quackquack

New Quaker Youth book off press. “Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices” celebrates, critiques, questions, and reflects on the Quaker faith experience.

Recent visitor Faith Kelley writes about the value of reaching across the Friends spectrum over on the FGC Quaker Youth blog:

These stories are troubling in and of themselves, but the more disturbing thing is they point to a real barrier as Friends attempt to reach across the seemingly wide theological and cultural chasms between us.  Stories of wild behavior and harm inflicted seem to be the only things we know about each other, the only narrative we tell ourselves about those “other” Friends.  We don’t interact with each other often enough to have any other tales to tell.

If you’re of the right age, you can continue this conversation this summer at the YAF 2010 Gathering that Faith is co-organizing.

I think that so often, we refrain from speaking to children about faith in fear of impacting the decisions they must make for themselves. I believe that this all too common silence comes from a place of good intentions, but I want to challenge it. In order for the faith of our children to be alive and vibrant, they must discover it themselves. But as adults, we have some maps that we can share with our children. We can tell them of our adventures, and our failures in faith without forcing them to take the same road.

The youth culture of our liberal Friends really has little to do with much of anything else. It’s segregated and it’s not even slightly religious. It can be wonderful and close and nurturing. It can…

And for those wondering, this year’s U.S. Quaker nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize was Gene Sharp, whose exhaustive list of nonviolent strategies and case studies is must-reading for any campaigner.

And for those wondering about the “Quaker vote,” Friends won the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize en masse for post-war relief work. Friends were represented by what was then called the Friends Service Council (now Quaker Peace and Social Witness) in London and by the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, both of whom have the honor to nominate future recipients. According to the FGC Quaker Youth blog, this year’s AFSC nominating nod went to Sharp. The actual vote is up to the Nobel Committee itself.

My wife Julie on her Catholic blog: Lest we wonder, where are the “younger people”

it is as fairy tales rendered from experience, rather than as blunt records of life, that his mid-’80s movies live on. They capture — with a winning mixture of optimism and melancholy, with a generosity of spirit tempered by a punitive sense of right and wrong — something essential in the experience of youth. Not only in that specific era, but also before and, I’m guessing, since. Like most artists who are perceived as the voice of a generation, Mr. Hughes did not belong to the generation in question. He was a baby boomer, a member of the high school class of 1968 in Northbrook, Ill. And his vision of the classes of 1984 and after was certainly colored by a post-’60s sense of wariness and counter-counterculture suspicion. A few years ago an article in Slate pegged Mr. Hughes as a conservative, even a reactionary, whose celebration of rebellion had more to do with the middle-class resentments that brought Reagan into office than with residual anti-establishment radicalism. The answers to this accusation are: maybe so, and so what? It is true that while his heroes, most notably Ferris Bueller and the members of the Breakfast Club, are in conflict with authority, they are also stubborn in their individualism and often unapologetically materialistic. Which is part of what makes them authentic, and authentically confused. The unspecified North Shore Chicago suburb where most of these stories take place is, at first glance and in its own mind, a paradise of uniformity and privilege. And this setting, rather than being the facile hell imagined in movies like “American Beauty,” is shown as a genuine expression of the American utopian ideal, a pastoral city on a hill where everyone is comfortable and everyone’s the same. The paradox is that most people feel, and want to be, different. Not to smash the system or flee its clutches, but rather to find a place within it where they can be themselves, even if they like strange music, come from a poorer family or favor eccentric styles of dress. That desire is what motivates Sam, the birthday girl in “Sixteen Candles,” and it also drives both the cocky Ferris Bueller and his nervous buddy Cameron. The great, paradoxical insight of “The Breakfast Club” is that alienation is the norm, that nerds, jocks, stoners, popular girls and weirdos are all, in their own ways, outsiders.

The youth were unanimously and passionately in favor of hiring a youth coordinator, and so were most adults who had worked with youth. But for some Friends, this was not enough. They were concerned about the cost, felt that the age range was too broad, that the YM did not have the experience to run such a program [and] whether the YM should even hire a paid staff person. Underlying many of these concerns was the old bugaboo: fear of change, and suspicion of young people.

Evangelical Friend AJ Schwanz writes about a new book from Mike King called Presence-centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation:

In my history of being part of faith communities I realized that those who are “group”-oriented seem more clubish, more “come in, be one of us”, more fractured, more self-interested. Those that were “ministry”-0riented thought of the bigger picture, had more awareness of the each other, practiced more over-arching hospitality. And in my faith gathering we have many ministries, but not a lot of groups … but the places where there are groups, we seem to have more lack of communication and conflict with each other.

Martin Commentary: On her post I asked AJ to tease out this distinction between “groups” that separate youth and “ministry” that keeps them in the church body.

I wonder if there’s some lesson for liberal Friends in this and not just for youth ministry. It seems like we have a tendency to compartimentalize our activities. Every purpose needs its own committee and we spend a lot of time starting and laying down committees. Why is “peace and concerns” separated from “earthcare” separated from “outreach” separated from “racial justice”? They’re all loving our neighbors.

My impression is that earlier generations of Friends did most things through two “committees”: ministers and elders. By divorcing our good deeds from ministry, we often secularlize them. How might we pull these functions together? Have any liberal Friends read out there Mike King’s work? Here’s the Amazon description:

How many programs does it take to change a youth group?

That question has bothered youth workers for decades, and the cracks in its logic are beginning to show. In place of the contrived, artificial mechanisms employed so widely in modern youth outreach and discipleship, Mike King proposes a ministry centered in the presence of God.

Young people encounter Christ not in the flash and pop of arena ministry, but in the sacred shadow of his presence. They learn what it is to love and follow Christ by observing others loving and following Christ—letting Christ shape their worldviews, their habits, their virtues. Presence-Centered Youth Ministry gives shape to such ministry through the classic disciplines and potent symbols and practices that have sustained the church over the centuries.

The sound and fury that has characterized youth ministry for so long has left too many youth workers tired and too many young people disillusioned. Come explore the deeper terrain; your students are sure to follow.

A birthright Friend on discovering the Bible as a child: “At my yearly meeting one year I found a children’s bible and I was drawn to it, not because it was spiritual, but because it had stories of…

“Quakers worship in many ways seeking a connection with the divine,” from silent worship to circle dances to unexplained watercolor worship, a wide range of display. Produced by the youth ministries…

Obama: “I don’t think America’s youth are interest groups.” #current #qqtalk

Julie’s latest piece on the South Jersey Catholic wars is pretty darn funny. Of course, what’s not to laugh about when we get the Bishop’s favorite Texas McCatholic Church profiled by the local reporter voted most likely to get down on his knees to serve the Bishop? They call their coffeeshop the “barrista ministry.” Their pagan labyrinth is surrounded by their crematorium, they have tai chi on the grass and sell Zulu music in the bookstore (as Father Jack would say “Yes! That would be an ecumenical matter!”) The senior pastor tried to explain all the positive, feel-good energy at the church by saying “it’s like walking into a mall at Christmas,” which I guess is a more transcendent experience than, say, umm.., I dunno, maybe walking into a church at Christmas?

Scroll down to the bottom where Julie’s sister and our brother-in-law go on a riff about the services they’d like to see at any McCatholic Churches on Bishop Galante’s drawing board (example: “Do you have to put a quarter in the confessional to get the door to open? Do the hosts have an imprint of the Nike swoosh on them?”). Galante’s all about vibrancy and youth programs, blah blah blah, and the Texas church does have a youth group website. It sports the requisite stupid name (X-Tream Faith) and theming from the X-Files, a show that went off the air when today’s teens were still in their Barney phase. It’s calendar is completely empty, natch. What’s most incredible is that Bishop Galante and the Courier Post actually think any of this making their case. Are they really really so out of touch? Does this look like vibrancy to anyone?

Someone needs to get the Bishop a cup of strong coffee: his incarcerated pal Raffaello Follieri is finally scheduled to appear in Federal District Court this Friday and we can expect all sorts of FBI documentation to tumble into the public record. The Wall Street Journal is hinting at a plea agreement but confirms that the Federal case is being built around bribe money paid to church officials, though the leak only places them at the Vatican. I don’t suspect it’s feeling much like the the mall on Christmas morning over at the Diocesan offices.