Drinking Coffee and Preparing to Speak to Pennsylvania Quakers About Digital Outreach

This morning, while drinking this cup of coffee, I am preparing to present to a Quaker Quarterly meeting in Pennsylvania via a Zoom teleconference. They invited me to speak on the topic of digital outreach.

I have felt challenged by this invitation the moment it was extended. I reached out to trusted elders in my own Quaker community for insight and sat with it in silence. Although Pennsylvania Quakers are a foreign and intimidating unknown to me, I felt both a spiritual movement to be present for them in whatever way we find together to do so.

I know not whether the issues we need to speak on are the objections to making our faith available on line or that acts of how to do that. Both are important conversations.

For me, both are an extension of this aspect of me: becoming Quaker.

I came to a Friend’s meeting house for the first time in late November 2016, after the election of Donald Trump. It was hard to find Quakers in the way that this Generation X technologist knows how to look for an sample things. I was lucky that a dear (small f) friend Kate was in conversation with me and good at endeavoring to search on the internet. Quaker’s findability is low, starting with their hesitance to use the very name that every one else uses to search for them.

I probably would not have taken the initiative to attend if not for Kate doing the research, finding the place and time and a little about what it would be like. I don’t know if I could have been brave about going in to an unknown place without her.

I am glad that Kate helped me over that initial nervousness (a nervousness that I reflect is similar to the nervousness I am feeling right now). I found a place to be confused, to continue to seek. The expectation that I would be judged started to fall away in the silence.

Since then, Quaker experience both collectively and privately has grown in me. That has meant a fair amount of book reading along with sitting in silence. I started to develop relationships with people in the meeting I regularly attend, Multnomah Monthly Meeting, perhaps six months after first going. I know do what all good Quakers do: I sit on committees.

I know that Quaker experience — in its personalized nature, in its emphasis on listening, in its trust in each of us as imperfect seekers, has a lot to give our world right now. I hope to help make those messages available.

What does that look like for an organization that is decentralized and 350 years old? I believe that looks like decentralized creation. That the voices of individuals who have things to say about their experience can lift each other up by finding and weaving together their stories. I hear that in the silence, and I hear that melding of voices making a comfortable space for the next seeker to wander in.