This article is based on the George Gorman Memorial Lecture, given during Yearly Meeting Gathering in Canterbury on Sunday 31stJuly 2011. If you want to listen to the lecture you can do so here.. George Gorman Lecture on Nayler
Radical, sustainable Quakerism
In
this article I
explore what radical, sustainable Quakerism might mean for us as a Yearly
Meeting, and how we can respond to the challenges of our age.
What does it mean for Quakerism to be
radical?
The
early Friends were religious radicals. The Quaker message is one of religious
extremism. By extremism I mean beliefs
and practices which are far removed from the ordinary.
Quakers
are extremist in affirming the reality of the Priesthood of all believers. We
don’t just say that anyone can be a
priest. We say that everyone is a
priest. Quakers are extremists in our position on peace. We don’t have a ‘just
war’ principle like other faiths, we say that all violence is unjust. We are extremist in our belief in that of
God in everyone, even those others consider evil. We are extremist in our
decision making, that the will of God is more important than a majority
decision. These are not ordinary ways of doing things in British society which is
increasingly secular. They are extraordinary and they are radical.
But
I think present day Friends have lost that extremism in a desperate search for
more members. Quakerism in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century has slid into ordinariness. I am sure
this started with a desire to be open, accepting and inclusive. The consequence
is that, by trying to become all things to all people Quakers have become
nothing distinctive to anyone.
Quakerism
came into being as a new and radical way to communicate Christianity which had
become institutionalised and distorted by ritual, clergy and power. Early
Friends were radical in that they worshipped when they wanted, how they wanted
and where they wanted. Early Friends met
in barns and fields, George Fox preached in pubs and people’s houses. This
period saw social change; rebellion against the power of the church and a
growth of anti-establishment thinking. The Quaker movement resonated with that.
I
think what Quakers have to say can still resonate with today’s world. Sadly the
way we say things today rarely has much impact on the world. Often we wrap
things up in attempts to be agreeable to all sides and when we do our message
loses it radicalness.
Quakerism
with its emphasis on continuing revelation and an evolving, developing, dynamic
theology[ii]
has been radical in the past and it can be now. However, having a theology so
open that people can believe anything and become a member, shows that we are
scared of remaining connected to our tradition, of being spiritually grounded
and of acknowledging that our ways are based on faith.
I
believe the Religious Society of Friends could once more be as vibrant, radical
and vital as it was in the 1640s and 1650s but only if we operate in ways which
engage with the twenty-first century and relate to how people live, work and
have faith today. If we are not prepared to change in these ways, then we will
continue our slide into ordinariness.
What might it mean for Quakerism to be sustainable?
I
now want to move on to thinking about what being a sustainable faith community
might be like for us as a Yearly Meeting. At Yearly Meeting Gathering we made a
corporate commitment to become a low carbon sustainable community, and while
that is important any action is meaningless if it not rooted in our faith and
guided by the spirit.
As
we take corporate action it is vital that we build a faith community that is
spiritually and organisationally sustainable as well as environmentally
sustainable.
Sustain
means amongst other things; “to maintain or prolong”; “to keep up the vitality
of” “to affirm the validity of”; “to establish the truth of” and “to provide
with nourishment”.
If
all we are prepared to do is prolong Quakerism as it slowly declines into the
obscurity of history then we may as well give up now and lay ourselves down.
I’m
not interested in that, and I don’t believe most other Quakers are, so I’m
going to focus on four other meanings.
Vitality
One of the distinctive characteristics of Quaker
theology is that it is able to evolve and to reflect the age, the social context
and the world around it.
Through this evolution Quakerism has retained a
connection to what the early Friends thought. This was that they had a message
for everyone. Not merely that one or other of their testimonies was especially
relevant to their own time but that message in its wholeness was what the world
needed to hear. That message was that the kingdom of God
wasn’t something that would come in the future but was something that could be
made real here and now.
The message of the early Friends should be our
message today, not that sustainability is more important than peace, or
equality is more important than simplicity but that all are vital aspects of
building the Kingdom.
What this might look like in twenty-first century Britain is very different to how it looked in
seventeenth-century Britain.
Currently Quakerism doesn’t reflect, respond to or speak to contemporary
society effectively. I think that in a desire to be welcoming and inclusive
we’ve hidden the heart of our theology.
We need to recapture the vitality of the Quaker
message that that we are called to be a
community guided by God here and now witnessing to a world built on love and
peace rather than violence and greed. We need to think in new ways about how we
might do this. We need to understand our
purpose and only do what is essential to our life as a religious community.
Being religious is the core of our vitality. Sometimes
I wonder whether we have become only activists, campaigning on the latest issue
that we become political or philosophically or personally interested in. If we
can’t find an essentially Quaker basis for doing something we need ask whether
we should be doing it at all?
If Britain Yearly Meeting wants to become a secular
campaigning organisation like Oxfam or Friends of the Earth, or a social club then
we can. But let us take that decision honestly. If you want friendship and
community that’s fine. If you want to be an activist that’s fine. If you want
to explore your spirituality that’s fine. If you want to do any of this without
being communally connected to God/the light/the spirit or however we describe
our understanding that there is something which is more than just us, then is
the Religious Society of Friends the place for you?
Central to our corporate life is our worship and as
Quakerism has changed so has Quaker worship. Early Friends worshiped for hours,
Friends in the eighteenth century thought silence was so precious that they
rarely ministered. Quakers in Britain
have made silence so central that we worship the silence rather than worshiping
in the silence. Worship tends to be restricted to an hour on Sunday morning. We
sit together in silence but are separate and do very different things. We need to move
away from the idea that silent Quaker worship on Sunday morning is the only way
to authentically express our identity as Quakers. What
was right for early Friends or for Quakers fifty years ago might not be right
for us now.
We already have semi-programmed worship in our
Yearly Meeting such as epilogue especially at events and gatherings. Is that a
lesser form of worship? Is ministry offered in semi-programmed worship any less
from God? We must explore new approaches to
worship, including semi-programmed worship, where silence is still the basis
but which enable different types of people, and people of all ages, to engage
with our relationship with God/, or however we
describe our understanding that there is something which is more than just us.
We
must not idolise silent worship just because we think some Quakers have worshiped
that way for three and a half centuries. Any occasion where people of any and
every age come together in worship and meaningfully renew their connection with
God and with each other, is vital to our well-being as a religious society. The
length of silence isn’t important, it’s the depth. You can have deep silence
that only lasts a moment. The deepest worship I have experienced was a couple
of years ago with a group of 12 to 15 year olds, sat round a bonfire. There was lots of ministry with deep,
powerful but quite short silence between contributions. Being a Quaker is not
about keeping quiet but knowing when to speak, what to say and how to listen.
Nourishment
The
second key aspect of making Quakerism sustainable is that it must provide us
with nourishment. How much of the work of our local meetings focuses on keeping
the building running, doing the accounts, filling the roles we’re told by
tradition that we need? How much, by contrast is spent on nourishing ourselves
spiritually as individuals and as a community?
We
need to do less and talk more. We need to talk as meetings, to talk about our
faith, to talk about God, about what we believe as individuals and as a
community. It is vital that we live in meetings and in a Religious Society
where there is a culture of sharing, and where the theological diversity and
new forms of individual belief don’t remain hidden in the silence of meeting
for worship or the busy-ness of keeping the meeting going. This sharing nurtures
and nourishes spiritual communities and is vital to enabling us to be open to n
new leadings which in turn means our faith as Quakers can develop.
As
Quakers we talk about being pilgrims on a shared journey. But how this can be real if we don’t know where the
people we worship with are on their spiritual journey? When we don’t know what each
other believes, how can we support and care for each other as fellow Quakers?
We
don’t have a creed so we have nothing everyone has signed up to that we can
refer to. Not having a creed gives us greater responsibility to understand and
articulate what unites us. Quakerism is hard work. Because we’ve rejected most of
the outward structures that other faiths have we need to talk more about what we
believe. The only way we can find the spiritual nourishment that each of us
needs and that our meetings need is to share deeply.
Truth
The
third thing we need to do to make Quakerism sustainable is to affirm our Truth.
One
of the most damaging and insidious characteristics of current British Quakerism
is that there is a tyranny of the individual and small pressure groups. Because
we are scared of excluding people, we end up saying, in relation to belief,
that ‘anything goes’. This gives power to the individual over the community. It
allows one person or a small group to veto decisions they’re unhappy with or
push through things that are their personal projects. This happens because we
listen to ourselves more than we listen to God. Often in our meetings one
person’s trenchant opinions are allowed to block a properly discerned decision
because we think we should be seeking unanimity or even consensus. In being part of any community, like a workplace or a school or a family
we have to give up some of our own personal preferences. The same is true of
the Religious Society of Friends. If we want to be part of an intentional
spiritual community then we have to we have to make sacrifices. Often these
sacrifices will be of our own self-interest.
If
we as a Quaker community are going to establish the truth of who we should be,
what we should be saying and what we should doing, we need to seek what God
wants us to be and say and do, rather than who we as individuals or as a group want to say and do.
We as meetings and as a Yearly Meeting need to
discern our truth and speak it to the power of individualism and self centeredness
amongst Friends. If a community is true
to itself as a corporate body then there will be times that it makes decisions
that put previously loved members beyond the bounds of the community.
What
can we as Quakers say that our truth is? Is it even possible for us to say
collectively ‘this is our truth as a Yearly Meeting’? I think we can. The
decision about same sex marriage taken at Yearly Meeting Gathering in York, the decision to call
for a boycott on goods from Israeli settlements and the decision made at YMG to
become a low carbon community were such moments. These weren’t decisions all
Quakers were happy with, they didn’t follow a particular pressure group, but they
were the right decision for our Yearly Meeting.
An essential Quaker principle is integrity. As the
Religious Society of Friends we need to establish and stick to our shared
purposes and if I am not prepared to give account to my religious community for
how I live out those principles then how can I remain part of the community?
Yes we need to support each other but we also need to lovingly challenge each
other.
As
well as speaking our truth within our Quaker meetings and within the Yearly
Meeting we also need to speak it publicly and proclaim it to the world. Maybe
‘proclaim’ isn’t a very Quakerly word but I believe that’s what we must do more
of, proclaiming our Truth, so that the world know who Quakers are, what they
believe and stand for.
Validity
It is what we do, how we live our lives as
individuals and as a Yearly Meeting, that affirms the validity of the truth we
have to speak to the world.
Once we know what our truth is, when we know who we
are and what we have to say we can think about what we are here to do, what our
purpose as Quakers is.
We must consider what we as Quakers, as local
meetings and as a Yearly Meeting are here to do. We need to look at every piece
of work we do in every Quaker organisation and ask “how does this fit with our purpose,
our reasons for being”. We shouldn’t be asking whether it is good or worthy or
how long we have been doing it. Much of
the work we do may be good and worthy and Friends may be very attached to it
but it may also be taking energy from our key purposes as a Yearly Meeting.
We do things that we have always done merely
because we have always done them and because Quaker faith and practice tells us that we need to, we hear reports
and appoint people to committees. These
take time and energy. How many meetings struggle to fill nominations, even
seemingly flourishing meetings. How many of these roles are truly necessary to
our life as a faith community. How often do we ask ‘is this what God is calling
us to do’? We need to put our resources
where they can make a difference and realise where they can’t and not worry
about them. We can’t be vital and energetic when buildings and organisational
stuff takes up so much time.
I believe as Quakers we do have a message that
people want and need to hear but we are failing to reach out to people who are
seeking to engage with this message.
This isn’t about getting bums on seats, it is not
about numbers. It is about saying clearly ‘this is who we are, if you agree
with us, come and join us.’
If someone comes to a Quaker meeting they might
find out from a leaflet, or a conversation after meeting, but will they know
what is going on in the silence or what the person next to them believes?
If we want to engage with people, we must develop
sustainable ways of being in spiritual community which nourish rather than sap
our energy, which enable us to identify what it is we are called to do and to
do it. At the same time we have to rediscover and reconnect with our roots
This doesn’t mean that we all have to go on a
Quaker history course or read dusty books. What it means is that we need to
reconnect with why the early Friends were led to do what they did – that they
believed they were led from within, that they were bound together by the unity
of the Spirit and they believed in transforming the world here and now. That’s
truly radical.
We need to be extremist and
extraordinary in saying that we are living as if the Kingdom of God is already
here, we need to be accountable to each other and to the Quaker communities
which we are part of in living that kingdom. We need to be clearer and more
open in what we say and how we say it.
How can we do this?
Right
now, the existence of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain is at stake.
If
we choose to do nothing then in 50 years we won’t be having Yearly Meeting
Gathering. If we choose to identify our purposes as
a Yearly Meeting and act on them; if we choose to change in ways that retain
our core Quaker beliefs but engage with how people live, work and have faith
today; then who knows, in fifty years time there might be
50,000 people at Yearly Meeting rather than 1,500.
We
have to honestly examine our Religious Society of Friends. However, it’s just that,
ours. All of ours, it doesn’t belong to any one of us alone. It is not mine,
it’s not the Clerk of Yearly Meeting’s, it’s not the Recording Clerk’s, it
doesn’t belong to the elders in your
meeting, it doesn’t just belong to the loudest voice, or the most persistent
Friend, it doesn’t just belong to a JYMer or to someone of five on the
children’s programme. It belongs to all of us and we all have a responsibility
to consider these questions collectively.
I
believe that all Quakers need to talk about this seriously, and then have that
conversation again with each other and to move beyond talking to doing.
This
process won’t be easy. People will get hurt. But I’m not a Quaker because it is
easy. I’m a Quaker because I am convinced now, right now that it is my faith
community and where I belong spiritually.
Change
is difficult but it is also inevitable. We can choose the change we want or we
will face the change of the Religious Society of Friends dying out. I believe we must move forward but we must do
it lovingly, remembering as Isaac Pennington wrote that:
Our life is
love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving
one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one
for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand (Britain Yearly Meeting: Quaker faith and practice 10.01).
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