Through the Flaming Sword

Best practices:

• Dedicate a committee to pastoral care.
• Develop a care list of members and attenders for each member of the committee.
• Ask the members how you’re doing and what they need.
• If possible, dedicate resources to helping members in material need.

A pastoral care committee

Central Philadelphia Meeting has a Membership Care committee charged with pastoral care of members. I know meetings that combine pastoral care and care of ministry and worship in one committee, and I think this might make sense for small meetings. But in medium and large sized meetings, I suspect that the pastoral care concerns will tend to take priority on the committee’s agenda and thus will tend to squeeze out attention to worship and ministry. Both roles are important and deserve our full attention.

It’s true that pastoral matters almost always have a spiritual dimension and spiritual matters can have a pastoral dimension, so these committees need to talk to each other when appropriate and keep the other dimension in mind when doing their own work. But that seems easier to me than trying to charge one committee with these two very important roles when you have only so much time in committee meetings.

Care list

I think it is very useful for each member and attender to have a Friend who checks in on them every once in a while, providing an opening and invitation to come forward with any concerns they might have, something they might not do on their own if the meeting did not provide the opportunity. Members should not have to struggle against obstacles if they need to seek help from the meeting; it’s hard enough to seek help. They shouldn’t have to figure out whom to approach. They should feel like they know at least one person, if only slightly, who has already declared their willingness to listen. And everybody should enjoy some contact from the meeting, so that we all feel known and included, and so the meeting is in a better position to serve its members and the Spirit in this important way.

Reality check

Over the past year, Central Philadelphia Meeting has held a series of potlucks to explore pastoral care in the meeting, asking what Friends’ experience has been and asking for ideas and feedback to the Membership Care Committee. This effort has grounded the work of the committee in a new and good way. I think our meetings need to be more deliberate than we usually are in sounding the life of the meeting in a number of areas—quality of worship and vocal ministry; openness and friendliness of the community to newcomers, children, families, and young adults, people of color, conservatives, and Christ-centered Friends;; support of leadings and ministries; spiritual formation in general; and the meeting’s witness life. The culture of silence that so often prevails in a Quaker meeting can mask discontent that should be more forthrightly addressed. I think we should periodically and proactively seek out the spiritual condition of the meeting in these various areas. Even an anonymous survey would be a help, though potlucks do a great job of building the very community you’re trying to sound out.

Material support

Central Philadelphia Meeting has a Meeting Community Assistance Fund Committee that responds to material needs of the members. Obviously, the meeting has some resources for this ministry, as well. The meeting is truly blessed in this way. Many meetings have no reserves that could be available to help members who face some financial emergency. This is an extremely delicate matter and requires the highest degree of discernment. But I think it should be central to a meeting’s mission.

My model is Jesus and the early church. When Jesus declared himself the christ in Luke 4:18, he defined his “christ-hood” in terms of “good news to the poor”. When the post-resurrection church was born in the Pentecost (Acts 2:1-11), the very first thing they did was fulfill Jesus’ promise of debt relief for the poor by setting up a welfare system. The heart of that system was that members who had surplus wealth made those resources available to the community for poor relief. The positive example was Barnabas (Acts 4:36-37); the negative example was Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5: 1-11). And this was a community that was almost by definition already really poor to start with.

The question is, do we know who might be sitting on the bench next to us that is suffering under a crushing burden of debt or struggling to meet their basic needs? And if we did know, what would we do about it?

So how might small meetings and meetings with no reserves try to follow in the early Christian example? This is one of the roles that regional and yearly meetings should serve. How can we expand our pool of resources to meet this potential need? And money is not the only option. Pastoral care committees should research the resources available outside even the wider Quaker community. What programs are available from local and state governments and from other charity organizations? Our committees should keep a portfolio of such resources, so that, even if the meeting can’t be of direct financial assistance, at least we can help steer Friends toward the resources they need.

Best practices:

• Distribute the agenda and relevant documents in the week prior to meeting for business in worship.
• Consider one of the queries from your Faith and Practice.
• Set aside time for exploring long-term issues, big picture issues, and other concerns that lie outside the usual business of the meeting.

Business materials

Central Philadelphia Meeting distributes materials pertaining to the upcoming meeting for business in worship by email during the week before meeting. The meeting also provides some packets of these materials on a table by the door into the meeting room for those who don’t use email or have not printed them or brought some mobile device to view them on. These should be in a format that makes mobile viewing manageable; pdf files work pretty well; html pages work better.

Queries

One of the first things on the agenda is to read and consider one of the queries in PhYM’s* Faith and Practice, rotating through them month by month. I think this is an excellent practice. My previous meeting (Yardley, PA) also read the queries in the meeting for worship on the same Sunday as meeting for business, so that the larger number of members attending worship could respond. It tended to shape the vocal ministry, sometimes, but that was the point. I liked this practice, also.

Dedicated time for exploration and reflection

On most business meeting Sundays, Central Philadelphia Meeting holds two meetings for business in worship, one before meeting for worship, and one after. The morning session is dedicated to considering the kinds of things that the necessary and regular business of a meeting almost always pushes to the side—exploration of issues facing the meeting, presentations from important outside groups, consideration of matters that affect the meeting but are not part of the meeting’s regular business, etc. We used this time a while back to work on the FCNL priorities survey. We’ve looked at the annual budget and the meeting’s priorities for the coming year. We’ve had a presentation from a local interfaith witness network that we’ve joined. We considered the report and recommendations from an ad hoc committee charged with addressing racism.

This makes for a long day for sure. For personal reasons, I myself am rarely able to dedicate that much time on a Sunday, so I often attend only one. I imagine that many meetings would never consider doing this. But I do think that it’s important to set aside time regularly for these kinds of concerns. Otherwise, they never happen. There is always too much regular and pressing business to attend to. Which sounds like an argument to not set aside such time. But realistically, how often would the meeting really suffer if some of the regular and even the pressing business didn’t happen until the next month? When you make an hour and a quarter available virtually every month to consider the important meta-issues of the meeting, as CPM does, the meeting grows into the future with self-awareness and a measure of confidence that is hard to get otherwise.

*  I use PhYM for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, even though members of the yearly meeting and the yearly meeting itself use PYM (it’s url is pym.org). I do this because Pacific Yearly Meeting also uses PYM, and I think it’s worth minding the distinction. PhYM’s historical importance, its venerable age, and its large size has given it first chance at PYM and this history encourages the yearly meeting to be a little self-centered. I have never heard anyone even mention the problem of the overlapping acronyms with Pacific. One could refer to Pacific Yearly Meeting as PaYM, I suppose, but that would suggest Pennsylvania and be confusing. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the “Ph” in Philadelphia lends itself nicely to an alternative usage for PhYM. PhYM can do nothing about its url, though, so I am resigned to being eccentric in this usage.

One day, I’m going to write a series of posts on “Bioregional Quakerism” and make a case for completely abandoning our historical nomenclature and boundaries and adopting bioregional names and boundaries. Then there wouldn’t even be yearly meetings named after cities, as Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore Yearly Meetings are. We already have some bioregional yearly meeting names, Pacific being one of them. But I suspect that most yearly meetings—maybe all—are virtually totally unaware of the bioregion they inhabit, its geology and physiography, its flora and fauna, its watersheds, its endangered species and invasive species, its water supplies and waste management systems, its fault lines and ecosystems. What would North American Quakerism look like if our yearly meetings had boundaries and identities that were directly informed by their bioregions, if the places we lived in really mattered?