Growing the Community of Friends - Embracing Diversity in Quakerism

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Filming and Editing by Christopher Cuthrell
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The surprising thing about my journey in the Quaker faith is that despite it being a predominantly white faith community, that I'm still able to show up as my entire self and not be penalized for it or punished for it and, in fact, to be celebrated for it. And I notice that about the Quaker faith and people that identify as Friends, that we are all unapologetic in our own way about our ways of being and ways of showing up in the world. And I can't help but think that that is divine intervention. That is nothing but God, that is not "we all read the same book and came to the same conclusions". It's that we looked within, and listened, and were led to the same place.
My name is Rashid Darden. My pronouns are he/him/his, I live in Conway, North Carolina. And I worship with Friends Meeting of Washington in Washington, D.C., virtually at the nine o'clock hour
It's tough to articulate what you are to people who simply may not be there, may not be interested, or there are other faith communities that are more prevailing. The Religious Society of Friends is one of the smallest denominations, if you will, in North America at least. Quaker faith is largely white in this country and is very, in some places, middle class and in some places very agrarian. So if we want to diversify the religious society of friends in locations like New York or Washington, you are, you know, if you're looking for black people, you're competing with the black Protestant tradition.
But I don't think the answer is simply "Let's go find one community. Let's go find a particular segment". There's data out there that discusses people who are making the decision to be spiritual but not religious. What a lot of people are doing is leaving Christianity altogether. And I would say as someone who almost wasn't a Christian myself, that the Quaker faith was the last stop before I decided to not be religious at all. I believe that that ought to be the prevailing narrative and that we can't propagate the Quaker faith by having babies and hoping they decide to be Quakers. We should propagate outwards as much as we propagate up and down, if that makes sense.
In addition to understanding that we ought to be catching people before they leave wherever their first home was, we have to do smart things like bilingual literature. That if you're in a city like Washington with a lot of Spanish speaking immigrants, your meeting materials need to be in Spanish or Amharic or French or whatever works for your local community. We have to experiment with meeting days and times. We have to experiment with worship as a community practice, meaning part of a monthly meeting, or worship as a service. Entities like Friends General Conference and Pendle Hill do offer virtual worship, which is very important, and I would hope that those experiences also share the next logical step: Here's how you find a community of your own. Here's how you go from recipients of a service to participant in a community. And if our entities, whatever our Quaker entities are not doing that, then they're not investing in the growth of the Religious Society of Friends.
We should invest resources in folks that are conversant in the languages of the communities that we want to attract. And that doesn't just mean foreign languages. That means someone like me who is from a particular Protestant experience, from a particular kind of city that is steeped in a pro-black tradition. How do we generate the conversations around how to attract people that look like me? If people that look like me are not in leadership of those initiatives. Those are things to think about. Those are things to talk about. But most importantly, those are things to act on. Even if we fail, we have to be okay with failing and pivoting and causing the least amount of harm. But we cause more harm to the community when we don't try.
I think we have to cast off the fear. And I think that we need to cast on whatever armor we need to do this work. The Quaker faith is not a country club. It's not a legacy society. The most important Quaker is the friend who is yet to be convinced. My personal ministry is one that is so convinced that Quakerism is one of the best possible paths to take that it would be wrong for me to keep quiet about it, that it would be wrong for me not to share my story, George Fox, the Valiant Sixty, whoever your favorite Quaker hero is, did not do this work so that it could die along bloodlines. It's supposed to be continued. The revelation is supposed to continue through bodies, through living people who can then tell others.