Being Ready for the Seekers

There’s a revealing line in the memoir of Samuel Bownas, a British traveling minister who visited the English colonies in North America in 1702 and 1727, staying a few years each time. On his second journey, he noted that “very few of the elders, that twenty years before were serviceable, zealous men, were now living.” Moreover, “many of the rising youth did come up in the form more than in the power and life that their predecessors were in.” There you have it: the golden age of Quakers was over 300 years ago.

But, of course, it wasn’t. Only a decade or so later, Benjamin Lay stunned Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sessions by coming in dressed as a soldier and concluding an antislavery diatribe by thrusting a sword into a hollowed-out Bible filled with fake blood. So many of our Quaker heroes, from John Woolman to Lucretia Mott to Bayard Rustin, were to follow. For every lionized Friend, hundreds worked to minister and elder and even do unglamorous work like maintaining the meetinghouses.

It’s my pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn. It’s been a messy process with lots of hurt feelings. Many people have left Friends, and there are a bewildering number of institutional schisms still dividing us. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Samuel Bownas himself recognized the cycle of regrowth. He’s most well-known for his short book, A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister, which has come to be widely recognized as the canonical how-to book of Quaker ministry (a beautiful well-produced volume from 1989 is still available from either of its co-publishers, Pendle Hill and the Tract Association of Friends). Bownas responded to a stultifying Quaker tradition by writing down the unwritten folkways of his predecessors. In so doing, he helped keep our ways alive.

There’s a curious debate over the intentionality of revivals. Some Friends counsel that we should wait and be true to our ways until the Spirit leads people to us. Others believe that with enough money and force of will, we can jump-start a revival among Friends.

I tend to fall in between. I wrote my first manifesto about organizing 20-something Friends back in the late 1990s. Over the years, I’ve served as a national outreach coordinator and also helped to organize various social media movements. I’ve seen many a much-hyped outreach initiative come and go.

Surprisingly, many of the forces bringing people to Friends are outside our control. The most effective outreach tool in the last 30 years has been the Beliefnet “What Religion Are You?” quiz, which must have told tens of thousands of seekers they are compatible with Friends. It’s a random quiz, made without academic rigor simply to make a few bucks on an advertising platform. We Quakers can’t match this kind of free publicity, but we can be ready when visitors seek us out. We can have good websites and social media; we can do the work to know our faith well enough to answer questions when people come in; we can practice hospitality and build meeting cultures that bring first-time visitors back the next week, and the week after that.

Anecdotally it seems like many new visitors have been checking out Friends in the last few years. There’s a growing curiosity about what we’ve found. Let’s greet these seekers, share our ways, and honor their observations and journeys. Let’s revive Quakerism yet again.

In Friendship,