Can the Spirit of Quaker Service Be Resurrected?

 I am glad to see some signs that the spirit of Quaker service isn't dead, that it is being lived out in places like Atlanta and Seattle, and that Greg Wood plans to write about it. I was part of the resurrection of Quaker service in 1993, four years after moving to California from Philadelphia, where I became a Quaker in 1986. I wrote this when I was editor of a Quaker publication called  Friends Bulletin.

Are we beginning to lose the vital ideal of Quaker service? Can we resurrect it? These are some of the important questions addressed by Sue Glover and Franco Perna in their excellent article “Faith into practice” (The Friend, 12 June 1998).

As an American Friend, I have had some experience trying to answer these questions. Seven years ago I helped to start a youth service program jointly sponsored by the American Friends Service and by Southern California Quakerly Meeting (SCQM). This project was in part a response to Friends who were disappointed that the AFSC had, in their view, abandoned youth and service work. We were also inspired by a joint service project initiated by the AFSC and Intermountain Yearly Meeting (which embraces Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado). These joint projects have demonstrated conclusively that the AFSC and Friends can still work together to revive the spirit of Quaker service.

Intermountain Yearly Meeting’s joint service project now conducts ten week-long service projects each year—at the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations, in the Lakota reservation, in a Mexican village, and at many other sites.  The AFSC/SCQM conducts four weekend service and one weeklong project in the Southern California and Mexico. We have done volunteer work in homeless shelters, an AIDS center, migrant camps, a shelter for abandoned wild animals, a squatters settlement in Mexico, etc.  Each project attracts between 15-30 participants. Over the years hundreds of adults and youth have contributed tens of thousands of hours to these “service learning projects,” as we like to call them.

Has our work helped to resurrect the spirit of Quaker service? Let me quote some of the comments of our youth:

“This experience has changed my perspective utterly and given new fire to old convictions. That these projects speak to the heart of Quakerism is beyond all doubt.” —Holly Summers, La Jolla youth.

“The growth I experienced and the friendship I made are well worth any difficulties I encountered. I learned more this week than any other in my life.”—Anna Morgan, Orange County Quaker youth and Clerk of the Youth Service Project Committee.

One reason that our efforts are often ignored is because Western Friends are seen as “fringe group” by the Eastern Friends establishment and perhaps those in Europe as well. This may be true—like Jesus and his Gallilean followers, we Westerners are far from the centers of Quaker power.  But I hope that our work will eventually be recognized as a useful model by Friends elsewhere in the United States, and perhaps in other parts of the world as well.

     In discussing the Burlington Conference on Quaker Volunteer Service, Training and Witness (which I also attended, along with a contingent from the West),  Sue Glover and Franco Perna allude to Gilbert White’s article about the future of Quaker service that appeared in Friends Journal (January, 1998). Gilbert writes from a long and deep experience working with Friends and the Service Committee dating back to the early days. He notes that while some Friends are eager to revitalize the spirit of volunteer spirit, the AFSC seems to be heading in a different direction. Gilbert is correct is noting that volunteer service will not be a major focus of the Service Committee in the near future. But youth work has become one of the AFSC’s four primary “focus areas.”

Why has youth work become so important to the AFSC? Several years ago, AFSC had all but abandoned its youth work, much to the chagrin of many Friends, but now the AFSC has made youth one of its main focus areas. The main reason that the AFSC finally started paying attention to youth is that many of us kept raising this concern over and over again, and as the saying goes, the squeaky wheel finally got some oil. It is my hope that we Quakers can continue to nudge the AFSC in a Friendly direction, as the Spirit leads us. That’s why I stick around.

I also stick around the AFSC because the situation of Friends out here in the West is quite different from that in the East. In the East there are large concentrations of Friends in big cities such Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Washington. The AFSC and the Religious Society of Friends are such large entities that they can get along pretty much independently 

It’s not quite the same story here in the West. There are only 4,000-6,000 unprogrammed Quakers west of the Mississippi spread out over an enormous geographical range, and the AFSC is equally scattered. There are probably more Friends in the 50 mile radius around Philly than there are in the entire West. Because we are spread so thin, we Westerners need each other, and we can help each other, in ways that may not be the case back East.

Joint service projects like the one started by IMYM and Southern California Meeting serve a special need that we have here in the West. But what we are doing to revitalize Quaker service and the AFSC out here in the West may also be what George Fox would call a "pattern," a model for how Friends and the AFSC can work together, and for how Quaker service can still be re-visioned for the current age.

Helping to nurture the spirit of Quaker service in myself and others has been a vitally important part of my spiritual development. I will always cherish the lessons I learned from my experiences working with adults and teens in a variety of settings. But above all, I will value the friendships I have made, and the encounters I have had with people.

It is my hope that Quaker service will eventually become a world-wide phenomenon, as it has been in the past. I am pleased to hear that British and European Friends are concerned about the future of Quaker service and wish you all the best in your efforts to put your Quaker faith into practice. Those who would like to know more about what Americans are doing in this area can contact me. I will gladly send a copy of the Quaker Service issue of Friends Bulletin to anyone who is interested. You can also check out the new Quaker service website at www.quaker.org/fb/quakes.

Bio: Anthony Manousos is the editor of Friends Bulletin, the official publication of the three independent Western Yearly Meetings. He is also coordinator of the AFSC/SCQM Youth Service Project. Some of the remarks in this article are taken from a talk he delivered at Arizona Half-Yearly Meeting. The full text of this talk, along with other articles by Anthony Manousos, can be found at the Quaker service website. Anthony resides in Whittier, California, with his wife Kathleen.