Young Adult Friends Gathering Video Series – Friday Evening Program and Worship

By Micah Bales

This is the second in a series of videos put together from footage and interviews taken during the 2010 Young Adult Friends Gathering in Wichita, Kansas. This gathering took place over the 2010 Memorial Day Weekend and was perhaps the most diverse and balanced YAF gathering in generations. Roughly equal numbers of Liberal-Unprogrammed, Pastoral and Evangelical Friends were in attendance, along with a small number of Conservative Friends.

This particular video gives a glimpse into the opening evening of the YAF gathering, as Friends gather and begin to get to know one another.

For more information about the 2010 YAF Gathering, please check out the official website, which features the advance materials that Friends were asked to use in their preparation for the conference, as well as the epistle that those gathered issued at the end of the weekend.

Micah Bales serves as Coordinator of Young Adult Engagement at ESR. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Faith Kelley. He is active with Capitol Hill Friendsand is a member of Rockingham Friends Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting.

Joerg Reiger: Challenging Empire

By Diane Reynolds
How can Christianity challenge Empire? Joerg Rieger, professor of theology at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, author of several books, including Christ and Empire and No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics and the Future, asked that question when he came to ESR last week as the seminary’s Wilson lecturer.
Empire concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a few, Rieger said, and works to convince the people under its rule that it represents the only viable way to live. Military might supports and enforces this empire vision. The U.S. is an empire today, Reiger said, as the Roman Empire once was. In both cases, Christianity threatens to undermine Empire’s totalizing tendencies.
Empire has long tried to domesticate and dilute the Christian message, but has never been able to do so entirely. The alternative Christian vision flourishes at the bottom of society and works its way up. It can be found not in Empire promises of future benefits, but in the here and now—where the sick are healed, the blind see and the lame walk. It offers a shalom vision that challenges a top-down, all-powerful Empire.
Much of what Rieger said accords with Quakerism, which has traditionally spoken truth to power and aligned itself with the marginalized. Quakerism roots itself in an understanding of Christianity that opposes Empire’s hierarchy, oppression and material pomp.
Rieger explicitly linked Christianity to economics and politics. As I listened to him, I found myself agreeing - and wishing an alternative voice would debate him. Where do progressive notions go awry? Where can they be critiqued? In an era, unprecedented in my lifetime, in which the social contract appears to be in process of being fundamentally renegotiated, where do we find new ideas? When Reiger, for instance, was asked what could be done about “permanently disappeared” jobs, his answer was a government jobs program. However, in this political climate, the government doesn’t seem inclined to create jobs.  What do we do instead of looking to the government?
In a blog on the high tuition of a Quaker school in New York City, Bob Doto described a punk mentality, where, instead of fighting with the system, we find spaces where we can live with integrity. I’d love ESR to invite Rieger back, along with a punk theologian, and a conservative theologian, to debate each other and spark some perhaps heated conversation. After all, as the early Quakers knew, Jesus came not to support the status quo, be it progressive or conservative, but to light the world on fire.

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Localize: Your Vote Counts

By Diane Reynolds
When one side of an argument speaks louder than the other side, local governments and develop skewed policies that are not based on the wishes of the majority of their electorate.  It's no mystery that elements of hate and intolerance in our society have advanced their agenda through grassroots organizing.  Progressive people can do the same, said Allan Kauffman, mayor of Goshen, Indiana and father of a Bethany Seminary student at this week’s Peace Forum lunch held at ESR.
Nine votes or fewer can decide who is elected to a town or city council, and one council member can change the whole political balance of a town, Kauffman said, encouraging listeners to become civically engaged at the most local level of government. “Local issues count,” he said.
In Goshen, said Kauffman, a member of the Church of the Brethren, most of the city council now comes from historic peace churches, primarily the Mennonites, changing the tenor of government business practices. Now, the council puts more emphasis on consensus, and is less likely to support an item that passes on a divided vote, such as 4 to 3, knowing that such narrow margins lead to divisiveness, not unity. The desire for consensus also leads to more creative problem-solving, he said.
Even when their ideas are defeated, having progressives on the council has brought good to the city, Kauffman said. The council was able to create a Human Relations Commission (HRC) in response to an influx of Latino immigrants into Goshen, who came seeking some of the many blue collar jobs there. When the Ku Klux Klan, which has historic ties to Goshen, marched in the city, the commission organized a fundraising drive for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization loathed by the Klan. As long as the Klan stayed in town, the fundraiser continued, which encouraged the Klan to leave. Later, the city passed an ordinance that supported free speech but required that the speaker be unmasked.  Although the ACLU contested this law in court and won—the Constitution protects anonymous speech—Kauffman felt the project was success because it brought ordinary citizens into local government action. Similarly, when the HRC proposed the city adopt language to protect gays and lesbians, outside pressure defeated the measure—but civic engagement increased.
Since the 18th century, Quakers have had an ambivalent relationship with governments, both withdrawing from and engaging in political action. Clearly, from a religious viewpoint, political engagement must be Spirit-led, raising the question of what exactly a Spirit-led politics look like? Yet with the U.S. economy shaky and politics growing more extreme, Kauffman makes a strong case for progressive people of faith to engage in the process of discerning where and when to get involved, even at the most local level.
Questions that cross my mind are these: Are Quakers hampered by “old wineskins,” sometimes hanging on to cherished notions from the 1960s that have become outdated? What are some new ways that Quakers could get more creatively involved local politics? What impedes our civic engagement?

Diane Reynolds is a student in Earlham School of Religion’s Master of Divinity program. She maintains a personal blog, Emerging Quaker.

Young Adult Friends Gathering 2010 Video Series

By Micah Bales

This is the first in a series of videos put together from footage and interviews taken during the 2010 Young Adult Friends Gathering in Wichita, Kansas. This gathering took place over the 2010 Memorial Day Weekend and was perhaps the most diverse and balanced YAF gathering in generations. Roughly equal numbers of Liberal-Unprogrammed, Pastoral and Evangelical Friends were in attendance, along with a small number of Conservative Friends.

I hope that these videos will provide you with a sense of the importance – and complexity - what took place in Wichita last May. Coming together from across the United States and Canada, we sought to draw together in the Holy Spirit. Through our joys and our struggles, we came to know each other better and to understand more deeply our shared heritage as Friends.

For more information about the 2010 YAF Gathering, please check out the official website, which features the advance materials that Friends were asked to use in their preparation for the conference, as well as the epistle that those gathered issued at the end of the weekend.

Micah Bales serves as Coordinator of Young Adult Engagement at ESR. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Faith Kelley. He is active with Capitol Hill Friends and is a member of Rockingham Friends Meeting, Ohio Yearly Meeting.

Less-Anxious Leadership

By Jim Higginbotham

Being a less-anxious presence is a core concept of pastoral care. (The literature actually uses the term “non-anxious presence”; I think that's unrealistic.) Being anxious comes in many forms. For example, students in my classes are encouraged to recognize the ways they over-function in helping another person. Giving advice, asking too many probing questions, and doing things for someone who could do it for him/herself are some of the common ways that caring people try too hard to help. What students often discover is that the more they attempt to alter someone's behavior or feelings, even out of compassion, the less the other person changes. Ironically, doing less often has more power.  Under-functioning is another kind of anxious reaction, which is often related to a history of woundedness.

Systems theorists assert that managing anxiety is the key to effective leadership. The less anxiously a leader reacts to the dynamics of a group the more effectively s/he can guide them through even the most difficult situations. Unfortunately, leaders, like everyone else in a group, have difficulty recognizing their own reactivity. Organizations of all sizes have particular, often unrecognized patterns to their interactions, which are most characteristically exhibited in difficult decision-making. Groups will repeat the same “mistakes” over and over, even when the leadership changes. In small groups, people take on roles as if in a play, and it is hard to escape these roles without leaving the group. This is most evident in families, of course. Even in large organizations, systemic dynamics encourage the leader to react in a certain manner: the leader rose to that position, in part, because his/her style fits the system.

Therefore, good leadership is often not about changing the group you lead, but changing how you react to the group. Less reactivity can affect group dynamics. Similar to pastoral caregiving, leaders need to recognize when they are trying to do too much or when they are helping the group continue to spin in a direction that hasn't worked. In the latter situation, pushing the group to change directions probably won't be effective. However, if a leader stops enabling the current patterns and reacts with less anxiety when the group “rebels” against this new style, the group might slowly begin to function in a new manner. Organizations will also react strongly when one stops over-functioning. For many of us, it is hard not to rescue a group when it seems like it will fail without our doing what we have always done. However, good leadership has to allow the members to do what they can do for themselves, even if it means they have to learn the “hard way.”

So, what do you think about this idea of becoming a less-anxious presence as the heart of good leadership?

Jim Higginbotham is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care at Earlham School of Religion. He live in Indianapolis.

Voices from the ESR Access Community (Part 2)

By Valerie Hurwitz

A follow-up to my post from last Monday--two more videos of ESR Access students discussing their January Intensive classes.  View Part 1 here.  Any tips from Access Students about travel or taking classes in the two-week intensive format?  Who plans to take a May intensive?  What class?

Rob Pierson (Albuquerque, NM)

Tandy Scheffler (Oak Ridge, TN)

Valerie Hurwitz is Director of Recruitment and Admissions at Earlham School of Religion. She lives in Richmond, Indiana and serves as choir director at West Richmond Friends Meeting.

The Story of Fancy Gap Friends

By Tony Lowe

Fancy Gap Friends Fellowship began as a Bible study/discussion group in the summer of 2004 with a dozen or so folks that met weekly at our house. A few months later, we began meeting for worship on Sunday mornings as well, partly because folks who had previously been part of a church still felt the need for a Sunday gathering, but also because they wanted a deeper worship experience than the Bible study. Some folks then chose to only attend the Sunday meeting for worship while others due to schedule conflicts or other things could only commit to the week night Bible study. Then one of our teenagers started a weekly meeting on Sunday afternoons for young people, so we soon had three separate groups meeting. In order to create some sense of community, we tried to have a picnic or some other kind of fellowship at least once a month so folks in the various groups could get to know one another.

This idea like most of our basic format came directly from a conference I had attended in Richmond earlier that year on simple churches led by Doug and Wendy Biehr. Their presentation was really about gathering friends and neighbors as a way of starting new unprogrammed Friends meetings, but it seemed to me it could work in what I would call a semi programmed setting as well. So we kept the idea of meeting in small groups in a home setting, but I (or occasionally someone else in the group) would share some Scripture and reflect on it as a way of leading the group into worship. For me that meant condensing my remarks into a no more than fifteen minute time frame and leaving things more open ended, making fewer statements and raising more questions for folks to wrestle with in our time of open worship.

We also did a couple of service projects. We got the names of several needy families from Social Services at Thanksgiving and shopped together and then delivered baskets with turkeys and all the works they would need for a traditional Thanksgiving meal to each household. We were also in contact with a military chaplain in Iraq who was involved in the “balls instead of bombs” campaign, and we bought and packed boxes of soccer balls, baseballs, footballs, dolls, stuffed animals, and other toys to be distributed to Iraqi children. When Christmas came, we once again adopted a couple of neighborhood families through social services and provided toys, clothes, and food for their holiday.

Along the way it became clear to us that we were no longer just a Bible study group, but had become a real faith community doing everything we thought a church should be doing. Our original group had five or six folks in it who had been a part of a Quaker meeting in the past which is why we had the word Friends in our name. Most of the others had no strong ties to any particular church, but really liked the way we did worship and the service aspect of our fellowship, so they were comfortable with the idea of becoming a Quaker worship group. Since a number of us were or had been affiliated with North Carolina Yearly Meeting -FUM, in April of 2005 we asked to become a preparative meeting under the care of the quarterly meeting in closest proximity to us.

Making the transition from a fellowship to a preparative meeting was relatively painless. We were already basically using Quaker business procedures and we had folks in the group who volunteered to be our presiding clerk, recording clerk, and treasurer. Thus far we have had 4 presiding clerks, 3 recording clerks, and 3 people serve as treasurer, none of whom are the same, so virtually everyone in the fellowship has served in one capacity or another. We have even had two of our Young Friends serve as presiding and recording clerks.

Although we are somewhat different from the more traditional programmed pastoral meetings that make up most of North Carolina Yearly Meeting, we feel that we have much in common with early Friends. Quakers from the very beginning have understood the church to be the people in whose hearts Christ dwells by faith rather than a building or some other gathering place. Our fellowship has embraced this concept as a way of breaking down the barriers between sacred and secular space since God is everywhere. With this goal in mind, we have purposely chosen not to have a regular meeting place, but instead gather in homes, parks, coffee houses, restaurants, even at overlooks along the Blue Ridge Parkway for worship and fellowship.

We also feel very strongly connected to the “emerging church” (the word is Convergent among Quakers) and identify very closely with the characteristics of this new movement, some of which are not new to Quakers at all, like the idea that worship should be experiential and interactive. In addition to the traditional Quaker period of open worship, during our “preaching time” folks are also free to raise questions, make comments, and share their own observations and illustrations (some of which are often better than mine) as we work through a passage of Scripture together. We always end our Sunday worship with a communal meal.

We also relate to the emergent idea of “being the church” rather than going to church. Our treasurer came to me once with a note of thanks from someone we did not know. It turned out that a couple who had not been able to get to worship for a couple of weeks because of their work schedules had heard about a need in their community and just gone out and bought groceries and other necessities and showed up at the family’s door and told them they were from Fancy Gap Friends Fellowship. Some of our folks have gotten together in teams of two or three to volunteer at local food pantries. A group of youth and adult volunteers spent most a weekend last summer installing new shelving, repairing leaks, and sorting and shelving food in the food pantry run by our local Red Cross.

Because folks are constantly taking on these kinds of projects, we do very little in the way of programs. Most of the folks in our fellowship have pretty demanding jobs (teachers, mental health counselor, chaplain, real estate agent, etc) so we don’t try to add on additional responsibilities but encourage them to be salt and light in the places God has already put them (something Jesus said about making disciples as you go). At this point there is no one on our fellowship who wasn’t invited to come by a family member, friend, or co-worker. And since we don’t have a building to maintain or programs to support, we are able to put most of our resources to work in our community, either through help given directly to individuals and families or by supporting the local food banks and other community agencies.

We’re a user friendly group. We don’t have it all together, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers (we don’t even have all the questions yet). We’re just a group of folks on a journey together, learning as we go, encountering God along the road in ordinary people, places, and situations in ways that make them all extraordinary which is verily, verily awesome.

Tony Lowe is a recorded minister in North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM). He is a graduate of Houston Graduate School of Theology and Carolina Evangelical Divinity School. After serving five years as a pastor in more traditional Friends Meetings, Tony became the pastoral minister of Fancy Gap Friends Fellowship. In addition to his work with Fancy Gap Friends, Tony is very interested in Convergent Friends and enjoys traveling among different groups of Quakers to promote mutual respect and understanding.