The “Testimony of Community”
March 16, 2019 § 12 Comments
The testimony of community finds its way onto almost any list of Quaker testimonies these days, especially under the influence of the vexing anagram SPICES.
However: define for me the “testimony of community”. There’s no entry in the books of discipline of either New York Yearly Meeting or Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the two yearly meetings for which I have copies. It doesn’t appear in John Punshon’s pamphlet Testimony and Tradition, nor could I find anything in my own fairly extensive library on such a testimony, though our tradition is rich with discussion of community life.
I recently asked some Friends in my meeting to define it and they just looked at me. And I looked at them. We have no clear definition of this testimony. Nevertheless, they insisted that I include it in a list of our testimonies in a document we’re preparing for our meeting defining what membership means.
Oh, if asked we might come up with something. But it would be just our own ideas, not something clearly and corporately discerned by our meeting, or our yearly meeting.
What does the “testimony of community” mean? Where did this “testimony” come from? How did we come to espouse it without any apparent community discernment?
I suspect a process may be at work similar to the one that has made “that of God in everyone” the putative foundation of all our testimonies: an unselfconscious thought-drift in a culture increasingly impatient with intellectual/theological rigor, or even attention of any serious kind, not to mention care for the testimony of integrity. These ideas arise somehow, somewhere, and then get picked up and disseminated because they sound nice, they meet some need, and they don’t demand much. They apparently don’t require discernment, anyway.
For “that of God”, we know the point source—Rufus Jones. But for the “testimony of community”? Any ideas?
If Lewis Benson is correct about “that of God”, the disseminator of this idea that “that of God in everyone” is the foundation of our testimonies was AFSC. Not surprising, since Rufus Jones was a cofounder of AFSC. I suspect that AFSC may also have given us the testimony of community. It sort of sounds like them—to me, at least—if you know what I mean.
Anyway, I hereby call upon Friends to do some actual discernment, to decide, in our local meetings and our yearly meetings, whether the “testimony of community” really is one of our “testimonies”, and, in the process, tell us what it means. And if we can’t, then I suggest we get rid of it. Maybe that will finally put a spike in the heart of SPICES. I doubt we’d continue with SPIES.
Through the Flaming Sword 
While I am truly unhappy with the 30 minute sound bite know as SPICE, there are meetings that have spent time discerning community. You might want to look at North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s new edition of our Faith and Practice. We have 22 pages on community.
https://npym.org/?q=faith-and-practice
Here’s a link to Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting’s
Faith and Practice on the testimony of community:
Click to access FaithandPractice.pdf
Very helpful. Thank you
And if you want to search other Books of Faith and Practice online, there is a resource which lists them at http://www.quakerinfo.com/fandp.shtml
Yes, this is great. Just what I was looking for. The last paragraph in the Testimony of Community section deserves repeating here:
[…] The “Testimony of Community” […]
I’m grateful, as always, that you’ve turned your gifted eye onto a so-called testimony that seems to have sneaked into the banquet without a wedding robe on (cf. Matt 22:11-13) and may need to be thrown into the outer darkness. I can’t imagine George Fox preaching “community” at Firbank Fell, or Barclay framing a proposition around it. It sounds bogus. It sounds like the voice of the serpent, persuading a meeting to rebuke or disown a prophetically gifted Friend whose messages make some other Friends uncomfortable, on the grounds that “community” suffers from his or her ministry.
But before we throw the invader into the outer darkness, let me think aloud about why *I* might have proposed a “testimony of community,” if I had been the one responsible for it. I might have proposed it because I saw my meeting, or our whole Society, infected by a spirit of selfishness, and a lack of the mutual love by which, Jesus said, everyone would know that we were His disciples (John 13:35). I might have seen Quaker culture becoming tainted by a mainstream ethos of individualism and capitalist competition, and I might have wanted to temper that competitiveness, particularly in the Quaker schools that so easily dance to the tune of student and parental anxiety about MY kid proving herself outstanding enough to be accepted by one of the best colleges — to the disadvantage of all the competing candidates. Since I couldn’t get away with selling a SPICES slogan to the local Quaker school where the “C” stood for “Christ,” or even for “compassion” (because, after all, even Quaker schools have to harden their hearts and expel or “counsel out” their poorer performers) I might have thought, “Hmm, ‘community’ — that might just be the right spice to correct the flavor of this afflicted institution.”
I spies with my little eye… 😉
In the Quietist period, the Religious Society of Friends was, from the outside, experienced as being synagogue-like. In NYYM’s first published Book of Discipline (1820), which members – other than those of the Meetings of Ministers and Elders had access to, advises disowning members for marriage outside of the Religious Society. Such a discipline-in-practice effectively affects a functional community. Biblically, of course, the Body of Christ infers community, and theologically, the Church is functionally a theocracy.
Furthermore, and perhaps fundamentally for Quakers, the integrity of early Friends made them trusted middlemen of the colonial trade of the Atlantic Rim Culture’s economy … as the rape and pillage of this continent’s natural resources and its indigenous peoples built up its head of steam. Research presented at the 1990 or 1991 Northeast USA FWCC gathering hosted by NEYM, “Racism and Quakerism”, suggested that the closing years of the century that began with an individual’s religious concern about the moral integrity of human slavery, and ended, in 1790, when no members of the RSOF owning slaves, reached that unanimous conclusion as much due a fear of the economic consequences of being cut off from an insider’s economic privilege that membership afforded, as it was ‘religious conviction’. The Meeting I was a member of modern-day pride of being in that condition in … 1790 … took on a whole new meaning. And it went a long way toward explaining why the Underground Railway took a hard left 20 miles south of its Meetinghouse this also offered clarity regarding a birthright member’s ministry in Business Meeting that stood in the way of the Meeting financially supporting an MLK celebration with a $50 contribution by stating he didn’t want any of his money to go to helping the coloreds in Newburgh.
Doesn’t peer pressure a community make?
If it weren’t for Dead Quaker trust funds, how many of today’s Monthly Meetings would exist? Without such funds, what would be the ‘life’ of current Yearly Meetings? To the degree we walk in the name of our Go[]d, and GREED is go[]d, my goodness!”, concerning what defines Quaker community!?!
=)
sNAILmALEnotHAIL …but pace’n myself
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCeDkezgoyyZAlN7nW1tlfeA
life is for learning so all my failures must mean that I’m wicked smart
>
Your question is interesting, and coincidental with reading I have done as part of the “Becoming Friends” programme created by Woodbrooke Study Centre (UK). My experience of Quaker community in Ireland is that it is the context within which we live out our Quaker lives.
In the (British) Quaker Faith & Practice 10.01:
“Our life is love, and peace , and tenderness; bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying for one another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.”
Similarly I cherish the experience of discernment in Quaker meeting 3.02: “…God’s guidance can be discerned if we are truly listening together and to each other, and are not blinkered by preconceived opinions. It is this belief that God’s will can be recognised through the discipline of silent waiting which distinguishes our decision-making from the secular idea of consensus.”
The beauty of it is that we are able to let go of our own opinions and positions, as John Punshon said “the meeting for business cannot be understood in isolation; it is part of a spiritual discipline”.
Testimonies do not appear anywhere in one particular authorised form, as far as I can see. It is suggested in (Irish) Quaker LIfe and Practice 3.42 that “… the testimonies are integral to the nature of our Society – a set not of texts but of inherited values which are assimilated rather than learned or taught.”
SPICES I think is liberal Quakerism’s attempt to have something like a creed without being doctrinal. Early Friends kept referring to “our Christian testimony” rather than using a list of specific testimonies. I agree that the Community testimony is notable for the general failure to define it. I think it may be an attempt to use a more popular contemporary word to capture something of what Brinton refers to as Harmony in Friends for 350 Years. I think harmony is a word that would have been more used by earlier Friends to capture this.
I think the traditional Quaker understanding of testimony is captured by James Healton’s The One Testimony that Binds Them All Together at http://www.quakerinfo.com/one_test.shtml
We Friends do so crave the security of creedal religion. How ironic that our so-called SPICES are so bland as to be nearly meaningless. The only “testimony” that matters is how we live and what we do; not what we believe.
You speak my mind, Friend