What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Support of Ministry

November 30, 2013 § 2 Comments

The soul of Quaker spirituality is the faith and practice of Quaker ministry:

the faith . . .

  • that all of life is sacramental, a vehicle for grace;
  • that the Inward Teacher is always with us, seeking to guide us throughout our lives and throughout each day, in matters from the significant to the mundane; and
  • that each of us is called on occasion into special service;

the individual practice of . . .

  • always turning toward the Light, seeking its guidance in our affairs; of
  • always listening for the call to special ministry; of
  • living lives that will allow us to answer the call when it comes; and then of
  • answering the call to service faithfully, to the measure we are able;

the corporate practice, as a meeting, of . . .

  • helping members and attenders with discernment regarding their ministry—is the prompting a true one, is it of the Spirit? and
  • with clarity—helping them move past an unformed sense of calling into clarity about the work they are called to do; and
  • providing support and oversight for the ministry and the minister, once the service has begun.

The faith and practice of Quaker ministry is a unique, tested, and powerful Way of approaching one’s life. It is a tremendous gift that we can offer to our members and attenders, and indeed to the world.

So what is the Religious Society of Friends for regarding our distinctive faith and practice of ministry? What is the purpose of a Quaker meeting in respect to Quaker ministry? :

One of the purposes of the Quaker meeting is to present the path of Quaker ministry clearly to our members and to equip them to follow it.

To fulfill its corporate calling, a meeting has to be equipped itself to serve its members in their ministry. A meeting should be ready and able to . . .

  • teach this Way of discipleship, so that all in the meeting know what it is and how it works;
  • provide resources and guidance on Quaker ministry—books, internal programs and access to outside programs and resources, and, especially, eldering—mentoring by Friends who are seasoned in the Way themselves;
  • conduct clearness committees, both clearness committees for discernment, and committees for clearness about life decisions—two different forms that are convened and conducted differently;
  • be ready as a body to provide support to its ministers, in the form of
    • minutes of travel and/or service;
    • support committees;
    • oversight committees, if appropriate; that is, the willingness to take responsibility for accountability;
    • and release of its ministers—a willingness to unburden the minister from those obstacles that might stand in the way of answering the call; these days, this often means financial aid; and
    • readiness to engage gospel order, if appropriate—to take the ministry to your regional and/or yearly meeting, if it is clear that the work will take the minister outside of local Quaker circles and/or requires more resources than the local meeting can provide.

As I said, I think that the faith and practice of Quaker ministry is the very soul of Quaker spirituality. Consequently, I think that few things could me more important to the life of a meeting than being able to support their members and attenders in their ministry.

Therefore, I think meetings (presumably starting with their committees on ministry and worship, whatever they are called) should use something like this outline as a kind of checklist to determine whether they are up to speed.

  • Do you need to develop your capabilities in some of these areas?
  • Do you have Friends who can teach this stuff? Are you providing the religious education this practice requires?
  • Do you know how to conduct clearness committees?
  • Are you paying attention to help members recognize their calls to ministry, since very often we find ourselves moving before we even know consciously what’s happening, especially if we are not familiar with the faith and practice of Quaker ministry?
  • Are you helping members who are already performing some service in the meeting or in the world to recognize this work as Spirit-led ministry? (How often have we discovered that one of our members is visiting a nursing home once a week, or whatever, and we didn’t know, and they had never thought of it as religious service, or as Spirit-led, or thought to tell anyone or to take it to the meeting in this way!)
  • Does your meeting think of vocal ministry as religious service, rather than just the sharing of messages, as a call to ministry (especially for those who speak often) that should be developed, supported, and held accountable?

A minute of conscience: Apology to Afro-Descendants

November 18, 2013 § 7 Comments

This past weekend (November 15–17, 2013), New York Yearly Meeting held its Fall Sessions and we approved an Apology to Afro-Descendants for our historical participation in and profit from slavery. It was a very difficult meeting.

The Apology had been years in the works, including distribution to our local meetings for discernment. The local meetings ran the gamut from approval to disapproval and ignore-ance. In addition to individual Friends, two formally constituted groups within the Yearly Meeting had participated in its development: a Task Group on Racism and the European American Quakers Working to End Racism Working Group.

Several Friends objected on various grounds and the clerk, perceiving that we were not in unity, decided to discontinue the discussion and move on to other business. At this point, all the African-Americans (three, I think!) in the room stood and left, and others left to support them. Other Friends refused to let the matter rest, however, and we returned to discernment on the Apology. The Friends who left came back. Ultimately, we did approve the Apology, with one Friend asking to be recorded as standing aside and another asking to be recorded as standing aside on behalf of his meeting, though the meeting had not formally charged him to speak for them. That meeting had labored over the Apology at length and could not support it.

I wish I had kept better notes on Friends’ objections. Several of those who spoke had clearly thought about the matter to some depth. This is what I remember:

  • The body was not in a position to make such an apology because none of us had participated in the institution of slavery and we were not accountable for the actions of others, even if they were our Quaker “ancestors”. This was the reason voiced most often.
  • We were not a collective body that could in any way be held accountable for the actions of individuals in the past. We were a living body that had moved beyond the condition of the Friends who had owned slaves in the past.
  • The Apology was not enough: it needed more work and it didn’t say enough.
  • As worded, it spoke on behalf of the Yearly Meeting as though that body were a white body speaking to a black audience, whereas the body did in fact include African-Americans, so its voice was wrong.
  • It was unclear to whom the Apology would be addressed, since the victims of slavery were no longer alive, though the Apology did address the ongoing suffering and oppression of the descendants of slaves (it was titled “Apology to Afro-Descendants”).
  • The Apology looked to the past and it would be more constructive to look forward and dedicate ourselves to ending racism, rather than look backward in this way.
  • Many Friends were not comfortable with various aspects of the Apology’s wording, and wished to add things or change things in the minute.

This was an extremely emotional discussion for many Friends. Many wept as they spoke. I myself spoke with some passion and came close to breaking up, which surprised me. I think a lot of us surprised ourselves.

I spoke in support of the Apology. I do feel that:

  • Both in faith and practice, we have a strong sense of ourselves as a corporate entity that can and should be held accountable for its actions, even those the community has taken in the past.
  • Because in our meetings for worship with attention to the life of the meeting we seek to discern and do the will of G*d, and always have, the body that gathers today stands in a continuum, in a prophet stream that is continuous with Friends of past ages, and thus we share in some way in their failure to discern a truth that we now see clearly, namely that slavery is abhorrent and morally wrong. The oneness, the continuity of the prophetic stream that is embodied in the meeting for business in worship, ties us to our past.
  • just as present-day African-Americans live lives constrained by the legacy of slavery, so we European Americans live lives constrained by the legacy of our privilege, bought in part by our historical participation in slavery and its aftermath, and thus we European Americans living today do owe Afro-Descendants an apology.
  • I felt that the Apology did not go far enough, because it did not ask for forgiveness.
  • I felt that, though the audience for such an Apology might be a little vague—to whom would we deliver such an apology, for instance—that it should also have been addressed to G*d, as a prayer of repentance and for forgiveness, though here also, the audience is a little vague, since many modern Liberal Friends do not believe in a theistic God to whom one could address such a prayer. Nevertheless, our slaveholder Quaker ancestors had believed in such a God, and so have the vast majority of our Quaker ancestors since, up until perhaps the middle of the 20th century. We therefore have inherited an unfulfilled religious obligation, even though this is complicated by the fact that we mostly don’t have a theology that matches up with that obligation. Still, I thought it important to ask for forgiveness.

It was a confusing and disturbing meeting. Friends did things that troubled me, though I think I understand and appreciate their motives, both the rational and the emotional ones.

Several Friends brought prepared statements. The clerk, rightly I think, encouraged Friends not to make this a regular practice, but these Friends are not likely to make it a regular practice, I am sure. Furthermore, we had been encouraged to read the Apology and think about it before we came to the Sessions, so it was only natural that many of us had already formed an opinion. I would have been more comfortable if these Friends had waited to read their messages until they had heard some other vocal ministry, remaining open in this way to the possibility of hearing an alternative to their view that carried the power of the Holy Spirit, but they were all virtually the first to speak.

When Friends left the meeting at the point that the clerk decided to move on, it had the effect of holding the meeting emotionally hostage. I am sure that this was not their intent, though one Friend did say that she could not remain present in a body that could not unite behind such an apology. In retrospect, I think that rising to ask the clerk to test whether the meeting really was ready to move on to other business would have been more constructive, because clearly we were not ready to move on. But sometimes the only thing you can do with searing pain is try to get away from it. Perhaps that was what they were doing. I haven’t had a chance yet to find out what motivated them. I hadn’t even realized they were gone, actually, until someone rose to point it out, and that was the thing that brought us back to the discernment. I think my eyes were closed in prayer when they left.

So the withdrawal of these Friends did in fact have the effect of drawing us back into discernment on the matter. But I worried at the time that our subsequent willingness to approve the Apology over the objections of Friends may have arisen, at least in part, as an attempt to affirm our fellowship with those who had left, as a natural response to their pain, rather than as a response to the prophetic call of the Holy Spirit.

Now, however, I think it might have been both. Walter Brueggeman, the biblical theologian, once wrote that lamentation is the beginning of prophecy—that before the prophetic message can emerge, a community often has to be able to name its suffering and oppression first. So perhaps answering that of pain in our Friends was answering the work of the Spirit among us, after all.

The final complication for me was approving an action over the rather strong objections of Friends. From the formal point of view, there was no problem because both Friends stood aside, rather than standing in the way, so we were clear to go forward. But I doubt very much that those other Friends who had expressed their objection had changed their minds; they certainly did not say so.

Normally, we would have kept at it in the face of such resistance. I strongly suspect that it was the clock that drove us forward. We were already over time, it was the last session of the last day of Fall Sessions, and we were waiting to eat lunch. Moreover, we had yet to approve our 2014 budget, which was important business and business that in the past has often proved to be its own very difficult discussion.

How many times have I seen an important piece of G*d’s work face the tyranny of the clock and suffer for it? And how many times have I seen a meeting fail to take decisive prophetic action (if you can call a minute an “action”) because we could not come to unity on the language of a minute, even when the issue is a no-brainer? How many times have I seen a meeting make a decision simply out of exhaustion?

We were stuck. Things were going to go badly almost no matter what we did. So we stumbled forward. On the way, we trampled some people, our gospel order, and maybe some Truth. We did our best and it wasn’t all that good. Some Friends felt triumphant, I think. I felt battered. This was the best we could do and I feel it was a net positive, in the end. But if it was a “victory”, it was pyrrhic.

This is the bittersweet condition of a community that tries to live according to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in a world that does not grasp the Light. Our way is not an easy path and we often do stumble. But it’s still the best one I’ve found so far.

PS: A note about the clerking of this meeting. Reading over this post, I realize that I may have given the impression that I thought the clerk failed to discern the sense of the meeting. I do not think that. We really were deeply divided, with no clear breakthrough on the horizon. I suspect that only a crisis such as what did take place could have given us direction. And the clerk has responsibility for all of the business on the agenda. Given how important the budget was and the way the body was writhing under the burden of discernment over the Apology, I think it was perfectly reasonable to lay the matter aside and go on. We do this all of the time, and properly.

Furthermore, one really does have a different perspective when sitting at the clerk’s table, able to see the body as a whole, and the body language of all the individuals, and so on. It’s a lot easier to second-guess a clerk than to be one.

Finally, it is my experience that Friends really need time to vent when their emotions get so involved in a matter of business. The venting is going to happen until it’s spent, usually, and it’s almost not worth trying to reach a decision until it’s over. We were a long way from done with venting. We still are, I suspect. But the body—some of it anyway—was going to charge forward. So maybe we surfed the venting into a decision. Clerks are not in control of such a wave.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Confidence in our Answers

November 15, 2013 § 5 Comments

Answers—restoring confidence in the “content” of Quakerism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, because we know these things experientially, we believe that the important question is not what do you believe, but what have you experienced yourself? As George Fox, our founder, put it: “You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?” Hence, we believe that true religion is inward; it is directly experienced; it is not a set of propositions to which we adhere with our outward minds, but revelation and relationship known inwardly in the heart.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Vocal Ministry

November 8, 2013 § 6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Spiritual Nurture

November 2, 2013 § 1 Comment

First, a question of scale

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

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

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

Bringing people to G*d—spiritual nurture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the benchmarks that I think are important:

Knowledge and teaching.

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

Children and families.

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

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

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

Spiritual disciplines.

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

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

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

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

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

Elders.

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

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

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

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

On recording gifts in ministry

October 18, 2013 § 13 Comments

Many Friends in the Liberal tradition oppose the practice of “recording ministers”. I support it.

Or rather, I feel that it is extremely important that meetings do something to proactively recognize, name, and nurture the spiritual gifts of our members and attenders. This is one of the things we are here for, to nurture each other’s lives in the Spirit. This is one of the key responsibilities of a Quaker meeting. We don’t have to record people as ministers, but we should be doing something.

I got to thinking about this because of a post by Ashley W (I think the W is for Wilcox) about being a recorded Quaker minister student in a Methodist seminary. I clicked on the label “Recorded” for that post and found that she has blogged quite a lot about her experience as a recorded minister—really good stuff. I highly recommend reading her posts on recording, especially if you don’t understand or agree with the practice.

I published a piece myself on this topic in the online edition of the November 2012 issue of Spark, the newsletter of New York Yearly Meeting. You can click here to read my “On Recording Gifts in Ministry.” The issue’s theme of Recognizing Gifts in Ministry was part of an effort of the Yearly Meeting to reconsider the practice in light of resistance from some in the Yearly Meeting to its continuance. The Yearly Meeting was not able to come to unity on laying the practice down, and so the practice stands. Thankfully, to my mind, as you will see if you read my article.

New York Yearly Meeting has a pamphlet offering guidelines for recording in the Yearly Meeting, available here: “Recording Gifts in Ministry”.

What do you think? What has been your experience?

What is Quakerism for? An outline

October 10, 2013 § 7 Comments

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

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

What is the Religious Society of Friends for?

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

I have organized this answer into two sections:

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

The goals of the Quaker Way

Bringing people to G*d:

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

To nurture people’s growth in the Spirit:

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

To nurture families.

To foster genuine worship in spirit and in truth.

To foster fellowship in divine love.

Bringing G*d to the world:

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

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

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

To support the ministry and witness of our members.

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

The way to the Quaker goals:

Bringing people to G*d:

Personal spirituality:

Spiritual nurture of individuals:

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

Answers: 

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

Community: foster loving, supportive, and joyful community.

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

Communal spirituality: religion.

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

Spiritual nurture in covenantal community:

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

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

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

  • Seek to be gathered in the Spirit.

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

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

Bringing G*d to the world

Ministry:

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

Publishing the truth:

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

Witness:

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

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

More on “consciousness” and the gathered meeting: personal consciousness, collective consciousness, and the Christ as siddha

September 28, 2013 § 3 Comments

I have not posted in a while—intense deadlines at work have been a distraction. But I have kept writing, only waiting for some time to confirm that these pieces were ready for publication. Here, I return to the theme of the gathered meeting. (Meanwhile, however, I am going on vacation tomorrow for a week. So I hope my readers will comment, if they feel so led, but I won’t be able to respond to your comments until I get back.)

In previous posts on this theme, I have asked how the Christ gathers the meeting, while I have circled an understanding of the Christ in terms of consciousness, a recurrent theme in this series. It’s time to look at “consciousness” itself more closely, especially as it might apply to our understanding of the gathered meeting and of the Christ. And here I am talking about both personal consciousness and collective consciousness.

Unfortunately, Christianity’s understanding of personal consciousness is primitive in the extreme. Being so theistic at its core, Christianity’s real strength lies in its understanding of personhood, of psychology, personality, feelings, will, and the religious dimension of human social systems (though, in this regard, I feel it has given unwarranted emphasis to the social systems of monarchy and the law and has only begun to focus on democracy and ecology). But I’m talking, not about personality or personal psychology, but about consciousness itself, the underlying miracle of the human being that is capable of self-understanding and transcendental communion.

And Christianity’s understanding of collective consciousness—well, such a thing hardly exists at all—only, as far as I know, in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. In fact, like me, Teilhard virtually defines the Christ in terms of collective consciousness. Teilhard deserves his own post(s), so I will defer a discussion of his work for now.

To understand more deeply the religious dimension of consciousness, we must look outside the Christian tradition, and especially to the East.

Some insights on the gathered meeting from yoga, the ancient Indian science of consciousness

I was an avid student of yoga for several years. My formal affiliation in those days was with Self Realization Fellowship, the organization founded to teach Kriya Yoga in North America by Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the great Indian gurus of the 20th century.

But I started with Transcendental Meditation, which was the Western world’s institution for another deeply respected school from India. And living within striking distance of New York in the 1960s and ‘70s gave me and my friends access to a number of other teachers based in the City, most notably, Ram Das and Hilda Charlton. Hilda Charlton held fairly regular satsangs in Manhattan and every time I went, Ram Das was there.

Hilda Charlton was a mildly gifted siddha yogi. A siddha yogi is an adept with the ability to psychically reach into a student’s consciousness and effect some spiritual transformation, to help the student’s spiritual progress along. Once when I attended one of her satsangs, she did some laying on of hands and she laid her hands on me.

When she touched me, I felt her presence and I felt a thrill, a jolt of awareness and joy. I don’t know how transforming it was. But it did blow my mind.

Such an experience has only limited spiritual value, if it does not demonstrably transform you. I can’t say that that experience changed me at all except to reinforce a faith in my practice. At the least, however, it suggests that a gifted teacher can posses psychic power. Such a teacher is called a siddha.

Siddha yoga emphasizes close relationship between teacher and student. Actual physical proximity is important, face-to-face encounter with the teacher, preferably living closely together in an ashram or community settlement, because just living in the presence of such a soul is transformative. And there are moments when the siddha’s power manifests, when she or he sees an opportunity to reach into you and grab a piece of your karma and set it straight, usually by yanking it out. The path of the siddha yoga devotee is one of extreme personal devotion and self-sacrifice. You are baring your soul to another in utmost faith. Sound familiar?

I think Jesus was a siddha. His ashram was a traveling ashram, instead of a settlement, which probably upped the level of commitment required even more.

I think of the story in the gospels of the Syro-Phoenician woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and Jesus felt his power go out from him. Or again, the experience of the lame man at the healing pool in the gospel of John; or of Jesus healing the blind man by mixing his spittle with dust. In a wonderful book titled Jesus the Healer, the author looks at Jesus’ healing miracles from various angles, and has really interesting things to say about his parables as psychic koans, stories that reached into his listeners and opened a channel for him to transform them. And Jesus often knows what’s really going on inside his disciples.

The skeptic would say, of course, that what I experienced was no more than a form of hypnosis, the power of suggestion. This is a frequent explanation of Pentecostal experience, of “holy rollers” and faith healers. And in my case, with Hilda Charlton, they may be right; in fact, I suspect that they are right. But siddha yoga is real, siddhas do exist, and this reality confirms, at the very least, that a realm or medium exists in which interpersonal psychic/spiritual communication takes place.

I have been there, not only in gathered meetings for worship among Friends, but also in moments of communion while meditating with other meditators, as a student of yoga and as a student and teacher of Silva Mind Control. (I know, that’s a truly sinister sounding name, but actually a rather benign but remarkably effective pseudo-scientific, pop-psych self-help program. I taught Silva Mind Control for several years in the mid-1970s. More about that later.)

When I was a disciple of Yogananda, Yogananda was dead. He died in 1947, I think, the year I was born. But I was taught that we was still alive as a guru, that he still had the power to work with me as a student. His transformational autobiography, The Autobiography of a Yogi, is full of stories in which his own teachers going back several generations, continued to teach him, even though they were dead. Sound familiar?

Who’s to say that the Christ as siddha is not also still capable of gathering his people? (In fact, Yogananda himself considered Christ one of his teachers, having had mystical experience of Jesus, as he describes in The Autobiography.) Without direct experience, I can only conjecture. But I have had experience of the siddha galvanizing a community into a covered state of spiritual unity. Maybe that will be my next post.

But back to the gathered meeting and the relevance of what I’m discussing here. My experience of siddha yoga, and the faith and practice of siddha yoga, all suggest that there is a psycho-spiritual dimension in which direct communion between people, and between disciples and teachers, does exist. That, I believe, is the medium in which the gathered meeting takes place.

Minutes of exercise

August 26, 2013 § Leave a comment

I have just discovered Peter Lasersohn’s blog and it is a fantastic resource. Take this entry, for example:

Peter Lasersohn's avatarQuaker Historical Lexicon

I’ve been neglecting this blog for quite some time, but I recently was involved in committee work for my yearly meeting which required me to do some historical investigation of Quaker uses of the term exercise, as in “minutes of exercise” or “report of the exercises of the meeting,” and it seems appropriate to present what I found here.

As background, Illinois Yearly Meeting has, for many, many years, appointed a committee each year to compose a report called “the Exercises,” which summarizes the major activities and business conducted during the annual sessions of the yearly meeting. This report was traditionally sent to Friends Journal for publication, but it was noticed in the last few years that the Exercises were not being published. When representatives from the meeting inquired about this, they were informed that the editorial staff of Friends Journal did not consider the Exercises to be of…

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Genesis and earthcare

August 17, 2013 § 9 Comments

The theme for New York Yearly Meeting Summer Sessions 2013 was “Keeping Faith: Answering that of God in All Creation”. The Bible study for the week focused on the first three chapters of Genesis and what they might teach us about “answering that of God in all creation”. The facilitator, Ruth Kinsey, was the pastor of Farmington Meeting for a long time, though she now is retired, lives in Folkeways, a Quaker retirement community, and is a member of Gwynedd Meeting in Pennsylvania.

I thought Ruth did a great job of calling forth from the material a strong message of responsible earth stewardship and of reinterpreting some of the more problematic aspects of these stories. Nevertheless, many participants, I think, were deeply troubled by some of these passages, especially the verses on dominion over creation and the submission of women to men. And I have my own concerns, as well.

I think that Friends should not use the first three chapters of Genesis in defining Quaker earthcare, for several reasons. I want to return to each of these in future posts.

  • Creation. First, the creation myths in Genesis one and two are not the true story of the earth’s creation. Why would we be guided by stories that have no relation to the evolutionary processes that really produced the human race and our world, processes that we must understand and respect if we are to be responsible earth stewards? We should ground our earthcare witness in the science that reveals the mind of God more truly than this myth can.
  • God. Some would say that while the Genesis stories may not describe the true process of creation, they do give us valuable insights into the Creator, into God’s relation to creation, and our relation to God vis a vis creation. I disagree, however. I feel that these chapters either portray a God that does not exist or they misrepresent God in ways that make God irrelevant or even inimical to our earthcare concerns. We should ground our earthcare witness in the leadings that the Spirit of Love and Truth has given to our earthcare prophets, both Quaker and non.
  • Stewardship. The theology of traditional Christian earth stewardship for which these chapters are the starting point offers principles of real value and power for earthcare witness. However, I feel that ultimately, traditional Christian earth stewardship leads to a dead end. I have written a book on this subject and I don’t want to use this blog to lay out the whole book, but in future posts, I do want to discuss some of what I call the 9+ principles of Christian earth stewardship vis a vis Quaker earthcare witness. If we took full responsibility for these principles, we would embark on a truly radical witness—but we won’t. No Christians will. And even if we did, it would not be enough.
  • The Fall. The story of the Fall in Genesis two and three is the very foundation of the sin-salvation paradigm so central to traditional Christian belief. But there was no Fall. Where is the evidence for a pair of proto-humans who were living in a pure “state of innocency”, as George Fox put it, and then fell from grace, leaving the rest of humanity inherently corrupt and disobedient to God?
  • As a parable, the story of the Fall may be trying to teach us something about human nature, our situation here on earth, and about God. However, I feel that the story of the Fall distorts the reality of human nature and of the world we live in, and, as I have said before, it defines a relationship between God, humans, and the world that has a shadow side; I feel that this shadow too strongly dims any light that these verses might offer us.
  • We do have an inherent tendency to disobey and to do wrong; I’m not denying that. But we also have inherent tendencies to obey and to do good, to create, to procreate, to organize socially, to nurture our young, to wage war—sinfulness is just one of a complex and extensive constellation of human instincts or predilections, and not, i my opinion, the most important at all. Why single sinfulness out among them all as the one that truly and decisively defines the human condition and the God we worship? Well, I plan to return to this topic of what I call the sin-salvation paradigm in later posts. And I want to focus especially on how the story of the Fall actually undermines faithful earthcare.

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