing amongst them­selves. With­in two weeks of email­ing this essay, both of my for­mal posi­tions in the orga­ni­za­tion were being chal­lenged. One insid­er wrote a request to the year­ly meet­ing to set up a com­pet­ing Friends Insti­tute web­site; oth­ers start­ed won­der­ing aloud whether it prop­er for an atten­der to be Friends Insti­tute trea­sur­er. No one ever ques­tioned my ded­i­ca­tion, hon­esty and good work. I was more active­ly involved in Quak­erism and my meet­ing than most of the birthright mem­bers who par­tic­i­pat­ed in FI, and I was the most con­sci­en­tious trea­sur­er and web­mas­ter the group ever had. My essay had obvi­ous­ly hit a nerve and the wag­ons were cir­cling in against the out­sider threat. Real­iz­ing just how ingrained these issues were and to what extent the insid­ers would go to pro­tect their pow­er, I even­tu­al­ly left Friends Insti­tute to focus again on my month­ly meet­ing’s thriv­ing twenty- and thirty-something scene.

The essay con­tin­ued to have a life of its own. The May 1997 vision­ing retreat focused on noth­ing at all and sub­se­quent busi­ness meet­ings dropped to a hand­ful of peo­ple. But the issues of the high-school focus, cliquish­ness, and unfriend­li­ness to new­com­ers came to the fore­front again a few months lat­er, after some sex­u­al assaults took place in the young adult com­mu­ni­ty. A con­fer­ence on “sex­u­al bound­aries” pro­duced an epis­tle that hit some of the same top­ics as my vision­ing essay:

We iden­ti­fied a num­ber of habits and issues in our young adult com­mu­ni­ty that tend to bring up dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. For exam­ple, some of our sex­u­al bound­aries car­ry over from our expe­ri­ence as high-school aged Young Friends… New­com­ers become “fresh meat” for peo­ple who come to gath­er­ings look­ing to find quick con­nec­tions… Peo­ple get lost espe­cial­ly when we have larg­er gath­er­ings, and we don’t watch out for each other.

Friends Insti­tute drift­ed for a few years. By the sum­mer of 2000, a con­vince Friend became clerk and tried to revive the group. She found my essay and emailed me: “I’ve been look­ing over the FI archives and am impressed by your con­tri­bu­tion. Do you have any advice, sug­ges­tions, or time to become active again in FI?” Sad to say this attempt to revive Friends Insti­tute also had a lot of problems.

I repost this essay here in 2003 part­ly to have a ongo­ing record of my Quak­er writ­ings here on my web­site. But I sus­pect these same issues con­tin­ue in var­i­ous young adult friends groups. Per­haps some­one else can see this essay and be inspired, but a warn­ing that I’ve seen these dynam­ics in many dif­fer­ent young adult friends groups and seri­ous­ly won­der whether reform or revival is impossible.
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