ministry | Through the Flaming Sword

Joys of the Quaker Way—Openings & Leadings

October 25, 2014 § 1 Comment

Ministry Unfolds

The opening

My call to ministry began in 1987, I think. It was the year that Marshall Massey spoke at the FGC Gathering about the need for Friends to pick up an earthcare ministry and he had encouraged meetings to form committees around the concern. Eric Maya Joy and his family came to New York Yearly Meeting from the Gathering that year and I was among a handful of Friends who met with them as they passed on the call. That little group formed a Friends in Unity with Nature task group and began organizing interest groups, workshops, and so on.

In 1990, Buffalo Meeting asked FUN to send them a program for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, and Ty Griese and I answered that call. On the Saturday night before the program, sitting on Talva Chapin’s Hide-A-Bed, going over my notes and praying, an opening suddenly seized me, a completely different message to give the next morning. In content it was not only completely unexpected; it was a cross to my habits of thought at the time.

It was an idea I later discovered in the work of Matthew Fox: that, if Christ, the Word, the Logos, had created the earth, as the Gospel of John chapter one says, and was in fact one with creation, then destroying the creation was recrucifying Christ. In the course of an hour that Saturday night, this initial insight kept ramifying and expanding and deepening. I literally quaked with its power and the joy and thrill of it.

Buffalo Meeting received this message rather coolly, as I remember. I did not blame them. I had spent the past ten years being hostile to Christianity and to the Bible, myself. I had been harassing Christian Friends in my meeting for their Christ-centered and biblical ministry. I had helped prevent the First Day School from teaching my kids the Bible. And now I was obsessing about the Bible and earth stewardship.

The leading

Over the next few weeks, the opening became a floodgate.

I had once known the Bible really well. In Lutheran confirmation class in seventh grade, I had memorized a couple dozen Psalms, the Sermon on the Mount in both Matthew and Luke, 1 Corinthians 13, dozens of individual passages, and virtually all of Luther’s Small Catechism. But only snatches came to me related to earthcare. I didn’t know enough. Yet a message was struggling to be born of what little knowledge I had.

Increasingly, I felt compelled—impelled—to write a book about earth stewardship. The impulse would not go away. It did not yield to my long-practiced hostility toward the Bible or the arguments i had been rehearsing for years against what I perceived to be its message and worldview. I could not ignore it.

In fact, this impulse rekindled my original adolescent love of the Bible. I found myself rehearsing the creation story in my head, thinking, “This is where I must start. I wonder what this story really means . . . “

I gave in. I surrendered to the seduction of the years of focused study that I knew this project required. I bought a study Bible, then another one. I paid for borrowing privileges at Princeton Theological Seminary library.

I felt that, if the Christian world could be convinced of the religious imperative to care for the earth, we could turn the corner as a planet. There were so many Christians, so many congregations, that it would only take a small critical mass to begin a worldwide revolution. But I felt that the Christian world would not listen unless the message came from Scripture.

I felt compelled to find that message, articulate it, and share it. I was going to write a book about earth stewardship, a work of biblical eco-theology. I had a leading.

Challenges for Large Quaker Meetings

September 9, 2014 § 5 Comments

I moved to Philadelphia in June and while packing my Quaker library I uncovered a paper I didn’t know I had: The Caring Multitude: Is It Possible? Preliminary Reflections on Experience in a Large Quaker Meeting in an Urban Setting, by Dan Seeger. Dan is a fairly well-known Friend who has held several high-level positions with AFSC and was Executive Director of Pendle Hill for a time, among a number of other significant contributions to Quaker culture. His 1965 case before the US Supreme Court, The United States of America vs Daniel A. Seeger, won the right to conscientious objection to military service for secular people who were not claiming religious grounds for their stand.

The Caring Multitude was written in 1979 and was originally meant “to be shared with a small group of Friends concerned with the life of the Monthly Meeting”. I am not at all sure how I ended up with a copy, which is a photocopy of a typewritten manuscript that has someone else’s notes on it.

In this little talking paper, as he calls it, Dan addresses the challenges that large urban meetings face in three crucial areas: pastoral care, meeting for worship, and corporate social outreach. He makes a lot of really interesting points. More than interesting—they are true, to my mind, and very much worth considering, especially by Friends worshipping in large meetings.

Because I don’t have permission to republish his paper, I don’t feel comfortable even quoting it extensively, which I would like to do, but I do want to raise up some of his ideas and add some of my own, and invite my readers to think about them. They are especially pertinent for Friends in large meetings and for those of us who attend regional and yearly meeting sessions that get large.

What do I mean by “large”? I want to leave this definition to the subjective sense of large, rather than giving a number. I think, when you read further, you will have a sense of what I mean. And anyway, some of these dynamics apply even to smaller meetings.

What it’s like to worship in a “large” meeting?

I agree with Dan’s assessment that our way of silent, waiting worship doesn’t really work in large meetings. That it can’t work, in fact. Here’s why (the core insight here is Dan’s; most of the elaboration is mine):

A certain proportion of Friends are likely to feel a genuine call to speak in meeting. Another proportion are likely to speak with less obvious grounding in the Spirit. The more people in the meeting, the more people are likely to speak. When the population gets to a certain point, you get an awful lot of speaking, and, as Hegel first pointed out, at that point, quantitative change precipitates qualitative change.

First, it tends to induce popcorn speaking, a chain reaction of messages that have been prompted more by each other than by the Holy Spirit. Second, the increased number of messages squeezes the intervals between messages, and this squeezing suppresses the ministry of those Friends who feel it’s important to leave a decent interval between messages and who use that interval to properly attend to each offering. Thus the Friends who are most likely to bring a deeper, more seasoned ministry to the meeting are least likely to finish their seasoning or find an appropriate moment in which to deliver it.

This has several bad effects. First, by denying Friends the time of waiting silence necessary to go deep, we don’t go deep. By denying Friends the vocal ministry of some of its most gifted ministers, we disrespect both the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s servants. And by virtually guaranteeing a certain amount of un-gifted ministry, we degrade the quality of the worship.

Furthermore, the situation reinforces the low standards for both corporate behavior and individual ministry that prevail in such a meeting, encouraging more of the behavior that causes the problem. It gives newcomers a false impression of what meeting for worship is for, and it inevitably drives some of them away. I know this from personal experience: one of my sons stopped attending such a meeting because “the same blowhards rise to speak every meeting”. And it drives away seasoned Friends who want a deeper worship experience; but before they go, it leads them into grief and even despair.

And the whole dynamic is a self-reinforcing downward spiral. The more devoid of Spirit the ministry is,

the more likely that gifted ministers will either keep quiet (and bring down the spirit of the worship with their despair), or leave;
the less likely that avid Spirit-seekers will stay and join;
the more bandwidth the blowhards will occupy; and
the more likely that gifted ministers will lower their own standards in desperation, and then get even more depressed because of their own perceived unfaithfulness.

Does any of this make sense to you? Is it your experience? Do you serve on a ministry and worship committee, which is charged with nurturing a deep meeting for worship and with protecting the worship from unworshipful influences? Do you have any idea what to do about these problems?

I hope you respond, and, in my next post, I want to try out some ideas for dealing with these problems. Some come from Dan’s paper, and some are my own.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Pastoral Care

March 28, 2014 § 3 Comments

Human life is quite full of human suffering. One of the most important roles for the Quaker meeting is to minister to one another in our suffering. Thus pastoral care is for Friends a form of ministry.

The faith and practice of pastoral care, the roles and responsibilities of both the individual and the meeting, are not different for pastoral care ministry than they are for vocal ministry or witness ministry, or any other form of ministry:

As individuals, to always seek to be open to the promptings of the Spirit to serve, in the knowledge that any one of us at any time could be called to be there for someone in pain; that you do not have to have professional training to do this.

As meetings, to teach the spiritual practice of Quaker ministry, including pastoral care as one of its forms, thus encouraging all members and attenders to be available to the Holy Spirit, and to each other as pastoral caregivers; and to create a fellowship in which Friends know each other well enough to recognize when someone needs our care.

Pastoral care as ministry

As with all other forms of ministry, the goal is to bring someone to G*d and to bring G*d into their life. To seek to awaken the sufferer to the Comforter within them and to give them whatever kinds of support seems appropriate.

The one sure vehicle for doing this is love. For whatever else “God” is, most of us can agree that G*d is love, that loving is as close as we can normally get to the divine. This love is taught in a Masters program that no outward schooling in counseling can replicate, though it can facilitate.

Just as this love is inwardly learned without outward instruction, so it is outwardly expressed without specific forms. That is, when we encounter someone in pain, the first thing we can do is to be still inwardly and listen for how we might be led. We can seek to act and to speak in the situation in answer to that of G*d within our Friend, and to heed that of G*d within ourselves, waiting as it were to be led into action and speech by the Holy Spirit, by the Mystery Reality that binds us together in love. We can settle into the feelings we have for our Friend, our care for them, our wish for their well-being, and in the fullness of that silence, find a way forward revealed. Thus simply sitting together for a time, in the silence, in the light, in that love, can often be the best first action.

We may, in fact, end up employing professional skills and tools in the situation, just as a Bible passage may find its way into our vocal ministry, or our knowledge of hydrofracking may inform our tactics in our earthcare ministry. But love is the first motion, and along with that, expectant listening, knowing that we can be inspired to right action if we attend to the light within us and within others.

But pastoral problems often are—well, usually are—complex and hard to deal with. They often feel bigger than our meager knowledge or skills or gifts. And they are so fraught with tension that it is hard to silence our fears and sense of helplessness, our reluctance to intrude or the tendency to seek a solution, so that it can be very hard to hear that little voice inside or feel that little nudge toward right action. And very often, there really isn’t much we can do, as an individual or as a meeting or pastoral care committee, to actually solve these difficult situations.

We can try. We should try to do something, even if we are not clearly led, I think. The trying is its own act of love. But at the least, we can love and we can pray. We can just be there, and say that we are there. We can listen. And we can minister to the heart, even when we cannot minister to the situation. We all know what a difference it makes to know that the meeting cares, to get those flowers and cards and visits and covered dishes. These things any pastoral care committee can do, whether it has trained professionals or not.

We often do put people on our pastoral care committees who are mental health professionals or professional mediators, people whom we recognize have already realized their gifts and their calling in this area. But even when these Friends are bringing their professional training and skills to a pastoral need in the meeting, they also are bringing the gifts and the calling that led them to their profession, they are bringing the love and the healing of G*d, the giver of those gifts, the source of that calling.

Gifts of pastoral ministry

And what are the gifts of pastoral ministry?

The gift of attention, of being consciously open to the signs of suffering in others;
of listening, of really being present to someone when they are speaking;
of empathy, making a habit of imagining what someone else is going through as though it were you;
of compassion, making a habit of turning from the awareness of some problem to the resolve to do what you can to help;
of discernment, a deep openness to G*d’s inspiration as to the source of someone’s suffering, or the solution to the situation, or to the possible role of the meeting;
of prayer, the practice of bringing others into our devotional life;
of presence, the willingness to simply be with someone on their own terms, without any expectation of outcome and without fretting too much about the awkwardness;
of healing, one of the rarer gifts, of channeling healing power, knowing what to do or what to say or how to help in the moment of counsel, beyond even the great gift of just being present.

These gifts are universal, a natural capacity we all possess, though we each possess them in different measure. Some people seem quite naturally to possess some of these gifts in greater measure, but I believe we can cultivate them within ourselves, we can raise them up or strengthen them, with a little practice.

On prayer

I want to emphasize the value of prayer. The gift of prayer is one of the most endangered in the liberal Society of Friends. But ironically, its very rarity among us enhances its power when we use it. And it has tremendous power to start with. Even “holding someone in the Light” has real power when through the practice we descend into our own depths and send forth our love.

I have seen the truth of this many, many times. In my own meeting just recently more than one Friend has testified to how important the meeting’s prayers were to them and how they could feel the meeting’s love at work within them. I have seen miracles.

I do believe that healing prayer stands a much better chance if practiced in conjunction with some deepening exercise. At least that’s been my experience. Something happens when you take the time to really center down before praying for someone, and when you stay in that deep place for a good time, allowing your lovingkindness to sink you ever deeper as you reach out across the ocean of light with G*d’s love. Oh, it feels sublime and it has great power.

On money

I believe that the Quaker meeting has a special role to play in ministering to the financial suffering of its members. This was the central mission of the church that Jesus built and it was a central mission of the Quaker meeting in the earliest times for Friends. But this post is long enough. This discussion will have to wait until my next post.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? —Witness, Part III

March 15, 2014 § 6 Comments

Witness Ministry: An Alternative to Committees

My last post laid out a critique of standing committees organized around concerns, claiming that they tend bring the world’s ways into our discernment, to quench the spirit behind spirit-led ministry, and to force those with leadings to compete with each other for time, attention, people, and money. But at the end of that post, I had to admit that we have at present no alternative to our habitual committee structures. Most of our meetings are not equipped to support the traditional Quaker structures for spirit-led concerns, the faith and practice of Quaker ministry; some of our meetings probably don’t even really know what it is. Committees are all we know.

The strategy

This calls for a “meta-ministry” whose goal is to recover the faith and practice of Quaker ministry and to adapt them to our present needs. We need to teach our meetings how ministry works, train ourselves in the tools we have for discerning leadings and supporting and overseeing ministries, and develop a culture of eldership in which Friends seasoned in the faith and practice of ministry help other members, our newcomers, and our young people to recognize their gifts of ministry and their leadings, and to give them some guidance and support.

In the meantime, we would have to run two parallel systems for our witness work while we migrate gradually from a committee-based structure to a ministry-based structure. I expect that this transition phase would take at least ten years, if pursued vigorously; I can’t imagine it taking less than five years. I think it could easily take a generation. I have been at this “meta-ministry” myself for twenty years and have achieved almost nothing.

What to do? I think that to so radically change our culture, we would need to leverage our current standing committees in the service of midwifing traditional ministry.

For instance, I think that each of our witness committees should train itself in how to conduct clearness committees for discernment and then conduct clearness committees for each of its own members. The goal would be to help each member of the committee get over that hump from strong caring about the concern to clear leading about what they are called to do about it.

Then, as the members of the committee become clear about their individual leadings, the committee should reorganize itself around these leadings and provide the kind of support these ministries require, serving essentially as surrogate meetings until the meeting itself gets up to speed enough to take over the role of ministry support.

To accomplish this, each standing committee would have a second charge parallel to the charge of pursuing its concern: to teach the rest of the meeting the faith and practice of Quaker ministry, to be a kind of seedbed, case study, and laboratory for creating the kind of culture of eldership that ministry requires.

Eventually, theoretically, each witness committee would have migrated care of all its members’ ministries to ad hoc ministry support committees, and the committee would then lay itself down.

In this way, all of the good work that our witness committees are currently doing would continue, but the structure for their support would gradually shift, at the yearly meeting level, from committees to local meetings and, at the local meeting level, from standing committees to ad hoc support committees for specific ministries. Some concerns would be bigger in scope, in their need for resources, and so on, than a local meeting could effectively support, and these concerns would then be referred in gospel order to the quarterly or regional meeting. For the same reasons, some concerns would properly find their way in gospel order to the yearly meeting.

And some concerns might, after all, really need a standing committee. But this would be discerned in gospel order, being the spirit-led decision of a meeting or of progressively higher-level meetings, rather than out of unconsidered habit.

For example, some of NYYM’s prison work might remain in the Yearly Meeting’s hands because some of that work involves the state’s corrections department. Much of the rest of their work, however, is already being done at the regional level, since many of the volunteers in a given prison come from various meetings in the area. But some centralization of services might still be very useful and thus remain in the hands of some Yearly Meeting structure.

Some problems

I see several problems with this idea of using witness committees to lead the migration to a ministry-based model, however. These boil down to reasonable resistance to these changes in the witness committees themselves and in the wider meeting.

First, we are asking them to radically transform themselves, and organizations rarely willingly undertake their own creative destruction. Usually they fight for their lives and they identify their lives with the status quo.

Second, many (most?) of the Friends who are doing the work in these committees—the ministers—may not see that there’s a problem. They may not see themselves as “ministers” with “ministries”, may not know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry themselves, and may be fairly happy with the way things are. They are doing the work, so who cares, really, how we structure it? They are likely to be much more focused on doing it than on thinking about it. Furthermore, nobody likes to be told that they’re doing what they’re doing wrong.

Third, the knowledge about the Quaker traditions of ministry is much more likely to reside in the ministry and worship committee or in Friends with that bent than in the witness committees. So not only must these committee members change what they do, but they must study first, and then start experimenting with new structures and processes that no one really knows now to operate to do their precious work.

And I am not being facetious when I say “precious”—this is precious work they are doing most of the time. Normally, we would not want to mess with something as important as effective witness work.

And then there’s the rest of the meeting and the wider Quaker culture. Almost all organizations suffer inherently from inertia and habitual and instinctive resistance to change. I know from personal experience that talking about these ideas excites almost instantaneous and often vehement objections. I have literally never been given the opportunity to finish laying these ideas out (it takes a few sentences, at least) before my listener starts rebutting the half-finished and half-heard proposal. All they hear is that I’m trying to destroy or at least disrespect their witness ministry.

Then there’s the broad knowledge gap. There are pockets of Friends in the wider Quaker community who are excited about and conversant with the faith and practice of Quaker ministry, but I suspect that many meetings may not have anyone who knows these traditions well enough to lead the way. And even if they do have such people, we all know how Friends tend to treat such leaders—or leaders of any kind.

These pockets of Friends who yearn for a deeper culture of eldership around Quaker ministry tend to form at higher levels of meeting life than the local meeting. I find them at the yearly meeting level and clustered in and around our conference centers and in and around other self-organized groups like the School of the Spirit. I suspect that they gather in some numbers at FGC Gathering; I’ve only been to the Gathering once and only for one day, in which I myself was doing a program, so I didn’t get around much or get a sense of the Gathering more broadly. So, if these Friends lead the way, now we have a top-down or outside-inside dynamic that often puts off Friends in local meetings, unless they have themselves asked for a program of some kind.

These amount to huge obstacles to the kind of cultural change I am advocating, and I’m not sure what to do about them. I would despair if I did not know quite a few Friends who share my love for these traditions and likewise yearn for a vital culture of Quaker ministry.

Here’s what I hope for: That here and there in the Liberal Quaker world a meeting sees the value of trying to recover our traditions of ministry and vigorously undertakes to transform itself. Then, after a few years, other meetings see that it isn’t the apocalypse, after all, to transform witness committees in this way, and they take a closer look. If I’m right about ministry-based structures being better at nurturing ministry than committees, then the light of witness in these starter meetings will shine quite brightly; more people in the meeting will be engaged in the witness work, and everyone in the meeting will have a deeper and better-informed Quaker spirituality. Business meetings might even be more exciting.

What the alternative to committees would look like

The ultimate end result would be a culture of eldership in all our meetings in which a meeting’s members would all know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry and would understand ministry’s role in Quaker spirituality. To achieve and maintain this culture would require a sustained program of religious education about Quaker ministry in all its aspects.

The meetings would know how to convene clearness committees for discernment. Their ministry and worship committees and other elders would always be on the lookout for emerging concerns, sometimes even recognizing G*d’s work in someone before the minister does; they might see cues in the vocal ministry or just in casual conversation. They would regularly sponsor programs in which Friends shared their concerns and other aspects of their religious and spiritual lives, so there would be more opportunities to recognize Friends’ gifts and leadings. Nominating committee would not just seek to fill slots but seek to really know the members and attenders, so that they recognized spiritual gifts and the concerns that each member cares about and could then provide mentoring, support, books, recommendations for conferences—whatever might nurture the gifts and leadings they become aware of. In this way, nominating committees might take on a bit of a ministry-and-worship role.

Once leadings had been through a clearness process, they would begin to come before the meeting for the collective discernment of the whole meeting in its meeting for business in worship. Those who had served on a Friend’s clearness committee would testify as to the source, depth, and direction of the leading. These Friends would already be deeply involved in the concern by serving on the clearness committee and now everyone present in the business meeting would become involved.

Thus the structures and processes of Quaker ministry tend to do a better job than committees of integrating the meeting’s witness work with the rest of the meeting’s life because it involves at least those Friends who serve on the original clearness committee quite intimately in the Friends’s leading and inner life. Once a meeting had held two or three such clearness committees, you now have quite a rich network of Friends personally and meaningfully engaged in each other’s witness activities. And that’s only the first phase of evolution in this network of elders (defining “elders” as Friends whose ministry is, in part, the nurture of the ministry of others).

The second phase comes with the convening of care committees. Once a meeting had recognized a leading, then it would convene an ad hoc committee for support and perhaps oversight for the conduct of the ministry. These care committees would try to help the meetings’ ministers stay on track and overcome the obstacles they might encounter along the way. They might help “release” the ministry by helping with financial support, if needed, and with release from other obligations that might stand in the way of a minister’s faithfulness.

Now the network of Friends intimately involved in a given ministry has become quite extensive, and, if the meeting is discerning and supporting other Friends’ leadings, these double-concentric rings of elders with a minister at the center would likely start to overlap. At the center of each ring is a Friend with a leading. Around her is a circle of Friends how have served on her clearness committee. Around that circle is a second circle of Friends who now serve on her care committee. But some of the Friends in these two circles might also serve on some other Friend’s clearness committee or care committee. Now you have a robust network of elders, a framework for a vital culture eldership for ministry.

Then comes the third phase in this culture’s evolution. The meeting might recommend the minister to other meetings or to people outside the meeting when appropriate by writing minutes of travel or service. This would almost certainly be the case in “activist” witness ministry that focuses on one of the world’s many ills, though we would probably want to call the minute of service a letter of introduction, so that the recipients understand it.

So now we have more than just one Friend personally involved in some activist activity like prison work. Now we have a Friend representing her meeting in that activity.

Finally, when the ministry has run its course, the meeting would lay down the care committee. The meeting might need to help the minister discern whether she had been released from the weight of the concern.

Thus meeting life would be a constant flow and cycle of gifts being recognized, of leadings being discerned and pursued and laid down, of nurturing the work of bringing G*d into the world.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Witness & Service, Part II

March 13, 2014 § 3 Comments

Witness ministry: What’s wrong with witness committees?

Standing committees organized around a concern can work pretty well when the ministries they support engage the same social systems in a sustained way over a long time—and when they enjoy the necessary dedication of Friends who feel a powerful and lasting calling to the work.

A clear example of this in my experience is Prisons Committee in New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM). This committee provides support to worship groups and individuals in an impressive number of New York State prisons. They have been ministering to the same individuals for decades, in some cases. They have been struggling with the same bureaucratic structures in the state’s Corrections department, as well. Unwavering presence, sustained effort, deep institutional memory, these all require a structure that stays put, even as people come and go. And this has all paid off in New York Yearly Meeting, by producing some gains in the institutional response of Corrections and by demonstrably diminishing the suffering of incarcerated people.

You could make this argument for virtually any witness concern. Gains in any area of social change depend on sustained action. Sustained action requires a lasting structure for garnering and managing financial, human, and institutional resources. This usually means a committee. So yes, we do need committees. But do we need standing committees for witness?

I think that, while they usually do support worthwhile work, standing witness committees also have a negative impact on our witness life. I think that, in the case of most of our witness work, we need instead ad hoc committees of support and oversight for individual ministries.

Let’s look at the real case of a new witness impulse in New York Yearly Meeting and follow its trail into and through the conventional Quaker committee structure.

A case study: Friends in Unity with Nature in New York Yearly Meeting

After Marshall Massey’s address to Friends General Conference in I think it was 1987 urging Friends into ecological witness, some Friends came to New York Yearly Meeting’s Summer Sessions with his message that we should get off our butts and bring G*d into the world in environmental ministry. Actually, what I think he called for was the formation of environmental concern committees.

A bunch of us decided to form a committee, which we called Friends in Unity with Nature (FUN). Over the next several years, we organized conferences and interest groups and submitted text on the environment for the Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, which was then in revision. We held endless committee meetings, and we sought ways to tap the resources and capture the attention of the Yearly Meeting on behalf of our earthcare concern.

Internally, we groped for vision. We approached this problem of what to do in the conventional ways common in committees: lots of discussion, some brainstorming, “visioning” retreats. We each felt a deep concern for what was happening to the earth, but we were interested in different aspects of the ecological crises we face, and we brought different strengths and temperaments to the work. I don’t remember any of us being very clear about what specifically we were led to do as individuals.

We each needed individual discernment. None of us went to our local meetings for this discernment. I don’t think any of us at that time really knew or understood the traditions of Quaker ministry. I suspect that most Friends in our local meetings did not know what we were up to, either. Nor did we do much to help each other discern our individual leadings. We strove instead, mostly out of habit, for collective discernment aimed at finding a vision as a group. This did not go too badly. We did do quite a bit in the years we worked together.

When we asked the Yearly Meeting for formal structure, they first tried to put us in Peace Concerns. But Peace Concerns committee already had its own agenda and we had ours. Both groups could see that both of us would suffer if Peace Concerns tried to absorb us. So we were formed as a Task Group, which, in NYYM, is a formally recognized group lasting three years and charged with exploring a concern that has no home as yet in the Yearly Meeting on its behalf, in order to determine what to do about it.

After our three years, we asked to become a standing committee and were turned down, on the grounds that we had not yet built a base of interest and support throughout the Yearly Meeting strong enough and broad enough to justify being a yearly meeting committee. And we hadn’t. We received a one-year extension, and set about building that base. We didn’t succeed, and the Task Group was laid down. Formal, organized ministry organized around earthcare in New York Yearly Meeting died on the vine.

Most of us continued to carry the concern, however, and some of us eventually become clear about our own leadings.

Lessons learned from FUN’s experience in New York Yearly Meeting

We needed—and didn’t get, or give to each other—discernment about our individual leadings. We felt the concern; we had the emotional commitment necessary. But we never got over the hump from having intense but rather unfocused feelings to having a concrete vision of what to do about them. Therefore, it took us a long time to get organized and our subsequent efforts ended up taking rather arbitrary directions as we groped toward a more coherent vision. In the end, we ran out of time before we could fulfill our task. Lesson: committees distract Friends from individual discernment with a habitual focus on group discernment.

The committee structure of the yearly meeting tried to fit us into itself, and couldn’t do it. Even though, as individuals, we were clearly led into earthcare witness, as a group, we could not satisfy the requirements of the committee structure. The system could only deal with us as a group and on its own terms, not as individuals with leadings. Also, a structural clock was ticking toward an arbitrary time when the task group would be laid down, whether we still felt led as individuals or had achieved clarity as a group. The bureaucracy defeated us. Lesson: committee structures tend to suppress emerging ministry and are more or less oblivious to individual leadings.

The attempt to place us within Peace Concerns revealed the competition inherent in the committee structure:

we would have crowded their agenda, they would have overwhelmed ours;
we would be competing with our concerns and projects against their concerns and projects, for time in their agenda and for resources within their already resource-strapped budget;
if we had become a subcommittee of Peace Concerns, we just would have doubled the number of meetings we had to go to in order to do our work, without relieving any of the pressures on Peace Concerns.
Lesson: the committee structure forces the ministries internal to the committee to compete with each other.

Suppose we had become a standing committee, after all:

Within the committee, matters would have been exactly the same as if we were part of Peace Concerns, in terms of individual leadings and ministries competing with each other (assuming we individuals were clear about our leadings): my ministry would have to compete with the ministries of the other members of the committee for time, attention, support, and resources within the committee. Lesson: committees force ministries to compete with each other.

At the time, of course, we thought of our individual “ministries” as projects of the Task Group and not as personal ministries at all. So our pursuit of these projects tended to further quench the spirit of clarity about individual leadings: we were so busy deciding on, designing, and executing our various projects that we never had the space to discover what G*d wanted each of us to do individually. We only found our individual ways once the Task Group had been laid down. The Task Group’s projects were worthwhile, however, and I suspect that they advanced the concern of earthcare in the Yearly Meeting somewhat. Lesson: clearly the standing committee structure in our meetings has the sustained effect of suppressing individual ministry, though committees are certainly capable of doing good work.

However this suppressive effect of pursuing our collective projects was only half the spirit-quenching story. Maybe even worse was the mechanics of being a Task Group. The machinery of a committee, the bureaucratic demands involved, took up soooo much time. How many hours did we spend just fussing over the minutes! Now arguably, a support committee for someone called to a witness ministry would spend some time writing minutes and reports and dealing with money and other “bureaucratic” matters, too. But the lesson is that the machinery of our committee structure wastes precious energy and distracts you from the real work you are trying to do.

Furthermore, as an emerging concern in New York Yearly Meeting, FUN was also somewhat distracted from the primary work of awakening and fostering ecological concern in the Yearly Meeting by seeking to become a committee. Becoming a committee became one of our goals. I’m not sure how much this affected our actual work, but it certainly altered our consciousness of ourselves. Lesson: the demands of committee structure threaten to replace some of the work the committee was convened to pursue.

If we had become a standing committee, we then would have been competing with Peace Concerns and all the other committees organized around a concern for the attention of the yearly meeting, for time on the yearly meeting floor, for people in the nominating process (already unable to fill its rosters), and for money in the yearly meeting budget. Lesson: committees are inherently a structure or framework for competition.

NYYM appoints Friends for three-year terms and normally allows only two terms of service, expecting Friends to rotate off for at least one year. Never mind whether you still carry the concern or are in the middle of pursuing some ministry. Committees have term limits for a good reason: it helps to prevent power structures from taking root and helps to ensure that new blood and ideas get a chance. Lesson: the committee structure is oblivious to the natural life-cycles of spirit-led ministry; it’s a machine that runs on its own schedule and it tends to truncate ministry before its time.

Or committees continue doing things that no one has any passion for anymore. Witness committees suppress ministry, on the one hand, and then ultimately and ironically, they tend to become moribund over time as people with the real leadings move on or rotate off. It is really hard to lay down a committee that has lost the spirit because some Friends inevitably cannot conceive of a meeting without “x” concern. Lesson: committees, like any organization, tend to fight for their lives no matter how ineffective they have become.

One more matter endemic to committees at the yearly meeting level. FUN in New York Yearly Meeting arose at Yearly Meeting sessions among “Yearly Meeting Friends”, that is, among the small, rarified, and rather insular community of Friends under appointment to Yearly Meeting committees. The Yearly Meeting never asked us to bring our concerns to our individual local meetings and I suspect that our own meetings were largely unaware of what we were doing. Most of our programs were likewise focused on the Yearly Meeting organization, taking place during YM sessions, or at the Yearly Meeting’s conference center, Powell House. We did do some programs at local and regional meetings. But we were born, lived, and died inside the bubble that is the Yearly Meeting committee organization, without ever putting down roots in the Yearly Meeting’s local meetings. This was one of reasons we were laid down. Admittedly, this was a hard thing to accomplish in so geographically large and dispersed a yearly meeting. Lesson: Yearly Meeting committee structures tend to be rather alienated from local Friends and local meetings.

A similar dynamic seems to work even within local meetings. I have often observed that a witness committee, with a handful of very dedicated people, often gets frustrated by their meeting’s unwillingness to get meaningfully involved in their concern, to really even care about what they are doing. When a witness committee does succeed in galvanizing the meeting, this often is because of passionate leadership by Friends who are truly driven by their leading. Lesson: the normal committee-meeting dynamics seem ill equipped to overcome the inertia that witness concerns sometimes face in local meetings.

In sum, our standing committee structures for witness ministry tend to suppress ministry, especially emerging new concerns, they force Friends and their ministries to compete with each other for time, money, people, and other resources, and there is something about the habitual dynamics of the structure that often fails to connect organically with the meeting and the meeting’s members.

What’s the alternative?

Now the reality is that committees are all we know. We have mostly lost the faith and practice of Quaker ministry, the alternative to standing committees that I propose. I know from personal experience that many of our meetings do not know the traditions of Quaker ministry and are not equipped to help their members discern their leadings or support their ministries. So we can’t just start laying down our witness committees. There are no alternative structures waiting to support the important work that our witness committees are doing, no knowledge, structures or vital processes in our meetings to help our members discover new leadings and follow them.

Overcoming this problem is the subject of my next post.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Witness & Service

March 8, 2014 § 5 Comments

Bringing G*d into the world in social action—witness and service.

We have a reputation as a socially engaged religious community and, more than any other religious community perhaps, we elevate social witness to a central place in our religious identity.

The testimonial impulse arises within individuals as spirit-led concern, as feelings of anguish at suffering and oppression, as compassion for those who suffer and are oppressed, both human and non-human, and as a desire to do something about it. That our religion offers these feelings a welcoming home in the community is a deep, powerful, and profound aspect of Quakerism.

For hundreds of years, Friends who felt these emotions, and who felt prompted by the Light within them to act on their feelings, brought their concerns to their meetings for discernment and support in the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. To be fair, it seems that for most of this time, the impulse was mostly to evangelism as traditionally understood, to travel in gospel ministry, though we always have had our John Bellers, our John Woolman, our Elizabeth Fry, our Lucretia Mott.

For most of our history, what I am calling the “witness impulse” was usually a prompting to witness to individuals to change their ways, rather than an attempt to address the root sources of suffering and oppression in the structures of society and their systemic dimension. I think of Elizabeth Fry teaching women prisoners to read or John Woolman traveling from household to household urging Friends to stop holding slaves.

Also, Friends who felt led to more focused, more practical, more truly witness-oriented action often faced inertia, if not resistance. I think of John Bellers, for example, who in the early 18th century repeatedly presented practical solutions to poverty to what was then London Yearly Meeting, and got nowhere.

It seems to me that what we now think of as “witness” work really only got going with the rise of liberal Quakerism at the turn of the 20th century. By “witness ministry” I mean spirit-led work aimed at righting wrongs, changing the social order, getting at the roots of human suffering and oppression, rather than evangelizing individuals and treating the symptoms with charity.

When liberal Quakerism realized its identity during and after the Manchester Conference in England and the Richmond Conference in the United States, and Friends like Rufus Jones, John Wilhelm Rowntree and his brother Seebohm saw a new imperative in the Christian gospel, Quakerism entered a new era. This corresponded with the rise of the Social Gospel movement more broadly, a religious reaction of conscience against the ravages of industrial capitalism and the inequities of the Robber Baron era.

Then came World War I and the recovery of an active peace testimony that required of Friends true sacrifice in the face of social persecution and state prosecution. For the first time since the Lamb’s War of the 1650s, Quakers were defying social norms and the laws of the state and trying to change the social order itself from the light in their conscience, and a new consciousness was formed in us by adversity, sacrifice, and the need for a public defense of our witness. Quakers came out of the Great War a different people

But we were at the same time dismantling the traditional processes and structures for Quaker ministry. By the 1920s, in most parts of Quakerism, we had stopped recording ministers and elders and stopped writing minutes of travel and service. Instead, we started forming committees.

The American Friends Service Committee in the US and the Friends Service Committee in Great Britain set the standard. We had Committees of Industry and Social Order. Now we have committees for everything and most Friends know no other structure for their witness ministry.

I have said this elsewhere, but here I must repeat: I believe that committees do not serve us well as the structure for bringing G*d into the world in witness ministry.

I believe they quench the spirit in many ways. I believe they distort in harmful ways the ministries they are organized to pursue. I believe we should stop using them. I believe we should return to the faith and practice of Quaker ministry as the way to bear our concerns in the world, but modified to meet modern needs.

I know from experience sharing these ideas with Friends that people freak out when they hear what I am proposing. Or rather, when they think they have heard what I’m proposing. I have found that Friends have a very hard time really hearing what I am saying because they hear instead an attack on the work that the committees are doing rather than a critique of committees as a structure for doing the work. So I will say over and over again that I am not proposing that we lay down the ministries that our witness committees are pursuing; I am proposing that we move away from committees as the structure we use to do it. The ministries matter; the committees are just structures.

I know, also, that I am proposing a truly revolutionary shift in our culture. You my reader may find yourself resisting my arguments because it seems that I want to take away something that you value with the utmost fervor. Let me reassure you that I do not want to take away a single work that G*d has inspired you and others to do on behalf of Truth. I only want to release it from the shackles that I believe our committee structure has bound them with.

In the next couple of posts I want to lay out the reasons I believe we should abandon committees organized around a concern and a strategy for working our way forward into a new culture of eldership for witness ministry.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Doing G*d’s Work

January 10, 2014 § 5 Comments

[Reminder: I use the asterisk in the middle of G*d to stand in for whatever your experience of God is.]

Note: I have more to say about Fellowship as the mission of the Quaker meeting, but I want to do a little research first, so I am going on to the meeting for business in worship and will return to Fellowship in a subsequent post.

When I asked one of my grown sons a while back why, after being raised a Quaker, he has not continued, he answered, “Because meeting for worship is a bunch of blowhards saying the same things every week and meeting for business is about things that don’t really matter.” Something like that.

I think there’s probably more to it than that. And I think he might have a rather different experience of meeting for worship if he went to some other nearby meetings. But I doubt that the meeting for business would be different.

I once statistically analyzed the business of a yearly meeting over a year, as recorded in its minutes. The vast majority of that business was irrelevant to the kingdom of G*d *. Only three pieces of business out of some 120 minutes came to the Yearly Meeting floor in gospel order, that is, originating in a local meeting and passing on through a regional meeting to the yearly meeting because that was the appropriate body for it; and one of these items was a fairly routine request for a disbursement from a trust fund asking for help with meetinghouse repairs.

Almost all of the yearly meeting’s business was generated by the yearly meeting’s committees. Most had to do with either the mechanics of the meeting sessions or money. Most of the business affected only the yearly meeting organization (by which I mean the yearly meeting’s committees and the Friends under appointment to those committees, and the apparatus of the Yearly Meeting sessions). Most of our business is, to use the most shocking and crass expression possible, spiritual masturbation. It brings forth almost nothing in the world we live in, which is in dire need of spirit-led ministry. It is a waste of the Seed.

A lot of our business is quite mundane, it’s true. Property matters, budget stuff, routine reports from committees on their work. We have to do this work, and it is boring at the surface level of management. So we all sit there doing it, usually with the utmost conscientiousness, in my experience. Fine.

But we do sometimes get lulled into a pro forma treatment of this work. Put another way, we let ourselves fall into habit—and out of worship. And our meetings for business are supposed to be meetings for worship. Often, the tone of our business meetings is to get out of there as soon as possible. And it’s not always just tacit. My own meeting cuts fifteen minutes off the meeting for worship that day so that we can get out earlier.

Clerks, both the presiding clerk and committee clerks, can help maintain a spirit of worship by being prepared and thoughtful about the agenda, trying to help committees present effectively, maintaining a good period of silent waiting between items, knowing Quaker process well, and setting a worshipful tone throughout.

Then there are the decisions that are contentious or otherwise difficult. Two things really get on my nerves in the way we often handle difficult business. The first is our habit of asking for voiced approval before everyone who might have an objection has been heard, which forces the meeting to return to its discernment after approving something—which feels very odd to me and often results in some chaos in the discernment. Second, and often in tandem with this first dynamic, we often do our discernment by editing the text of a minute, focusing on tweaks to the language and often devolving into points of grammar and semantics, instead of focusing on the guidance of our Teacher.

I feel that clerks should pointedly ask for objections to a verbally proposed test minute, and do so repeatedly until no one speaks up; then ask the recording clerk to read her/his record of the minute that’s just been presented verbally by the presiding clerk—and then ask again for objections and corrections until no one speaks up; then ask if s/he may take the body’s silence as approval. (Doing this also means you don’t have to reread and approve this minute later in the process of approving minutes.)

But the basic problem remains: where is the kingdom-work? Why do we do so little that addresses directly the spiritual lives of our members or the woes of the world? Even when we approve a minute of conscience, all we are usually doing is laying down some words. Maybe we issue a press release or in some other way broadcast our words. Still just words.

I believe the root problem behind our lackluster business agendas is that we have lost the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. I know I keep saying this, but this is my ministry—to recover the central role that I believe ministry could and should play in our personal and corporate spiritual lives. I believe that the faith and practice of Quaker ministry is the very soul of Quaker spirituality, both personal and collective.

Currently, our standing committees generate most of our business. I believe that some of the work that some of our committees do should be treated as ministries under the care of the meeting and in the hands of people who feel led to do the work, with committees of support and oversight when appropriate. I’ve written about this before.

However, we do need standing committees for some of our work, especially that which concerns the necessary and routine business for which we have fiduciary responsibility: property, money, the corporation. But I question the use of standing committees that are organized around concerns, like our witness committees, advancement, outreach, even religious education. But that’s another blog post.

If we actively taught—trained, really—our members in the faith and practice of ministry as a personal path, ministries would arise, hopefully even flourish. By “ministry” I mean clear leadings to do something to enrich our members’ spiritual lives or to bring G*d’s love, healing, compassion, and justice into the world. Then we would have some great work to do in our meetings for business in worship, helping to discern and support these leadings—are they spirit-led, what exactly is our Friend led to do, what can we do to help, does our minister need oversight, how do we track the ministry’s progress, when should s/he and we lay it down?

Imagine business meetings so packed with G*d’s work that we have to lay over property decisions, or simply leave them in the hands of our competent property committee! For this kind of work, young people like my son might show up. In fact, they probably would be bringing a lot of the work, if our meetings fostered this kind of religious environment.

One other thing would deepen our business meetings and invite some kingdom-building: extended periods of open worship without an agenda at all, except a kind of non-binding focus on the life of the meeting and its members and on the world we live in, leaving the more open-ended, not-focused worship to our regular meetings for worship.

* Saying “kingdom of G*d” is like saying “mankind”—it carries bad gender baggage, and I would like to use some other phrase. I hope my readers will accept that I mean what the Greek of Christian scripture really connotes with the word “basileus“, which translates clumsily in English. For us, influenced by Latin more than Greek, “kingdom” is an abstract noun. It denotes a place and a state governed by a man. But the Greek basileus is, like most Greek nouns, a verb-noun: it’s a noun built from a verb. So a gerund would be more faithful: “ruling”, without the “-dom” on the end, would be a better translation: the “ruling of God”, rather than the “kingdom of God”, the state in which God rules.

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

December 29, 2013 § 4 Comments

I’ve written quite a bit already about the next items in my outline of What the Religious Society of Friends is for—the role of the community in nurturing the spiritual lives of its members and attenders. I want to revisit some of those themes here and to expand on them to include more of the corporate worship life and fellowship of the meeting itself. Here’s the excerpt from the outline:

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — 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.

By “covenantal community” I mean a meeting in which the members invite the meeting to actively participate in their spiritual lives and offer their own active participation in the life of the meeting. In concrete terms, this means:

Sharing your spiritual and religious experience with the meeting. Does anyone in your meeting know what your spiritual practice is? How you came to Quakerism? Why you stay? What you want from the meeting and whether you are getting it? If you were going through a crisis or a dry period in your prayer life, your family life, your work life, your creative life, would your meeting know? If you were facing an important decision and didn’t see clearly what to do, would you ask for a clearness committee?
- If you asked for a clearness committee, would the meeting know what to do? Would your meeting welcome deeper knowledge of your spiritual life? Would they be prepared to help you with a crisis in your spiritual or prayer life? Does your meeting have elders whose own depth of religious experience would equip them to mentor you or help you with your spiritual life? Are you yourself such an elder, at least potentially? Do you look for opportunities to serve the members of your meeting in these ways?
Eldering. Do you feel that there are people whose behavior disturbs your meeting’s worship or fellowship? Do conflicts trouble your meeting? If you were yourself bringing conflict or disturbance to your meeting, would you welcome loving eldering—the meeting’s caring attention to your behavior?
- Does your meeting act with confidence to protect the worship from inappropriate behavior? Does your meeting act with confidence to protect the fellowship of the meeting? Is your meeting in denial of the conflicts that trouble it? Does your meeting bring accountability up in any way with applicants for membership in its committees for clearness on membership?
Inviting the meeting to help you deepen your spiritual gifts, your vocal ministry, and the other ministries to which you feel called. Have you identified your gifts of the spirit? Are you engaged in some activity outside of meeting that is a ministry, that the meeting doesn’t know about? Do you think of it as a ministry yourself? Do you speak fairly often in meeting? Do you want to deepen your vocal ministry? Do you feel some obstacle to speaking in meeting?
- Would your meeting welcome knowledge of your leadings? Does your meeting do anything concrete to name each other’s gifts of the spirit? Does your meeting know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry well enough to take responsibility for it? Do they know how to conduct a clearness committee for discernment of leadings? Does your meeting provide opportunities to discuss ministry, especially vocal ministry, in general? Does your meeting provide its ministers with committees of support or oversight, or engage with them in any other way?

What if your answers to some of these questions are no? If our “no”s involve the personal queries about our own relation to the meeting, we can start thinking about how to reengage with the meeting. But often, our reticence stems from our sense that our meeting will not be there for us. So what then? What do we do when our meeting does not meet our spiritual needs, either because it does not have the resources, especially the human resources, or it doesn’t have the interest or the will?

Meetings often lack the will to be a true covenantal community in the way I am describing (that is, to work with their members and attenders in a meaningful way to enrich their spiritual lives) because it isn’t in unity about it whether to do it, let alone about how to do it. Some Friends just wouldn’t want to go there, and through tacit understanding, it just never even comes up. And we are so cautious about possibly hurting people or driving them away. In my experience, very often a solid majority of people in the meeting would be uncomfortable with this kind of meeting life, for a variety of reasons.

People come to a meeting and to religious life wanting different things. Most want comfort, support, spiritual companionship, renewal, recharging—peace. Far fewer want transformation, let alone the fire of the spiritual crucible. And yet a meeting should try to meet all these needs, both the comfortable and the uncomfortable.

So a meeting should try to accommodate those of us who want more engagement around our spiritual lives, but hopefully in ways that don’t threaten others, or force them to change in ways they don’t want to, or that pulls the community rug out from under them. This is a delicate balance and hard-to-achieve. Any experiments along the path toward greater engagement and accountability between members and the meeting would inevitably meet obstacles and inevitably, we would make some mistakes.

I’m not sure what to do about this. Naturally, we can’t force our meeting to change just for us, especially if we really are in the minority about this sort of thing. Some meetings might be led in this direction over time—a long time, probably—given some deft leadership.

But it’s awkward—and not often successful—to try to be the leader yourself, the person who teaches the meeting to how meet your needs; to teach the meeting how to conduct clearness committees for discernment, for instance, when you are the one who needs help with discernment; or to teach the meeting how to write a minute for travel when you are the minister who feels the leading to travel.

And it’s even more complicated when eldering is called for, when conflict or inappropriate behavior or weak clerking trouble the meeting. In these cases, bold and wise leadership is called for, and it’s not easy to take the initiative, especially if you’re not serving on a committee that would normally deal with such things.

Very often, in fact, the nominating process is one of the sources of the problem—people appointed to positions for which they lack the depth or knowledge of the Quaker way, or who in areas in which they have a strong opinion or an axe to grind that would obstruct the committee’s effective action. I have seen more than one committee on worship and ministry with a member or two who either know very little about Quaker ministry and/or are uncomfortable with its faith and practice, especially with the role of eldering, and would resist action in these areas. I am not sure what to do in these situations, except perhaps speak with nominating committee about one’s concerns, and see what the next cycle of nominations brings about.

In the easier case of personal ministry and spiritual nurture, the only thing I can think to do is to try the meeting first, to see how far you can go. And then, if it looks like the meeting isn’t going to be able to respond to your needs in a timely fashion, to try to create for one’s self, with others of like mind, a non-formal structure for spiritual exploration, support, nurture, and accountability independent of the meeting’s formal structures. For many Friends in smaller meetings or meetings less amenable to these ideas, this will mean some kind of regional group. In New York Yearly Meeting, the networking for this kind of engagement is quite lively at the Yearly Meeting level, but it hasn’t moved down into the regional meetings very much, as far as I know.

What I’m getting at is that, in many yearly Meetings, there might be opportunities for grassroots networking at the local meeting level around this kind of spiritual nurture that could converge with similar efforts taking place at the yearly meeting level, which could then be relocated at the regional meeting level without too much difficulty. New York Yearly Meeting is too big geographically and meets too seldom as a yearly meeting body to host groups that serve these kinds of spiritual needs very well. But a New York City spiritual nurture group, or an outer Long Island group, or a central or northern New Jersey or Finger Lakes group might be able to meet more regularly.

The model here might be the Experiment with Light groups, which are usually organized, if I am not mistaken, at the local meeting level, but often with participants from nearby meetings; and the spiritual nurture groups formed by the School of the Spirit and by the spiritual nurture programs sponsored by Baltimore and other yearly meetings.

And what would such groups do? The following ideas assume that the local meetings are not willing or able to serve your needs in these ways:

Hold extended periods of open worship, hopefully without a programmed time to end.
Provide opportunities to share the joys, challenges, and evolution of each others’ inner lives, personal practice, and the life of the spirit in general.
Conduct clearness committees for discernment of leadings.
Name each others’ spiritual gifts in some way, and find ways to help each other mature in your gifts.
Share your spiritual practices with each other and provide mentoring in them, if you feel qualified and others show interest.
Create structures for sharing and learning together the faith and practice of Quaker ministry and Quaker spirituality.
Provide support and oversight committees for those following a leading, especially those led to travel in the ministry or to pursue some specific service, and for those who feel called to vocal ministry.
They would not, however, intervene in local meeting situations that require eldering. This, I think, remains the prerogative of the meeting, even if it’s dysfunctional in this area.

Hopefully, within some meetings, such non-formal groups would prove to be seeds for a more robust culture of eldership based in the meeting, once members saw how it worked and how valuable it was for its participants. So these groups should not hide their light under a bushel. Nor should they evangelize out of spiritual pride. But they should be open and inviting to any who would want to participate. For this is one of the things that the Religious Society of Friends is for—corporate nurture and support of personal ministry and spiritual life.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Worship

December 11, 2013 § 4 Comments

A reminder that the original post with the outline of my answers to the question “What is the Religious Society of Friends for?” can be found here.

Note on versions of the survey. After I first published this survey, some Friends with more experience in designing surveys suggested changes and I realized from a comment to this post that I would like to include a section surveying Friends’ own spiritual practice. So I have created a new version of the survey with these changes. But I have not changed the original survey because some people have already been taking it as it was originally published. Here’s the new version of the survey.

What is the Religious Society of Friends for: worship . . .

Give members the experience of direct communion with G*d that is our promise, by fostering deep silence, spirit-prompted vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting.

Many people find that their spiritual lives do not require community. But for Friends, the communal life of the spirit provides an indispensable context for their individual spiritual lives. And for us Quakers, the Quaker way of worship is the bridge between our individual spirituality and our communal religious life.

For, just as the faith and practice of Quaker ministry is the soul of personal Quaker spiritual life, the meeting for worship is the very soul of communal Quaker religious life. And in the meeting for worship, the two fulfill each other. The worshippers bring their vocal ministry to the community in the meeting for worship and, when the ministry is deep and spirit-led, it leads the community into the depths of collective communion with G*d.

Thus the purpose of the Religious Society of Friends is to foster worship “in spirit and in truth”, as the gospel of John puts it. And the purpose of the meeting is to do whatever it can to help its members and attenders find that Well, the wellspring within themselves and the Well at the center of the community’s worship together. The goal of the meeting for worship is to align itself with that Christ-consciousness, to sink into its arms, to rejoice in its embrace, and to follow its truth into peace and reconciliation, into new prophetic revelation, and into the world outside the meetinghouse doors.

Virtually all of us agree, I suspect, about how important the meeting for worship is, both for us as individuals and for the meeting as a whole. Yet I know a lot of Friends who are unsatisfied with at least some aspects of their meeting’s worship, who yearn for more spirit-led vocal ministry, in particular, and for the meeting to be gathered in the Spirit more often. It’s pretty common to hear Friends complain about the quality of their meeting’s worship. So what can we do about it? How do we foster “deep silence, spirit-prompted vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting”?

I’ve written elsewhere about the gathered meeting, how important I think it is, how to nurture it, how it is the fulfillment of the promise of Quakerism: that it is possible to commune collectively and directly with G*d when the meeting is gathered. But the gathered meeting, the deepest communion, does not just happen by itself—well, yes, it can come as unexpected grace. But it depends to a large degree on the depth of the silence and on the quality of the vocal ministry. The gathered meeting is much more likely to occur when the meeting commits itself to providing certain essential forms of support:

religious education that teaches the faith and practices of Quaker worship, vocal ministry, and eldering, so that everyone knows what they are doing when they gather to worship;
spiritual formation efforts that help the members find the spiritual practices that work for them as individuals, so that everyone knows how to seek the depths in their own way and with confidence; and
spiritual nurture efforts that help Friends mature in their practice;
a meeting space that is comfortable, welcoming, and conducive to centering;
a fellowship that is infused with love and emotional maturity, in great enough measure to transform conflict and to absorb or transform the inevitable occasional disturbances to worship; and
elders, Friends who have the spiritual depth, wisdom, and authority to take responsibility for nurturing and protecting the worship.

This last is controversial for some Friends, but I consider it very important.

Every meeting has a committee that is charged with the care and nurture of the meeting for worship and its ministry. Ideally, this committee comprises Friends who know our traditions regarding worship, whose experience of deep silence, spirit-led vocal ministry, and the gathered meeting prepares them to be spiritual nurturers, and who can act to protect and deepen the worship with the full encouragement of the meeting.

But how many meetings have the people they need to fulfill these responsibilities? And how many meetings actually encourage their elders to act on behalf of the worship, to be proactive about deepening it and protecting it?

Virtually every local meeting that I know is rather timid about this, at best. At worst, meetings are actually and actively allergic to any suggestion that something could or should be done proactively to protect or deepen the worship, never mind that someone should act toward these goals. In my experience, very many meetings are more or less paralyzed by a combination of factors and conditions that make action on behalf of deeper worship difficult. These include:

diversity of attitudes about proactive attention to worship and vocal ministry, in the meeting at large and also among those serving on the worship committee itself;
attachment to the status quo and resistance to change;
misplaced fear of leadership;
resistance to discipline as somehow unQuakerly;
strong personalities, especially when these Friends are either ignorant of or ingore-ant of Quaker tradition, or when they let their past wounds and their current baggage color their behavior;
a misplaced fear of hurting Friends’ feelings; and
the suppression of ministry, most often directed (in liberal meetings) toward Christians and ministry that is Christ-centered, evangelizing, biblical, or even just theistic; but sometimes also directed toward prophetic witness; ironically, this suppression often manifests as intolerance in the name of tolerance and exclusion on behalf of inclusiveness and diversity, out of a feeling that the ministry being suppressed is itself exclusionary or intolerant.

Also paradoxically and ironically, Friends often resist proactive attempts to protect or deepen the worship and the vocal ministry precisely because they fear that it will suppress the ministry they already have. God forbid that we should suggest that the messages we get are not spirit-led or not spirit-led enough. That would surely shut down those Friends who do speak, if not drive them away, and then where would we be?

It’s a problem. Even if meetings did not have to deal with the paralyzing factors I’ve described above, it would still be hard to know what to do. How do you try to deepen the worship without implying that it’s not deep enough, which seems tantamount to implying that the worshippers are not deep enough? Even though that may be true.

The only people who would want to hear such criticism would be those who desperately yearn for deeper worship, who know that deeper worship depends on them, and who know that they are not, in fact, deep enough, that they do need to dedicate themselves more faithfully to their own devotional practice. Well, that’s my condition, anyway.

The only way forward through these difficulties, it seems to me, is to have some open and frank conversations about our experience of worship, to get a reading on how well the status quo is serving everyone’s spiritual needs, as a prelude to talking about how to improve—or whether we can try to improve it at all.

Because it’s such a sensitive issue, it might work best to conduct an anonymous survey to start with, and commission some group or committee to gather the results and present a report. Ask some pointed questions and find out what the members and attenders actually think about their meeting for worship without putting them at risk.

If a significant portion of Friends are unhappy with the worship, it would be good to know. If they are unhappy, it would be good to know why. It would be good to know how many Friends are willing to tackle the problems, if they exist. And it would be good to know how many Friends are satisfied with the status quo, who don’t think there is a problem to tackle, who would resent any intrusion into a worship that works for them. After learning where we are, maybe we could have a good conversation about what to do next.

To this end, I have devised such a survey. It includes the questions to which I would like to know the answers. Please let me know what you think. Have I missed some questions that you think need to be asked?

I anticipate that even suggesting using such a survey will trigger some of the responses I’ve outlined. It is tantamount to suggesting that there is a problem with the worship, which some Friends are likely to resist. But what if we know that we are not alone in wanting deeper worship, that other people in the meeting feel as we do? Then we know there is, in fact, a problem. So there we are. It’s harder if we think we are virtually alone in our unhappiness. But maybe we aren’t alone? A survey like this is a way to find out.

These are just queries, after all. We use queries all the time to examine the quality of our religious lives. The only difference here is that these are a bit more pointed than the general ones we have in our books of discipline. But they have the same basic purpose.

If you bring this survey to your meeting, would you please let me know how it goes? I also would like to survey my own readers. Would you be willing? You can either download a Word doc of the survey, fill it out, and email it to me at sddavison@icloud.com, or you can click here to go to a web page that has a survey form. Filling out and submitting this form sends your answers directly to my database of answers.

And thanks!

What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Community

December 4, 2013 § Leave a comment

Foster loving, supportive, and joyful community.

One of the most valuable and unique contributions Friends have made to the religious landscape is the faith and practice of Quaker community.

Faith:

We believe that the life of the Spirit flourishes best in the bosom of loving and supportive community and in community we share its joys and difficulties.
We believe—because we have experienced it—that the worshipping community, like the individual, is capable of direct, unmediated communion with G*d; we call this the gathered meeting for worship.
We believe that through this communion, the worshipping community can be called into collective ministry, just as individuals are called into individual ministries of service of various kinds.
We believe that the meeting has an indispensable role to play in nurturing, supporting, and overseeing the gifts and ministry of its members.
We believe that the meeting also should offer its members loving pastoral care, helping when able in matters temporal, emotional, and spiritual, sharing love in times of both trouble and joy. In particular, meetings conduct meetings for marriage and memorial meetings for those who have died.
We believe that the community helps us fulfill the commandments of love—to love G*d, to love one another, and to love our enemies.
And we rejoice in the fellowship of the Spirit that manifests in the gathered meeting for worship and our love for each other.

Practice:

We conduct our business affairs in meetings for worship, seeking to find divine guidance for our corporate life in that communion. We also conduct marriages and memorials as meetings for worship.
We have evolved tests and tools for the discernment and support of individual ministry and for pastoral care.

Community

I am supremely grateful for the wisdom and care of Margaret Fell and others like her who modeled for early Friends and for us how to nurture religious community; and for the genius of George Fox, who ushered in the infrastructure for Quaker community when he began “bringing gospel order” in the 1660s by organizing monthly meetings and other aspects of our corporate life.

I also believe that loving, welcoming community is one of the three essentials required for the growth of our meetings—for holding onto newcomers who come to test for themselves whether we are their new spiritual home. The other two are a ready and substantive welcome to young families—a first day school that does not require parents to teach their own children instead of joining the worship; and spirit-filled meetings for worship—the deep silence of communion and spirit-filled vocal ministry.

To fulfill this vision of Quaker community, we need:

clerks who know what they are doing;
members who also know “Quaker process”;
Friends with the gift of eldership, who are equipped to provide support and oversight for ministry, including vocal ministry, and spirit-led pastoral care;
Friends with the gift of hospitality, who know how to make everyone feel welcome and at home in the meeting’s fellowship;
Friends with the gift of administration, who know how to run the more mundane aspects of meeting life with joy, humility, and grace;
Friends with the gift of pastoral care, who know how to recognize the needs of our members and attenders and minister to them in good ways; and
the requisites for experiencing the gathered meeting (discussed here),

For many Friends, it seems to me, community is what they are here for. People have different religious temperaments and, while Quakerism is not equipped to fulfill some temperaments, we do offer those with a temperament for community life a uniquely fulfilling spiritual home. Because we have no paid professionals, we must do all the work of the meeting ourselves, and this provides abundant opportunities for Friends who have the community temperament to share their gifts.

This is true for all the spiritual gifts. What a tremendous blessing it is to belong to a community that recognizes our gifts and provides opportunities for their use. It is one of the great joys of my life that my meeting welcomes my gifts, and I am proud of the way my meeting tries to do the same for all its members.

Does your meeting provide opportunities for you and others to exercise their spiritual gifts? Is your worshipping community a rich environment for spiritual fulfillment?

Membership

Finally, membership—arguably the most important aspect of Quaker community, and yet one about which we are perennially confused and even dysfunctional. I have written about this before (Membership, and On Clearness Committees for Membership).

Membership in a Quaker meeting used to commit you to a covenant in which you invited (or at least expected) the meeting to engage with you regarding your spiritual life. That culture of eldership was quite intrusive and eventually (maybe fairly soon) became abusive and self-destructive. In revolt and for good reasons, we abandoned the communal discipline and mutual accountability that discipleship used to entail.

But now we are on our own with our spiritual lives, and it’s hard to follow the life of the spirit without help, at least when it becomes intense or when you are called into ministry. We are not meant to do it alone.

So I think we need to recover some new approach to helping each other along the Way. And that starts with how we conduct our clearness committees for membership.

Well, as I said, I’ve written at length about this before. But I do think that reforming our approach to membership is one of the most important imperatives for renewing the Religious Society of Friends.