- "if their perspectives are listened to and if they participate in the leadership of the community, it will help create a community they will love to participate in"
- "if we invite them, and invite them persistently and lovingly, to participate in our community, then they will participate".
- "if we contribute money we'll feel more invested and participate more"
- "if we contribute our time as a service we'll feel more invested in the community and participate more"
- "if it's difficult for us to find a way to participate, we might not participate"
It strikes me that participation from various groups such as young adults in...
- leadership,
- financial support of the community,
- membership,
- worship,
- service,
- community life,
I hope you'll consider the possibility that neither you nor the Quaker community is "bad" or "wrong" for not having already looked at this more, or not having created more age/race/social class diversity. I hope you'll also consider that our faith community has a lot to rejoice in, in terms of the stand that we have taken for equality and the ways that has influenced us.
If you've read this far, I'd like to make this request of you:
Would you be willing to invite people to participate in ways that will help our community's base of support* include people who are new or whose age, social class, or race is different from your own?
*by that i I mean our membership, leadership, worship, etc.
2 comments:
Yes! Thanks Julian.
Invitations are good, but also important is that the community has a sense of mission it's working on and that people who are not like us are included and, like you say, can change how things are done. That can be hard as Quakers are set in their ways about how things are done. We want people who are different to join us and do things like us.
A community that is healthy and attractive will draw people to it. My opinion is that if it isn't, it says more about the health of the community than the need to invite. (In business you don't fix a quality control problem with marketing).
Of course parts of Quaker culture are very alien to some, and in my observation that's a bigger gap for minorities and working class folks than for white professionals.
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