They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others Photo: William Penn
Laboratory of the Spirit?
Alec Davison shares The Kindlers’ vision of spiritual renewal
Jonathan Fox’s suggestion, at the December Meeting for Sufferings, as he concluded his good service as clerk to Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees, was music to the ears of those of us in the Kindlers team. He talked of re-visioning the roles of travelling ministers as an agency for helping to create more vibrant Meetings. For nearly five years now The Kindlers, an ‘inreach’ project of North West London Area Meeting and sister to Quaker Quest, its outreach project, has responded to the BYM’s five-year Framework for action. This calls for more experimentation in our worship and our witness. As well as developing resources and publications, partly from extended courses at Friends House, London, we have travelled widely throughout Britain Yearly Meeting.
At the invitation of local Friends, we have been able to work with scores of Meetings around issues that lie at the heart of the Society’s spiritual life. Witness fifty Friends gathering recently to explore forgiveness, in our current ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ series. Not being a large team, we can also focus and reflect together on our findings from these experiences, to devise new ways of responding to perceived needs. It is a practical action-research venture.
Keen seekers
The Society today is in a place where it has never been before. Partly because of the success of recent outreach undertakings, there are many newcomers who are keen seekers for a way of life that is more meaningful than endless materialism but who have little history of spiritual or religious engagement. For many the Bible is virtually an unknown land. They are more impatient than longer standing Friends for a clearer understanding about our worship and our lifestyle. They expect well-articulated answers to their questions in twenty-first century language. At the same time most Friends are convinced rather than birthright, and there is an increasing loss of ‘weighty Friends’ through death and disillusionment, as they feel the Society is losing its spiritual roots; but this is a story that is also heard throughout many Christian denominations.
Travelling ministers
The Kindlers are asking, How can we better support and prepare local elders for their spiritual role? Friends now become elders much sooner after newly joining the Society. Some Meetings have even abandoned them. Without spiritually experienced elders how can we deepen and revivify our faith?
The best of recent projects is Being a Quaker, where members of a Meeting, however innocent of Quakerism, can learn together relying on the expertise in the materials. This is an excellent resource. But, as well, the very kind of people who are Quakers need a BYM-wide people-interacting-with-people medium of induction and learning that will lead into spiritual practices that are ways of opening to touch deep places.
We are proposing that the Society develops, again, a concept of travelling ministers, who may, in part, be spiritual teachers and, in part, be spiritual enablers/companions. In recent decades, although many Quakers are teachers, Friends have been ambivalent about being taught.
However, there are now enactive and participatory ways of learning through experience and facilitation that can speak to a Meeting’s condition without being too didactic or overbearing. It will be a workshop rather than a lecture style. There is much about Quaker/Christian/spiritual developments that we have to learn. But where can we turn when we need our own spiritual direction? Some Friends find a good liberal Catholic to help them experience a human depth and spiritual understanding that is difficult to find in the Society today. If travelling ministers were more rigorously prepared and trained this might not always need to be so.
What if there were a Quaker ‘Laboratory of the Spirit’ that could help in the development of travelling ministers? Their task would be to journey in pairs to Meetings, from a regional base, and work with elders and Friends on deepening their spiritual practices and engaging in lively learning. The laboratory would be a centre of experiment, action-research and spiritual education. There has never been anything quite like it in BYM’s history.
Spiritual needs
Woodbrooke runs an excellent ‘Equipping for Ministry’ course to prepare Friends for taking Quaker values into life at large, but not for working as facilitators to the spiritual needs of their Local Meetings. One imagines that such a preparation would be much longer than our usual weekend trainings – say three ten-week blocks of one whole day a week (Fridays or Saturdays) over a year. Being non-residential, costs could be kept accessible. It would range over appropriate contemporary spiritual/religious issues, train in techniques and strategies for group learning, and give rich experiences in worship, some of it experimental, but all of it about the growth of new inner life.
We are finding Friends around the country who feel they would have a calling for such work, but there is currently no opportunity. With those now retired, often early, and growing numbers who will be unemployed, this is not as absurd as it sounds. It would be a step of faith and need us to be bold and resolute, but we have nothing to lose, if the alternative is waffling and inertia.
In essence, a ‘Laboratory of the Spirit’ would inspire us to stand again where early Friends stood, also in the midst of troubled times. Their discovery of the inward light enabled them to explore their experiences, embrace their hurts, learn from them, and let the Seed within grow and flourish. They found a way of courage that transformed grief, pain and despair into an energy for facing social change. They became a movement in which the change and development of the individual became the condition for the change of an evolving Society.
A new vision
As William Penn wrote, ‘They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others’. They became researchers ‘on the hoof’ into matters of the Spirit, speaking their findings to the world not just to themselves. Theirs was a communal searching, testing, discovering and finding. It was research in action. Our times are also disjunctive: as the economic system fails, the ethics of those in authority flounders, the industrial-military complex dominates and climate change threatens.
Our generation cries out for new vision. Quakers are still a resurrection/Pentecostal people and, like the phoenix, can rise from our contemporary fires reborn. The fire cleanses and purifies, burning away the old – painfully but in a way that transforms – to create something vibrant and new.
The Kindlers are keen for Friends to work with us in offering positive proposals about new and original ways to help in the spiritual renewal of the Society, as well as commenting on our own thinking. A conference in October this year, ‘Visioning New Fire’, which is to be held at Woodbrooke, will address the subject. We hope it will be a seminal, forward-looking event and generate a lot of enthusiasm – through workshops, worship and song – and involve the threshing of constructive ideas that can be put to the Society.
Visioning new fire
If the Society is really going to take off, like a firebird, it needs more action-research and more experiential experiment to sustain that upward flight. It needs a Laboratory of the Spirit. For real WHOOSH!, it needs more OOMPH!
For further information about the ‘Visioning New Fire’ conference contact Gill Sewell: gill.sewell410@gmail.com
