Through the Flaming Sword

Answers—restoring confidence in the “content” of Quakerism

In my original outline of answers to the question, What is the Religious Society of Friends for?, I included as part of Bringing People to G*d—

Answers: Help Friends find answers to their spiritual and religious questions (provide religious content).

Seekers come to us with questions about God and the life of the Spirit, and about the meaning of their own lives in general. So do our children. We owe it to them to be clear and confident in our answers, if we can. Our answers may not satisfy them. But we fail in our opportunity to bring them to G*d if we have no answer at all. And we also fail our meetings and the Religious Society of Friends.

We do have answers to offer—empowering answers that over the centuries have continued to meet the emerging needs of the times as the Society has evolved.

Yet we all too often lack the clarity and confidence we need to serve these inquirers properly. Take the basic question that is likely one of the first questions out of their mouths: What do Quakers believe?

We are likely to start with some disclaimers: “Well, Quakerism is so diverse theologically that I don’t feel that I can speak for all of us.” Or: “Quakers have never had a creed”, by which we mean we have no set doctrine; the former is true, the latter is not true, not quite.

When we get around to answering, the one thing most (Liberal) Friends can say is that we believe that there is that of God in everyone (see my earlier posts on “that of God”). Maybe after that, we mention the testimonies. At this point, though, we tend to run out of answers.

I have answered this basic question of what we believe in some depth in earlier blog entries. Here I want to just offer my elevator speech, a concise answer to the question, What do Quakers believe?

We believe—nay, rather we know, for we have experienced it for ourselves—

1. the Light: every person is capable of direct, unmediated communion with G*d; see John 1:3, 9, 12, and Luke 17:21; George Fox: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to they condition.” (Nickalls, p. 10); Robert Barclay: “Direct revelation is still the essential purpose of faith.” (Apology, Freiday ed., p. 28)
2. the gathered meeting: the meeting is also capable as a worshipping community of direct, unmediated communion with G*d; this communion is the purpose of worship; see Matthew 18:20 and John 4:23–24; George Fox:  “But I brought them Scriptures, and told them there was an anointing within man to teach him, that the Lord would teach his people himself.” (Nickalls, p. 8)
3. continuing revelation: G*d is always revealing G*d’s truth, healing, guidance, inspiration, grace, and love; it continues today, and is not confined to ancient tradition or scripture; see John 14:26 and John 15:15; George Fox: “And I was to direct people to the Spirit that gave forth the Scriptures, by which they might be led into all Truth, and so up to Christ and God, as they had been who gave them forth.” (Nickalls, p. 34)
4. the testimonial life: we are called to live outward lives that express the truth, healing, guidance, inspiration, grace, and love that G*d inwardly awakens within us; see Matthew 5:16; George Fox: “And so be faithful every one to god, in your measures of his power and life, that ye may answer God’s love and mercy to you, as the obedient children of the Most Hight, dwelling in love, unity, and peace, and in innocency of heart towards one another, that God my be glorified in you, and you keep faithful witnesses for him and valiant for the Truth on earth.” (Nickalls, p. 282); and
5. love: chief among the requirements of the life of the Spirit is the commandment to love; see John 15:9–17.

Five simple essentials of Quaker faith that you can then unpack to discuss the rest of what we often call the Quaker “distinctives”.

From the doctrine of the Light, from the principle of direct communion with the Divine, both personal and collective, we derive the practices of silent worship, of conducting our business in meetings for worship and all the meanings of gospel order, of universal ministry rather than paid professional ministry, the laying down of the outward sacraments and other outward forms, the testimonies and the testimonial life, and the rest of Quaker faith and practice.

Finally, because we know these things experientially, we believe that the important question is not what do you believe, but what have you experienced yourself? As George Fox, our founder, put it: “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?” Hence, we believe that true religion is inward; it is directly experienced; it is not a set of propositions to which we adhere with our outward minds, but revelation and relationship known inwardly in the heart.

Taking people to G*d—the role of vocal ministry

In theory, we only speak in meeting for worship when prompted to by the Holy Spirit. In practice, I think that most of us most of the time are not so sure what—or who—prompts us to speak, and would hesitate to claim we speak for God, even thought that’s exactly what our forebears thought for centuries. Yet we each have certain signs, certain criteria that the experience of prompting must meet before we rise. We take speaking in meeting very seriously.

And yet, if you’re like me, you have the sense some of the time (maybe a lot of the time) that Friends place their bar a little too low, that “vocal ministry” has devolved into “speaking in meeting”, that the Spirit-led prophetic Word need only be “heartfelt” and “uplifting”.

But who’s to say? While I completely trust my general sense that much of our vocal ministry is superficial and not likely to pull the meeting into the depths of divine communion, I agree that we must beware judging any specific message or messenger. How many times have I sighed inwardly at some message, only to find out later how deeply it has affected someone else.

Thus I war with my judgmental self while I wish our vocal ministry was more nurturing and I constantly seek ways to deepen it, in myself and in the meetings I attend, without offending my fellow worshippers or quenching the spirit that might be working within them.

All this inner foment we experience over vocal ministry is one of the reasons why many Friends and attenders are so nervous about speaking that they just don’t speak; they quench their own spirit. And any “program” that would seek to lift up the quality of vocal ministry runs the risk of making this all-important service even more intimidating.

Nevertheless, for many reasons, paying better attention to vocal ministry, as individuals, as committees with oversight for ministry, and as meetings, could not be more important. For the purpose of vocal ministry is to bring people to G*d, to reveal the Light within them and to help kindle the kingdom in our midst. In addition to this essential role, vocal ministry serves G*d and the meeting in several other ways, as well.

Take outreach and the growth of the meeting. Meetings need to do three things to hold onto the people who come to meeting to check us out: a friendly community, a ready ministry for children and young families, and a certain depth to meeting for worship, some sense that the Spirit really is at work here. This latter depends on the quality of the silence, which in turns depends on that critical mass of Friends who know how to find their own center and help the meeting find its center. And it depends on the quality of the vocal ministry. Superficial, conversational vocal ministry not only fails to bring people to G*d, but gives the wrong impression about what the meeting for worship is for.

Or take the place of ministry generally in the life of the members and of the meeting. Vocal ministry is the training ground for ministry of all kinds: for individuals, it’s how we learn to recognize the true promptings of the Holy Spirit and gain the courage to faithfully answer it; for the meeting, it’s how we learn to take responsibility for nurturing, recognizing, and supporting our members’ ministry, and how we gain the courage to take responsibility for our worship—being willing to engage with our members to deepen their ministry and being willing to protect the worship from disorderly messages and messengers.

Or—back to my theme of the gathered meeting—vocal ministry is a key element in bringing the gathered body into the Presence at the center of our worship and fellowship. When each message calls us deeper toward that center within us and amongst us, oh how sweet is the water from that well! When messages pull us outward, into the thinking mind, or toward the surface with some personal story, some media content, or some worldly event . . .

And then there’s the call to vocal ministry, what Friends used to call “gospel ministry”. In the elder days, when meetings recorded ministers and took active responsibility for vocal ministry, Friends assumed that one could be called to the vocal ministry, that God could tap you on the shoulder for more or less regular service. We rarely think of it this way anymore. I think we should.

Many meetings (most meetings?) do have Friends who speak quite regularly. My meeting does. I am one. We each have our style. We each have a reservoir of personal experience that informs and colors our ministry. Some of us have found that there are themes to our ministry. We each have a calling. Don’t we?

Often our members do not recognize this pattern as a calling and neither do our meetings. We do not take responsibility for such callings, for the consequences of a Friend feeling led to speak fairly often. This inattention causes no trouble most of the time; we simply trust each other and most of the time, this works out fine. And there’s something to be said for, “first, do no harm”.

Unless, of course, one of your regular speakers does cause trouble. Then the committee with oversight of worship and ministry needs to act to protect the worship. This eldership role is fraught with difficulties nowadays, and that will have to be a subject for another post.

I am more focused here on those of us who feel a calling and are struggling to be faithful. In my own case, for instance, I feel called to a vocal ministry of teaching (among a handful of other areas in meeting life for which I carry a concern). I often take an opportunity, often suggested by some earlier vocal ministry, to expose the meeting to some aspect of Quaker history, faith, or practice—to do some religious education.

For one thing, it’s just about the only way to reach most of the meeting with the elements of our tradition that the meeting needs to know in order to function effectively and to carry the tradition forward. My meeting does have a pretty robust adult RE program, but it ranges widely across many topics and only occasionally focuses on Quaker essentials.

But doing this sometimes feels like I am lowering my own bar a little. I constantly question myself: am I really led—again—to do this? Usually the answer is yes. But it makes me nervous.

I would love to to have some oversight, a backup, a corporate haven to which I can return to test my discernment and my usefulness. Am I bringing people closer to G*d with my vocal ministry? That’s the question—and the role of vocal ministry.

First, a question of scale

The question of what is Quakerism for got me thinking about answers right away and, now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I realize that I had zoomed past the question to the answers without thinking about the question itself very much. It’s pitched in the largest possible scale and the answers we could give for the whole “Religious Society of Friends” would necessarily be correspondingly general. Like “bringing people to G*d and G*d to the world”, my first and very global answer.

But as soon as I got down to specifics, I found I was talking mostly about individual Quaker meetings, a very different matter. Furthermore, we would have a slightly different set of answers for regional and yearly meetings, and again for the macro-organizations like Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting, not to mention our publishing houses, conference centers, and so on. So at some point I will reorganize my original set of answers to include these other levels of Quaker life, but for now, I want to stay focused on the level that really carries the load—the local meeting.

So what is the “mission” of our local meetings? I want to start with . . .

Bringing people to G*d—spiritual nurture.

The local meeting has a profound responsibility to (according to my original post):

“nurture people’s growth in the Spirit, to nurture their spiritual gifts, to help them answer faithfully G*d’s call to service and ministry and the call to witness on behalf of the truth that has been awakened within them, and to give them confidence in their faith.”

We could be doing much more to nurture our members’ and attenders’ spiritual lives. We have at our disposal several avenues for doing this:

• vocal ministry in meeting for worship,
• meeting-sponsored programs outside of meeting for worship,
• the rich Quaker tradition of written ministry and spiritual literature more generally, and
• conferences and programs outside the meeting.

What a meeting needs to serve its members and attenders in the life of the Spirit.

This kind of spiritual nurture does not just happen. Someone has to do it. We are a “do it yourself” religion, meaning (in my opinion) not that every Friend is free to do whatever they want, but that, without paid professionals, it’s up to individual Quakers to take responsibility for each aspect of meeting life, including the roles required for spiritual nurture. I am asking you, my reader, to consider whether you are called to such a ministry of spiritual nurture yourself, or at least, whether you are called to help build the necessary capacity for such ministry in your meeting.

Addressing the bullet points above, this means that each meeting needs Friends who have a gift for vocal ministry, who can lead programs on Quakerism, who know our tradition, and who are familiar with the resources available in their region for spiritual nurture. Both Friends United Meeting and Friends General Conference are a good place to start for the latter. Most meetings, I suspect, have a committee whose charge includes these roles, so that’s the place to start, presumably. The Friends serving on these committees should take it upon themselves to ensure their meeting has the human and other resources needed to meet the spiritual needs of its members and attenders and children.

I think there are certain benchmarks that such committees should strive for, goals that would indicate whether the meeting is equipped to faithfully serve its members with meaningful spiritual nurture. If a meeting doesn’t have what it takes in one of these areas, it should work towards fulfilling the missing roles. But a meeting’s ministry committee should not confine its efforts to itself; it should encourage all its members and attenders to ask themselves whether they might be called to some aspect of spiritual nurture.

Here are the benchmarks that I think are important:

Knowledge and teaching.

Meetings need at least two people in the meeting who know Quaker history, faith, and practice well enough to teach it. Hopefully they also have the gift of teaching, but spirit-led willingness is all you really need. At the least, a meeting needs Friends who are willing to “study up” on a topic so that they could lead some kind of program on it for your meeting. Over the years, if you have people who are willing to study up in this way, you eventually end up with a broad, reliable capacity for religious education. My own meeting is doing it this way and it’s working out pretty well.

Children and families.

Meetings need at least two people who are willing to work with children, who are not parents of those children, and whom the meeting encourages to actually teach Quakerism to them—I mean real Quaker content, including the Bible, not just Quaker “values” and the testimonies, but also history, faith, and practice.

Liberal Quakerism has come to the point where we identify ourselves almost exclusively in terms of our practice, especially silent worship and the lack of professional ministry, and our values, usually expressed in terms of our testimonies. In terms of content, we have made a creed out of not having a creed. A creed is a belief system used to control the thought of a religious society. We sometimes use our creed of non-creedalism to suppress the transmission of the contents of our tradition, to keep people from teaching, or sometimes even talking about, the essential tenets of our faith, out of a fear of dogma, proselytizing, and the divisive effects of “theology”.

As a result, we have members and attenders who have no real idea of what Quakerism is about, who cannot confidently talk about our faith with others, or even with our own children. This is a grave disservice to the spiritual lives of our members and attenders, and our children.

Spiritual disciplines.

Meetings need someone who has experience with the spiritual disciplines— or at least enough interest in them to explore them for themselves and share the results with their meeting. By “spiritual disciplines” I mean those treated so beautifully in Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, that is, prayer, meditation, fasting, study, etc. Historically, and in my own experience, nothing quite beats Bible study, as both a personal and a corporate practice. Alongside Bible study, I would place the classics of prayer and meditation.

I know some of my readers disagree with my emphasis on the importance of altering consciousness—deepening, we Friends call it—and methods for achieving it, feeling that true religion really only requires faithful turning toward the Light, toward God, toward the Christ within, however you experience it. And I agree: that is all true religion requires. But there is more to religious life than just its bare requirements.

Very few of us are gifted with a natural capacity for deep communion with the Divine, as George Fox was. On the other hand, every one of us can develop this capacity through practice. It’s just silly to leave unused the powerful tools available to us for deepening our own spiritual lives and the worship of our meetings. Why would we do that, when these techniques are so effective and so simple?

I am thinking especially of centering prayer. Nothing could be simpler or more congenial to the rest of Quaker faith and practice than centering prayer, and it is so powerful! Even simpler than centering prayer is simply watching the breath. Try it for ten minutes; you will, I think, be quite surprised.

And that is just to speak of meditation’s benefits to the individual practitioner. I believe that it’s one of the most important keys to fostering the gathered meeting for worship, as well: to have a critical mass of Friends who know how to deepen, really deepen, the way you can when you meditate regularly.

Elders.

Meetings need at least two elders. By elder I mean someone who has a gift for recognizing what’s going on inside other people, picking up clues from what they talk about, what they do, what they seem interested in, coupled with an interest in helping them along. The elders in my life have picked up on some aspect of my inner life and then recommended a book, or a conference, or a committee, or a person. They have spoken words of encouragement, thanked me for my contributions, urged me to act, asked me out to lunch or just sat next to me at a potluck to engage in conversation.

Most of our members come to us without much knowledge of our tradition and its resources, or, for that matter without much knowledge of religious faith and practice of any kind. Without paid professional ministry, we have to take it upon ourselves to raise up the level of knowledge and understanding in the meeting to a level that can sustain the spiritual life of the meeting. More important is the spiritual life of each of our members. People join a religion because they are looking for something. It’s our job to help them find it. That means that we need leadership, people who have found some of what they themselves are looking for and along the way have discovered some of the resources that foster this kind of religious self-discovery.

The only thing remaining to build a culture of eldership in the meeting is for these Friends to be on the lookout for others who are seeking and to share what they know—and to be proactive about it.

In the next post, I want to return with a little more attention to the role of vocal ministry in  a robust culture of eldership.

I recently found amongst some papers I was cleaning out a printout of an essay entitled “What is the Future of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain” by John Fitzgerald, a British Friend, published in 2009 in his blog things that might have been otherwise. I found Friend Fitzgerald’s thoughts very insightful. I agreed with much of his description and analysis of the current state of Liberal Quakerism, and found, not to my surprise, that the British experience is very similar to our own condition in the US. Much of his description of Britain Yearly Meeting could aptly apply to New York Yearly Meeting. I want to return to some of the themes he raises in future posts.

But the thing that really caught my eye was his question, “What is the Religious Society of Friends for?” What follows is an outline of my answer(s) to his provocative question. I plan to unpack the individual entries in future posts.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for?

Answer: To bring people to G*d (1) and to bring G*d to the world.

I have organized this answer into two sections:

1. The goals of the Quaker Way, and
2. the way to the Quaker goals.

The goals of the Quaker Way

Bringing people to G*d:

The purpose of the Religious Society of Friends is to awaken people to the Light within them, the Christ within, their Inner Teacher.

To nurture people’s growth in the Spirit:

• to nurture their spiritual gifts,
• to help them answer faithfully G*d’s call to service and ministry and the call to witness on behalf of the truth that has been awakened within them, and
• to give them confidence in their faith.

To nurture families.

To foster genuine worship in spirit and in truth.

To foster fellowship in divine love.

Bringing G*d to the world:

The purpose of the Religious Society of Friends is to help us love one another, to love our fellow humans and our nonhuman neighbors, and to love our enemies, answering that of G*d within all.

To be patterns and examples, both in our personal lives and in our communal life.

To listen to the world’s needs and woes and answer with corporate service and witness.

To support the ministry and witness of our members.

To be visible, present, and available to those who seek the life of the spirit.

The way to the Quaker goals:

Bringing people to G*d:

Personal spirituality:

Spiritual nurture of individuals:

1. Present clearly and confidently the Quaker good news, to seekers, attenders, members, and our children. (Henceforth, “members” includes attenders.)
2. Recognize, name, and nurture our members’ spiritual (and other) gifts and religious temperaments. Provide opportunities for members to express their gifts and find support and fulfillment that matches their temperament..
3. Recognize and nurture our members’ ministry.
4. Expose our members to the various spiritual disciplines (a la Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline) and provide training in the disciplines to which they feel called.

Answers: 

1. Help Friends find answers to their spiritual and religious questions (provide religious content).
2. Help Friends discover their religious identity and their direction in the world, their religious “genius/daemon”.

Community: foster loving, supportive, and joyful community.

Worship: give members the experience of direct communion with G*d by fostering deep silence, spirit-prompted vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting .

Communal spirituality: religion.

Families: provide religious education for children and supportive community for families.

Spiritual nurture in covenantal community:

• Engage in each other’s spiritual growth through a robust and nurturing culture of eldership;
  • protect the communal fellowship and the community’s worship.
• Take responsibility for the corporate side of personal spiritual nurture; that is,
  • work together to name each other’s gifts and
  • discern and support each other’s ministry.

Fellowship: celebrate and share our joy in G*d’s work and love.

Worship: give members the experience of direct communion with G*d by fostering deep silence, spirit-prompted vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting.

• Seek to be gathered in the Spirit.

The work of the meeting: conduct the meeting’s business as worship.

Service to the meeting: focus on the gifts and the ministries of the members, rather than their service on committees: seek not where in the committee structure they could serve, but what enriches their lives and gives them religious fulfillment.

Bringing G*d to the world

Ministry:

• Explore corporately the world’s condition and open ourselves to G*d’s call to service and witness.
• Create an environment in which we recognize emerging ministry.
• Support our members’ (G*d’s) work in the world.

Publishing the truth:

• Encourage and support the written ministry and the outreach ministry of our members.
• Develop a vigorous advancement/outreach program, especially an active and effective web presence, including outreach to religious bloggers and aggregator sites on religion (eg., Beliefnet.net).

Witness:

• Participate in witness at all levels, from the local to the international.
• Actively engage with ecumenical organizations.

In future posts, I will get into these answers in greater detail.
Notes:
(1) G*d. For centuries, Friends have written and said the word “God” with the relative assurance that their Quaker readers knew what they meant. This is no longer true, at least among Liberal Friends. Now the word carries baggage; or rather, we carry baggage and we load it onto the word. The asterisk I use in “G*d” stands in for whatever you mean by “God”. For myself, the asterisk stands for the Mystery Reality behind my spiritual and religious experience, which has taken many forms, and also, if you will, for the Mystery Reality behind your spiritual/religious experience, whatever that experience is.