‘Our business method and our formal structures depend more than perhaps we realised on our informal relationships.’
It’s good to talk: Beth Allen says informal conversation is important for the Quaker business method
‘I am sad to lose some aspects of the past, but I don’t despair.’
Can conversations help us make good decisions? I think we might be able to answer this question by looking at a few things I’ve observed in the development of our Friendly community. I’m not a sociologist; what follows are just my own amateur reflections.
Back 150 years ago, our community of British Quakers was mostly a close-knit group of interrelated families and tribes. In Friends House library, I have seen one of these family trees spread out sideways, over at least six horizontal feet, showing links and marriages, with second and third cousins carefully listed (the family irreverently called it the ‘Stud Book’!). This was only one of many clans. These large families worked together, wrote each other long letters, and appointed each other as trustees of the family trusts that supported Quaker and other work.
Some Friends retired early, so that they could give themselves more fully to Friends’ service, locally and nationally. At Friends House there was a big reading room called ‘the Institute’, set up as a club, where Quakers passing through London could stop for a few hours, meet each other, write letters, eat in the restaurant, and drop in on the staff. In those days the families also sat on Quaker committees together. The London-based work was run by these committees and, about once a month, in Committee Week, Friends would stay in London with family members, attend Meetings during the day, and eat and talk together in the evenings. In those days the work was not centrally managed, but friendship and family networks linked it together, and people knew what was going on.
On Fridays, Meeting for Sufferings met, with its agenda written up that morning on a blackboard in the entrance hall. This agenda might have developed during the week as the independent committees met. It’s very likely that, during the previous few days, much of the Society’s work was talked over informally around the family supper tables. In this way formal decisions were made after a great deal of informal discussion. This does not mean that decisions were rigged, or that the Spirit didn’t move us! But matters were decided by people who mostly knew each other very well, and the decisions made in our formal structures were based on a lot of underlying conversations, friendships and relationships.
Even fifty years ago, it was possible to observe how the bush telegraph of family links could quickly take news across the Yearly Meeting, supplemented by groups such as the Friends Homosexual Fellowship, as it then was, and all the other special interest and friendship groups that networked support, information and gossip. On Sunday mornings, my mother would regularly prepare extra potatoes for our lunch so that a newcomer at Meeting could be invited home, and a new friendship might begin. We ate Monthly Meeting teas together, we met for study weekends, and we shared cars and train journeys as we travelled to events. Local Meetings, Area Meetings and national committees met residentially; we gathered and chatted at Woodbrooke, at Cober Hill, at Lattendales, at Summer Gatherings and week-long Yearly Meetings. Staff groups had regular teatimes together, and the Friends House restaurant gave us all sorts of opportunities for meeting and talking. So the quiet community was underpinned and held together by a shared chatty talkative life.
Today, our wider society is far more fractured. We are all distracted by so many other calls on our time: the good causes we are involved in, our phones, caring for older family members, or travelling for work. If we are the lone Quaker in our family, it is hard to take time away from family life. Early retirement, which enables so much voluntary work, has become a vanishing dream for many.
After the height of the Covid pandemic, it took a while before we remembered how to behave informally together. Lots of us are naturally introverted, and it has been hard to get out of habits of shielding, withdrawal and silence. Many of us older Quakers don’t go out much; we don’t meet each other so often. Thank goodness for Zoom, which enables us to meet for business without using so much of the planet’s resources – but you can’t have a shared lunch on Zoom!
Woodbrooke’s online courses bring us together, but we can’t talk between sessions as we used to in its dining room. In our Yearly Meeting sessions, we see each other on our screens across the miles, but we don’t breathe the same air, we can’t chat. Many of us meet on social media and we are learning to build communities there, but some older Friends don’t move easily in that world. Friendships, networks and trusting relationships need cultivation, time, energy, and opportunity.
I think our business method and our formal structures depend more than perhaps we realised on our informal relationships. It’s good, of course, that our community is no longer tribal, and that we welcome so many new Quakers. It’s good for all of us that we have to explain our unwritten systems and practices. The residential events were costly; going to Summer Gathering as a family became almost prohibitively expensive. But we have lost so much of the informal unnoticed conversation which built us together as a community.
I am sad to lose some aspects of the past, but I don’t despair. We are in a new situation, like all the first Quakers – and let’s remember, all the early Quakers were new Quakers! Their solid base was a firm grasp of essential principles, and a firm faith that they could meet the Divine Spirit together in silent worship.
Today, enterprising Friends with experience of IT and social media, together with savvy staff at Britain Yearly Meeting, have got us using social media for outreach, for business, for shared thinking and funny stories, and for keeping our Meetings together. Our local development workers, now within reach of every Quaker in Britain, are helping us to rebuild and link our overstretched communities.
Of course the Friend keeps us in touch too, with personal, regional, national and international Quaker thinking and news, whether we read the paper and ink, or the online version. The Friends Quarterly helps too, as do the other printed and online magazines from organisations like Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs, the Friends Historical Society, the Friends Fellowship of Healing, as well as all the local newsletters.
I hope that at every level of British Quakerism we can consciously consider how we can make opportunities to get to know each other better, locally, regionally and nationally. This will all help us to make good decisions together, grounded in our shared principles, our worship and faith, good trusting relationships… and lots of friendly conversations.
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