Quaker-pocalypse—and Personal -pocalypse

September 19, 2015 § 8 Comments

In the next post in this series on reforming committee service in the service of Quaker renewal, I had planned to start laying out my plan. But I found myself reviewing the challenges we face, and when I was done, I had talked myself into a funk. I rolled back from my desk and looked out the window, overcome with grief and depression. My plan was just so much beaver pucky, because no meting was going to embrace it. Only a relative handful of Friends even read this blog, and I imagined that most would just shake their heads and say to themselves, some interesting ideas in there, Steve, but it will never fly in my meeting.

Now I believe in the dialectic of community evolution. It’s of some value to present the antithesis to a community’s thesis, a radical alternative to its current condition and direction. Even an unachievable vision, even a ridiculous proposal, will pull a community farther along the curve that it would have progressed otherwise. It will make only moderately radical (is there such a thing?) alternatives seem acceptable by contrast.

More to the point, though, this blog is for me a form of written ministry. I have to feel that it’s spirit-led before I can publish it. Reviewing my plan and the obstacles in its path left me wondering about my plan’s source. I questioned the balance between my head and my Muse.

It doesn’t help that I am now reading Neil Stephenson’s latest novel Seveneves, an apocalyptic science fiction thriller in which the moon has for reasons unknown broken up and planet Earth has roughly two years before the moon’s pieces start falling in a Hard Rain that will destroy most life on the planet.

Also, I have made a very in-depth study of biblical apocalyptic. I’ve read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. I am myself an apocalyptic by intellectual temperament. I’ve been thinking and talking (mostly with my brother) about the collapse of corporate capitalism and of civilization as we know it, since the mid-1970s.

My observation, born of my biblical study and from watching contemporary Christian apocalyptic movements—David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, in particular—is that apocalyptics usually do get the nature of the problem, the causes of the collapse, and of course, the prophecy of collapse itself, mostly right. But they always get the timeline wrong. It’s always going to be day after tomorrow, and it never is.

I think the book of Revelation was written during the first Jewish War, sometime between 65 and 73 CE. But even if it was written in the second century, as many scholars think, it’s been roughly two thousand years and we are still waiting—and still believing that our time is the Endtime.

The apocalyptic impulse arises (say its scholars, and I agree) when a fervent religious minority believes in its community’s rampant and deeply-rooted corruption, a corruption so endemic that human efforts at reform cannot suffice and only God can bring true renewal; that therefore God’s judgment is inevitably going to fall, and only the faithful remnant will remain.

The first paradigm for this pattern was the one the priests of captive Judah recrafted from Babylonian material during the Babylonian Exile to explain why this disaster had befallen God’s people—the story of Noah and the ark.

Six hundred years later, Jesus was praying for God’s manifestation on the slopes of the Mount of Olives with his disciples when the police showed up and his vision of God’s return had apparently been forsaken. His Little Apoclypse (Mark 13 and parallels in Matthew and Luke) lacks Revelation’s cosmic and iconic imagery, but it’s a pretty horrifying picture—one that did not come true until 35 years later when the Zealots could not take it any more and Rome muddled around for several years because they could not take these peasants very seriously. Jesus saw it coming, but he got the timeline wrong. And, of course, the wrong side won.

George Fox had the same experience. Empire usually wins the outward war. But the Lamb and the persecuted minority sometimes win the inward war.

I think we are going to lose the outward war. Liberal Quakerism is—outwardly—withering away. I suspect that our institutions will either collapse for lack of time, talent, and treasure, or accommodate themselves, the way our schools have, and AFSC has, getting time, talent, and treasure from other sources while trying, with varying degrees of success, to hold on to a distinctive Quaker character.

Two questions remain for me. First, how do we deal with the death of Quakerism as we know it? And, more importantly, where is God in all of this?

These questions mirror the questions I have regarding our global ecological collapse. Not how do we stop sea level rise from taking down New York City, but what ministries will arise in Fifteenth Street Meeting, and Brooklyn Meeting, and Morningside and Flushing Meetings, to deal with the suffering that will inevitably result when that drowning finally takes place. Because it’s going to.

God has somewhere between zero and maybe fifty years to raise those ministers up. The history of apocalyptic suggests that the prophets will not appear until the water is at the door. That was Hurricane Sandy. I’m eagerly waiting, looking, praying.

So we can stick our fingers in the committee service dike and hold back the tide for a while, struggling along with too few Friends doing too much work with too little monty until we can’t anymore—which is already happening in some meetings. But no grand scheme like mine will prevent the inevitable.
Only God can do that.

So the real question is, how do we build a culture that knows God, that offers fertile soil for divine seed? This work will probably fall to a tiny remnant. And mostly to young people.

At least that’s been the pattern of Quaker renewal in the past. The original prophetic spark in the 1650s was largely a youth movement. Joseph Stephenson Rountree was in his early twenties when his essay Quakerism Past and Present won the £100 prize for the best description of the causes of London Yearly Meeting’s decline and the best solution; within two years, the Yearly Meeting had revised its book of discipline to correct the issues he described. So, too, with the renewal movement in midwestern Quakerism that gave rise to the programmed, pastoral tradition—mostly youth. And again with the emergence around the turn of the twentieth century of liberal Quakerism under the leadership of the young Rufus Jones and John Wilhelm Rountree.

We have been in decline before. And the Holy Spirit has never failed to raise up ministries of renewal. Our task is to be midwives to that renewal. To recognize the divine seeds when they fall on good soil and begin to sprout, and to water and feed those plants without standing in the way of the sun.

Quaker-pocalypse: Nominations, Committee Service, and Spiritual Renewal, Part Three

September 12, 2015 § 1 Comment

Some solutions to the problems of committee service—a preview

I said at the outset of this series that, if there are solutions to the problems of committee service, they will have to be sustained and long-term, far-reaching and multi-dimensional, structural and radical.

In subsequent posts, I want to unpack these approaches to a solution. Here, let me outline them in preview. We might consider pursuing the following alternatives:

Redefine the purpose of the meeting committee. Make the committee a laboratory for helping its members discern and explore their leadings in the committee’s area of concern, and an incubator for helping to bring its members’ leadings to fruition.
This is in contrast to the committee’s usual role as a workshop for handling the meeting’s tasks. However, we would probably have to add this role to the committee’s existing roles or the meeting’s business would collapse—not a very realistic proposition, since the committees and their members are already overworked. So this is a case, I think, in which the half-way measure just won’t do. We need a more radical solution . . .
Virtually eliminate standing committees altogether, except in the case of those necessary for the good operation and fiduciary responsibility of the meeting as a corporation—trustees, financial services, property, etc. And . . .
Replace these standing committees with something else, a combination of ad hoc working groups, support committees for ministers who feel led to work in various areas of meeting life, and something like Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Threads, open gatherings of Friends interested in various areas of meeting life.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has undertaken numbers two and three, and I will be very interested to see how this unfolds. This approach might be easier for a yearly meeting than for a monthly meeting. More about this in a subsequent post.
Redefine membership, so that, in the covenant between meeting and member, the meeting offers its members energetic, reliable, and focused spiritual nurture and pastoral care, not just an invitation to serve on committees, and then sees how the members reciprocate with service to the meeting. This reverses the usual pattern, in which we ask the members to contribute to the meeting, without thinking about how the meeting will contribute to their lives, assuming, I guess, that meeting for worship and committee service are enough, and then we wait to see whether worship and meeting service are enough to keep them active.
Once the meeting is clear about its identity, its role in its members’ lives, and about what membership means (see #5 below), we might consider a membership jubilee, in which all members are asked to reapply for membership in a round of clearness committees stretched out over a few years that focus on learning how the meeting can serve the member.
Consciousness raising. In general, we need a sustained, long-term program of consciousness raising, not about the value of committees, but about the purpose of the monthly meeting, the nature of the life of the spirit, and the role of the meeting in the members’ spiritual lives. We need open discussion, threshing sessions, and spirit-led discernment about who we think we are as a monthly meeting and about the meaning of meeting membership. We need spiritual formation programs that implement the offering of spiritual nurture that I suggest in bullet #4 above as the meeting’s commitment to new members—assuming that we are willing to reconceive the meeting as a two-way street, a covenant in which both the meeting and the members are actively contributing to each others’ lives.

In the next few posts, I want to unpack some of these ideas in greater detail.

Quaker-pocalypse: Nominations, Committee Service, and Spiritual Renewal, Part Two

September 11, 2015 § 3 Comments

Part Two: The Problem(s) with Committees

In this entry, I want to focus just on the purpose of the committee and its dynamics and how they tend to turn off our members.

The Problem(s) with Committees

Committees are oriented toward the meeting and its needs, not the needs of those who serve on them. Each committee’s charge is a set of tasks that meet a set of needs in the meeting. In this system, the committee member’s role is to contribute to these tasks. Committees are the commit-ees—they are the thing to which we are committed, rather than the Spirit or the expression of our own spiritual gifts. This orientation toward the meeting is mostly an unconscious and structurally imposed dynamic that we do not even recognize is at work most of the time.

Committees have a life of their own. They exist whether or not anyone on the committee has a true spirit-led call to be there. Most members of the committee have been suggested by Nominating committee because someone knows they do have some gifts or a concern for the aspect of meeting life served by the committee. But that does not mean that the appointees are clear about what the committee should do. And if they are clear, then God help them! Furthermore, committees can be extremely hard to lay down. Even the most moribund committee will often have one member who thinks it’s unthinkable that the meeting does not have a peace committee, or whatever.

Committees quench the spirit. If a member of committee has a real leading in the committee’s area of concern, the committee inevitably tries to fit that leading into its own work—rather than turn its full attention to the Friend and her leading, providing the discernment the leading probably needs in order to reach full maturity, and providing whatever support the Friend called to this ministry might need to be faithful to the call. I am serving on a committee right now in which this has just happened. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit is a wild, unpredictable, untamable force; who knows where the discernment process for a new leading will lead? This emerging ministry might fit in the committee—or it might not; it might not fit in any committee at all. Then it’s really in trouble.

Committees are the way of the world, not the way of the Spirit. The way of the Spirit employs worship and collective discernment, and looks to the Light within individuals as the source and ground for direction and action. The Quaker way of structuring spirit-led action is the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. Committees, on the other hand, often employ only a perfunctory period of silence, usually daring, nevertheless, to call this worship. They do practice corporate discernment, sometimes reverting to real worship when it’s clear that the group is either stuck or close to something that needs some Light to get through. However, when a committee is not riding a clear wave of movement in the Spirit, when it is bereft of ideas, it often employs brainstorming or “visioning exercises” to get over the hump. This happens either informally, with members just throwing out ideas, or in a more structured format, with newsprint pasted on the walls with scotch tape, etc. Brainstorming and “visioning” are (in my opinion) insidious incursions into the Quaker way by the ways of the world. A committee that doesn’t know where it’s going or what it’s doing should commit itself to real worship until it is clear about its way forward or that its work is done.

Committee meetings often are tedious. Committees often spend a lot of time doing business that is only about the mechanics and administration of the committee structure. Developing a budget is one aspect of this. Much of this business is regular or cyclical and routine, business that must be attended to. This often gets in the way of doing new things or exploring new directions, and of thinking about the big picture or the long term. Committees sometimes have weak clerks who have trouble keeping the committee focused. Committees sometimes have appointees who don’t know what they’re doing, don’t understand Quaker process or respect it, who have an axe to grind, who are long-winded, or who are otherwise ungovernable.

Committee service often is onerous. We lead busy lives. Time is precious. Work and family life is demanding. This can be especially troublesome for Friends who have non-Friend partners who might wish that you were doing something with your time that included them. Serving on more than one committee multiplies all these problems. Then there’s possible service on a quarterly meeting or yearly meeting committee. Uff da, as the Norwegians say.

Membership. The only thing that we offer prospective members as a benefit of membership is service on a committee. We virtually define membership as the willingness to serve on a committee. By presenting membership and committees in this way, we virtually define Quakerism as committee service.

The upshot

It’s a miracle that any Friends choose to serve on a meeting committee. What’s in it for them? In what ways are their spiritual lives served by serving on a committee?

Okay, service is a gift of the spirit. I myself actually like serving on committees, and that is because serving the meeting is fulfilling for me. And it is for a lot of Friends. Good thing, too. And other gifts of the spirit can find expression in a committee, though, as I’ve said, committees tend to interfere with the traditional practice of Quaker ministry.

The solution(s)—a preview

I said at the outset that, if there are solutions to the problems of committee service, they will have to be sustained and long-term, far-reaching and multi-dimensional, structural and radical.

In the next post, I want to offer some approaches to a solution., then in subsequent posts, I will unpack some of these ideas with more detail.

Quaker-pocalypse: Nominations, Committee Service, and Spiritual Renewal, Part One

September 11, 2015 § 4 Comments

Part One: Quaker “Decline” and the Committee System

Introduction

One of the signs of Quaker “decline” is the trouble nominating committees have finding enough Friends to serve on committees. All the work of the meeting tends to get done by the same small, dedicated, and overworked group of Friends.

In my experience, nominating committees often have very dedicated, seasoned Friends who are doing their best to match the interests and gifts of the members to the work that needs to be done. However, the “slots” that have to be filled loom over their work, and they have to do it over and over again, with a deadline. Meanwhile, nominating committees themselves are often among the hardest committees to fill, partly because so few Friends want to shoulder this burden. Agreeing to serve on Nominating committee is signing up for a kind of failure, or at least for hard work and frustration.

This problem is universal and persistent. In my thirty-some years as a Friend, I have never known a meeting that did not struggle with too few people doing too much work, with committees that are under-appointed and sometimes not very effective. I have come to the conclusion that the problem cannot be solved, at least with the solutions we have been trying all these decades. We should ditch them—ditch the solutions that are failing us, and maybe ditch committees themselves, as well, at least in a lot of cases.

Past solutions

As they say, doing the same things over and over again to solve a problem while expecting a different outcome is a definition of insanity. I would call it deep neurosis, myself; “insanity” is a little strong. Let’s stop doing the things that have not worked after all this time, and try something new.

In the past, meetings have tried the following:

We have tried to improve communications, assuming that, if only Friends knew what the committees did and how important that work was, they would agree to serve. —Not. The product we are trying to sell with better “advertising” is flawed and needs a recall.
We have formed ad hoc committees to study the problem and propose solutions—of course; what else would Quakers do? This often leads to the creation of at least one new committee. A truly dysfunctional approach, except . . . what else can you do?
Because—in general, we have been taking the system for granted, a system in which the business of the meeting is done by standing committees with a discreet set of tasks that define their charges, staffed by Friends appointed for set terms by nominating committees. Maybe the system itself is the problem.

Sometimes, meetings go a little deeper in their search for solutions than exploratory committees and renewed efforts at communication. Are we losing people because the committees are dysfunctional? Are the committee meetings tedious because of ineffective clerking? Would an orientation for new members and training for clerks help? Do we have too many committees? Do we have the right committees? Could some restructuring solve the problem?

These questions get closer to the heart of the matter. I think the problem is structural and it does call for structural solutions—but not for a shuffling of the meeting’s committee chart. If there are solutions, they will have to be sustained and long-term, far-reaching and multi-dimensional, structural and radical.

The real problem(s)

I think the basic problem is that we define the problem in terms of the meeting’s needs instead of the members’ needs. We have been looking for ways to get more Friends to serve on committees. I think we should be looking instead for ways to serve our members in their spiritual lives and see where that leads.

This orientation toward the meeting rather than the members is natural and mostly unconscious. It has a lot of dimensions, too many to address in one blog entry, even one as long as mine usually are. So—

In the next entry, I want to focus just on the purpose of the committee and its dynamics and how they tend to turn off our members.
Then, in a subsequent post, I want to sketch out some possible solutions.
Then I’ll unpack some of these solutions in greater detail.

The overall thrust will be to turn the vector of service around so that it flows from the meeting toward the member, rather than the other other way around.

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement: What Can We Say?

July 17, 2015 § 1 Comment

What can we say?

. . . when seekers ask what Quakers believe? Here is one version of the answers I’ve been working on.

An “elevator speech”:

We believe that there is in everyone a Light—

a light in the conscience that can guide and strengthen us to do the right, that can awaken us to the wrong we have done and are about to do;
a light that can heal us, that can strengthen us to live better lives, that can release us from our demons, make us more whole, relieve us of suffering, and lead us to redemption;
a light that can inspire us to acts of kindness and to creativity;
a light that can lead us to the deepest fulfillment and the “peace that passes all understanding” and into acts of kindness, service, and witness;
a light that can help transform us into the people we were meant to be;
a light that can open to us direct communion with God (however you experience God), both as individuals and as a community.

We Quakers have experienced this light as the Light of Christ, as Jesus Christ himself, as the Spirit of Love and Truth, as a Presence in our midst, as that which has gathered us as a people of God and continues to guide our meetings and the Quaker movement into the future.

In this Light, through this Light, God is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth. In this Christ-spirit we are sometimes gathered in our worship into a joy-filled ttanscendental communion with God and with each other.

That’s my “elevator speech,” a quick answer to a deep question. But of course, we can say a lot more than this. So here is a more fully developed presentation of Quaker “beliefs”.

Six Quaker essentials

The Light. We believe that there is a principle in every person (often called the Light, the Seed, “that of God”) that can know God directly and that yearns for this intimate communion.

Because we experience the Light inwardly, we do not practice many of the outward forms that other religious communities practice; we do not rely on outward sacraments for God’s grace.
Because the Light is universal, we believe that all people are equal in God’s sight and this informs how we treat them.
Because we all have access to the Light, we have no professional clergy that are thought of as intermediaries between God and the individual worshiper. But we have not laid down the clergy itself; rather, we have no laypeople, for all of us are potential ministers. We believe that God can and does call each one of us into service or ministry directly and in various ways, most commonly, to speak from the Spirit in our meetings for worship. And for this, we need no special education or ceremonial ordination, but only attention to the promptings of the Spirit and a willingness to be faithful to the call.
This, in fact, is the essence of Quaker spirituality: to be open always to God’s guidance and to listen always for God’s call into service, and to answer the call faithfully when it comes.

The gathered meeting. Ever since the 1650s when Quakers were first gathered as a dedicated people of God, we have felt that the same Light and Spirit that dwells within each individual also loves and guides us as a community.

Just as we believe that each individual can enjoy a direct relationship with God, so also we believe that the same Holy Spirit leads the worshipping community.
Thus many of our meetings hold our worship in waiting, expectant silence, turning our full attention toward God and leaving off any outward liturgical forms like the Bible readings, collective prayer, hymn singing, and prepared sermons that are featured in most religious services. We worship in utter simplicity in order not to crowd out God’s direct voice or drown out the still, small voice within each of us.
However, many Quaker meetings hold “programmed” worship that is more like other protestant churches, with hymn singing, Bible readings, prepared collective prayer,s and sermons. These meetings feel that these outward forms help the meeting commune with God.
We also conduct the business of the meeting in meetings for worship under the direct leadership of the Holly Spirit, having no professional human leadership or hierarchies. We have a number of distinctive community tools to discern God’s wish for us.

Continuing revelation. We believe that direct communion with God means that God is still teaching God’s people.

God’s revelation did not end with the Bible; rather God is always trying to reveal to us the way of love and peace and truth.
Thus, in answer to God’s continuing revelation over the centuries, we have laid down the outward practice of the sacraments, we have always recognized God’s prophetic inspiration of women ministers, we have struggled against slavery, and, in some yearly meetings, we fully welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people into our fellowship, even though the Bible seems to some on the surface to condemn homosexuality, condone slavery, deny women’s role in ministry, and require outward sacramental practice.
And we remain open to new light, expecting that God will intend further changes for us in the future.

“Let your lives speak.” We believe that God calls us to live our inner faith in outward practice, to live our lives as testimony to the Truth that has been awakened within us, leading us to alleviate suffering, injustice, and oppression, and to amend their causes. As a movement, we have come to unity on a number of stands of conscience, which we call our “testimonies,” and we seek to be open to new truth as to how we should live, as individuals, as a faith community, and as a society.

Love. We believe that “love is the first motion,” as we say, the commandment by which we should live our lives—that we should love God, love our fellow human beings, and love the creation we share with all other living things.

Direct experience. While “What do you believe?” is an important question, one that deserves a clear and straightforward answer, Friends often focus on a rather different question, one posed by George Fox in the 1600s and from which I derive the title for this little series on Quaker beliefs:

“You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?”
In other words, even though we do have a distinctive set of beliefs, Friends try to focus more on experience than on doctrine. For us, the essential question is: what is your experience of God? And we seek to ground our religious lives on what we have ourselves experienced, rather than on the inherited experience of others, however valuable that tradition might be.

Each of these core beliefs can be unpacked further to get into all of the other beliefs and practices that distinguish Friends, which I have only just touched upon here. That’s for a subsequent post.

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement: Outreach & Inreach

July 17, 2015 § 2 Comments

Outreach and Inreach

Quaker renewal depends on “advancement”, on advancing Quakerism—reaching people who hunger for what we have to offer, but haven’t found us yet, and being ready for them when they come. Thus there is both an outreach and an inreach dimension to Quaker advancement.

A lot of the posts in this Quaker-pocalypse series so far have been about inreach, the project of deepening the spiritual life of the meeting into maturity so that we are ready when seekers come.

But now I want to turn to outreach. Or really, to the bridge we must inevitably build between the two—how we present our faith and practice to these seekers when they ask—what do Quakers believe?

For very often, this is the first thing seekers ask us.

When people ask us this question, we often stumble in our answer. We often start with a bunch of disclaimers about how diverse our theologies are, and how we can’t really speak for all Friends, and really, I can only speak for myself . . .

Then we are likely to start by saying that we believe that there is that of God in everyone—which isn’t true! “We” don’t believe this; only some liberal Friends do. And, while it may be true that many, or even most, liberal Friends believe there is that of God in everyone, this turns what George Fox meant by this phrase on its head and has only been used by us this way since Rufus Jones started it around the turn of the twentieth century.

And anyway, just what does it mean to say that there is that of God in everyone? What does “that of” mean? What do we mean by “God” when we use the word this way? And how do we know there is that of God in other people? Are all of the Friends who profess a belief in “that of God” in other people so psychic that they have actually experienced the “that of God” in someone else? Or do we just believe it because we believe it of ourselves?

After perching all 350 years of our exceedingly rich, centuries-old tradition on this one slender, 100-year-old notional pedestal, we then go on to say, maybe, that we believe in “the testimonies”. But we don’t “believe in” the testimonies; we hold them as truths that have been consistently revealed to us over the centuries, but what we “believe in” is the guiding and strengthening power of the Light and a G*d who breaks into the community’s life with new truth about how to live when we turn toward the Light in our individual and collective discernment.

We need more of an answer than this when people ask us what we believe. What canst we say?

I have been working on an answer to this question of what we believe for decades. I received an answer in 1991 and I’ve been trying to refine it ever since. I now have several versions, and I want to publish them here, but most are quite long, so I will have to publish them as downloadable pdf files. And, as usual, now that I look at them again after some time away, I find I have some things to add and some things to change, so they’re not ready yet.

My latest effort, however, is fairly short and designed to be easier to read online. I will publish it next. But first, I want to provide a resource, a set of links to how various Quaker organizations present the essentials of Quaker faith and practice.

Various Quaker answers to the question, what do we believe?

Friends General Conference offers a general introduction to Quakerism and videos.
Friends United Meeting offers a set of Frequently Asked Questions.
Evangelical Friends Church International gives us an evangelical Quaker answer.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has a fairly well developed and attractively presented section on the Quaker way.
New England Yearly Meeting also has a Frequently Asked Questions approach.
Ohio Yearly Meeting offers a simple Conservative Friends perspective.
Friends World Committee for Consultation offers an introduction to the kinds of Friends around the world.
QuakerSpeak.org features videos on dozens of Quaker topics.

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement & Ministry

June 17, 2015 § 3 Comments

When a meeting recognizes the gifts of its members and helps its members mature into their spiritual lives, the meeting matures in its collective religious life. This manifests in deep meetings for worship, spirit-led discernment in meetings for business in worship, effective pastoral care, a loving and resilient fellowship, grounded and focused social witness, and well-managed property and finances.

Newcomers can sense this vitality, even though the sources of it may not be very visible. Even less visible, oftentimes, are the ministries that flourish in a meeting. But they, too, give a meeting a vitality that true seekers after the divine will recognize: here, they will say to themselves, God truly is at work.

Gifts of the spirit and gifts in ministry—almost the same thing. Ministries often arise from one’s gifts—but not always. Both are given by the Holy Spirit. Both are given to the community and to the world but entrusted to individuals.

Because the gifts of ministry are given to the community, the community has a responsibility for them. If meetings do not recognize emerging ministries, they throw the gift away. If meetings do not give ministers help with discerning their leadings, they may lose the gift. And if meetings do not give ministers the support and oversight they need to be faithful to their call, meetings trample on the gifts. These are sins against the spirit.

Because the gifts of ministry are entrusted to individual Friends, the ministers also have responsibilities. If Friends do not bring their gifts in ministry and their leadings to their meeting, they deny their meeting the grace of the spirit. If Friends do not seek help with discernment, they may misunderstand their call. And if Friends do not seek support for their ministry if they need it, the gift may be squandered, or lost, or tangled in the obstacles that arise.

Do our meetings welcome the gifts of ministry that are given to us in the Spirit? And do our meetings and members live the faith and practice of Quaker ministry as an essential aspect of our corporate and individual religious lives?

Queries for our meetings

Recognizing ministry. Does your meeting know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry? Do you teach it often enough so that all members and attenders, and especially newcomers, have a chance to learn it, as well? Does your meeting encourage members to share their leadings and ministries with the meeting, providing both opportunities to share, and an open and visible structure for welcoming leadings? Are your members thinking about the gifts they have as spirit-led? Would a member of your meeting who has a leading recognize it as such? Are they in the habit of thinking about the interests they have in witness or service activities or whatever, within the meeting or in their everyday lives, as possible leadings from the Spirit into Quaker ministry?

Discerning leadings. Does your meeting know how to conduct a clearness committee for discernment of leadings? Does your meeting understand the difference between a clearness committee for discernment and clearness committees for membership, marriage, and making personal decisions, in terms of how the people are chosen and how the committees are conducted? Or does your meeting have some other process for helping ministers with the discernment of their leadings?

Supporting ministry. Does your meeting have a structure and processes in place for supporting the leadings of your members? Would a Friend with a leading know where to go with their leading? Does your meeting know how to form a care committee for its ministers? Is your meeting prepared to provide oversight as well as support, ready, for instance, to help a Friend discover when they have run past their guide, or have stepped through the traces * , or when they have been released from their call? Does your meeting know how to write a minute for travel or service in ministry?

Releasing ministry. In the elder days, when a Friend traveled in the ministry, members of their meeting helped run their farm or their store in their absence. This was called releasing ministry. When your meeting writes a minute for travel or service, do you also inquire into what obstacles may hinder the minister’s ability answer the call and then see what you can do to remove these obstacles? Are you familiar with ReleasingMinistry.org, a new independent Quaker initiative to support Quaker ministry?

* “Step through the traces.” This is a phrase from the elder days of Quaker ministry and refers to a draught horse getting its legs tangled in the tackle—the traces—by which it pulls a wagon. Thus it means to get tangled up in the pursuit of your ministry, making mistakes, failing to walk in the paths of Christ’s leading.

What are Spiritual Gifts?

June 13, 2015 § 2 Comments

When I started writing the queries for a previous post that meetings might use to examine and deepen their understanding of spiritual gifts and of their nurture, I realized that some meetings might not be very clear about what spiritual gifts are, or at least, about what I mean by spiritual gifts. Then I realized that I needed to be more clear myself. So I revisited some of the thinking I’ve done on gifts of the spirit for workshops I’ve done that apply Paul’s discussions of gifts of the spirit to Quaker needs.

I think we have two ways to categorize spiritual gifts. The first is according to the character of the giving. The second, adapted from the writings of Paul, is according to how they manifest.

What are spiritual gifts—in terms of how they are given?

Innate gifts. Some spiritual gifts seem to be innate and personal. Such spiritual gifts are talents, inclinations, and experience that give shape and direction to one’s spiritual life and/or that are useful in service to the religious community and in the wider world. An example is the gift of studiousness, or the love of learning, which often is paired with the gift of teaching; another is the gifts of money management, another—being good with your hands. Of course, we can think of even innate gifts as Spirit-given.

Gifts of the Spirit. Subtly different are “gifts of the Spirit”, as Paul calls them, manifestations of the Spirit that arise in a person independently of the person’s more innate gifts. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,” writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:7. The signature example of a Spirit-given gift is the opening that prompts vocal ministry in meeting for worship.

Spirit-nurtured gifts. Somewhere in between lie the majority of gifts, I think, gifts that arise from some apparently innate attribute but that have clearly been nurtured into maturity by the Holy Spirit and by the person holding the gift. In this group, I would include the gift of hospitality, of making people feel welcome and at home, the gift of teaching, which might arise from the more innate gift of studiousness, and the gift of healing, which in many healers starts as an innate inclination toward and gift for caring for others, but which the person holding the gift has developed by learning the healing arts.

What are gifts of the spirit—in terms of how they manifest?

Paul offers us two categories of spiritual gifts, according to how they manifest: gifts of speaking, and gifts of serving. And I would add a third as I see them described in Paul’s letters—gifts as signs.

I’m not sure how useful these categories are, especially since Paul does not mention a lot of the gifts that we find at work among us today. But I do think it’s useful to list and describe gifts of the spirit, so that Friends recognize them in their members and attenders. Below is my list and descriptions, as I see them manifesting among Friends. Where I have found them in the letters of Paul, I have indicated this. The letters I am referring to are 1 Corinthians 12–14, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4 *.

Naming spiritual gifts.

A tentative list of spiritual gifts and their descriptions:

Vocal ministry	Someone who feels called to vocal ministry, whose ministry consistently lifts up the meeting and speaks often to the inner needs and lives of the members, not necessarily just someone who speaks often in meeting. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who brings us spirit-led ministry. In Paul’s letter, the gift of prophecy.
Preaching	Someone whose gift of vocal ministry manifests at times in sustained spirit-led ministry that draws the meeting into a deeper understanding of and feeling for the life of the spirit; whose ministry would seem to violate the frequent recommendation to make your message brief, except that the sermon does speak to someone’s condition, or to the meeting’s condition. Among liberal Friends, “preach” is often considered a four letter word, though, of course, programmed meetings know full well that preaching is a spiritual gift. I think it depends entirely on whether a sermon is Spirit-led, and I am certain that the Holy Spirit does sometimes take longer than “brief” to say what needs saying—and that Friends should not quench that Spirit by invoking a convention found in books or out of some fear that “preaching” necessarily means some form of preachiness. Paul: evangelism, exhortation
Prayer	Someone who through vocal prayer (praying out loud in meeting for worship) can often draw others into true communion with the Divine. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend moved by the Holy Spirit into prayer. It is worth noting that William Penn said in his introduction to George Fox’s Journal that Fox’s greatest gift was the gift of prayer. This gift is almost completely extinct among liberal Friends. The gift of prayer is not in Paul.
Discernment	Someone who often sees to the heart of matters, understands what a person or the meeting needs in a given situation, or finds solutions to problems. Someone with a gift for clerking and/or recording. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who leads us to the Truth. Paul: discerning spirits.
Eldership	Someone who recognizes spiritual gifts in others and seeks ways to nurture these gifts into maturity and support them when they blossom into active ministry; who recommends books or conferences to Friends who show an interest in the Quaker way; who recognizes newly emerging ministry and ministers and encourages it or them; someone who finds themselves holding the meeting in prayer, or who finds fulfillment in serving as a companion to a minister in their service or their travels in the ministry; someone who recognizes walking that disturbs the spiritual welfare of someone’s own self, or that of others, or of the meeting as a community, and who seeks ways to restore gospel order, to bring affairs back into the Light. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend as the divinely inspired ability to teach, lead, and correct the members of the meeting out of one’s own experience of Christ’s inward transformation. Paul: exhortation, direction.
Pastoral care	Someone who by nature keeps track of people who need care and often sees that they get the care they need. These Friends often are employed in the secular church, as social workers, therapists, doctors, etc. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who finds herself or himself knowing just what to say or do to meet someone’s needs. Paul: pastors, helping, showing mercy.
Teaching	Someone whose knowledge and passion for a subject manifest as a desire, even a need, to share it. Also manifesting any time in any Friend who finds herself or himself sharing what they know in response to someone else’s desire to know. Paul: teaching.
Hospitality	Someone who has a way of making people feel welcome and at home in the meeting, or who consistently feels led to organize fellowship gatherings, who brings food to the meeting, and/or who likes to greet newcomers. Not found in Paul.
Prophecy	Someone who brings to an individual, or to the meeting, or to the Religious Society of Friends, or to the wider society a message of correction, and/or the inspiration to take a new direction, manifesting at any time in any Friend. Paul: prophecy.
Witness	Someone who carries a concern for bettering the world, for building the kingdom of the Spirit on earth, often with a focus on some specific concern, manifesting at any time in any Friend as a leading into witness ministry. Not found in Paul. (One of Paul’s great failures was his spiritualization of the gospel of Jesus and his abandonment of the world to its suffering, turning instead to evangelizing the world to his gospel as its cure.)
Serving	Someone who finds spiritual fulfillment in service to the meeting community, or to the wider community. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend who takes up a task of service. Often manifesting in combination with the gifts of leadership, administration, hospitality, and financial or property management. Paul: serving.
Leadership	Someone who, out of the gift of serving, also gets things done, who knows how to organize things effectively and leads by serving example. Paul: leadership.
Financial management	Someone who, by natural inclination and through life experience, knows how to manage money matters and, through the gift of serving, brings this gift to the meeting. Paul: leadership.
Contribution	Anyone who supports the meeting financially out of the promptings of the Holy Spirit, or who responds with generosity of treasure and spirit to someone’s financial or other material need. Paul: contributing.
Property management	Someone who, by natural inclination and through life experience, knows how to manage and take care of property and, through the gift of serving, brings this gift to the meeting. Not in Paul.
Healing	Someone who, through natural inclination and acquired life experience, brings the healing arts to the meeting and to the world, often but not necessarily manifesting in a healing vocation. Also manifesting at any time in any Friend as spirit-led ministry that alleviates suffering. Paul: Healing.
Faith	Someone whose faith is so deep and so manifest in their lives that it lifts others up into a stronger sense of God’s presence in their lives. Also manifesting any time in any Friend whose faith, in the moment, turns others toward the Light, or the Presence in our midst, or toward the divine wish for the community’s direction. Paul: faith.
Miracles	Manifesting at any time through any Friend as the Holy Spirit bringing about the utterly unexpected and seemingly impossible outcome. Paul: miracles.

* Once, when I was leading an exercise in naming spiritual gifts and started discussing Paul, a woman asked why we should bother with Paul—and I had to agree that we didn’t have to look to Paul as an authority. Taken aback in the moment, I could only answer that I did not feel responsible to the tradition, but that I did feel responsible for it, that, even when we decide to lay down some aspect of our tradition, we should know what that tradition is and we should leave part of our tradition behind only in spirit-led discernment, not through ignorance or unconsidered drift of purpose and identity.

In the instance of gifts of the spirit, I actually find Paul useful, maybe even spirit-led. In general, I don’t like Paul. I think he hijacked the gospel of Jesus. In abandoning all aspects of Torah, he gutted Jesus’ teachings, especially those about the kingdom of God. And, of course, he drifted away from Jesus’ egalitarian treatment and respect for women, especially as he got older.

But Paul was a religious genius and he was not always wrong about everything. And his treatment of the gifts of the spirit are brilliant. His famous passage about love in 1 Corinthians 13 is sandwiched in between two discourses on the gifts of the spirit in chapters 12 and 14, and this hymn to love is an integral part of his understanding of the place of spiritual gifts in the life of the community. His metaphor of the body for the relative importance of the various spiritual gifts is also a profound opening.

Finally, he did, after all, give us a pretty good list of spiritual gifts as a starting point. It’s hard to figure out what some of them mean, and some come clear only after some study, not just of Paul’s letters but also importantly, of the structure and practices of the early Christian church. His gifts of serving, for instance (leadership, helping, contributing, having mercy), mostly define roles in the church’s social welfare system, its mechanisms for taking care of the poor.

Therefore, because I feel responsible for our tradition, I indicate when one of the gifts I name here appears in Paul’s discussions of gifts. But I’m not going to go any farther than that with Paul’s list in this post. One of these days, I will write the monograph for which I have extensive notes on Paul’s gifts of the spirit.

Quaker-pocalypse—Spiritual Nurture & Advancement

June 3, 2015 § 6 Comments

If we want to reverse our decline and fulfill our calling in the world, our meetings need to enjoy a vital religious life. In recent posts, I have offered queries for meetings to assess how well they are doing in the areas of worship and fellowship. People coming to a meeting for the first time or for the first few times will first experience the quality of the worship and its vocal ministry and get a first impression of the community, so these two aspects of meeting life impact the growth or decline of a meeting directly.

Spiritual nurture for individuals and families has a less direct impact on meeting growth because it takes a while for newcomers to experience and appreciate whatever efforts a meeting makes to recognize and nurture the members’ spiritual gifts and their ministry, and the meeting’s religious education programs for youth and adults.

I fear, however, that most of our meetings do not try to name our members’ spiritual gifts or nurture them in any proactive way. Too often we are left to our own devices when it comes to maturing in the life of the spirit. As a result, the collective life of the spirit, the spiritual maturity of the meeting, suffers. So, when people come to our meeting for the first time or for a handful of times, is there a there there?

I believe that recognizing and nurturing spiritual gifts is an absolute essential for a vital meeting’s religious life. If, as I said in my series on What is Quakerism for?, our mission as meetings is to bring people to God and God into the world, why would we leave our members and attenders on their own in finding God, in finding a personal spiritual practice that works for them (spiritual formation *)? And why would we deny our meetings the blessings of a membership that is confident and mature in its gifts and equipped to serve the meeting and the waiting world with their gifts’ unfolding?

We are not without resources. Several yearly meetings have spiritual nurture or spiritual formation programs, we have the School of the Spirit, and we have our conference centers that hopefully have programs along these lines. And even if meetings do not have anyone with substantive experience in spiritual nurture and spiritual formation, the meeting still has some good options. But first we have to ask ourselves some questions.

Recognizing and Nurturing Spiritual Gifts

Does your meeting have a list in its collective head of spiritual gifts, so that you would recognize them when you saw them? (I plan a subsequent post or series of posts in which I provide such a list and some context for understanding them, using the gifts of the spirit in Paul’s letters (Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, and Ephesians 4) as a starting point.)
Does your meeting do anything to help its members and attenders recognize their own gifts in the spirit? Does your ministry committee take the time to discuss the gifts of each member and attender with an eye to how they might be nurtured?
Or do you leave this task to nominating committee? Does your nominating committee go beyond just its charge to fill slots in the roster with people who who have a gift in a certain area, to recognize where some gifts may lie unrecognized or unexpressed because there is no committee for that gift, and to help Friends recognize and grow their gifts, regardless of whether they choose to bring those gifts to a committee in service?
Do your other committees think in terms of the gifts that the Friends who serve on them bring? In addition to the tasks involved in the committee’s charge, do your committees take time to be laboratories for the exploration of the gifts of its members, to name those gifts, and to be nurturing gardens in which the gifts of the committee’s members may grow, regardless of whether they directly serve the tasks laid upon the committee?
Does your meeting record gifts in ministry, or do anything else to collectively name and recognize your members’ spiritual gifts for the meeting? Or do you have members who fear that somehow recognizing gifts in ministry elevates the minister in ways that violate the testimony of equality? If this fear does prevail in your meeting, then why? Do you have direct, concrete experience of harmful exaltation of recognized ministers? If this fear does not come from direct experience, then where does it come from?
Does anyone or any committee in your meeting proactively watch for emerging gifts and emerging ministries, so that you are ready to serve as an elder or mentor when you see them?
Has your meeting considered helping someone in the meeting to attend the School of the Spirit or some other spiritual formation program or conference?
Does your meeting invite members to share their spiritual practice, either in an open discussion gathering or, in the case of Friends who have some experience or a personal practice of some kind, in a more formal teaching mode? Does you meeting know of Friends outside the meeting with these skills that you could invite in?
If you think your meeting lacks the resources to do some of these things, have you considered hosting a study group that reads books on spiritual formation together? The books that come to my mind are Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, Patricia Loring’s two volume Listening Spirituality; anything written by William Taber or Lloyd Lee Wilson; Martha Paxson Grundy’s Tall Poppies: Supporting Gifts of Ministry and Eldering in the Monthly Meeting, a Pendle Hill Pamphlet. I have not read the following books, but they are available from QuakerBooks.org and they look promising: Connecting with God: A Spiritual Formation Guide, by Lynda Graybeal and Julia Roller; Light to Live By: An Exploration in Quaker Spirituality, by Rex Ambler; Living the Way: Quaker Spirituality and Community, by Ursula-Jane O’Shea.

* Spiritual nurture and spiritual formation
Readers may not be clear what I mean by “spiritual formation” and what the difference is between spiritual formation and spiritual nurture. By spiritual nurture, I mean anything that fosters a deeper spiritual life. By spiritual formation I mean programs to impart a spiritual practice, or, in the broader sense, an organized effort to help Friends find the spiritual practice that works for them.

Quaker-pocalypse—Advancement: Fellowship

May 24, 2015 § 3 Comments

When newcomers come to a meeting, the first thing they encounter is the culture of the meeting, the way it feels and the way it operates. Even if they go directly into the meeting room, even here they are surrounded by the unspoken assumptions and agreements about identity, behavior, and relationship that comprise a community’s fellowship.

But hopefully, they don’t get a chance to go directly to the meeting room (unless that’s what they want to do) because someone has greeted them at the door and then the greeter and the rest of the Friends in the gathering space offer them the meeting’s hospitality.

If we want our meetings to grow, we must be warm, welcoming, and interested in new people. Fellowship is the second item under “a vital religious life” in my list of the three essentials for Quaker advancement.

Hospitality. Is your community warm and welcoming to all? Do you have greeters who meet newcomers at the door on First Day and help them find their way into worship, mentally, emotionally, and physically? Do all the members take responsibility for making newcomers feel welcome, well informed, and comfortable, not just when they first come in the door, but also after worship, and when they return, if they do?

Inclusiveness. How homogenous is your meeting population and are people of all races, all classes, all sexual orientations, and all cultural styles welcome in your meeting? Is your meetinghouse accessible? Is your bathroom? Do you have equipment for the hearing impaired? Do you welcome children into your worship?

Pastoral care. Do the Friends charged with pastoral care in your meeting feel confident in their roles and responsibilities? If not, how can you help them? Does your meeting regularly encourage the members and attenders to come to the pastoral care committee with their concerns and do members know whom to approach? Are you prepared with a network of mental health and other professionals who can give your committee advice or to whom they can refer Friends when the concern seems too deep or difficult for the committee, or seems to require professional attention?

Membership. Is there any meaningful difference between being a member and being an attender of your meeting? Is your meeting clear about what membership in your meeting means and what it expects from its members? Are your clearness committees for membership clear about these things? Is it easy for attenders to find out what membership means in your meeting, what the meeting expects from them, and how to apply for membership? Does your meeting think of membership as a covenant, as a set of mutual promises and responsibilities in which members expect to contribute to the spiritual and material life of the meeting and in which members invite the meeting to proactively engage with their spiritual lives? Or is your meeting too afraid to intrude to be proactive in its spiritual nurture and/or do your members consider their religious lives to be a completely private domain in which the meeting has no business?

Willingness to change. New people bring new energy to the meeting, energy that might change the culture of your meeting. Does your meeting reflexively resist change? Is your meeting overly attached to the way your meeting “feels” today and its unspoken assumptions and agreements?

Eldering authority and mandate. Does someone in your meeting have clear authority and a clear mandate to protect your fellowship from inappropriate behavior? Are you and they clear about what “inappropriate behavior” deserves attention? Do these Friends feel equipped to act with some confidence when needed?

Conflict. Does your meeting forthrightly address conflict when it arises in the meeting? Do you have members who are not attending because of some conflict with the meeting or with other members? If they have left because of some difficult person, is that person still attending? (If your meeting has lost even one member because of a disruptive person, you might as well have lost the disruptive person.) Does your meeting seek outside help if it finds it too difficult to deal with a conflict on its own? Is your quarterly or regional meeting and/or your yearly meeting prepared to respond to such a request for intervention with people who have the gift of mediation and with resources? (See the video and other resources available from New York Yearly Meeting’s Conflict Transformation Committee.)

Emotional blackmail. Do you let members hold the meeting hostage with their emotions, threatening to leave or to do something else if the meeting does “x” or doesn’t do “y”, especially in meeting for worship with attention to the life of the meeting?