No rest for the wicked.
I’ve just arrived home from the week-long Gathering of Friends General Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, and in a couple hours must head out for North Carolina Yearly Meeting-Conservative.
There’s much to be reflected on from the earlier leg; but no time to do it now.
Stand by; and keep those card and letters coming in.
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The thesis in the first two parts of this discussion comes down to this: The Quaker “brand” is in trouble. Thus AFSC, as an organization which depends on the support generated by this “brand,” is likewise in trouble, and this trouble goes beyond the adverse impact of the financial crash. To get through this trouble, AFSC will have a significant part to play in renewing and restoring this Quaker “brand.”
This renewal will not be achieved by a focus on Quaker “values,” which, to speak plainly, I consider a bogus smokescreen for secularization. It is not actually the “values” themselves, like “peace” that are bogus; it is their use as a substitute for a live relationship to the motley crew of actual Quakers. The Quaker “Reputation of Truth” (i.e., the Quaker brand) ultimately depends, for better and for worse, on actual Quakers, how we live and witness in the world today, tomorrow (and yesterday).
Why has the Quaker “brand” been worth so much until recently? I think the answer is simple, and twofold: First, because the Religious Society of Friends (RSOF) has done great and good things; and second, for a long time the RSOF did a superior job of letting the world know that.
AFCS’s Nobel Peace Prize: Doing Great Things, and Letting The World Know
And why is the brand in decline? Another twofold answer: because recent Quaker generations, in the US particularly, have been undistinguished; and because we have been particularly undistinguished and inept — lousy also comes to mind–at telling the world about ourselves and our faith.
(BTW and just for the record: when speaking critically about recent American Quakerdom, I am including myself in the number.)
Why is contemporary Quakerism undistinguished? There are some good books, and better doctoral dissertations waiting to be written in response. Here I can attempt only a brief sketch, based on four decades of participant-observation.
This sketch starts with what I call “Compost Theology.”
Compost Theology: Not Just A Garden Variety
Here’s how Compost Theology works:
As an “institution,” the RSOF takes physical form primarily in its Meetings, then in associations, concern-based committees and their organizational offspring, and schools and colleges. These structures, populated by actual Friends and their experiences therein, make up the “compost” of Quaker experience.
As in your backyard compost heap, what often looks like an undifferentiated pile, when well-mixed and heated up by the Light/God/Spirit energy, produces a surprisingly rich and fertile soil base. From this “soil” spring up a variety of hardy plants — usually unexpected, and any of which may at first look like weeds –but which prove again and again to be fruitful and useful in the world.
For awhile, I thought my Compost Theology notion was perhaps something new. Then I re-read the Parable of the Sower, in Luke’s Gospel, 8:5-8.
Wouldn’t you know, Jesus got there first: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. . . . Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.”
This is a familiar story; but I’d forgotten that “good soil” was the punch line.
Note that when Jesus finished telling it, “he called out, ’He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’” I hadn’t been listening so well.
Anyway, the Sower is definitely a “universalist” – the seeds of the Spirit are scattered all over. The point for us is to be tending and developing “good soil.” Then good stuff will grow.
But what will sprout there is not predictable. AFSC was one such shoot that appeared, grew and (for a long time) flourished.
Okay, so what’s happened to make our recent compost not so productive?
For one thing, we’ve lost our history. Here’s an example, drawn from my pamphlet, “Study War Some More”: during peace workshops I often write three lists of five names on a blackboard, and ask the group how many they recognize.
One list is of second tier famous US generals (e.g., Stonewall Jackson). Almost everyone recognizes the names, because our society is steeped in military lore.
Old Stonewall — I’d know him anywhere.
Next is a list of several Friends who made outstanding contributions to peace work (e.g., Lewis Fry Richardson, the British Friend who invented peace research. You remember him, right?)
Lewis Fry Richardson, a British Quaker weatherman.
Who knew he would sprout up and invent peace research in his “spare time”??
Almost no Quakers ever recognize any of these names.
The third list is always immediately recognized: announcers from National Public Radio.
Here’s what I draw from this (and lots of other related data):
Contemporary Quakers have bought into the media-centered view of war, peace and change. This media-centered view is also Washington-centered, and sees these issues in almost exclusively political terms.
Quakers’ specific political views vary predictably based on their demographics: in 2008, for instance, in the liberal groups all were hard at work for the Democratic ticket. And when I visited a pastoral yearly meeting just after the Governor of Alaska had been put on the Republican ticket, the place was electrified and agog. The spirit of secular politics reigned in both places.
There are many problems with this political-media fixation (whether it be on NPR or Fox), not the least of which is that it is completely disempowering, since the “Quaker vote” (for whichever party) is but the tiniest of microblips on any worldly radar screen.
And it’s disempowering in another, perhaps more important way: the historical amnesia it breeds leaves us out of touch with the potential strength of our own tradition, and its achievements, which are many. One of my favorite quotes is from Sun Tzu, in his strategic classic, The Art of War:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
(And never mind “battles”; if we don’t know our history and its achievements — which we don’t — just how are we supposed to tell the world about them? Actually, that is a “battle,” for our own identity and brand, and it’s one US Quakers have been losing for almost fifty years.)
Quakers 2010: Oatmeal . . . and what?
Most American Quakers today are caught in a mass media “matrix” that leaves us in just that “know-nothing” plight. It’s hardly a surprise that I so often hear Friends speak about feeling as if their efforts are futile. They’re not wrong; in secular political terms, they pretty much are.
AFSC too, with exceptions. One recent exception was the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit. It succeeded because it substituted a powerful visual symbol for the usual political rhetoric, and moreover took the symbol to the people, not merely to Washington. Big win for AFSC.
Liberal Friends have another debilitating cultural characteristic: despite being generally highly educated, we are resolutely anti-intellectual about our religion, and religion in general. In a world which is increasingly shaped by religious ideas and movements (many of them bad), this is a distinctly dysfunctional stance; yet we cling to it.
AFSC is little better here. Consider this from its Mission Statement: “The American Friends Service Committee is a practical expression of the faith of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). . . .”
And what might that “faith” be that they’re getting practical about?
There’s no indication of that, except to assert that whatever it is, “the leadings of the Spirit and the principles of truth found through Friends’ experience and practice are not the exclusive possession of any group.”
In institutional terms, this is a rationale for why the large majority of AFSC staff are non-Quaker. But theologically, it is utterly vacuous. Its Quaker “faith” is emptied of any distinct content, and with it, any reason for separate existence.
AFSC is hardly alone in this. One hears widely among liberal Friends the conviction that above all and before all we are all about “seeking,” typically in a privatized “spiritual-but-not-religious” manner. All tradition, scripture, and the witness of those that went before are of only incidental interest. (The Evangelicals have a somewhat different form of this spiritual virus, with distinct but not much better outcomes.)
To sum up: a mass media, Washington-centered, politicized view of the world, and our witness within it. A Quaker faith without content or history; a religious “community” of privatized “seeking.”
This is a recipe for mediocrity, and that’s how it has turned out.
Again, any claim to originality in this analysis is already trumped in the Parable of the Sower. (Why does this keep happening to me?) There some of the seed of the Spirit (Mark 4:5-6) fell “where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.”
That about nails it.
Note that I am not here trying to blame AFSC for this unhappy development. That would be facile, and give the body too much credit to boot. Yet AFSC certainly shares in this condition, contributes to it–and has paid the price.
AFSC also has a role to play in ameliorating the situation. It could be an important role; possibly even a pivotal one. Such an effort would mark a drastic departure from its path of the past several decades. But it’s possible.
We’ll consider what such a role might look like in the next post.
(But here’s a hint: Think Compost Theology, and Peculiar People.)
We mentioned briefly in our first post about this that Friends United Meeting was likely on the list for a change of leadership.
The details of that are at the FUM website (scroll down to the link to the Memo from the Executive Committee), and applications are due by September 1.
FUM has been a troubled organization, about which much has been written online. My own analysis, called “Wrestling With A Roomful of Elephants,” was posted in 2007, and still seems largely on target. Perhaps the most extensive comments in recent years have come from Johan Maurer, a former FUM General Secretary, via his blog; here’s an archive.
I have often differed with Johan, but in his latest comment is a response that I can only second. He writes:
When I first saw the [FUM General Secretary job] announcement, I immediately thought of several people who should consider applying. I didn’t think about the details of the announcement; instead, the people who came to my mind were creative, energetic, visionary, expressive. I was still under the impression that being the general secretary of Friends United Meeting is the best job there is among Friends. I still want to believe that FUM is the strategic center of the Quaker world, the best place to catalyze the revival of the Quaker movement, if we can just shed the perennial jockeying over who will be the first to leave if the others don’t straighten out.
The very first person I encouraged to consider applying gave me a healthy reality check. Bottom line from this observer I respect highly: this is not an attractive organization to work for.
(Emphasis added.)
Somebody will fill the post, no doubt; and I hope he/she will do a good job. But if I were to make a list of Friends who seem to me, as Johan says, “creative, energetic, visionary, expressive” (and committed to peace and justice and serious Quakerism), I don’t think I would urge any of them to apply for it.
FUM is a mess. Maybe a terminal mess. I’m not at all sure it is the “strategic center of the Quaker world,” or if it ever was; indeed, I’m not sure there is such a “center” just now. Nor am I sure that’s a bad thing.
Can FUM be fixed? We’ll wait and see; but optimism is not in much supply on that front.
On June 11, at Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting (SAYMA), I heard a rising young Friend, Christina Repoley, talk about her longtime leading to see the creation of a new Friends service program, to be called Quaker Voluntary Service, or QVS.
Having heard mentions of and references to this idea for several years, and Christina’s special concern for it, I was eager to hear about it from “the horse’s mouth,” so to speak. My expectation was that with this much time for gestation, the idea must be about ready to get off the ground.
Christina Repoley
It sounded like that at first. Christina spoke of the idea having roots as far back as 1998, when she joined the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage to England’s “1652 country,” where Quakerism emerged. It took more definite form in 2003, and since then she has visited with the Mennonite Central Committee (where, in my view, they know how to do this volunteer service thing right), and consulted with various Quaker worthies here and in England.
Conscientious Objectors in world War Two doing alternative service.
By 2008, she was in seminary and learning about some previous efforts to start such a program, and then taking part in a consultation at Pendle Hill. A steering group emerged from that meeting, which has been in conversation since, and this coming weekend (June 25-27) an initial board of directors for QVS will meet, again at Pendle Hill.
As I say, I began the evening with great expectations. By the end, however, I was feeling much more cautious. That’s because, despite Christina’s enthusiasm and dedication, some big questions still hovered unanswered over the concept; and when they were asked, the answers indicated they had not yet been addressed; which was not good, especially this far along.
Here are the questions:
First, how does the QVS leadership plan to manage the “killer issues,” that sank the previous version of a Quaker service program?
These killer issues are three: 1) affirming (or not) the presence of open GLBT persons 2) insisting (or not) on celibacy or marriage-only sex for of-age heterosexuals. And 3) requiring (or not) a Christian identity for the program and/or participants.
Of course, these issues are alive and unwell across the Quaker spectrum. I wouldn’t expect QVS to resolve them. But managing them in their bailiwick had better be part of their policy framework.
“Managing” them means having policy responses worked out in advance, which they are prepared to articulate and stand up for, having carefully weighed the costs and benefits. Otherwise, the history of other similar efforts indicates these persistent conflicts will tear at the program’s fabric and morale; and once morale is gone, the rest is likely to follow.
A previous program, Quaker Volunteer Witness was sunk by just such a combination: fights over Christian “identity” and participation by gays alienated much of the institutional support, sapped morale and bogged down recruiting and fundraising. It was not pretty to watch. (Two brief accounts of the associated controversies can be found here and here.)
Sure, I have opinions on what the optimum policies on these vexed matters for the new QVS might be; but let the new QVS board to come to their own conclusions – as long as they don’t dither or equivocate about them. Because they won’t wait.
Neither will the other major unanswered question about QVS, which is: how will it be financed? Where will the money come from, not only for a launch, but to keep it going?
I was troubled to learn that after all the discussion and discerning, there does not appear to be any clarity about this most mundane of matters either. The most we heard about funding was Christina’s description of how last year the QVSers submitted an application to a Quaker fund for a large grant.
They had high hopes for the grant, she said: the application seemed well-prepared, and they had enthusiastic letters of support from several eminent Friends.
But QVS did not get the grant, or even part of it. The most money they have collected came in the form of unsolicited donations sent in after Christina published an article about the idea in the “FGC Connections” newsletter.
This report was also very discouraging, on several counts.
First of all, fundraising is basic. It’s what turns ideas into actions, and actions into ongoing programs. Second of all, the spontaneous response to Christina’s article about QVS suggests that there are Friends ready to respond to a clear and organized call for support.
But third, fundraising, especially for an ongoing, long-term effort, calls for more than enthusiasm and dedication: it requires skills and planning. One can learn these skills, including planning. But as the old chestnut goes, to fail to plan is to plan to fail; and QVS financial planning is still a worrisome unknown.
Personally, I think the Quaker fund likely did the QVSers a big favor by turning down their grant application. That’s because the program will need to built its own ongoing financial base if it expects to last. And the sooner it gets to building it (like from the start), the better.
All these items precede the perhaps more interesting questions of organizing and administering the QVS program itself: finding projects, attracting and orienting volunteers, communicating about it to Friends and others. Those matters are probably more fun to talk about; but to focus on them prior to dealing with the others is like trying to build a house from the attic down, rather than from the foundation up. There are problems with that.
So as the QVS board gathers and gets down to its work, here’s hoping they will dive directly into these knottier matters which are so critical to their hopes of success.
I wish them well. It’s been forty years since the collapse of the legendary Quaker workcamp program that only senior citizen Friends now remember, but with depthless gratitude, and hope for some kind of revival or resurrection. How the QVS leaders manage the killer issues, and organize for serious fundraising should tell most of the story about how much of those hopes can be safely pinned on their new venture.
And please Friends, remember, you’re builders now, so: foundation up, not attic down.
In the first post, I concluded by proffering a thesis: that AFSC’s relationship to the RSOF is more important to its overall financial future than the immediate numbers suggest. That is, the direct proportion of donations from Friends today may be small compared to the group’s total income. But it is the Quaker “Reputation of Truth” in the larger world – the “F” in the AFSC – that attracts the bulk of the funds. It’s what makes the organization financially viable at all.
Thus, I believe the road back to health for AFSC winds through the source of this Friendly “Reputation.” And I contend further that this “Reputation” is in trouble, and needs attention, from AFSC as well as other Quaker actors.
Think of Quakerism as like an apple tree: while they and others have been busy picking its fruit, eyes fixed on the branches above, beneath their feet the roots have been neglected, and have begun to wither; no wonder the crop is getting sparse.
Gustav Klimt: Apple Tree
These “roots” are no less than the actual constituency of people around the globe who make up the Religious Society of Friends, in its varied incarnations and with its 360-year history. For better and for worse, that’s what “Quakerism” is.
And these roots are tangled, no question. Actual Quakers are an unruly and confusing lot. Our history is convoluted and contested. Furthermore, my view is that the past generation or two of Quakers (i.e., mine) has been a rather undistinguished lot: mostly uninspired and uninspiring.
But there’s the rub: Amid this disarray, actual Quakers are still the seedbed and incubator of whatever empirical Quakerism is to become. And if actual Quakerism is a mess, its wider “Reputation” is sure to suffer, eventually if not right away. And with that larger decline, those bodies that depend on that larger esteem will suffer as well.
I believe such a broader decline is well underway.
Here let me switch from horticultural metaphor to a more mundane frame: marketing. “Quaker” is a brand, for more than oatmeal. It’s a brand which has commanded a lot of public goodwill.
And now the brand is in trouble. Not catastrophically dramatic-BP-oilspill trouble. More like melting iceberg trouble: drip, drip, drip.
AFSC didn’t create this brand and doesn’t control it. Yet AFSC is built on the brand, and has a big role to play in repairing it.
This brand is a lot more than oatmeal
That’s not been seen as an AFSC responsibility for a long time. Small wonder: when actual Quakerism is viewed without sentimentality or romance, it’s easy to experience at least a flash of panic, even an urge to flee.
Over the past couple of generations, that’s what many Quaker institutions have done – one thinks of the schools as well as AFSC: they have carefully distanced themselves from these snarled and messy “roots.” Instead they’ve taken cover under something called “Quaker values”: nonviolence, equality, peace, consensus, and so forth.
Unfortunately, when examined, these values turn out to be little more than a set of safe abstractions. There’s hardly anything that’s particularly “Quaker” about them, and it’s hardly a surprise that in the groups espousing them, agendas appear driven by secular (excuse me, “spiritual”) liberal fashions and factions, with a more or less lefty tinge.
Not that these values are “false”; they’re simply disconnected. AFSC’s own Mission Statement says as much: “We recognize that the leadings of the Spirit and the principles of truth found through Friends’ experience and practice are not the exclusive possession of any group.”
Well, sure. But in that case, what if any “exclusive possession” does AFSC have? If it’s only these “values,” why bother with AFSC? Take “peace.” Many groups seek and work for it. Equality? The NAACP was there first. Nonviolence? There are numerous other advocates nowadays. Relief work? AFSC is small fry in that world.
Any good marketer knows that a brand has to maintain some distinctive identity to stay viable in the marketplace. And here, it’s not abstract “values” that distinguishes AFSC; it’s the Quaker brand.
And the Quaker brand needs work. AFSC has a substantial role to play in that renewal project. Given its history over the past several decades, however, taking up the role will likely be traumatic for its corporate culture. Which is why this period of transition and retrenchment is as good a time as any to make the pivot.
What can AFSC do? We’ll talk about that in the next post.
As Shan Cretin prepares to take over as the AFSC’s new General Secretary, she will no doubt get lots of advice about how to renew and revive the organization.
I’m going to join the queue and offer mine here. To lay the groundwork for that, first a bit of background, and some diagnosis.
My attitude toward AFSC has gone through a couple of phases. First, for a long time I put a lot of mental energy into the state of the AFSC, worrying, talking and writing about what had happened to it, and what might be done. This phase lasted nearly twenty years, from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s.
My concerns about the AFSC centered primarily on its loss of grounding in the Religious Society of Friends (RSOF), and emerged during my term on the New England AFSC regional Executive Committee, 1970-75.
Toward the end of that stint I began to notice what seemed to be an increasingly pronounced drift toward a lefty secularism. The “lefty” part didn’t bother me much; the secularism was something else.
I wasn’t the only one noticing, inside or outside the RSOF. In June of 1979, a cover article in The New Republic attacked the AFSC, and by extension American Quakers generally, for supposedly abandoning the tradition of pacifism. (It was called “Shot From Guns: The Lost Pacifism of American Quakers,” by Stephen Chapman, in TNR’s Jun 9, 1979 issue.)
(This article is not online, at least where I can find it. But it is discussed in detail by David Hostetter in his doctoral dissertation, which is online here. It’s a searchable PDF: look for “Shot From Guns”)
A month later, Chapman’s article became the hook for a series of well-attended open discussions of Quaker concerns about AFSC at the FGC Gathering in Indiana. As convenor, I drafted a summary letter listing the points raised. It was signed by 130 individual Friends, including the President of Earlham College, and passed on to the AFSC Board.
Two years later, in 1981, I launched an independent monthly, “A Friendly Letter,” which continued until 1993. The newsletter covered a wide range of topics in it 134 issues, and AFSC was the focus at least once a year.
From time to time, other Friends also spoke up about AFSC concerns. Their experience seemed to mirror mine: AFSC wasn’t good at listening to Quakers, especially those with criticisms. We felt mollified, patronized, undermined, but mainly ignored.
Another major outside expression of concern appeared in 1987, in a book called Peace and Revolution, by a conservative scholar, Guenter Lewy. Lewy repeated the charges that AFSC had abandoned pacifism and religion. But he did more: he based his case on extensive research in AFSC archives. Lewy’s Cold Warrior bent was clear, but his book was not simply polemic; he had done his homework, and had chapter and verse to back it up.
I took Lewy’s challenge seriously, respecting his research while rejecting his political stance. My sense was that even with his evident bias, Lewy had done a job which Quakers should have done for ourselves, but had mostly been too lazy or timid to undertake. Peace and Revolution merited a careful, Quaker response, sifting out the wheat from the chaff, revising and re-framing his critique of AFSC for the RSOF’s benefit.
This reaction led me to organize, edit and publish another book, Quaker Service at the Crossroads, (1988, Kimo Press).
It included essays by more than a dozen authors, all but one Quakers, both defending and critiquing AFSC; Lewy contributed a concluding response. The Introduction described my own concerns in detail and offered them as an alternative to Lewy’s critique. The Introduction is now online here.
Much of the rest of the book still seems relevant more than two decades later. However, in the months following its publication I became aware that my concerns about AFSC seemed not to strike the chord of reforming enthusiasm I had hoped for among the wider community of Quakers. The subject did not draw a crowd for discussions, as it had in 1979; and the book itself sold slowly.
In response, I found myself talking and writing less about AFSC, while listening and watching more. This observer’s stance marked the next phase in my AFSC concern. It crystallized after I started work at Pendle Hill, from 1994-1997, and has continued since.
In these years, I had the chance to visit many Friends meetings, and made numerous presentations about peace issues. During these visits and talks, I made a point of not mentioning AFSC, or my concerns. Partly this was professional etiquette: as one Quaker hireling, it was bad manners to go around bashing other Quaker hirelings. But more basically, it was a kind of research project: if concern about AFSC was no longer a big item among Friends, what place, I wondered, did the organization now hold in Quaker awareness and priorities?
The trend of the data soon became clear, and has been reinforced by the scores of visits I’ve made to Friends Meetings and Churches in the thirteen years since leaving Pendle Hill, including many workshops and presentations, mainly on peace issues.
The blogger, doing research
What did this “research” show? One incident tells the story:
On a Saturday in the mid-1990s, a large Meeting in the Philadelphia area held an intensive, day-long exploration of ways to re-invigorate its peace witness. I was merely an interested visitor, sitting quietly and taking notes.
One exercise asked the thirty-plus Friends present to name their deepest peace-related concerns, as well as the organizations they were most eager to work with on them. The results were written on large sheets of butcher paper, brainstorming style, without discussion or debate. The exercise took more than an hour, then we broke for lunch.
I lingered in the room, going over the butcher paper lists. The issues were familiar enough: the arms race, Middle East tensions, military recruitment, and so on. The groups mentioned were many and varied, from local to international.
More than seventy were scrawled on the sheets. But there was one name that I hadn’t heard spoken, and I double-checked the list to see if I had missed it.
Nope. Of the seventy-plus groups named by thirty-plus Friends in an active Philadelphia area Meeting, none –not one – had identified the AFSC as a body they were eager to work with.
This was the more striking because the Meeting was home to a very high-level AFSC executive, so one could hardly imagine it being somehow unknown.
Less dramatically, this result was confirmed again and again over the next fifteen years, and across a wide geographic span. If I didn’t mention AFSC while talking about peace-related concerns, hardly anyone else ever did.
Not that the group had disappeared entirely: occasionally I saw a stack of mail awaiting a Clerk’s attention. Sure enough, envelopes from AFSC were there. Plus the occasional poster or brochure. But the surrounding silence was thunderous, and all but complete. (I’ve heard there are a few exceptions; but they prove the rule.)
The conclusion: I learned that AFSC has essentially dropped off the radar screen for active American Friends. We aren’t against it; we’ve just quit thinking about it. It’s mainly “divorced” from our life as a faith community. It’s become one more group with an agenda and fund appeals, one more envelope in the pile.
For a long time, this fact did not seem to make any difference to AFSC; it rolled on, with a budget climbing past $40 million per year, doing whatever it was doing. And for my part, while unease about the group’s de facto secularization continued, it slipped onto my own back burner. There was, after all, still plenty of room for Quaker action on peace and related issues, especially after September 11, 2001. So I was busy, as were other active Friends, in our Meetings and with many other groups.
AFSC hadn’t exactly been forgotten by me and these other Friends. Perhaps worse, it had simply become irrelevant.
From time to time, I wondered: could this situation go on forever? Or were there within it, chickens waiting to come home to roost?
I think we learned the answer to that in the past two years. AFSC’s chickens circled and came home; but they turned out to be buzzards.
Now the organization is at a moment of transition, rebuilding, and re-assessment. One item which could be re-assessed is the group’s attitude toward the RSOF and relationship with Friends.
I wonder, though, if such a reassessment is in the cards. I mean a serious one, not posturing or ritual patronizing.
It’s evident from the records turned up by Guenter Lewy and other researchers, that there has been a generation or more of dominant AFSC staff which mainly shrugged off this disconnection: Quakers were, if anything, seen as mainly part of the problems they were working on, rather than part of the solution. They (we) were (are) overwhelmingly white, middle class, politically unreliable, consumerist in fact (despite our organic protestations), shot through with racism, classism and homophobia, preoccupied with private and local matters, religiously parochial and given to nagging and complaining when approached. (Other than that, we’re fine.)
Besides which, we wielded little political influence and provided only a puny proportion of AFSC’s funds.
There are many grains of truth in this brief. Yet it is perhaps not decisive. And missing a key factor: that $40 million a year which AFSC used to raise -– it was harvested from the “F” for Friends in its name, from the Quaker reputation. Not AFSC’s on its own. So even if the funds didn’t come direct from Friends to AFSC’s coffers, there’s something about the RSOF that can ultimately be “taken to the bank,” in large amounts.
Given the AFSC’s current straitened circumstances and acknowledged need for renewal, maybe this mysterious Quaker “something” deserves another look.
I suggest it does. And more specifics about what that might entail and portend will be taken up in the next part of these reflections.
The AFSC Board has sent out a letter confirming our report of the appointment of Shan Cretin as the new General Secretary.
The letter and a brief biographical sketch are here.
Here’s a photo of Shan:
Reliable sources in & around Philadelphia tell us that AFSC has picked Shan Cretin, Director of its Southern California office, as its new national General Secretary.
No announcement has been seen on the AFSC website as of late Saturday June 12, but our sources are highly credible.
Although Cretin is an organizational insider, knowledgeable sources said she is expected to be a force for “bold change” in the financially-battered AFSC.
A member of Santa Monica (CA) Meeting, Cretin has also been Presiding Clerk of Pacific Yearly Meeting.
More details about Shan Cretin will be forthcoming soon.
This site had earlier predicted that another staffer would get the nod; but sources say that staffer did not in fact apply.
Or so goes the breathless headline from ekklesia, an ecumenical news service Over There:
Quakers to break tradition and allow journalists at annual meeting
The Philly papers have looked in on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting occasionally, for local controversy and the like. But only occasionally.
Britain Yearly Meeting feels it is different.
Friends House, London. No Longer to be a Journalist-Free Zone.
The body (or those who carry its sense of self) have a very exalted view of the proceedings; though the exaltation may have as much to do with good old Anglo class consciousness as anything like, say, religion. As the ekklesia report noted:
<< Concern was expressed about the tendency to stereotype journalists, who were described by one participant as “an unpleasant group”. >>
The technical term is, I believe, a “rum lot.” Journalists, or more loosely scribblers, are after all, mainly of the lower-middle class, who have to work for a living, and are over-full of damned cheek. Anyhow the place for tradespeople is not in the main hall, but below stairs somewhere, to be summoned when required.
By contrast, in the U.S., many of the liberal YM poohbahs would kill for some media attention. Um, that is, unless there’s real controversy within the body, in which case they react in much the same way as the Superintendents from the pastoral groups (or White House press secretaries), wanting only the most sanitized, properly vetted and euphemized version to reach the public print or telly screen.
These sentiments exist across the pond as well, as the report carefully described:
<< some opponents of the move admit to being motivated by fear of how Friends would be described in the media. >>
Indeed, the decision to admit the scribes involves a muted recognition that the body in London has, alas, come down a good bit in the world. Once when its hall was filled, the ranks included titans of industry – even owners of some of the major papers; Members of Parliament; and other certified Establishmentarians, indeed a few thought to be quite close to palace circles.
George Cadbury: Chocolate Magnate, acquaintance of monarchs, Newspaper baron –
and member, London YM, Back In The Day
Thus the media were not only unfit to enter, but unnecessary: the Right People would learn, discreetly, what was significant to know about the proceedings.
Now, alas, the Yearly Meeting is populated mainly by librarians, teachers, social workers and retirees from similar professions. Respectable, hmmm yes, but hardly the ones to make the mighty tremble, indeed only a small notch or two above – well, reporters.
The dispatch concluded that << While journalists will be invited from next year, the Quaker Communications Department has been asked to work out the details with sensitivity. It is likely that media will still be excluded from certain sessions and be asked to respect Quaker conventions. >>
Ah yes, “sensitivity.” Yet do the nervous Friends really need to worry? More likely, after all the agonizing, our cousins in Albion are soon to make a very deflating discovery, one quite familiar to Clerks this side of the Atlantic.
They’re about to find out that no matter how highly they still think of themselves as a body, or how important to the world their deliberations may seem, over the latest minute on recycling (for) or the Afghan war (against), the cadres of Fleet Street, except on the rarest of occasions, will likely not care tuppence what the Quakers are up to, for better or for worse.
I just hope they will be able to bear it.
