Through the Flaming Sword

I have just finished reading Simon Best’s fantastic presentation to Friends General Conferences’s consultation on spiritual deepening, and think so highly of it that I want my readers to know about it.

Download the presentation—click this link to download a pdf file of his remarks. You can also visit FGC’s web page on the consultation, but they offer very little more information on the consultation or the presentation. And here is a report of the consultation’s small breakout groups on various topics considered at the consultation.

Right here, I want to include an excerpt that really caught my attention. For one thing, it speaks directly to me as the communications director of New York Yearly Meeting, since his comments below address the very “motto” New York Yearly Meeting uses on its website, albeit slightly altered from the version he refers to used by Minneapolis Friends Meeting. NYYM’s website motto is “A simple faith. A radical witness.” Here’s that excerpt:

Many of you will have seen the slogan that has been used by meetings in both Britain and the US:

When I first saw the posters I thought it was brilliant. A week later I was having a Meeting for Worship with four other Friends, all of us aged about 30, in a basement flat in Bristol and realised that it wasn’t brilliant and it wasn’t even true. Before and since I have become increasingly aware that the Religious Society of Friends is not simple, it is not radical, and it is certainly not contemporary.

We are not simple. We have complex organisations, not just at the centre but at all levels. Meetings are struggling with bureaucracy and as a result placing large demands on the personal time, commitment and energy of members, and drawing this away from growing our meetings spiritually.

We are not contemporary, while I believe strongly that Quakers have a message for today the way it is presented does not fit with the society in which we live.

We are not radical, in a time of global crisis we are not overtly counter cultural in our social action and our engagement in the world.

I acknowledge that, of course, there are exceptions but I’m referring to the overall trend of liberal Quakerism. So what can we do to address this and to make the Quaker way highly available, teachable and experiential?

The rest of Simon Best’s presentation goes on to address these questions.

I have been looking for a new meeting, now that I’ve moved to Philadelphia, and in the process of “evaluating” the meetings I’ve been visiting, I have been refining my sense of what I’m looking for and refining the questions that I ask of myself and that I ask of people in the meetings I’m visiting.

Meanwhile, here in this blog, I’m thinking and writing about the Quaker-pocalypse, which raises a whole different but related set of questions. Now these two sets of questions are interacting with each other in my brain:

For myself: What do I want from a meeting and can I get it here? What gifts do I have to offer this meeting and does it look like my gifts would be welcome and nurtured here?

Regarding Quaker decline and renewal: Does the meeting seem to be aware of the forces driving our decline and does it seem committed to the kinds of things that invite the Holy Spirit into the lives of its members and into the collective life of the meeting? Is this meeting already in the process of spiritual renewal, or does it at least have enough spiritual resources in place to begin the effort?

I said in my previous post that Central Philadellphia Meeting seems to have several of my desiderata, the things that I desire as essential, in both these regards. The list of things that excited me is rather long, so I’ll have to take them one at a time.

At the top of my list was “a robust infrastructure for spiritual nurture”. What do I mean by “infrastructure for spiritual nurture”? What form does that “infrastructure” take? And how does an “infrastructure for spiritual nurture” serve our need for renewal in the Spirit?

I raise up Central Philadelphia Meeting as an example because I like some of the things they have done, but the specifics are less important than the concrete fact of having done something to nurture the life of the Spirit in its members. So I will use their examples as springboards to talk about what any meeting might do to renew its spiritual life.

So what has Central Philadelphia Meeting done to nurture its members’ spiritual lives? They have some structures in place and they have some processes in place. In terms of structure, we’re talking, of course, about committees.

Structure

The basics—spiritual and pastoral care committees. Like most meetings, Central Philadelphia has a Worship and Ministry Committee, responsible for the right ordering of meeting for worship and for the spiritual nurturing of meeting members and attenders, and a Membership Care Committee, responsible for pastoral care. I don’t know the meeting well enough to know how proactive Worship and Ministry is in the spiritual nurture of the meeting’s members and attenders. But they do have a spiritual journeys and practices series in which members share their spiritual journeys and practices with the rest of the meeting. Programs like this, for sharing our religious lives with each other, are a very effective and non-threatening way to nurture spirituality in the meeting. I don’t know which committee, if any, sponsors that program, but hurray for them, whoever they are.

Adult religious education committee. I believe that adult RE is absolutely essential to a vital Quaker meeting. When you don’t have religious professionals who have been trained in the tradition, a meeting needs a critical mass of people who know the tradition well enough to actually practice it in a faithful way.  Learning Quakerism by “osmosis” is a Quaker myth. Newcomers should not be left to figure things out for themselves; they should have frequent and regular opportunities to learn the Quaker way. If people have come to us and stayed for a while, then it seems Quakerism is what they want, so we should give it to them.

And the meeting also needs them to know their Quakerism; we do not need ignorant Quakers. I think this is so important that I would be tempted to require some level of study before giving applicants their membership. All the other faiths have confirmation classes, and they don’t need their members to actually run the religion the way we do. As a Lutheran teenager, I took two years of confirmation classes, even though I was given almost no opportunity to use my knowledge in the service of the congregation; the pastor did almost everything. Members of Lutheran and other churches are actually mostly “consumers” of their faith. You and I are also “consumers” of Quakerism, too, but we are also the “producers” of Quakerism—without us Quakerism doesn’t get produced. And you can’t produce something you don’t know and understand.

Gifts and Leadings Committee. This was the clincher for me. A committee for gifts and leadings—how fantastic! This suggests that the meeting as a whole has an active consciousness of this most essential aspect of the Quaker way: that everyone can and will be called by G*d into service, that each of us has unique gifts to bring to the meeting, to the world, and to the service of G*d, and that the meeting has a vital role to play in nurturing those gifts and raising up those ministries. I am mostly guessing what Central Philadelphia’s committee does, since I have no direct experience of it yet, but I hope it means that some seasoned Friends are trying to be actively alert to the spiritual gifts of the meeting’s members, that they proactively help both the members and the meeting recognize these gifts. Likewise, that they are ready and eager to provide Friends who have leadings with the discernment, support, and oversight they need. Presumably, the existence of such a committee also means that Friends who feel that perhaps they do have a leading know where to go with it. Finally, having such a committee means that the meeting as a whole is focused on gifts, leadings, and ministry, that they enjoy some level of unity in the Spirit about how important these things are, and that they are willing to take responsibility for the role the community should play in the spiritual lives of its members and their ministries.

Process

So structures are in place at Central Philadelphia for nurturing individual Friends’ spiritual gifts and ministries and for facilitating some of the meeting’s roles in that work. However, the meeting also has roles to play that lie outside the purview of these committees in the form of processes that belong to the wider gathered body.

Recording gifts in ministry. I wish I could remember better the details of a conversation I had when I last attended Central Philadelphia Meeting. But I had the impression that the Meeting had in some formal way acknowledged the gifts and/or ministry of one of its members. I don’t know whether it was a “recording” in the elder-days tradition; PhYM’s Faith and Practice does not seem to address the practice of recording ministers and I’m pretty sure that the yearly meeting laid the practice down, maybe in the 1920s. So either my impression is incorrect or perhaps the Meeting has opened a new path and formally recognized that Friends’ gifts in some other innovative way. But stepping aside from Central Philadelphia Meeting as a pattern and example, I’m saying that if your meeting did something as a body to name and raise up the gifts of the spirit that our faith tells us each of us have, your meeting would have turned its face decisively toward renewal in the spirit. It wouldn’t have to be recording ministers in the way of our ancestors; each meeting could find its own way forward in terms of the form. But I think it’s really important to actively identify and nurture the spiritual gifts of our members and attenders.

Clearness committees for discernment. If the Gifts and Leadings Committee is alert to the leadings rising up in the members, then presumably they are conducting clearness committees for discernment to help these emerging ministers confirm that their leadings are of the Spirit and to gain greater clarity about just what the Friend has been called to do.

Minutes of travel, support, and service for ministers. Once the meeting and a Friend with a leading are clear about a Friend’s leading, then the meeting may write and approve a minute in support of the ministry. I believe that Central Philadelphia has done this.

Care committees. The ministry and the minister may also benefit from a care committee, which would provide support and perhaps oversight for the work, and serve as the liaison between the ministry and the meeting. Again, I’m pretty sure that Central Philadelphia Meeting is doing this kind of thing.

Queries

What kind of infrastructure does your meeting have for spiritual formation? Is your meeting actively trying in some way to identify the gifts of the spirit with which your members have been blessed? Does your meeting know and practice the basics of Quaker ministry—discernment of leadings, minutes of travel and/or service, committees of support and oversight for active ministries? If someone in your meeting does have a leading, would they know where to go for the discernment and support the leading requires? Does your meeting offer regular opportunities for members to share their personal faith and practice? Does your meeting offer regular adult religious education that focuses in a meaningful way on Quaker history and tradition, on Quaker biographies, on Quaker faith and practice, on Quaker spirituality and ministry?

Whole is the goal—the goal is holy

I’ve been reading an essay by Wendel Berry in which he criticizes our culture’s love of analysis for the way that it does violence to our sense of the whole—just as I have done with my analysis of the causes of our decline, breaking the phenomenon down into its parts, intending to address each cause with a cure, with some kind of program. For analysis often goes hand in hand with program: we analyze a problem, work up a solution, create a program around the solution, and then implement it.

That’s where I was going. I was already laying out programs for one set of cures, programs for what I would call spiritual formation. This has specific meanings in the Christian tradition that don’t really express what I’m interested in here. By spiritual formation I mean

• helping each other discover our own spiritual paths and practices, the faith and the practices that work for us, that make us more whole; and
• helping to equip each other with the tools we need to follow our path, once we’ve found it—opportunities for ideas, learning, and knowledge; techniques and opportunities to practice them; and opportunities to explore, develop, and share our gifts.

And I suspect that I will come back to some of these programs. My analytic-programmatic goal had been to create a kind of master program, or a program buffet, an outline that a meeting could use to strengthen itself in the areas that impede its spiritual vitality and growth. And the ideas I have along those lines have not gone away.

But after reading Berry’s essay, I decided to take his advice and step back a bit and look at our situation more holistically. Whole is the goal. Holy is the goal, for holy is wholeness. So is healing. Heal, whole, and holy all have the same root. We do not seek to be cured of some spiritual disease so much as we seek to become whole.

Then I discovered a meeting that I think is modeling some of the very things I was going to propose.

I have moved into Philadelphia and I’ve been visiting meetings in the city to find a new religious home. Central Philadelphia Meeting has what I want:

• a robust infrastructure for spiritual nurture;
• a collective responsiveness to leadings;
• opportunities for Friends to share with the meeting the ministries they are pursuing outside the meeting;
• a First Day School;
• adult religious education;
• openness to small groups pursuing interests together;
• an active corporate witness;
• a meeting room that is not too big for the worshipping body (just barely) so that Friends do more or less sit together (in my opinion, a major factor in fostering a gathered meeting); and
• an apparent overall culture of spiritual awareness, by which I mean that the way the members talk and the structures they have in place for the life of the spirit, both individual and collective, suggest that they really are trying to live it and that they know how to in the Quaker way; or at least a certain critical mass of Friends do. And that’s really all it takes.

I say “apparent” culture because I’ve only been there twice and while my second impression was quite strong, the first impression wasn’t so much (though it was high summer and there were not very many people there). But I corralled a member to ask some questions after meeting for worship and I liked all the answers. I am sure they have their issues. Every meeting has its issues. But I am eager now to write a letter requesting a transfer of membership.

So in my next post, I want to explore some of these examples in greater depth.

Note: As soon as I published this post, I started thinking of causes of our decline that I had missed. And I suspect that my readers will be adding more in their comments. So I’m going to try updating this post with additions as they come along, adding some kind of notation that identifies new material, so that people who read the post early on can come back and watch the thing unfold. Click here to go to the beginning of these additions.

A couple of readers have encouraged me to give some kind of overview on this topic, some sense of where I’m going. When I started thinking about that, I realized how huge this undertaking is. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and I’ve thought about it a lot, so I have a lot to say. But my thoughts are not all that well organized. Every time I choose a place to begin, it starts branching out immediately, and folding back, and connecting to other threads of thought. And finally, I’m trying to be more disciplined about writing under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, and the more I succeed the less predictable will be the outcome.

So I think a grand overview isn’t happening. But I can say this much about some of the causes I see for our decline:

Godlessness. In the end and at its root, ours is a spiritual crisis, or, in the vocabulary I have developed for myself, a religious crisis. I’ll explain how I see the difference in a later post. By this I mean that the core problem is that we are loosing touch with G*d. Of course, the very fact that I write G*d with an asterisk means that I’ll have to define God and look more deeply at our relationship with the divine, and that I myself struggle with my own relationship with G*d.

Structures and processes. But other forces are at work, as well. I think the structures for meeting life and what we now call Quaker process often divert us off of our walk with G*d into the ways of the world. We need to rethink some of our modern structures and processes and lay some of them down, and reform some others. And we need to recover some that we’ve lost and adapt them to our modern needs.

Membership and meeting identity. While the essential cause may be religious and the material causes may be structural, the efficient cause, to go a bit Aristotelian here, is our attitudes and practices around membership. Many of our problems walk in the door on two legs. And I don’t mean just problem people, but all of us. And I’m not proposing that we keep some people out, necessarily, but that we be much more intentional about membership. More importantly, as meetings we should redefine, not only what it means to be a member but also what it means to be a meeting. Membership is really about what kind of meeting do we want and most meetings are not even thinking about that question, let alone being clear and united about it. Our meetings need to rethink membership and their own identity.

Quaker culture. Every community has a collective psychology, a more visible personality, a less visible character, a set of habits and neuroses and programmed responses to stimuli, and tribal boundaries—who is us and who is them. These act as an unconscious filter that attracts some people and repels others, that encourages some people to come in and discourages others, and that seeks to maintain the status quo in the face of crisis or change. We need some kind of Jungian collective therapy. The recent energy around examining our own racist tendencies is a very encouraging sign that, at least on that front, we’ve decided to go on the couch.

Ignorance and ignore-ance. Too few of us know the Quaker way well enough to actually practice it with any confidence and many of us seem not to care or even to realize it’s happening. We need a sustained commitment to religious education.

Content and substance. As a result, we’ve let the incredibly rich content of Quaker tradition slip away. We do not know what to say to seekers. We can offer them a set of values and a distinctive process for worship and so on, but we can’t answer the basic questions that religious seekers bring to us, or guide them in their personal spiritual search and practice. We need a sustained commitment to religious education and spiritual formation.

Secularism and individualism. In his recent book, Open for Transformation: Being Quaker, Ben Pink Dandelion identified these two trends as primary drivers of our decline. I agree. These are dominant trends in the wider society and our boundaries are now so porous that these trends have leaked in—well, gushed in, really. We now define Quakerism as a faith in which you can be and do whatever you want and call yourself a Quaker. Reversing that trend will feel like a dangerous veer toward fundamentalism, and many Friends will resist it mightily as an apparent assault on their rights as Quakers. But Quakerism is not about rights. It’s about discipleship. If we mean what we say, that we seek to be led by the Holy Spirit in all that we do, as individuals and as communities, then that means perforce that we submit. This goes beyond just trying to let go of our personal agendas in meeting for business. It means a radical realignment of our individual and collective lives. This is the actual meaning of Islam, I know, and that raises fears. But it is the Quaker way. Or it was. I don’t know how we reclaim the meaning and value of community, some new balance between the community and the individual, without a hue and cry, some anger and some crying, but I think we need it.

[Added 1.30.15] Theological diversity. Friends love our diversity so much that it’s on the verge of becoming one of our idols, like the Silence. It’s proof that we don’t have a creed, which is one of our idols. And, yes, it is one of our great strengths. But I suspect that it also is one of our great weaknesses. How can we pursue unity in the Spirit when we cannot agree on what we’re about in a simple, coherent, and honest way?

I guess I’ll start unpacking some of these ideas in later posts.