Reporting Live from Young Adult Friends Gathering

I pace back and forth across the balcony of the Burlington New Jersey Friends meetinghouse, one of the most beautiful meetinghouses I have ever been in, but right now I barely notice. I am so over whelmed with what has been going own, the conversations I have been hearing, and the changes taking place within me. This is the first full day of the first ever Young Adult Friends (YAF) Gathering, right before lunch. We, gathered here, have just finished responding to the questions: what direction do we think the Religious Society of Friends needs to go in? And what do we thing young adult friends can contribute to the Religious Society of Friends? The answers and emotions in response to those questions had been intense and varied. Yet as I stand before one of the windows high up in the balcony of the meetinghouse what goes through my head is that everyone has, had the same concerns I have. Thinking about this I realized it’s not true. No one had expressed the exact same needs and desires I had, what had been there in each and every one of us was our deep, almost palpable intensity and need that we took to Quakerism. Everyone who spoke and many others who didn’t, expressed the same sentiment; they loved Quakerism, loved the religion, loved the people, loved the work, loved being Friends, yet each and everyone of us where expressing a feeling of unfulfillment. Ever single one of us where saying, “we know that Quakerism can be, should be, more then what we are experiencing now, and we want, need, demand, and work for Quakerism to grow. We where all asking Quakerism, both in our own meeting and in general, to become more meaningful, more spiritual, more active, more radical, more intense. There was anger and frustration in some of the massages and concerns raised, but not as much as I had expect, for the most part the young adult Friends there where saying “yes there are problems, things need to change, we are no longer contented with the way things are, but we see the problems, we acknowledge the problems, and now we are ready to act to change them”. There was no blaming, no finger pointing, and most surprisingly no feeling of helplessness.
I realize now as I write this, it has been one of the most hope-filled experiences I have ever had with Friends. There was no sense that because we where all Quaker we should not have been criticizing Quakerism, no unfounded or false sense of Quaker solidarity, no brushing differences of goals and opinions under the rug, as one young Friend said as he rose to speak “I agree with a lot of what you said but some of what I have to say contradicts it too”, we each spoke truly, however critically, of Quakerism, of our own Meetings, of the Religious Society of Friends as a whole, of our selves. Yet there was hope, lots of it. There was no sense that the changes we where saying needed to happen wouldn’t happen, no sense that the cause was hopeless, no sense that their was nothing that we could do. Every Friend there was, I felt, filled with the Spirit and ready, willing and able to become the next generation of the writers, ministers, elders, and leaders of the Religious Society of Friends. The things I will take away at the end of YAF Gathering will be that there will be change within the Religious Society of Friends, intense, long lasting change, and that we will only grow stronger for it The next generation of Friends are alive and hungry for what God has to offer us, and the Spirit does move among us.