Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker

Generational strategies for Quaker outreach

August 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Emi­ly Provance:

An under-45 com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­e­gy, in con­trast, would most­ly involve social media (Face­book, Insta­gram, Twit­ter, pos­si­bly Tum­blr or Pin­ter­est). Arti­cles would be short and would con­tain most­ly con­tent direct­ly rel­e­vant to the read­er — or, if the con­tent were not direct­ly rel­e­vant, it would be single-story nar­ra­tives with an empha­sis on per­son­al impact. Announce­ments would come out through mes­sen­ger apps or text mes­sages, with a strong ele­ment of user con­trol about which announce­ments to receive and which not. Pho­tos and videos would be used frequently.

I’m always a bit wary of gen­er­a­tional deter­min­ism. I think gen­er­a­tional ideas are more like under­ly­ing trends that get more or less trac­tion over time. And Quak­er dig­i­tal out­reach in par­tic­u­lar has been a thing for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry now. But the under­ly­ing mes­sage — that some peo­ple need to be reached dig­i­tal­ly while oth­ers are still best served by print — is a sound one and I’m glad Emi­ly’s bring­ing it up.

But it’s still kind of sad that we still need to make this kind of argu­ment. I remem­ber hav­ing these dis­cus­sions around an FGC out­reach com­mit­tee table fif­teen years ago: sure­ly we’re all on board about the need for dig­i­tal out­reach in 2018?

The 45-Yard Line

Earlham College seeks to roll back expense budget by a decade after president’s resignation

August 4, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Inside High­er Ed:

Wor­ries mount that the col­lege has strayed too far from its lib­er­al arts core. Sus­pi­cions run high that col­lege lead­ers reached recent impor­tant deci­sions with­out regard for one of the key gov­er­nance prin­ci­ples root­ed in its Quak­er iden­ti­ty: consensus.

https://​www​.insid​e​high​ered​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​1​8​/​0​8​/​0​1​/​e​a​r​l​h​a​m​-​c​o​l​l​e​g​e​-​s​e​e​k​s​-​r​o​l​l​-​b​a​c​k​-​e​x​p​e​n​s​e​-​b​u​d​g​e​t​-​d​e​c​a​d​e​-​a​f​t​e​r​-​p​r​e​s​i​d​e​n​t​s​-​r​e​s​i​g​n​a​t​i​o​n​#​.​W​2​I​x​c​z​v​6​v​J​c​.​f​a​c​e​b​ook

Wilmington Yearly Meeting splinters

August 1, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Not a sur­prise: Wilm­ing­ton Year­ly Meet­ing (west­ern Ohio and Ten­nessee) is splin­ter­ing along famil­iar lines:

The sep­a­ra­tions stem from a dis­agree­ment over whether same-sex wed­dings are to be per­mit­ted in mem­ber church­es, or as they are often called in the Quak­er tra­di­tion, meet­ings. The church­es leav­ing WYM regard same-sex mar­riage as against the will of God.

It looks like many of the more Evan­gel­i­cal church­es are the ones pulling out of the year­ly meet­ing. The lines of con­tro­ver­sy are sim­i­lar to recent sep­a­ra­tions in Indi­ana and North Car­oli­na Year­ly Meet­ings. The big-tent cen­ter of Mid­west­ern FUM Friends seems to be pret­ty per­ma­nent­ly fractured.

https://​www​.wnewsj​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​7​8​9​3​9​/​s​e​v​e​r​a​l​-​c​h​u​r​c​h​e​s​-​l​e​a​v​e​-​w​i​l​m​i​n​g​t​o​n​-​y​e​a​r​l​y​-​m​e​e​t​i​n​g​-​o​v​e​r​-​s​a​m​e​-​s​e​x​-​m​a​r​r​i​age

Membership — in a Yearly Meeting?

July 31, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Steven Davi­son looks at a pro­pos­al to record mem­bers at the year­ly meet­ing level:

with­out mean­ing­ful pas­toral care, reg­u­lar wor­ship, spir­i­tu­al nur­ture, and a fel­low­ship that goes deep­er than just three annu­al meet­ings could pro­vide, what does “mem­ber­ship” mean? All that’s left is Quak­er iden­ti­ty and a sense of belong­ing to the unique spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty that is New York Year­ly Meet­ing. To me, that’s a half-baked Quak­er life.

Mem­ber­ship — in a Year­ly Meeting?

Autopsy of a Deceased Church

July 26, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From a book review by Macken­zie Mor­gan on the Quak­er Out­reach site:

Often church­es that fail to reflect their chang­ing local com­mu­ni­ty die off in a gen­er­a­tion or two. Implic­it bias has been a point of dis­cus­sion in some year­ly meet­ings in recent years, and this is related.

In fact, a Friend once told me they’d been asked, “can we tar­get these Face­book ads only to peo­ple who are just like us?”

Actu­al­ly, Face­book can cre­ate what they call looka­like audi­ences. It’s very cool and very creepy at the same time. It’s part of the suite of fine-grain tar­get­ing tools that’s let­ting polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­dists and lifestyle-focused com­pa­nies con­trol our media con­sump­tion at the social feed lev­el and rein­force liked-minded group­think. Atten­tion silos are dan­ger­ous for our democ­ra­cy and they’re no good for our church­es. If the Quak­er good news has any mean­ing left in it, it has to be wide­ly applic­a­ble out­side of our cul­tur­al, style bubbles.

Autop­sy of a Deceased Church

What do Quaker believe anyway?

July 19, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Answer quick­ly: what are three things Quak­ers believe? Unless you’ve prac­ticed an answer to this ques­tion, chances are you’ll end up with a lot of umm’s and ahh’s and sen­tences so built up with dis­claimers that your lis­ten­er has to start sen­tence dia­gram­ming just to fig­ure out if you actu­al­ly answered. Arthur Larrabee got frus­trat­ed by the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble task for explain­ing mod­ern Quak­er beliefs and decid­ed to do some­thing about it:

About 9 years ago I began to give voice to a life­long frus­tra­tion of mine. The frus­tra­tion was that I can­not answer the ques­tion “What do Quak­ers believe?” I would always answer the ques­tions some­what defen­sive­ly. I would say, “it’s kind of hard to know what Quak­ers believe, but let me tell you what I believe.” Or I would say, “well, it’s hard to know what Quak­ers believe today but let me tell you what Quak­ers believed at the begin­ning.” Or I would say what I thought Quak­ers believed and I would hope that no one else was lis­ten­ing because I did not want to be overcalled.

I think Arthur does a pret­ty good job tack­ling a very tough task. He bare­ly even men­tions Howard Brin­ton’s “SPICES.”

http://quakerspeak.com/9‑core-quaker-beliefs/

Dynamics of Evil

July 16, 2018
· Martin Kelley

From Patri­cia Dallmann:

Hold­ing the line, speak­ing the truth is the Christian’s (Quaker’s) oblig­a­tion in the Lamb’s War. If the God of truth is hon­ored in just one mind, heart, and soul, the world is not lost, as Jesus showed us by pro­to­typ­al exam­ple. In this state­ment giv­en before Pilate short­ly before the end of his earth­ly life, Jesus iden­ti­fied his life’s pur­pose not only for him­self but for us all.

https://​patradall​mann​.word​press​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​7​/​0​1​/​d​y​n​a​m​i​c​s​-​o​f​-​e​v​il/

QuakerSpeak on old Quaker records

July 12, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I must admit to lov­ing old libraries and geek­ing out on his­to­ries. In this week’s install­ment of Quak­er­S­peak, Mary Crauderu­eff, cura­tor at Haver­ford College’s Quak­er Col­lec­tion, talks about some of the favorite parts of her work:

You have things like mem­ber­ship records, mar­riage records, and mar­riage cer­tifi­cates. You have min­utes of the busi­ness meet­ings and you have com­mit­tee min­utes. Oth­er cool things that we have are deeds for meet­ings and meet­ing­hous­es. Peo­ple will some­times come to var­i­ous Quak­er archives and say, “Our meet­ing is in this dis­pute with the town­ship. We need to find the orig­i­nal deed to the meet­ing­house and we think that you have it. Can we look at it?” 

http://​Quak​er​s​peak​.com/​w​o​r​k​i​n​g​-​i​n​-​a​-​h​i​s​t​o​r​i​c​a​l​-​q​u​a​k​e​r​-​l​i​b​r​a​ry/