Gospel Order—Some Guidelines for Eldering Discipline

March 4, 2016 § Leave a comment

While serving in the early 1990s on New York Yearly Meeting’s Ministry & Counsel Coordinating Committee, as it was then called, which had oversight for the yearly meeting committees concerned with worship, ministry, and pastoral care, and for the support of worship, ministry, and pastoral care in the local meetings, I participated in a few “interventions” with meetings that were experiencing conflict or difficulties of some kind with members.

In that service, I noticed some themes that were common to all these cases:

  • Meetings inevitably wished that they had acted more decisively and sooner than they did.
  • They wished that they had talked with each other more about what was going on; a culture of silence had masked unacceptable behavior.
  • They were not clear collectively as a ministry or pastoral care committee or as a meeting about what exactly was not acceptable behavior.
  • They had experienced some denial, considerable confusion about how to act, and a deep hesitancy to act in a way that might harm someone, even when that someone was harming others or the fellowship or the worship.
  • They lost members, and some who did not leave still felt deeply betrayed or hurt by the meeting’s actions and/or inactions.

When we set out to create the Gospel Order Packet, I developed two documents intended as aids to a meeting’s efforts to protect the worship and protect the fellowship of the meeting. One was a tentative list of unacceptable behavior and the other was a set of “triggers” and response to those triggers, a list of behaviors or incidents that should attract the meeting or committee’s attention, and some tentative general suggestions about what to do when these things happened.

I have converted these to pdf files, which you can download using the links below, and I have also entered them as their own blog posts.

Gospel Order—Four Types of Clearness Committees

March 3, 2016 § 7 Comments

The gospel order packet committee of New York Yearly Meeting wanted to include resources on clearness committees, but as we looked into them, we discovered a bit of confusion and heard accounts of Friends being mishandled in their conduct. So we did some research and some thinking and came up with this handout on Four Types of Clearness Committees, which I have revised very slightly for this publication.

Introduction

Clearness committees are an ancient tradition among Friends, originating with clearness committees for marriage in our earliest days. In a letter written in 1653, George Fox refers to some process in which, “when all things [are] found clear,” the faithful “might appoint a meeting on purpose for the taking of each other” in marriage.

In our own time, this tradition has enjoyed a renaissance, with new forms emerging spontaneously as meetings creatively adapt the basic format to new situations and needs. In this process, some confusion has resulted about what a clearness committee is, how it is appointed and conducted, and what it can be used for. With this short paper, we hope to clarify very briefly the various purposes and formats for clearness committees that we have encountered. It is also a resource guide, citing pamphlets that provide useful information on the variations described.

We have identified four kinds of clearness committees in use among us so far. These include:

  1. The traditional clearness committees for marriage and meeting membership.
  2. The more recent but widely used committees for helping a Friend reach clearness in making a decision or solving a personal problem.
  3. Clearness committees for discerning a leading.
  4. Clearness committees used for conflict resolution.

Some comments: In our experience, the last two uses just mentioned are much less well defined than the first two. For one thing, there are fewer support materials available, especially of the ‘how-to’ kind that would be useful to conveners. Consequently, in discussing them we have gone past description of present experience and practice and have provided some general suggestions for the purpose of clarity. Nevertheless, questions about their actual practice remain unanswered. We hope that more research and experimentation will produce more useful materials in the future. As we explore these new forms, we recommend that meetings use some caution. We know of circumstances in which the wrong format was used and Friends were hurt. We hope that the clarifications we offer below will help prevent accidental misuse.

Some suggestions: Experience with clearness committees suggests several things. It’s important to have some seasoned Friends on any clearness committee, folks who can guide the process when it needs it, and leave it to the Spirit when it is gathered. It’s useful to have some connection to Ministry & Counsel in the meeting, so that someone has an overview of what’s going on in the meeting and can help with resources, if necessary. We also recommend thinking out which kind of clearness committee is called for in those cases that are not for marriage or membership, to help provide good order for the committee’s conduct.

The role of worship: Finally, a word about the role of worship in the clearness process. The more worshipful a clearness committee is, the better it works. As in meeting for worship and meeting for business in worship—and especially like worship sharing, with which clearness committees have many affinities—it is God who leads us into clarity of mind and singleness of heart. It is the faith of Friends that in silent attention to the Inner Guide, the Spirit of truth of whom John speaks (John 14:17) will come to us and guide our work. One key to such worshipfulness is humility. The more we come to the work of the committee as servants of the Friends involved and lay ourselves in God’s hands, the better the process seems to work. Many Friends have had the experience of surprising openings in the process of the committee session and of unlooked-for answers afterwards, even when the session itself has seemed at first unfruitful. Worship, cultivated in all aspects of the clearness committee’s process, nurtures this rising up of God’s leading light, in which we are enabled to answer that of God in each other.

Four types of clearness committee

Clearness committees for marriage and membership

The meeting chooses the committee. The committee has a specific goal: whether the meeting and the applicant(s) are clear to go forward with either the marriage or the membership application.

Resources:

  • The NYYM pamphlet on Marrying Under the Care of Friends.
  • Peter Woodrow, Clearness: Processes For Supporting Individuals And Groups In Decision-Making, Movement for a New Society, 1985. Part Two covers clearness committees for membership in a Movement for a New Society household; developed from the Quaker process for membership.

Clearness committees for discerning a leading

The committee might be chosen in consultation between the meeting and the member. The goal is to determine whether a specific leading is of God and/or how the meeting might support the ministry that arises from the leading; in this sense, the form is close to that for membership and marriage.

Resources:

  • Patricia Loring, Spiritual Discernment: the context and goal of clearness committees, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #305.
  • Paul A. Lacey, Leading And Being Led, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #264. What Quakers mean by a “leading.”

Clearness committees to help a Friend make a decision or understand a personal problem

The committee is chosen mostly by the applicant. The process is one of simply asking good questions designed to clarify the situation for the ‘focus person’; there is no specific goal or corporate decision to be sought.

Resources:

  • Jan Hoffman, “Clearness Committees and their use in Personal Discernment.” A short piece widely reprinted.
  • Peter Woodrow, Clearness: Processes For Supporting Individuals And Groups In Decision-Making, Movement for a New Society, 1985. Part One covers clearness committees for decision making and seeking greater clarity about ones directions in life and work.

Clearness committees for conflict resolution.

This is a new and as yet somewhat undefined use for clearness committees for which there are no set format or guidelines currently in use among Friends. Meetings seem to be doing whatever makes sense to them in an attempt to resolve a conflict and calling the process a clearness committee. Here we offer some suggestions to help clarify things.

Both the meeting and those in conflict might choose the people on the committee. The ideal, long-term goal is reconciliation or a new agreement between the parties in conflict; the practical, short-term goal is a safe environment in which those in conflict can speak and be heard and achieve enough clarity about the situation for the meeting (including the parties in the conflict) to choose a course of action. The form can have two parts.

The first part uses Quaker dialog, a process in which the parties in the conflict respond directly and in turn to questions out of worship, as in worship sharing, addressing themselves to the questions rather than to each other’s offerings, and with no discussion, responses, or rebuttals, but rather silence between the sharings. This is not really a dialog.

It seems to work well if the questions stay focused on a single thread until some clarity is reached about that thread. Two such threads—about what actually happened, and about how we feel about the events—often get tangled and it’s useful to keep them separate, exploring first the factual or “events” thread, and then the other “emotional” thread, if possible: one thread tries to clarify what has actually happened; the other explores how each party to the conflict feels as a result.

We have seen that the parties in the conflict often have different stories about events, that neither story is fully accurate, and that misunderstandings have colored the perception of events. It can be very difficult to arrive at a single narrative that all agree on, but it’s one way to structure the questions. So one person tells their story without interruption, then the other. Then follow questions to clarify the discrepancies.

Feelings come up in the process of telling the story. They are part of the story. But they can derail the session. Experienced, spirit-led facilitation and worship are the key to sorting this out.

A second part might follow the listening session if it seems that some progress has been made or it seems it’s safe to reach a little deeper. If not, then the clerk should just end the session and let the simple act of having listened to each other do some work. At some later time, it might be useful to convene a more open dialog between the parties in the conflict.

Whichever way it’s done—immediately after a listening session or some other time—this second session consists of facilitated question-asking by a clerk or other participants, to which each party in the conflict responds, trying to maintain a spirit of worship and using periods of silence to return the participants to this spirit when necessary. But, in contrast to the earlier session, here the parties in the conflict are really in dialog, speaking their point of view in answer to the other party’s statements.

It is useful to have someone trained in mediation clerking this session, if possible, as the stated tentative goal of the session is to arrive at a new agreement between the parties in the conflict about how things will go in the future. At some point, if things seem to be opening up and if the parties in the conflict express readiness to do so and an agreement seems achievable, then the parties to the conflict and the other participants can try to zero in on what that agreement might be. This might be treated as a third stage in the process—trying to fashion an agreement about behavior in the future.

We want to stress that these guidelines are experimental. Some of them we’ve seen in action; others are just suggestions based on experience. Meetings will want to think the process through carefully and then adapt these suggestions and/or come up with new elements that they think will work in their situation.

Resources:

  • Fellowship; in Depth and Spiritual Renewal through QUAKER DIALOGUE “CREATIVE LISTENING, Suggestions for Leaders of Group Dialogues Derived from the Experience of Claremont, California Friends, Library Committee, Claremont Monthly Meeting, 727 West Harrison Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. A pamphlet on the so-called Claremont Dialog, also called Quaker Dialog.
  • Margaret S. Gibbons, Encounter Through Worship Sharing, FWCC 1506 Race St., Phila. PA 19102.

 

Gospel Order—Some Definitions

February 29, 2016 § 1 Comment

Introduction

“Gospel order” appears as a distinctive idiom in the writings of Friends from the earliest days until the present. It has meant different things in different contexts, and at different times. But these various meanings can be organized loosely into four groups:

  1. the principle of conducting individual and community affairs under the leadership of the Spirit;
  2. processes for conflict resolution and mutual accountability,
  3. Quaker church structure and business process, and
  4. a “cosmic” meaning that speaks of the underlying order of creation as established by the cosmic Christ, the Logos/Word of creative divine wisdom. At the end of this documenta are footnotes and scriptural references.

Led by the Spirit in personal and community life

Gospel order is a generic term for the ordering of the meeting’s life and our own lives in accordance with the gospel, in accordance with the leadings of the living spirit of God. In the words of Joseph Pickvance [footnote #1], “The order that arises in the Church when the members live in the Gospel, the power of God, under the government of the Spirit and Light of God and Christ.”

This is not just an outward adherence to the principles of governance and right walking which are to be found in scripture; but more properly, the alignment of life to the spirit of Christ, or the Inward Light, which is the source of all wisdom and love, and a commitment to follow the guidance and changes of heart which arise from that alignment.

Fox defined gospel order this way: “the spirit of God, which was given to every one to profit withal, and the grace of God, which bringeth salvation, and which hath appeared unto all men, and teacheth them that obey it to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world: that this is the most fit, proper, and universal rule, which God hath given to all mankind to rule, direct, govern, and order their lives by.” [2]

In her Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Gospel Order: A Quaker Understanding of Faithful Church Community, (PHP #297) Sandra Cronk defines gospel order as “the phrase early Friends most often used to describe the communal/ecclesiastical and societal dimensions” of “the inbreaking of God’s new order in our lives.” “God’s new order meant a reconciled and faithful personal relationship with God. It also meant being gathered into a community of God’s people who lived the way of faithfulness together eschewing those conventions of the larger social order which were considered contrary to God’s will.” [#3]

“Early Friends stressed that God’s new order was not present simply because people did all the ‘right’ things in an outward sense; rather, God’s new order, gospel order, was present when people lived out of the fullness of their living relationship with Christ.” “It simply means that gospel order is, first and foremost, life lived in God’s transforming, guiding, and sustaining power.” [#4]

Cronk identifies three general areas of concern in gospel order:

  1. the inward life of worship and discernment, including meeting for worship and meeting for business in worship;
  2. the interior functioning of the meeting community, including the traditional role of eldering, home life, meeting for marriage, and the larger meeting structures that we call quarterly meeting and yearly meeting; and
  3. the social testimonies of Friends.

Mutual accountability in the Spirit

Gospel order is a technical term for the 3-step process for conflict resolution instituted by Jesus among his disciples in Matthew 18, verses 15-20.

The specifics of this process, as adapted by Friends, date back to George Fox himself, as the excerpt below describes. As a technical term for this process, it continued through the middle period of Quaker history. The process includes 1) meeting alone with the other party in conflict to work toward resolution; 2) bringing one or two others to speak to the other party; 3) bringing the matter before the church/meeting.

Gospel order then, in addition to this specific reference to Matthew 18, has the wider meaning of mutual accountability. Friends soon institutionalized the functions of accountability in the role of the elder, who had nurturing care and disciplinary oversight of how individuals and the meeting walked in the Light. Friends derived the deeper spiritual authority for discipline in the meeting from verses 18-20 in the passage of Matthew mentioned above, which ends with the promise that “where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”

Church structure and business process

Gospel order also means the traditional “path” through which individual concerns become the business of the meeting and the ordering of meetings into quarterly and yearly meetings for accountability.

This applies to the practice of bringing leadings and concerns before the meeting for worship with a concern for business for corporate discernment and action; of the meeting then laying such a concern before the quarterly or regional meeting when the meeting has chosen to support a concern; and then, perhaps before the yearly meeting at the decision of the regional meeting.

Thus, ‘gospel order’ includes the particular “ecclesiastical” structures of Friends that carry responsibility for spirit-led governance and discernment: the monthly meeting, the quarterly or regional meeting, and the yearly meeting. (By implication, then, gospel order also includes the process of clearness committees, both committees for clearness for membership and marriage and committees for personal discernment, especially when used to test leadings.)

This “system” of increasingly inclusive “tiers” of meetings for the conduct of corporate affairs was instituted by George Fox in the 1660s, along with other structural reforms (including Quaker marriage procedures, the setting up of schools, and the establishment of women’s meetings with pastoral responsibility) after his release from prison at a time when so many travelling ministers were either imprisoned or dead. “What is important to recognize,” writes Doug Gwyn, “is that this system of monthly, quarterly, and yearly men’s and women’s meetings was not the Church government itself, but the discipline by which Christ the head was allowed to rule the body of his Church according to his spirit.” [#5]

Behind the structure, we can see in the quotes that follow the intimation of a principle of moral ordering, of discipline as an aspect of discipleship: “And after we had visited most of the meetings in Somersetshire, we passed into Dorsetshire to one Harris his house, where we had a large Men’s Meeting, and there all the Men’s Monthly Meetings were settled in the glorious order of the Gospel, and that all in the power of God might seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and might cherish the good and reprove the evil.” [#6]

This next quote resonates with the sense of Matthew 18, with the background for the spiritual authority of meetings over individuals and of regional meetings over local meetings, becoming almost visible: “I had some of all the men Friends of each meeting and I established the Men’s Monthly Meetings amongst them also in the order of the Gospel, the power of God. And the power of the Lord confirmed it in all that felt it. And they came to see and feel that the power of God was the authority of their meetings.” [#7]

Thus, in addition to the role of the various levels of meetings as bodies of discernment with respect to leadings, concerns and ‘business’ in general, ‘gospel order’ also refers to their respective roles for discipline and pastoral care for each other. Thus, monthly meetings once were expected to formally answer queries from the regional meetings in meeting for business in worship, sending their minuted responses to their quarterly meetings for review and possible disciplinary action. Today this dimension of gospel order continues in our practice of writing and approving the written ‘discipline’ of Faith & Practice by the Yearly Meeting, the writing of Advices and Queries, the provision in Faith & Practice for a terminated member to appeal the decision of their meeting to the regional meeting, the practice of paying the proportional share to the Yearly Meeting through regional meeting treasurers, which is no longer New York Yearly Meeting’s practice, the writing of the State of Society Report, the recording of ministers, and so on.

Included in the original reforms initiated in 1667 was the establishment of women’s meetings. Up to this time, men had conducted all ‘business’ meetings.

Gospel order as the divinely ordained order of the universe

In his book, Lloyd Lee Wilson emphasizes a “cosmic” meaning for gospel order: “the order established by God that exists in every part of creation . . . the right relationship of every part of creation.” In fact, Lloyd Lee Wilson begins his book with this definition.

When Leanna and Linda and I first created this definition document, I don’t think we paid enough attention to this aspect of gospel order. In fact, it’s possible that Wilson’s book had not yet come out. And it’s been so long since I read it that I no longer know where to go to develop this idea fully, so I will leave it at this for now. I will return to expand on this meaning after I have had a chance to review the book.

I’m not too worried about this, though, because I don’t think Fox and early Friends emphasized this aspect of gospel order very much either. They weren’t much given to cosmic or metaphysical theologizing in general, preferring to focus on the here and now, to take a more practical approach to sin and salvation, and to be wary of “notions” and “shadows”, of ideas without manifest power. Fox did refer to Christ as the Word and the Word of Wisdom quite a lot, but less in speculation about the ordering of the universe and more in exhortation toward the ordering of the Godly life.

More quotes from George Fox

Gospel order and discipline:

“In the church of Christ, where he is the head, there is his gospel and his order and his government; there is his power felt in everyone’s heart, and there are his offices of admonishing, rebuking, exhorting, reproving, amongst them that are convinced, and converted, by them that are in the power … they that would not have the people to be admonished … and yet go into sin and wickedness, those are out of the gospel order and government of Christ Jesus …” [George Fox, Works, Vol. VIII:62]

The cosmic dimension of gospel order:

[1. The Everlasting Gospel Order]

“Herein is the holy, heavenly and powerful Order, which is everlasting and will have no end. This Order of the Gospel, which is the Power of God, is over all the orders in the world and before they were, whether Jews, gentiles or apostate Christians . . . “ [Epistle 313 (1674), p. 309 of …]

Fox’s guidelines for dispute reconciliation:

[1. The Disorderly who walk not in the Truth]

All Friends must know one another in the Spirit and Power of God. In all the Meetings of the Country, two or three may be appointed from them to go the Quarterly Meetings … to give notice … if there be any that walk not in the Truth and follow callings and dealings; nor honest, nor just, but run into debt and so bring a scandal upon the Truth. … Query and search out all [those who] live not as becomes the Truth and the Gospel, yet do profess it; so that they all may walk in it, as well as talk of it….

And Friends … that you all may be preserved in the Lord’s Power … in the order of the Gospel and in the government of Christ Jesus, “of the increase of which there shall be no end” (Isa. 9:7).

Settling Differences, Disputes and Misconduct in Gospel Order

Dear Friends, if there happen any difference between Friend and Friend, let them speak to one another. If they will not hear, let them take two or three of the Meeting they belong to, that they may end it if they can. And if they cannot end it, then it may be laid before the Monthly Meeting. [See Matt. 18:15-18] And if it cannot be ended there, then it may be brought to the Quarterly Meeting and there let it be put to half-a-dozen Friends, that they may end it…. Or, they that are at differences may choose three Friends and Friends may choose three more … and let them stand to their judgment. For there [are] few … will [want] their names brought to a Monthly or Quarterly Meeting, to have their names sounded over the country that they are in strife, but will rather endeavor to end it amongst themselves or at their own Meeting…

And if there be any difference brought to the Monthly or Quarterly Meeting … after you have heard them one by one, and let but one speak at a time, know [from] them whether they will stand to your judgment? If they will, let half-a-dozen Friends make a final end of it. But if they will not stand to your judgment, they are not fit to bring it thither.

And if any brother or sister hear any report of any brother or sister, let him or her go to the party and know the truth of the report. If it be true, let the thing be judged. If false, go then to the reporter and let him or her be judged….

Now concerning Gospel order, though the doctrine of Jesus Christ requires his people to admonish brother or sister twice before they tell the Church, yet that limits none … that they use no longer forbearance, before they tell the Church; but that they shall not less than twice admonish their brother or sister before they tell the Church. It is desired of all, that before they publicly complain, they wait in the Power of God to feel, if there is no more required of them to their brother or sister, before they expose him or her to the Church. Let this be weightily considered.

And further, when the Church is told and the party admonished by the Church again and again and he or they remain still unsensible and unreconciled, let not final judgment go forth against him or her, till everyone of the Meeting have cleared his or her conscience … that if possible the party may be reached and saved.

After all are clear of the blood of such an one, let the judgment of Friends in the Power of God go forth against him or her . . . that no reproach may come to rest upon God’s holy Name, Truth and people.

All [those who] behold their brother or sister in transgression, go not in a rough, light or upbraiding spirit to remove or admonish him or her, but in the Power of the Lord, Spirit of the Lamb, in the Wisdom and love of Truth, which suffers thereby…. so, may the soul of such a brother or sister be seasonably and effectually reached….

And be it known to all, we cast out none from among us. For if they go from the Light, Spirit and Power in which our Unity is, they cast out themselves. It has been our way to admonish them, that they may come to that Spirit and Light of God, which they are gone from, and so come into the Unity again. For our Fellowship stands in the Light, that the world hates…. If they will not hear our admonitions… the Light condemns them, and then goes the testimony of Truth out against them.

No condemnation ought to go further than the transgression is known. If he or she returns and gives forth a paper of condemnation against him or herself, which is more desirable than that we should do it, this is a testimony of his or her repentance and resurrection before God, his people and the whole world….

That no testimony by way of condemnation, be given forth against any man or woman, whatever crime they commit, before admonition….

And so, keep the Church order of the Gospel, according as the Lord Jesus Christ has commanded; that is, “If they brother offend thee, speak to him between thee and him; and if he will not hear, take two or three. If he will not hear two or three, then tell it to the Church, etc.” (Matt. 18:15)

And dear Friends, in the Power of the Lord God, you who … in your Men’s and Women’s meetings, in the Power of the Lord Jesus see that all things be well amongst you and that all do walk in the Truth as becomes the Gospel of Christ and his glorious Light and Life, so that all may stand up for God’s glory and be valiant for his Truth….

Contemporary usage

The following is a collection of definitions culled from modern writings.

“GOSPEL ORDER. A fellowship of the disciples of Christ that comes into being as the result of the preaching and experience of the Gospel. Our order, organization, testimonies, and closeness come from God through the relationships between people that Jesus described in parables and showed through his healing, counsel, and prophecy. Jesus lives amongst us, counsels and chastises, and leads us in living this order. Our fellowship is local, regional, national, and international at the same time, since we are a spiritual group that Christ heads rather than an episcopal, congregational, or bureaucratic system managed politically.” NYYM Faith & Practice, Glossary.

“Gospel order is the order established by God that exists in every part of creation, transcending the chaos that seems so often prevalent. It is the right relationship of every part of creation, however small, to every other part and to the Creator. Gospel order is the harmony and order which God established at the moment of creation, and which enables the individual aspects of creation to achieve that quality of being which God intended from the start, about which God could say that ‘it was very good.’ [Lloyd Lee Wilson, Essays On The Quaker Vision Of Gospel Order, Celo Valley Books, Burnsville, NC, 1993; p. 3]

“Gospel order…is an organizing principle by which Friends come to a clearer understanding of our relationship to God in all of the divine manifestations and the responsibilities of that relationship.” [Wilson, Essays, p. 4]

Gospel order includes evangelism:

This meaning is current among evangelical and pastoral Friends, but has its roots in the writings of George Fox: “You may see how the Apostle, after he had convinced people, brought them into the Order of the Gospel. The Jews, after they came out of Egypt, they were brought into the Order of the law of God. And as Christians came to believe in Christ, then they are come into the Order of the Gospel.

“So, as I was first moved of the Lord God, to go up and down the nation to preach the Gospel, then after[wards] the Lord moved me to go up and down to exhort and unite, that all people might come into the possession of the Gospel, and the Order of it, which is the Power of God . . . by which all things are upheld and ordered to the Glory of God.

“So, this was the spiritual Order of the Gospel, which the Apostle in Spirit beheld . . . in whom their walking should be, to wit, in Christ, the spiritual and heavenly Man; and not to walk in old Adam, who was without this spiritual, heavenly Gospel Order, which it is the duty of all Christians to walk in. . . . It is said in Psalm 37:23, ‘The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord:, that is, by his Power and Spirit.'” [George Fox, Epistle 313, The Power Of The Lord Is Over All, The Pastoral Letters Of George Fox, edited by T. Canby Jones, Friends United Press, Richmond, IN, 1966; p. 257]

Marlene Pedigo:

“Gospel Order is the practice of being led into God’s new order in worship, decision-making and daily living within the faith community.”

“The Everlasting Gospel Order was a term developed by early Friends to describe their commitment to live with integrity the Good News of Christ Jesus. . . . Gospel Order is an experiential reality, the results of a dynamic friendship with God.” [Marlene Pedigo, in Gospel Order, Study I – Lesson 1 of the Journey In Faith Series, introduced as a special section in Quaker Life, Jan/Feb 1995.]

Johan Maurer:

“‘Gospel order’ basically means ordering our lives and our churches so that we can be obedient to God and uphold each other in mutual accountability and support to achieve that obedience.” [Johan Maurer, in “Commitments,” Quaker Life, Jan/Feb 1995]

Stephanie Crumley-Effinger:

“Early Friends challenged all people to live by ‘gospel order,’ developing patterns for life in community that would enable individuals and meetings to discern, and to live according to, the will of God. Gospel order requires the power of the risen Christ, available to those who seek to be his disciples through corporate discernment about individual leadings and ways of living.”

Jim Healton, Sacramento Friends Church, offered an electrical model—Jesus Christ being the generator, with gospel order the gridlines through which power flows to meetings and individuals.

[Stephanie Crumley-Effinger, in “Gospel Order: Building True Community,” in Quaker Life, Jan/Feb 1995]

Lucy Davenport:

“[Early Quakers’] view of the light within was not of a natural light, but a light with power to save men from their temptation to turn from God, to be bound by evil. Thus the light becomes the judge of history, as men’s [sic] eyes are opened to the cause of wickedness both in themselves and in the unredeemed social order. Thus the doctrine of the light led naturally into an understanding of what came to be referred to by Friends as ‘gospel order,’ an order of righteousness in which God’s people obey God’s voice as it is revealed to them inwardly by the light of Christ, which leads them out of the disorder and chaos of Satan’s rule into the kingdom where Christ rules all.” (from “Christ Jesus the Covenant of God: Two Views of the Quaker Doctrine of the Light,” Quaker Religious Thought #80, Vol. 26, No. 2, March 1993, p. 11)

Lewis Benson:

“…what Fox is telling us is that gospel order is essentially a relationship between God’s son and God’s people. ‘They that do obey the voice of the Lord and Christ Jesus . . . in this they know the order of Christ.'” [Lewis Benson, “The People of God and Gospel Order,” The Church In Quaker Thought And Practice, Charles Thomas, ed. (Philadelphia: Faith and Life Movement, 1979), p. 21]

Bill Taber:

Gospel order is “a power which can be felt and experienced, and can bring forth the organizational agreements appropriate to a given situation.” [Bill Taber, as reported by Bill Wood in an article for Purchase Meeting newsletter, NYYM]

The working definition used by the subcommittee on gospel order:

Organizing principles that help keep God at the center of Friends community life.

Synonyms: “right order” or “good order”

Scripture passages

The following scripture passages are quoted by Fox as foundations for gospel order:

1 Cor. 13:10-13; 14:40    Matt. 7:24f     Heb. 11:10      Col. 2:5           Isa. 28:16

[Works, Vol. VIII:59f, 175] Ps. 37:23

Rev. 21:3

[Works, Vol. V:138]

Other scripture references include:

Pss. 25:1-5; 46                       Gal. 5:22-23

Isa. 42 [esp. vv. 5-7, 16]       Col. 3:1-17

Matt. 18                                  Eph. 3:14-21

John 15:1-17; 16:1-15            James 3:13-18

Acts 14:21-23; 15                   1 Pet. 1:13-25

Rom. 12:1-2

Footnotes:

[1]   Joseph Pickvance, A Reader’s Companion To George Fox’s Journal, Quaker Home Service, London, 1989; p. 79.

[2]   Fox’s Journal, 687.

[3]   Sandra L. Cronk, Gospel Order, A Quaker Understanding Of Faithful Church Community, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #297, Pendle Hill, Wallingford, PA, 1991; pp. 4-5.

[4]   Cronk, p. 8.

[5]   Douglas Gwyn, The Apocalypse Of The Word, Friends United Press, Richmond, IN; p. 50.

[6]   Fox’s Journal, p. 525.

[7]   Fox’s Journal, p. 520.

Holding Meetings Hostage

February 18, 2016 § 14 Comments

One of the meetings in New York Yearly Meeting withholds the portion of its covenant donation that would go to Friends United Meeting because of FUM’s personnel policy, which forbids sex outside of marriage, defined as between a man and a woman, for its staff and volunteers, which affects single heterosexuals and all homosexuals. Thus it’s often perceived as discrimination against LGBT Friends.

I know of a meeting in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that restored a sizable sum to its covenant donation after recovering from the Great Recession, but a committee in the meeting has asked the meeting to restrict the funds to the support of the yearly meeting’s anti-racism efforts.

Several Friends walked out of a New York Yearly Meeting session some time ago when the body could not come to unity on an apology to Afro-Descendants.

I have seen individual Friends hold their meetings emotionally hostage in a business session, too, saying one version or another of: “If you do (or don’t do) ‘x’, I’ll do ‘y’.”

The first three of these examples could have several motivations, but the effect of these Friends’ actions is to hold their meeting hostage to their will; that is, to punish or threaten to punish the meeting for crossing their will.

Motivations. A number of motives could be at play, at least in the first three examples. These Friends could be expressing solidarity with a victimized group. They could be protesting. They could be standing for a testimony, feeling that their action speaks with a prophetic voice. But holding the meeting hostage is a form of withdrawal and that amounts to a form of violence.

Withdrawal—of financial support, physical presence, or spiritual commitment—says I will not participate fully in the life of the meeting. This wounds the meeting in a number of ways. Thus, it is a form of violence. Some might rationalize this by saying that the meeting does a greater violence with its action or its inaction. Such a rationalization/accusation might well be the truth—and it might well compound the violence. At the least, it kicks the flywheel of action leading to reaction; it is not the third way of love.

Love. Like withdrawal, love in our religious tradition is an action, not just an emotion. Love is a commandment, something we do most especially when we least want to. Love is laying down one’s life for one’s Friends, using “life” here in an expanded sense—love is sacrifice. Love is staying at the table, maintaining one’s spiritual commitment even in adversity and discomfort. Love is not treating others as we would not want to be treated.

Trust. These actions evince a lack of trust. A lack of trust in the meeting community, in Quaker process, perhaps in the skills and discernment of the presiding clerk, and ultimately,  lack of trust in the Holy Spirit. Now, it may well be that the community, with its present actions and/or its past history, does in fact deserve distrust, or that the clerk is in over her or his head. And we have all seen Quaker process go bad. In the face of these obstacles, it is hard to trust the Spirit, to really commit to worship instead of throwing ourselves into ceaseless wrangling.

The covered meeting. Friends tend not to trust the Spirit when they have never experienced a covered meeting, never seen the meeting break through into the Light against everyone’s expectations. You can’t blame them, really. This just doesn’t happen very often. You might attend a meeting for years before you see the dramatic in-breaking of the Spirit-reign. And even if you have had this experience, you can forget how holy it is and how we get there if you have a dog in the fight.

Faith is patience. Usually, the coming of revelation in a covered meeting requires faith. Faith means patience, and commitment to worship. It is our faith that we all can commune directly with G*d and that the meeting as a community also can commune directly with the Spirit of Love and Truth, and that revelation is, in fact, continuing. However, it can be very frustrating when it takes too long for others to see the light that blazes so brightly in your own mind. This frustration casts a shadow on the Light. This frustration is a cousin to anger, arrogance, and spiritual pride. It can be an ancestor of hate.

Forced agreement. Sometimes, a meeting submits to the coercion. This often happens simply out of exhaustion. Or sometimes, someone stands aside, or asks to be recorded as standing aside, either by name or not—we have a subtly gradated system for acknowledging disunity while still going forward. This gets into a difficult area of collective discernment and I have come to believe that it should virtually never be allowed, though I still have mixed feelings about it.

What to do? When Friends withhold themselves from the spirit of the meeting or when a Friend proposes to stand aside, the clerk needs to ask some probing questions. Have these Friends been given the opportunity to fully explain themselves? Do they fully understand their own feelings or leading in the first place? Has the meeting lost the spirit of worship? Can it be recovered?

If the dissenters have not really been heard, or if they have not really had a chance to hear their own inner Guide, more worship is required, just as we hold a clerk or recording clerk in prayer while s/he crafts a minute.

The bottom line. The question is this: are the Friends who seem to be holding the meeting hostage truly led by the Spirit or not (assuming the clerk and the meeting agree that s/he is neither incapacitated nor a jackass)? Is the Holy Spirit behind the withholding of funds, or the restriction of funds, or the stop in a Friend’s mind, or not?

How do you decide?

With worship. With love and faith.

Ultimately, either our faith in Spirit-led worship is genuine—or we feel that we can lead it better ourselves. If it’s genuine, then we pray and worship.

What’s in the Name?

February 15, 2016 § Leave a comment

Through the Flaming Sword is not my first blog. My first blog is BibleMonster. I started that blog when Dick Cheney misquoted Benjamin Franklin to claim that God’s hand had blessed the American empire he was building.

So I started BibleMonster to deconstruct the way that right-wing evangelical Christians were torturing Scripture to say things they wanted it to say, to say things that it otherwise never would have said. Well, maybe it would have said some of these things; the Bible says some pretty unsavory things here and there. But it never said yes to empire.

Anyway, I found I couldn’t maintain two blogs at once. It’s hard enough to keep up with one. So when I was clearly led to write Through the Flaming Sword, I laid BibleMonster aside.

Lately, BibleMonster has been asking for more attention. This entry could be some kind of bridge between the two.

A meditation for Valentine’s Day:

Love and the Religious Society of Friends

In the beginning, Friends called themselves the Children of the Light and the Children of Truth, among other things. At some point, however, Friends settled into what is now our formal name, the Religious Society of Friends, and they rooted this identity in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, and especially verse fifteen.

This passage, in fact, the whole fifteenth chapter up to this point, is a sermon on the mutual in-dwelling of God, Jesus, and his disciples (among whom early Friends included themselves, and by extension, us), an in-dwelling made possible through the medium of love and reinforced with the constant repetition of the words “remain” and “abide in”.

Jesus starts with the figure of the vineyard. “I am the true vine and the Father is the vinedresser,” proclaims Jesus (Jn 15:1). “I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the same shall bear much fruit.” (v. 5)

But after developing this maschal, this “proverb” or figure of the vineyard, Jesus turns to love. I was not able to format this passage (John 15:9–17) the way I wanted, scanned to illuminate some of the elegant and poetic semantic structure of these verses, so I have created a pdf file that you can download here. This represents my own adaptation of the King James Version.

Early Friends knew not the ins and outs of the Greek that would have equated “friends” with “beloved” in their understanding, both of which are variations on “philos”, but they got the idea just the same.

So our identity as a movement they rooted in this idea of love as the sap that brings life to the vine, as the medium through which we dwell in Christ and he in us, just as love binds Jesus to his Father and his father to him. In this love, God’s truth is revealed. Out of this love, we bear much fruit, the fruit of love and service in the world.

This love is not (just) a good feeling that arises from good chemistry between friends, but a law, a commandment. It is something we do, even when we don’t want to.

Elsewhere, Jesus lays out the clauses in the law of love, quoting the law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: you shall love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Heart, soul, strength, and neighbor mean specific things in Torah, and not what we would expect, since the meanings we ascribe ti them come from a Greek understanding, rather than the Semitic, and from modern denotations of the English words we use in translation. But that’s for another sermon.

The point here is that this love in which early Friends chose to root our identity is not (just) an emotion in the worldview of Jesus and his disciples. It is a set of mutual responsibilities under the law, obligations that are quite thoroughly defined in the law.

Early Friends seem to have intuited this, while at the same time applying our modern English understanding, expanding “friends” to mean “beloved” and taking love as a commandment seriously while adding the emotional dimension we usually mean when we say “love”.

Collective Witness

February 5, 2016 § Leave a comment

Activist Friends sometimes get upset because their meeting has not taken up their cause and this apparent indifference feels hurtful. At the same time, meetings sometimes feel that they should have some collective witness, that the meeting as a whole should be engaged with some concern. At the very least, meetings sometimes feel that they should at least have a vital peace and social action committee, and are unhappy when they don’t.

The answer to both forms of discomfort, I believe, is the energetic and creative embrace of the faith and practice of Quaker ministry.

For the activist Friend, this means thinking of your impulse to engage some concern as a leading from the Spirit. Following a leading in the framework of Quaker ministry focuses the minister on several questions.

First, am I clear what my leading is and is it from G*d? Do I know what I am supposed to be doing and am I confident in my purpose?

If I am uncertain, then the next step is to ask the meeting for a clearness committee for discernment (for which the primary resource is Patricia Loring’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Spiritual Discernment: The Context and Goal of Clearness Committees Among Friends). Even if I am certain about my leading, it’s still a good idea to ask for a clearness committee. Here’s why.

First, of course, is the clearness. Even if you are clear in your concern, you will almost certainly learn things about yourself and your call that you didn’t know before.

But also, the clearness committee will go a long way toward easing your disappointment in the meeting’s lack of interest in your concern. A handful of Friends will become intimately familiar, not just with the character of your impulse toward social or ecological justice (along with yourself!), but they will also get to know you better as a person.

In my own experience as a participant in such a clearness committee, I came out of the clearness committee a champion of the ministry. This doesn’t necessarily translate into action alongside the minister in the cause, but it does at least bring the concern into my prayer life.

If the committee and the minister agree, then the next step would be to bring a minute for travel or service to the meeting. Now the whole meeting (or at least, those gathered for business in worship) learns about the call and brings to it the corporate discernment of the whole meeting.

If such a minute gets written and approved, then the next step is for the meeting to form a care committee, or a committee for support and/or oversight, for the leading. Now another small group of Friends becomes intimately engaged with the concern and with the activist.

Finally, as the activist reports periodically to the meeting about their leading, the meeting’s engagement is refreshed.

One more thing. Properly practiced, the structures and processes of Quaker ministry keep returning the focus to the ministry, and not just to the minister. This also goes a long way toward relieving the activist’s unhappiness with the meeting. It’s not really about you, it’s about the divine call to action. Your job shifts from trying to get the meeting to come on board to seeking to be faithful to the call.

And all this works to alleviate the discomfort the meeting might feel about not having a collective witness—for now they do. If several Friends go through this process of clearness and support committees, the network of relationships spreads through the meeting, deepening this sense of action on the part of the meeting. With this spirit-led dynamic at work in the life of the meeting, the meeting comes to feel that the Spirit is, in fact, at work amongst you.

And of course, chances are fair that, through this intimate contact with it and the Friend, some other Friends will join in the work of the leading more actively.

This is one of the reasons why I feel very strongly that we should not organize our witness in committees, but rather through the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. Committee’s are almost by definition silos of activity that only make contact with the meeting when they present business to the body, much of which amounts to reports and their budget.

There will be the occasional call to action, of course. But this almost always takes the form of asking for approval to act as a committee, which returns the action to the silo, or of approving a minute of conscience, which has its place, but a minute is not much to crow about as an act of collective witness.

Quaker-pocalypse: Collapse and Renewal in Quaker Social Witness, Part Three

January 31, 2016 § 7 Comments

Radical witness today?

I think the liberal, committee-based approach to Quaker witness has run its race.

The liberal approach: Study the problem, find the causes, develop a program, fund it with public money and action—we’ve been doing this since the New Deal, but since the 1960s, this approach has become increasingly impotent.

The committee-based approach: Someone feels led to engage some new concern—say, earthcare—so you form a working group. If you get enough people behind the concern, form a standing committee. Then spend half your time developing a budget, spend the rest of your time seeking unity over your direction, negotiating your leading with Friends who are maybe led in some other direction within the concern, or who have no direction at all; resort to brainstorming or visioning sessions when the group can’t find its corporate direction; call the seven minutes you sit in silence at the beginning of your meetings “worship”; hope nominating committee can find enough people to keep you going, linger on after the fire has died out because some Friend in the wider body can’t imagine your meeting without an [xyz] committee, become a zombie committee. X years later some Friends feel a new leading for the concern, the committee gets a defibrillator, and the cycle starts over again.

We may be standing today on the cusp of a new stage in the evolution of Quaker witness. I hope so.

We have awakened to the total integration of oppression across all areas of life, culture, economics, and politics. All of our problems are interrelated. The whole system is corrupt. Nothing less than a total social-cultural-economic-political-constitutional revolution will do. Civilization itself must change. How do you do that?

We are paralyzed by the enormity of the challenge. We are bereft of a prophetic vision that could take on this kind of monolithic global evil. We are chipping away at things here and there, and with some remarkable success. But a sense of helplessness and dread often looms over our efforts, as we seem to be losing ground on a number of really important fronts, especially ecologically. The human race seems bent on following the passenger pigeon into oblivion. It is as though the Book of Revelation has become our playbook.

Quaker witness now needs to recover the genius of all four stages of our witness history at once. We still need liberal activism and programs that alleviate the sufferings of the people and the planet. We still need the government—legislative reform and executive regulation and enforcement. We still need the truth and intelligence of science and the leverage of technology. We still need to threaten pharaoh in his own court with the prophecy of the plagues he is bringing upon us all.

But we also need a new evangelism, a message of good news that can bring individual people to the altar of light and life with a new consciousness. And that good news needs to be more than just the truth of salvation from sin in Christ.

And we need to recover, adapt, and embrace the faith and practice of spirit-led Quaker ministry, to rebuild a culture that is adept at recognizing and supporting G*d’s call to prophetic action, as we had in the 18th century. Now that we’ve expanded our understanding of ministry to include witness leadings, we need a robust infrastructure for the discernment and support of that ministry.

And we need a new Lamb’s War, a radical, unreasonable, Spirit-led assault on the roots of our civilization’s downturn, as we had in the 17th century. But with a new focus, a new sense of urgency, a new understanding of what the endtimes and the second coming of the Christ mean now that the seven seals are being opened and the Four Horsemen have been set loose, for real.

In short, we need the Holy Spirit.

We need a new apocalypse, a new revelation, one that gives us some hope and faith with which to overcome the fear and dread we feel and that helps us embrace the failure that we certainly face. For we are going down. The end is near—depending on what you mean by “the end” and “near”. My wife Christine just came back from a planning conference in which scientists studying the New Jersey shore say that the barrier islands won’t be there in 25 to 30 years; South Cape May is already under the Atlantic Ocean.

Climate change, sea level rise, species extinction, the death of our oceans, the spread of ideological evil, the collapse of old institutions, including our own—all this calls for something new, a lamentation that can reach the ears of God, a Seed that can awaken a new consciousness in at least a critical mass of the people.

We may be the only religious community on the planet that is already equipped to receive and nurture that seed, for whom continuing revelation is a concrete reality, a movement that knows that any one of us could hear that call and answer it.

This is very unlikely to happen in our witness committees. We have had committees for a hundred years and they, too, have run their course; they have become part of the problem.

If we take our faith in continuing revelation seriously; if we really believe in Spirit-led ministry, then meditation, prayer, and worship are where we will receive the Seed, not in some committee brainstorming session. Like the Seekers of the 1650s, we need to stand in expectant waiting for the Word to come.

Do we have the discipline, the patience, and the faith to do this? I’m not sure that I do. But I don’t know what else to think. I don’t know where else to turn, except radically, toward G*d, who century after century, has come through for us.

Quaker-pocalypse: Collapse and Renewal in Quaker Social Witness, Part Two

January 31, 2016 § Leave a comment

This is the second installment in a five-segment series on the history and future of Quaker witness, focusing on how we organize it.

 

Evangelical witness

Into the desert of late-18th century ossified Quaker ministry emerged evangelical Quakerism around the turn of the 19th century, giving rise to a third phase of Quaker witness. Evangelical witness had a new willingness to engage with the outside world and to minister to some of its needs. The new witness impulse took the forms of social witness against slavery, ministry to prisoners, the temperance movement, expanding women’s rights, and a few others I’m certain I have missed. It matured into the philanthropic movement as wealthy Friends felt compelled to use their wealth in positive ways for social change. Friends led the movement toward philanthropy that you see typified in scenes from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Evangelical witness had organizing principles that had been missing in the previous period: the cause of social ills was sin, and thus the solution was evangelism, calling people away from their lives in sin to a life in Christ. I think of Joseph John Gurney’s deep soul searching after the economic crash of 1828 in Britain, a depression that was worse in some ways than our Great Depression. The Gurney family nearly went under and Joseph John agonized over whether his greed had brought on his trials.

For evangelical political economists (the dominant economic school of the time) and evangelical ministers were laying the blame on those who had overextended themselves in debt through greed. The cause was the sin of greed. The solution was an avalanche of pamphlets and sermons against greed in particular, and sin in general. A clear understanding of business cycles, of boom, bubble, and burst, that would emerge in classical economic circles, had yet to find its adherents.

Evangelical witness was somewhat confrontational, but hardly unreasonable. The discourse was flooded with moral reasons, biblical reasoning, and intelligent argument. But it wasn’t radical. This was no real departure from 1,500 years of Christian religious culture, just a more focused intensification of an already seasoned message about sin and salvation. Thlnk of Elizabeth Fry teaching the women in Newgate prison to read the Bible.

The rise of liberal witness

The next phase of Quaker witness was a radical departure in very important ways from its evangelical roots. My poster boy for this revolution is Seebohm Rowntree, a member of the Rowntree chocolate dynasty located in York, and a member of the cohort of young Friends who gave birth to liberal Quakerism around the turn of the 20th century, a group that included Rufus Jones and Seebohm’s brother John Wilhelm Rowntree. Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Town Life was the first widely-read sociological analysis of a social problem in human history. He interviewed virtually all of the households in York and tabulated their economic condition, then drew some conclusions and made his arguments.

His central conclusion about the cause of poverty was truly radical at the time, though it seems obvious to some of us today (though obviously, not all of us): sin was not the problem. Most poor people worked hard, they just didn’t have enough money. Their poverty was not the consequence of their character, as the evangelical model had insisted. It was not lust (too many children), intemperance, gambling, etc., that made them poor; it was the low wages their employers paid them.

Rowntree gave us the first systematic analysis of systemic evil, and he saw that it called for structural solutions. Moral exhortation of the poor would never raise their wages; only their employers could do that, and they weren’t likely to do it on their own. Seebohm Rowntree himself reformed the labor relations in his own family business after writing his book, but he did not substantially raise worker’s wages. Meanwhile, he also argued that the government had an important role to play in making up the gap, in relieving this human suffering, and in trying to regulate business toward greater compassion.

This, too, was a radical departure. Evangelical witness had actively opposed government involvement, seeing it as intervention in a process of conviction and repentance that rightly involved only the sinner and God. Helping poor people with alms actually enabled the sinful life, in the evangelical view. Rowntree saw that the only agent powerful enough to affect the behavior of business—the real source of poverty—was the government. Poverty played a significant role in the creation of the Liberal Party in Great Britain and of Britain’s welfare state. Among other breakthroughs, the book popularized for the first time the brand new idea of a “poverty line”, a formula for measuring poverty and therefore for evaluating programs. His formula was picked up wholesale by Roosevelt’s New Deal labor department and is still the basic framework for policy thinking and poverty metrics today.

Rowntree went on to serve in government in several capacities for the rest of his life. Rufus Jones went on to help found the American Friends Service Committee. With the onset of World War I, Friends recovered their testimony against war and, for the first time since the late 1600s, Quakers were again being persecuted for their witness. Thus the Great War forged a new consciousness in Quakerism and we have been much more focused on “mending the world” ever since.

AFSC illustrates the arc that this witness took as the twentieth century roared on. While many men went to jail rather than serve in the military, AFSC and similar efforts aimed to reduce the suffering that the war was causing. The genius of the Orthodox Quaker Herbert Hoover at organizing relief efforts put him on the political map.

But gradually Friends turned their attention more and more to the structural causes of our problems, as the consciousness that Seebohm Rowntree had ignited began to mature. Committees on industry and the social order in both Great Britain and the US published amazingly searching and radical pamphlets. A small but vocal and influential socialist movement eventually spawned some collective communities in the UK.

World War II returned us toward the peace testimony again. Then the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s helped broaden the “peace testimony” beyond just a testimony against war into a deeper understanding of violence. The Alternatives to Violence Project was born.  AFSC became increasingly an advocacy organization rather than just a service organization. And other testimonies began to proliferate, as we woke up to new evils: environmental degradation, women’s rights (again), racial equality, then an even broader understanding of equality that could include the sanctuary movement, LGBTQ concerns, and so on.

Liberal witness is reasonable in the extreme and not radical, by definition; it is liberal. It works with existing institutions. it studies problems, proposes solutions, argues from science, develops programs, and seeks to move governments into the roles that only governmental scale, reach, and resources can assume.

And it is pursued by Friends through committees organized around concerns—a peace and social witness committee, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Friends Committee on National Legislation, the American Friends Service Committee. AFSC, I think, ,may have led the way into organization by committee. But the rise of liberal Quakerism settled the already significant trend toward abandoning the traditional infrastructure for Quaker ministry that had developed in the 18th century and continued into the 19th. It increasingly relied on membership donations and the operating budgets of local and yearly meetings rather than on the largesse of wealthy philanthropist Friends. And it was  inspired by a more reasonable energy than the apocalyptic fervor that had ignited the Valiant Sixty.

Quaker-pocalypse: Collapse and Renewal in Quaker Social Witness, Part One

January 31, 2016 § Leave a comment

I think I feel led to return to my Quaker-pocalypse series, to focus a bit on our witness life. But my leading for this blog has been sputtering lately and I find myself darting from one theme to another without clear coherence, so I’m not sure where I’ll be led next.

Meanwhile, this post, when I finally finished it, was so long that I decided to break it up into segments. This one takes a historical look at our witness—how we have organized it—in the first two of four—possibly five—stages. These first two stages are The Lamb’s War and “Quietist” Ministry. The next two segments are Evangelical Witness and Liberal Witness. Finally I look at Radical Quaker Witness Today.

I think we need a new approach to witness. And to work my way feebly toward such an opening, I found myself reviewing how Quakers have organized our social witness in the past. I see four modes of organizing witness in our history, in which energy followed by maturity and then decline—or in the first case, persecution—has led to a new form with new energy. It’s as if the Holy Spirit wants us to keep at it, providing new openings, and—hooray!—finding us with ears to hear. One big reason we believe in continuing revelation.

The Lamb’s War

The first phase was the Lamb’s War, the Apocalypse of the Word (see Doug Gwyn’s groundbreaking book of this title). It focused on the world with the zealot’s intensity and often was confrontational. It was unreasonable, being founded on religious faith. It engaged virtually all the Children of the Light, in the sense that virtually all Friends eschewed hat honor, used plain speech, etc., in their everyday lives. It aimed at what early Friends believed to be the root of social ills—false religion, as the agent of an even deeper cause, alienation from God. And it was radical, not just in its critique, its methods, and its proposed solutions. It also arose from radical discipleship and it aimed at the roots, as they saw it, of a world that could not comprehend the light that was coming into the world.

Then came the persecutions, the backlash from the established church and the state, bringing the wholesale death of our early leadership in Britain’s gaols—the collapse of the Apocalypse of the Word and the need to change our stance toward the world.

“Quietist” ministry

The result was the second phase of Quaker witness—the reliance on Quaker ministry that characterized the 18th century. Think of John Bellars and John Woolman. Friends who felt a divine leading to mend the world in some way who took their leading to their meeting and, if the meeting discerned that the leading was a true one, off they went. It tended to be focused internally (think of Woolman visiting Friends to persuade them against slaveholding) and it was not, generally speaking, confrontational or radical. Putting aside the vigorous culture of travel in the gospel ministry, this period’s social witness ministry did not, as far as I can tell, engage very many people as either ministers or recipients.

There was no overarching organizing vision for collective action, as there had been for the first generation, no sense of mission like the earlier apocalyptic belief that the second coming of Christ was at hand. As Doug Gwyn describes in The Covenant Crucified, Friends had cut a deal with the powers of the world after the persecutions gave way to some level of tolerance: you leave us be and we’ll leave you be—that was the deal.

This witness was morally reasonable, in that it relied on arguing from a scriptural and a moral stand. But it was not yet reasonable in the secular humanist sense that so dominates Quaker witness today, in which we argue from a stand in social science and use liberal political rhetoric.

This witness was radical in that Quaker ministry still relied radically on the movement of the Holy Spirit, at least in theory, but it was much more contained and far less focused on the world outside the Quaker community than the Apocalypse of the Word had been.

But Quakerism became more and more quietist, more withdrawn from the world into Quaker distinctives and an ossified culture of eldership that tended to quench the spirit.

Nurturing the call to vocal ministry

January 22, 2016 § 7 Comments

So, given that most of our meetings are never going to record the gifts of their vocal ministers, if we are going to abandon the centuries-old infrastructure that our forebears used, how do we nurture and elder those who are called to vocal ministry?

The infrastructure we use nowadays for the care of ministry is the committee for worship and ministry. Some meetings have committees for ministry and counsel or pastoral care, combining the pastoral care of members with the spiritual care of members. In theory, this combination makes a lot of sense, because there is always a spiritual dimension to a Friend’s pastoral concern or condition and a pastoral dimension to a spiritual concern or condition.

In practice, however, in my experience the pastoral concerns almost always shove the concern for the worship to the side. They are usually just too pressing to ignore, and the worship usually is just going along as it always has, at least until some problem arises. In my experience, proactive attention to the quality of the worship and the vocal ministry almost never happens. So I think meetings should have separate committees for pastoral care and for worship and ministry if they are going to give the worship and its vocal ministry any real attention.

But even when a meeting has a separate committee for worship and ministry, proactive eldership of vocal ministry almost never takes place. I think the main reason is that the wider meeting usually has never clarified for itself how it wants the infrastructure for spiritual nurture of vocal ministry to operate, so the committee feels uncertain about its charge. The meeting and the committee share a concern for judgmentalism regarding the vocal ministry, even when many in the meeting are quite dissatisfied with its quality.

But this gets into the eldering of vocal ministry and I want to focus on the care of those who feel called to a ministry of speaking in meeting. I want to focus on the ministers.

It seems to me that Friends feel the call to vocal ministry with varying degrees of self-awareness. Some know they have been called. Some find themselves speaking fairly often, perhaps even along some theme, but don’t really know what to make of it or what to do with it, and end up dealing with it in the moment as they feel led to speak. And finally, some Friends just speak a lot.

These three groups of Friends need different kinds of support. And the meeting or the committee needs to be clear about which kind of support to give.

Those who know or strongly suspect that they are called to vocal ministry need corporate discernment to test the leading, to give the minister confidence and the meeting clarity. And then they need support and oversight, probably in the form of a committee for care or nurture of the ministry—a group to go to when doubts arise or some other problem, and just to proactively maintain faithfulness to the call; and a group that can step in when the minister steps through the traces or runs past his or her guide. For this is a covenantal relationship, in which the minister and the meeting mutually agree that eldership includes both support and nurture and discipline, a corporate agency for discipleship, or faithfulness to the call.

Those who are emerging ministers, who find themselves speaking often enough to notice a pattern but may not be clear about their call, need the same things, but with a different emphasis. Here, a clearness committee for discernment might be in order, for the first charge of the committee for worship and ministry is to help the minister gain clarity about the call and to reassure the Friend that more support is waiting if the discernment clarifies a leading—or even if it doesn’t, for that matter.

Those who just speak quite often need the same things, also, but with a different emphasis again. This is delicate. In fact, all of this is delicate. But if a meeting is going to actively nurture vocal ministry, if you are going to do more than just react when some vocal ministry seems so inappropriate as to require a reaction, then it needs to engage with its vocal ministers at all stages of their development.

How do you start this conversation?

If the meeting has never openly discussed the focused nurture and eldership of vocal ministry and the committee therefore has no clear charge in this area, then approaching such a Friend will seem odd and possibly criticizing. The wider conversation needs to take place first. So ministry and worship committee needs to bring the matter of support and oversight for vocal ministry to the wider meeting for discussion. They need to feel confident that they can act with the meeting’s blessing and be at least a little bit clear about who can do that, when, and how.

In any of these cases—even in the case of inappropriate ministry that you feels needs your attention—if you feel you can approach a Friend about their vocal ministry at all, then I would offer this way to open the conversation: “We have noticed that thee speaks fairly often in meeting and we wonder whether thee feels a call to vocal ministry? If thee is not sure—but especially if thee is sure—then we offer ourselves as a possible source of discernment and support. Would you welcome a deeper conversation?”

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