From Johan Maurer, a look at how we should think about growth and outreach. One part that stood out to me:
There is nothing about this obligation that requires me to exaggerate Quakers’ virtues, or to conceal our defects. I certainly don’t need to claim that no other faith communities are equally trustworthy or equally capable of healing and giving hope.
In my experience, a lot of incoming seekers really like it when we fess up to our past indiscretions and current struggles. Perhaps they’ve come from some church that was overly confident and unable to examine its flaws and so like our transparency. Nowadays the influencer class all talk about “emotional maturity” and I think part of that is appreciating ourselves for who we really are in a healthy way.
Maybe because I’m thinking about the upcoming Friends Journal issue of “Spiritual Optimism vs. Spiritual Pessimism” (there’s still ten days to write for it!) but I’m also thinking about the tone with which we approach outreach. In some circles there’s a panic that we somehow have to save Quakerism. That begs the question of “what is Quakerism”?
Is Quakerism a way of approaching our relationship with the living Christ and sharing that good news as we walk cheerfully over the world? Is it building communities that express our commitment to love of God and love of neighbor? If so, then nothing is ever going to destroy it. The whole point of the original Quaker movement is that it didn’t need a large infrastructure: no priests or pastors, no staff, no tithing. An empty barn and a small room of believers was enough. Here’s my naive side rising up: if we are faithful God, will continue to give us guidance and blessings.
When I dropped in for a day of the FGC Gathering this summer, I attended a workshop led by the most excellent Chiyo Moriuchi, titled “Letting our Light Shine: Governance & Friends.” The workshop wrote its own epistle, which FGC published on their website today with the title “A Call to Action.” Here’s part of its message:
Immediate action is required to address the fact of declining and aging membership. We have too few people available to do the “work,” and we are burning out too many of those who are. We feel that addressing the inadequate communication of who Quakers are is the most promising path to solve this problem.
This is all true, but it’s true of our institutions. It’s true of our infrastructure. The document has two calls to action: the first is for Quaker institutions to do some self-reflection on what makes them Quaker (sounds good to me!). The second is for Friends to hire outside marketing firms. I’ve seen big budgets poured into marketing firms before and sigh at what a proposal like this would likely give us: generic, feel-good copy that irons out all blemishes. Any spiritual language that might be deemed off-putting gets cut. History is dropped except for a few past heroes who are turned into cartoons.
Decades of religion surveys have found that people aren’t looking for bland and generic. A lot of the fastest-growing denominations are opinionated and have high expectations of incoming members. The newcomers I see walking into my meeting seem to be searching for something real, something palpable, as indeed I myself was when I walked into Abington Meeting over three decades ago. We can be ourselves and share our blemishes. We don’t need to put on an act.
And finally, some optimism: Quaker marketing is doing great. Seriously. We’re more visible and accessible than we’ve been in our entire history. Friends Journal is a part of that, with the magazine free without paywall and the Quakerspeak interview series, Quakers Today podcast, and Quaker.org portal. But we’re just a piece of what’s happening. My friend Jon Watts’s Thee Quaker podcast and the Daily Quaker email is super-visible. The Quakers sub-reddit and Discord server are very active. The slick Friends Library makes historic Quaker writings accessible by web, app, and audio (and the old-school Project Gutenberg, Christian Classics Etherial Library, Quaker Heritage Press are still around). It’s easy to find local meetings (FGC and FWCC have good resources, plus Google Maps does a great job). Any curious person wanting to know about Quakers can get up to speed in weeks. I know because I see these people walking into my own Cropwell Meeting.
So I don’t think our institutions necessarily need new marketing so much as new visioning. What kinds of support is needed for the new seekers and for local meetings? I think in some ways we need to step back and see with new eyes. What is it we want to market?
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