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Friends United Meeting |
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November 1999
"There's Just You and Me, Kid"
By Johan Maurer
Patti Crane was blunt: “ESR’s solutions will be derived here or not at all.” Looking around at Earlham School of Religion’s Board of Advisors, gathered for their annual meeting, she then said some words which continue to echo for me: “Everyone talks about what someone else should be doing or isn’t doing.”
This thread of truth-telling about Friends also appears in the remarkable Crane MetaMarketing report, Among Friends. (See Doug Bennett’s article, starting on page 14.) There is plenty of evidence that we Friends can be eloquent about our heritage, and equally eloquent about our shortcomings. Among those shortcomings are our paradoxical attitudes toward leaders: we need them but we don’t want them to lead.
The Crane report describes what happens when Friends stop worrying about whether they like being leaders or followers and just take responsibility for whatever comes next. One meeting has no standing committees; people organize to meet the needs they see. Another meeting found practical ways to highlight the diverse ministries of its “covenant” members. The report observes, “Today’s Friends, we believe, don’t need to follow; like the people in these few stories, they need to follow through.”
The report goes on, “What if such behavior began to spread? What if it infused the entire Society of Friends? Here’s the sequence we can imagine: Individual Friends, not passively or autocratically held accountable but actively choosing accountability, begin to feel more important, more useful, more engaged. Pastors and other ‘leaders’ begin to feel helped and lightened; freed from an unrealistic burden of duties, they can tend to the details of administration or can pursue their much-needed gifts of preaching, caring, teaching, elder-ing, mentoring. Newcomers quickly learn from others’ example, if not from explicit words, that ‘belonging’ among Friends carries an expectation of willingly shared tasks. And the entire Society flourishes.”
In one of the report’s stories, one Friend asks another, “Where are the strong people who used to be here to guide me?” He replies to her, “There’s just you and me, kid.” But “you and me” are a great start! I take the commissioning experience of the FUM Triennial seriously: You and I are the ones charged by God to tell the story of what it is like to live with Jesus as the leader of our lives and our meetings. You and I need to stop waiting for the right people to motivate us, for the conditions to be perfect, for the budget to be balanced. How can you and I experience that gospel freedom more fully, to identify and meet needs more directly, and to be more honest about the obstacles?
Among those who have been helping us in FUM to tell that story–the Quaker story of lives and meetings centered around Jesus–has been Ben Richmond. By the time you read this, Ben will be on the Quaker Life team for only a few more weeks. This issue carries the classified ad announcing the search for a successor, but that ad doesn’t begin to do justice to Ben’s ministry of communication.
Ben does a superb job managing the complex process of editorial selection, copy-editing, allocation of space, coordination with printers and other vendors, and financial oversight. Even more important, throughout these activities he expresses a vision of Friends that is humane, evangelical, true to our testimonies and discipleship, respectful of differences–in other words, compellingly faithful to the best of Friends United Meeting’s spiritual heritage while constantly asking us to say what God is doing now.
We are asking God to lead us in the search for Ben’s successor, and we are asking you to be part of that search. We are eager to receive your nominations or expressions of interest. In any case, please pray for us to be rightly led in this process.
Johan Maurer is general secretary of Friends United Meeting and editor of Quaker Life.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Meeting
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