Faith, Change, and Courage (abridged)

Keynote Presentation by Barry Crossno to Intermountain Yearly Meeting;

June 14, 2024; Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado

The following text was abridged from a transcript of this presentation, published online at: https://westernfriend.org/library/faith-change-and-courage/. An audiorecording of this presentation is available online at: https://westernfriend.org/library/wf-podcast-36-the-water-we-swim-in/ .

When I was twenty-nine, I had an acute health crisis, followed by a year of suffering. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I surrendered to God. I came to see clearly for the first time that the rock I had built my world on, the idea of control, was actually an illusion.

I am sharing this personal story with you because it seems to me that your yearly meeting – along with many other meetings in the U.S. – is confronting circumstances that are not completely within your control, requiring you to surrender to a future that, at this point, only God can see.

The ways that we have organized ourselves as Friends – a largely volunteer body that evolved out of an egalitarian theology – have worked reasonably well for us for a very long time. Our committee-based organization worked particularly well for us in the early-to-mid twentieth century, during the rise of the middle class and increased volunteerism based on expanded leisure time. We established new meetings across the continent, as well as new organizations like FGC, FCNL, and AFSC. The economic and social institutions of the early twentieth century were favorable to the white middle-class, the class that largely comprised liberal Quakers.

Over the last four years, however, the economic, cultural, and institutional foundations of our country have shifted so much that we can’t help but notice: There are fewer Friends. Committees are harder to form. There are few children in our meetings. And “We have grayed.”

I want to begin by simply raising up some important and valuable aspects of our faith: The affirmation of the full equality of all genders and races, the affirmation that each person can access something larger than themselves – God, Spirit of Christ, the Divine. That community enriches and enlarges our experience of God. That revelation is ongoing. That our experience of Spirit can transform us. That the way we live our lives is more important than what we say we believe. These aspects of our faith are incredibly relevant to the time that we live in.

But even with all that, we know something is going wrong.

Much of the way we structure ourselves and do our business as Friends relies on people who are middle class, who have disposable income and free time. It relies on people who have significant awareness of Friends’ cultural and spiritual practices and our history. And, at least in North America, it relies on people who are willing to navigate white, middle-class norms and biases.

In recent decades, the United States has become a country where the majority of couples are dual-income couples. Especially if they have children or adult family members to care for, they feel very pressed for time. There was a significant shift in rates of volunteerism in the U.S. from the 1970s until about 2015. Especially in the bracket of 25-years-old to 54-years-old, volunteerism really fell, and a significantly higher share of volunteerism is now being done by people who are essentially retired.

The birth rate has also dropped in recent decades. In the 1950s and ‘60s, couples were having an average of 3.7 children. That has fallen until it’s stayed fairly consistently below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple. So, a piece of what we’re seeing in falling participation in our meetings is simply a reflection of a change in demography.

Also, families are feeling a heightened sense of competition, which goes along with the extremes of income inequality in our country. This has led families with college aspirations for their children to pressure those children to be more competitive, to spend more time in various educational activities. I can’t tell you the number of parents who have told me they needed to choose between taking their teens to a Quaker event or enrolling them in a robotics camp or in X, Y, or Z.

Then, on top of all of this, the appeal of Western religion is fading. The Pew Research Center reports that as recently as the early 1990s, 90% of people in the U.S. identified as Christian, but that percentage had fallen to 64% by 2020. And they project somewhere between 54% and 35% by 2070. A number of Pew studies have demonstrated that, whereas young adults in past generations would find their way from right-wing churches to Unitarians or Quakers or other left-leaning religions, young adults today are just opting out. They’re not looking for alternatives. A recent survey asked young people, “What do you care about in terms of these particular values, and what do you think Christians care about?” The study found an enormous gap between what young people care about and what they think religious folks care about.

For Quakers, that hasn’t been the problem. For a century, we have attracted people by our involvement in causes that they care about. We have relied on people walking through the doors because of that. More and more, that’s not happening. Visibility is not the problem either. On the FGC website, some parts of the newcomers’ area have been read more than 100,000 times; some Quaker videos have been seen hundreds of thousands of times. But visibility does not necessarily clear the hurdles that people have in their minds against Western religion. Visibility does not necessarily translate into people walking over the threshold of a Quaker meetinghouse.

Our difficulties, in terms of the number of people in our meetings, are really twofold: One is that we do not engage in invitational outreach. The other is that some of the structures that we have built over time don’t match the needs of today.

I will illustrate the idea of invitational outreach with my own experience. I was not raised Quaker. I had a professor who mentioned Quakerism, and I started reading about it. I read about it for seven years. I did not cross the threshold of a Quaker meetinghouse until one day, going about my daily life, I happened to find I was talking with a Quaker. After we’d talked about that a little bit, they said, “Would you like to go with me on Sunday?” And I said, “Sure.” It took that invitation for me to stop reading and to go.

Experiments with new structures can also help. It’s not about the core of worship, but about the container that frames and strengthens worship. It’s childcare; it’s spiritual formation; it’s community building; it’s pastoral care at critical life moments.

The top need of many spiritual seekers – and this has come out of program work by Emily Provance – is the need for consistent pastoral care, especially related to childcare and children. Also important are opportunities to build connections at different times during the week. Here are some experiments by various meetings over the past several years, which seek to meet these needs:

Some meetings have tried paid childcare and paid children’s religious education.

Some meetings are experimenting with replacing certain committees with one-person volunteer roles.

Some meetings have been trying semi-programmed worship. For example, one meeting extended their regular weekly worship to 90 minutes. During the first 30 minutes, they engage in worship-sharing on queries. Then, they settle down in expectant waiting.

Finally, some meetings have really expanded on the idea of midweek worship by scheduling three, four, five different times for worship throughout the week.

In order to be faithful, we don’t need to have a complete plan that’s infallible. We can imagine together what’s possible, make a decision, and still leave room to adapt. It’s an iterative process. Sometimes we can only see as far as the next good step.

I think it is a particular strength of Friends that we move as a body. Both the joys and the challenges belong to all of us. Together, we consider how to change this and correct that and move the other. Our commitment to being a body means committing to doing as well as we can individually, but also committing to doing as well as we can as a body. And to being forgiving as things unfold and as we learn. ~~~

Barry Crossno (pictured above) is the General Secretary of Friends General Conference.