Photo: By Ben White on Unsplash.
Man on a mission: Clive Ashwin compares Quaker and evangelical worship
‘The experience was illuminating.’
I once attended a service at an evangelical church in London. I confess that my reason was not primarily to worship, but to find an old friend who, I was told, attended this church. The experience was illuminating, and led me to reflect upon aspects of Quaker practice.
The service was led by a dynamic minister who generated a great deal of interaction with, and between, members of the congregation. At one point we were asked to stand and embrace the person on either side of us.
The minister pointed to me and said, ‘I see a new face at the back! Have you come looking for Jesus?’ I didn’t want to disappoint him by telling him that, in truth, I had come looking for my friend Sandra, so I mumbled something incomprehensible.
The service did not rule out brief, spontaneous exclamations of faith from members of the congregation, which were clearly welcomed as part of the mix. Although at first this seems remote from the traditional Quaker act of worship, I began to see correspondences. A spontaneous declaration such as ‘Praise the Lord’ from a member of the congregation could be seen as an equivalent to the Quaker notion of spoken ministry: brief, but just as appropriate, and sincere. The pastor’s desire to know why I had come along was another way of expressing a genuine interest in someone new joining a church, although in a Quaker context it would be more likely to be done over coffee after Meeting.
The experience led me to ask myself, what is the basic structure of the Quaker Meeting for Worship? Is there such a thing? How important is it? (The following remarks apply only to Britain Yearly Meeting. Elsewhere in the world different structures are often used.)
Although Quakers have a high degree of self-determination at Local Meeting level, the majority, I believe, follow the outline of a common, shared structure. This structure can consist of four parts.
The first part is gathering, the simple fact of coming to the place of the scheduled Meeting, whether in a recognised Meeting house or elsewhere. There is normally a Friend to offer a brief greeting on arrival. When the first worshipper enters the Meeting space, it is assumed that the Meeting for Worship has begun. Arriving Friends try to avoid unnecessary noise outside the Meeting space. Conversations do not continue into the Meeting space, where earlier arrivals are already centring down.
The second part is the Meeting for Worship itself. The approximate anticipated duration of the Meeting is normally indicated in advance. Its close is signalled by a simple handshake between two appointed Friends.
The third part is Notices, usually delivered by the clerk or a delegate. These are traditionally brief, formal and of general interest to the Meeting, such as forthcoming fixtures and dates, collections, and other events of general importance. A notice is not generally an invitation to elicit a prolonged response or discussion.
The fourth and final part is normally a period of social exchange and interaction. This sometimes takes place in a space other than the Meeting room, often in an adjoining service area. It provides an opportunity to develop social relations, catch up with personal news, and so on.
Most Friends might feel that what I have said is obvious. However, what I want to focus on here is how we deal with the interfaces of the four parts I have described, and the transitions between them.
The first interface, between stages one and two, is, I trust, obvious and uncontroversial. When anyone has arrived in advance of the Meeting time, and is trying to centre down, they don’t want to have an extraneous social conversation imposed upon them by later arrivals.
The second interface, between worship and notices, is similarly straightforward. Discretion can be exercised to ensure that what is said under Notices is of genuinely universal interest.
‘“Have you come looking for Jesus?” I had come looking for my friend Sandra.’
The single formal handshake which used to mark the transition between worship and notices was originally purely functional – a necessary signal that the period of worship had come to an end. It had no independent symbolic meaning. In recent years, the practice of hand-shaking is sometimes extended beyond its original purpose as a necessary signal, with many or perhaps all worshippers shaking hands, even walking around the room to do so. When this happens, you can see a degree of similarity to the evangelical minister who invited us to embrace the person next to us. It is an outward expression of spiritual bonding. Similar practices include holding hands in a circle or waving your arms in the air, both of which I have encountered at Quaker events.
This is not to say that such practices are wrong, but we should note that, when they are adopted, a fundamental shift in meaning has taken place, from signal to symbol.
The importance of maintaining the principle of discrete Notices is to avoid exposing members of the Meeting, or newcomers, to information which might be of negligible interest to them. More importantly, allowing Notices to drift into generalised social chit-chat might also give the newcomer or enquirer the impression that they have joined some kind of long-established social club. Perhaps such news is best communicated via a newsletter, which has the added advantage of reaching Friends who cannot be present.
The third interface, between Notices and social intercourse, is equally important. Geoffrey Durham’s account of his introduction to Quakerism is instructive (Being a Quaker, 2016). For several weeks, he simply wanted to walk straight out of the Meeting house after Meeting for Worship and think about what he had experienced. As George Gorman put it of the newcomer, ‘He may want to slip away quietly so that he can most easily assimilate the impact that the meeting has made on him’ (The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship, 1979).
In order to ensure that this is possible, one needs a clear shuffle break between Notices and social association. If one follows on directly from the other, worshippers, including newcomers, can find themselves trapped in a situation they did not expect and might not want or enjoy.
This presents a challenge to hybrid Meetings, in which some worshippers are dependent upon online access. Because online worshippers are unable to ‘leave the room’, many worshippers in the room understandably feel the need to remain there after Notices and continue social exchanges with those online. This can lead to a dissolution of the interface between the parts of worship which I have described. At the same time, it eliminates the important opportunity to leave the Meeting house, graphically described by Geoffrey Durham.
A possible solution is for some Friends to bring their refreshments back into the Meeting room to continue to socialise with those online.
I began by describing my experience at an evangelical church. An important difference between that and traditional Quaker practice is that it tended to merge the separate parts or stages of worship and dissolve the important interfaces between them.
There is, of course, nothing inherently right or wrong about such practices. My purpose in writing this is to draw attention to the differences so that Meetings can make an informed choice.
Comments
For the majority of Friends around the world, Quaker worship *is* evangelical worship and they would call themselves evangelicals; the tiny little disclaimer in the fifth paragraph that things are different ‘elsewhere in the world’ hardly seems sufficient. I’m also not sure that modern British Quaker worship is the unaltered continuation of ‘traditional’ Quaker worship that the author seems to think it is!
By Tim Rouse on 18th September 2024 - 19:23
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