One of the key parts of George Fox’s revelation was that religious structures can kill the free movement of the Spirit. That was one of the main reasons the early Quakers left their gatherings unstructured: to allow the Spirit to give worship its form every time. I think George Fox recognized how deeply embedded the human need for structure is: after we have found an experience we like, we try to recreate the experience with the use of structure.
My Ffriend R has advocated the practice of disbanding the Religious Society of Friends every 5o years. He believes that the spark of the initial vision and passion of religious groups only survives for about 50 years before developing structures start to choke the movement of the Spirit. Then expectations of ”correct” practice take over, and the authentic fire gets doused. So R would disband the RSoF after 50 years, believing that a new RSoF (perhaps with a different name) would arise out of the ashes of the first group and be helpful for about 50 years, after which the structure would become harmful and the RSoF should be laid down again.
I think R’s idea is a bit too radical, perhaps. And yet…
Many Meetings around the USA have taken “sabbaticals” during the past decade or so. They needed a break from the weight of their committees and regular work. More recently I’ve heard that at least one Yearly Meeting (Pacific) and several Monthly Meetings (North Seattle Friends Church and University Friends Meeting here in Seattle) have decided to set aside a year to discern what the group’s needs are and what kind of a structure is most conducive to worshiping God and being faithful to God’s call in the world.
My own liberal Meeting, Salmon Bay, has just taken its own major steps. Despite worship being strong and deep for a while now, there is little life outside the hour of worship. Many members report feeling a sense of heaviness in relationship to Meeting, and our newcomers find it hard to get involved in the Meeting. Nominating Committee has struggled for years to fill all the committee positions and responsibilities for our Meeting. This year we were unable to put together a Nominating Committee: No-one wants the task of asking someone to take on yet another responsibility. Something had to be done.
First a little background: Our Meeting consists primarily of youngish families, with very few retired members with time to give to the Meeting. Most of our adult members have full-time commitments to family needs or very demanding paid work and have little energy left over for the Meeting structure. And yet there are almost as many offices to be held as there are adult members of our Meeting.
Now Salmon Bay’s Ministry & Worship Committee (on which I serve) has suggested to our Meeting, based on the model of our local evangelical church, North Seattle Friends Church, that we enter into a 6 month trial period of suspending as much of the old structure as we can. During that time we will put our focus on worship and fellowship. We will have a potluck on our regular business meeting Sunday, and if there is business that requires the full Meeting’s attention, we will have a short business Meeting, but only for matters of substance. Otherwise we will just eat together and talk with each other.
We want to change the way we think about our role as a Meeting – rather than being there to test leadings and ensure that everything under the Meetings’s auspices happens according to “good order”, we want to be encouragers and cheerleaders when vision emerges or energy flows. We want to help the Fire burn stronger and hotter!
We have proposed that our clerk take care of correspondance and outside requests in executive fashion, consulting with members of M&W/Oversight when needed. M&W and Oversight would continue to meet, but only to care for worship and our members in the most immediate ways, not to do any seasoning/pre-discernment for business that will come before the Meeting as a whole. There would be childcare, but we aren’t sure whether there will be children’s education, or adult education for that matter. Perhaps we will just use that time for intergenerational fellowship? In the past we have only had 20 minutes for fellowship each week, and I think many of us feel like we are strangers to each other.
In other words, we don’t want to try to serve the structure Quakers created more than 350 years ago. We want to rekindle the flames and devote ourselves again to the Fire. Then, when our attention is on the Fire, we can create whatever structure is appropriate based on our condition.
Isn’t that what Quakerism is truly about – being attentive so that the Letter of the law doesn’t kill the Spirit?
Query for prayerful consideration:
What are the needs of the Quaker group in which I worship? Do other Quaker groups (in my own branch of Quakerism and in others) have creative ideas which we might borrow to help keep structure from killing the Spirit?
11 comments
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April 18, 2008 at 12:36 pm
cath
Susanne–my Meeting always has a pitch-in fellowship meal after each Meeting for Business. The secent of warming cassaroles lends a certain homey quality to the tasks at hand.
At any rate, these meals are part of our “strucutre” but they don’t feel that way. And we haven’t had to abandon anything else to have them.
I’m glad to see that you’ve got pitch-ins on your agenda. I think you’ll find that they are a great way to stay involved with each other. Pretty soon, people will know their contribution niche (salad? pie?) and a structure that no one minds will have been developed.
cath
April 18, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Susanne Kromberg
Yes, I think breaking bread and drinking wine – literally or figuratively – are part of the glue of community. Salmon Bay Meeting was born out of group that gathered together for weekly potlucks. Somewhere along the way the weekly potlucks ended, and somehow a regular alternative opportunity for fellowship wasn’t created. Today only three of the original potluckers are in our Meeting, members have died, moved away or chosen a different spiritual community. Most of members have joined after the potlucks ended. We missed out on the shared stories and meals, we weren’t “bonded” in.
Another important part of the glue is redefining what members need in order to be faithful to God. In the early days, when enthusiasm and energy abounded, it was important for members to test one anothers’ leadings and discern carefully together, being careful no-one rush into things. Now that energy is low, perhaps we need to be encouragers and nurturers of any little flame that flickers…
And I think things will change again, and we’ll need to reshape our structure.
Susanne
April 20, 2008 at 6:29 am
Allison
Hm, disbanding every 50 years… interesting. Yes, a bit too radical, but it would be nice if there were some kind of renewal process when a Meeting starts to become dull/uninspired.
Sometimes I have felt that I’d like to start a worship group that states from the very beginning that it intends to be radically inclusive and multicultural. It almost seems easier to start a new one than to bring people into a Meeting that is dominated by one class and one race.
From Liberal Quaker Heresies: Part I, 2008/04/20 at 6:11 AM
April 20, 2008 at 6:42 am
Susanne Kromberg
I like your idea, Allison. Sometimes it is easier to build inclusive community from the foundation up.
Hm… here’s a new idea: rather than close down the Religious Society of Friends every 50 years, maybe what we need to do is revision each Quaker Meeting every 50 years – or sooner, if the Meeting is losing its vitality. Then we could state clearly a vision of who and what we are called to be. And I don’t mean by that the tired old mission statements that managers like organizations to have. I mean a deep spiritual quest and recommitment that the Meeting engages in as a whole.
Quakers CAN and do rebuild ourselves from the foundation up when we know we need to.
I hope that is something of what is happening in the Meetings that are taking a year off for discernment – that they are rebuilding from the foundation up. And I hope radical inclusivity is part of the new foundation!
Susanne
April 20, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Mariah Boone
I’m surprised at their being so many committee positions in your meeting if no one wants to do them. We have a tiny Meeting of busy folk and we have maybe two positions – sort of. Our clerk, in whose house we meet – he receives mail, opens his home, and chops up fruit mainly for Meeting – and me , the First Day School teacher. I ask questions of our two young Friends, provide reading material and do some slight facilitation of learning (and dote upon our 3 little friends). No committees. We may decide on more when we can handle more, but what we have is precious.
April 21, 2008 at 9:00 am
Susanne Kromberg
Mariah, I am glad to hear that you have such a good match between your Meeting’s needs and its structure.
At Salmon Bay, I think the committees and offices were appropriate to channel the vision and life of the Meeting at the time when they were created. Some 20 years later, though, some members have moved away, some died, and new people have joined. The old structure – instead of being a vehicle for the work of the Spirit – has become a dead weight under which the Meeting buckles.
I don’t think my Meeting’s situation is unique. As I mentioned above, there are many, many Meetings in the USA and elsewhere (I know it’s true in Norway YM too) that are in the same situation. Life in many Meetings has changed while our structures have not.
I suspect we have an easier time of creating structures out of nothing in response to a need than shrinking and laying down structures when they are no longer needed.
April 22, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Mariah Boone
That makes sense. Our Meeting got so small and flickering that it almost got laid down a decade ago, but we decided we didn’t need to do that – we like being a Meeting even if we function more like a Worship Group.
April 22, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Timothy Travis
Hey Suzanne, long time no see. Hope all is well.
Frankly, the Society, at least in our independent and united domain, reinvents itself more frequently than every fifty years. We don’t “disband” it but those who come in from elsewhere–the majority of us–change “Quakerism” at least as much as “Quakerism” changes us. Seems to me “Quakerism” changes so often that it doesn’t really have a definition, anymore.
One result is that State of the Society Reports read like Christmas letters and most minutes of concern sound like press releases from the Democratic Party. Friends have little idea about the past. After all, how many people in North Pacific Yearly Meeting know anything about Joel and Hannah Bean? Why should they? A concern about the fractured nature of the Society and the schisms and division are so irrelevant to us.
Forms were developed in response to needs and if they don’t meet the need anymore or if the need isn’t there anymore then they should be laid down. Arbitrarily laying them down–or laying them down as a form, itself, or on some schedule–may well be a good thing to do.
Yet, for some reason Friends at some time thought that this or that was necessary. Perhaps one should know and understand, first ,why the form came to be. Perhaps not. Perhaps those who came before us didn’t know as much about the Spirit as we do and they just were just trying to hide what they didn’t know, to begin with.
Or, perhaps, that’s what we are trying to do in shedding a faith and practice as though the new Spring fashions were just arriving. Oh, that Penn stuff is just so last week!
Hope to see you at Annual Session…
April 23, 2008 at 2:45 am
piotr
I publish your article with a french translation on our blog. (6 may 2008 )
The occasion to us to think on our action on the Web
http://quakers.blogs.nouvelobs.com/
Piotr
April 23, 2008 at 7:01 am
Susanne Kromberg
Timothy,
Thanks for your comments. They made me realize I made an assumption in what I wrote – namely that we would be prayerful, practical, and intentional about reconfiguring ourselves. Without prayer, pragmatism, and intention, of course, any changes we made would be meaningless or could even be unhelpful.
I think when you talk about re-inventing ourselves, you’re talking about our beliefs and understanding of ourselves, and I agree that we keep re-inventing ourselves in those ways. And then it is usually without afore-mentioned prayer, pragmatism, and intention – and it is often detrimental to the RSoF. Structurally, however, I don’t think we re-invent ourselves nearly often enough. I think we have a tendency to forget that the structure exists only for the purpose of doing our human part of keeping the Fire burning!
Unfortunately I will probably miss you at North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM) Annual Sessions this year – it appears that I have the good fortune again to have been appointed to be NPYM’s official visitor to our evangelical counterpart, Northwest Yearly Meeting. I hope our paths cross again soon, though!
Piotr,
Merci beaucoup. C’est une honneur que vous pouvez utilizer quelque-chose que j’ai ecrit. (Pardonnez moi parce-que je ne parle pas beaucoup de Francais.)
Susanne
June 14, 2008 at 11:01 am
Jay T
About three years ago, my meeting (Corvallis in North Pacific YM) was in a similar spot for nominating. We lay down the committees that existed mostly just to get the work done: social, house & grounds and peace & social concerns. We kept three committees: Nominating, Religious Education (all ages) and Ministry & Oversight. They each have ongoing, more or less regular meetings and develop some cohesion as a committee. Out of that and their discernment of the Way that is opening, they guide the work that’s usually done by such committees.
The other work is carried out with the coordination of six volunteer coordinators: Meeting House Maintenance, Gardening, Communications, Representation, House & Hospitality. Each year, each Friend on our mailing list is given the opportunity to be listed as a potential volunteer under one (or more) of the areas. It’s OK not to be listed as a volunteer.
When work or inspiration arises in one of those areas, the volunteer coordinator finds out and asks for a volunteer from the list or guides the work of the volunteer with the inspiration. If asked, it’s OK to say, “Not me for this one.”
We’ve tested our original leading on this structure at least three times. We’ve changed it recently by moving Children’s Religious Ed to a sixth volunteer coordinator. We’re considering a new way to facilitate concerned social action.
The scheme seems to work OK for us. At least as well as having more committees would. Because there are fewer positions to fill and less guilt involved with the process, it makes the job of Nominating Committee easier.
Jay T.