“I had to choose to go deeper or go elsewhere.”
From: Friends Journal:
Young Adults Want What Early Friends Had
By Olivia Chalkley. September 1, 2023
“I became a Quaker when I was 14, which means that this year I celebrate having spent half of my life among Friends. Over the past 14 years, I have seen my faith shift and transform many times over within the Religious Society of Friends. These days, I’m not so sure where I fit in as a young adult and Christ-centered Friend who finds herself in Quaker spaces that often feel more like liberal discussion groups than church. I fluctuate between leadings to seek the spiritual enrichment I need elsewhere and leadings to stick around and invest in the community that raised me. I’m hoping my experience might shed some light on our condition as a community (and the spiritual conditions of my generation more broadly) and inform our revitalization endeavors.
I started attending Baltimore Yearly Meeting Young Friends gatherings as a freshman in high school, finding community there among like-minded peers that was severely lacking at my school. Quakerism became the most important thing in my life, but my understanding of it was shallow. It was, for me and most of my peers, about community and about holding vaguely progressive political views, and also about being “not Christian like that…” READ MORE