Tag Archives ⇒ target

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

Does this need to be said?

April 11, 2018
· Martin Kelley

A great piece from newish Quak­er blog­ger Josh Tal­bot on the per­son­al strug­gle to fol­low the peace tes­ti­mo­ny: Not Falling Into the Fire of My Own Ire.

Los­ing your­self to anger is pos­si­ble even with anger focused against injus­tice and cru­el­ty. You can become so focused on the tar­get of your rage. That you do not notice when you have lost sight of your goals and are only in it for the fight. Even fol­low­ing the Peace Tes­ti­mo­ny of Non-Violence we need to rec­og­nize when we are no longer being Non-Aggressive.

Like many con­vinced Friends, I came to the soci­ety through activism. I had met plen­ty of peo­ple who let right­eous anger serve as cov­er for more vis­cer­al hatred. One eye-opening protest in the 90s was in a rur­al part of Penn­syl­va­nia. When one of the locals screamed the cliche of the era — “Go get a job!” — a pro­tes­tor shout­ed back, “I’ve got a job and I make more than you.” It was true even as it was cru­el and irrel­e­vant and braggy.

I did­n’t see this kind of behav­ior as much with the Friends I saw at var­i­ous protests, which is large­ly why I start­ed grav­i­tat­ing toward them when­ev­er pos­si­ble. I could see that there was some­thing in the Quak­er cul­ture and val­ue sys­tem that was able to nav­i­gate between right­eous and per­son­al anger and draw the line in dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions. I love Josh’s descrip­tion of the “Craig Fer­gu­son” method:

I ask myself. “Does this need to be said?” “Does this need to be said by me?” “Does this need to be said by me right now?” Doing this cuts down on moments of spon­ta­neous anger.

This could also describe the Quak­er dis­cern­ment method for min­istry. Maybe there’s some­thing to the care we take (or at least aim for) in that process that gives us a lit­tle more self-discipline in the heat of protest or that helps us sort through thorny eth­i­cal issues that run through our own community.

https://​quak​er​re​turns​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​4​/​n​o​t​-​f​a​l​l​i​n​g​-​i​n​t​o​-​f​i​r​e​-​o​f​-​m​y​-​o​w​n​-​i​r​e​.​h​tml