Twen­ty years ago this week I wrote one of my most wide­ly shared blog posts, “The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and Quak­er Renewal.” 

I was on fire that sum­mer, mak­ing con­nec­tions with a bub­bling up, grass­roots “emer­gent church” move­ment and find­ing oh-so-many unex­pect­ed sim­i­lar­i­ties between these frus­trat­ed, authenticity-seeking younger Evan­gel­i­cals and my super-Liberal East Coast Quak­er world. A lot of the prob­lems were clear­ly gen­er­a­tional and I was lap­ping up new posts by Cana­di­an blog­ger Jor­dan Coop­er. One day he shared a chart from the­olo­gian Robert E. Web­ber’s new book, The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals: Fac­ing the Chal­lenges of the New World, that showed the “dif­fer­ences between the mod­erns (tra­di­tion­al and prag­mat­ic evan­gel­i­cals) and the post­mod­ern (the younger evan­gel­i­cals).”

The chart was like a secret decoder ring for me. Web­ber might have been think­ing of more tra­di­tion­al church­es, but with a lit­tle trans­la­tion it lot of it sure explained a lot of what I was see­ing in Quak­erism. Old­er Friends want­ed youth min­istry that was a “Church-centred pro­gram” while I and my dis­af­fect­ed cohorts want­ed “prayer, Bible study, wor­ship, social action.” Old­er Friends thought of Chris­tian­i­ty as a “ratio­nal world­view” or a form of “ther­a­py” where­as I longed for a “com­mu­ni­ty of faith.”

Not much hap­pened after I clicked post. Face­book and Twit­ter weren’t around to pro­mote it. My blog was more-or-less me talk­ing to myself. But over the course of the next few years peo­ple found it. They must have been ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions and see­ing what Google turned up. The com­ments have some future Quak­er blog­gers (was this the first post Chris Mohr found and fan-emailed me about?). Even more remark­able, it includes some very unlike­ly Evan­gel­i­cal Friends, like the then-youth pas­tor at First Friends Can­ton and the then-general sec­re­tary of Iowa Year­ly Meet­ing. At the time I was answer­ing the book­store phone at Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence, the most Lib­er­al insti­tu­tion bas­tion of U.S. Quak­ers. To find com­mon cause across this the­o­log­i­cal spec­trum was quite unusu­al then (and alas, prob­a­bly now).

What’s changed after twen­ty years? Well, after a num­ber of false starts there are pro­grams to train younger Friends and bring them into insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism (Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice, Pen­dle Hill’s Con­tin­u­ing Rev­o­lu­tion con­fer­ence, and the 1992-founded Guil­ford Col­lege’s Quak­er Stud­ies Pro­gram deserve spe­cial shoutouts). Blogs and lat­er social media have cre­at­ed forums for dis­parate Friends to talk togeth­er in infor­mal con­ver­sa­tions. I’m con­tin­u­al­ly amazed that Friends Jour­nal mag­a­zine (of which I’m senior edi­tor) and Quak­er­S­peak videos can be accessed any­where with­out pay­wall, mak­ing our sto­ries wide­ly acces­si­ble. But some things haven’t changed. We’ve had rounds of Quak­er schisms, espe­cial­ly in North­west, Indi­ana, and North Car­oli­na Year­ly Meetings. 

And how much has changed for indi­vid­ual young adult Friends? The Sep­tem­ber issue of Friends Jour­nal is devot­ed to younger Friends and one break­out arti­cle is Olivia Chalk­ley’s “Young Adults Want What Ear­ly Friends Had.” Olivia came to Friends as a teen and has had the advan­tages of the new­er youth pro­grams — attend­ing Guil­ford QLSP and work­ing at a Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice fel­low — yet so much of her arti­cle felt like top­ics I dis­cussed on Quak­er Ranter back before my tem­ples went gray. For example:

We often don’t think about the poten­tial Friends who slip through the cracks because there’s not much to grab hold of: those who don’t know where to turn in the silence, not hav­ing a sol­id foun­da­tion in Scrip­ture, Chris­t­ian ethics and social teach­ings, or even Quak­er his­to­ry; those who feel alien­at­ed by the meet­ings in which Friends cringe if you talk about Jesus Christ, or even about God; and those who sim­ply can’t fig­ure out if we are Chris­t­ian or not, due to mixed mes­sag­ing and lack of con­vic­tion among mem­bers of their meet­ings. These obsta­cles must be rec­og­nized and addressed as part of our efforts to present acces­si­ble path­ways to entry, not only for the young adults hun­gry for reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty but also for the poor and work­ing class­es among which reli­gious belief tends to be high, accord­ing to recent Pew studies.

I guess it’s some progress that this arti­cle is pub­lished by Friends Jour­nal and not sit­ting bare­ly read on a per­son­al blog. But as I look back at this twenty-year anniver­sary I find it a lit­tle sad we’re still strug­gling with iden­ti­ty and mes­sag­ing. Maybe this is a peren­ni­al, never-answerable issue for a denom­i­na­tion, espe­cial­ly one as decen­tral­ized as ours. Or maybe it’s some­thing we can con­tin­ue to fig­ure out. Mid-twentieth cen­tu­ry Friends were able to work out a mod­ern vision of Quak­erism that was pow­er­ful enough to reunite and regal­va­nize a dwin­dling Quak­er move­ment; what would our vision look like?

Emer­gent Church Move­ment: The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and Quak­er Renewal 

A look at the gen­er­a­tional shifts fac­ing Friends. I’m cur­rent­ly read­ing Robert E. Web­ber’s The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals: Facing…

Quak­er Ranter