‘Maybe we get the God we need.’ Photo: by Michael Preston of BYM
On the record: Paul Parker, interviewed by Joseph Jones
‘I don’t think my job’s about being comfortable.’
Perhaps we should start with where Quakerism begins for you, personally.
I was a young teenager. I’d grown up in a household where one parent came from a non-conformist background and ran the Sunday school in the village chapel. The other was (and is) a fundamentalist atheist of the Richard Dawkins type who hopes ‘everybody will see the dark one day’. So religion was always a bit of a talking point. I used to go along to Sunday School but increasingly felt that I was being told I believed things that I didn’t believe. So I went looking for a religious experience that was a better fit. Eventually I went to a Quaker Meeting because some friends suggested it. It was the first time anybody asked me what I believed rather than telling me. Then, when I asked them what they believed, they didn’t know either. There was a sense of a shared journey. You could get into a real discussion about what God is, whether God is, and what that means in your life. I found that intriguing, as was the silent worship. That was really difficult at first – it’s not an easy thing to do – but the lack of rigidity and structure and certainty appealed to me enormously.
I was never a child who got on very well with other children, so I was very comfortable in the company of adults. Faith groups are one of the few places where a deep intergenerational conversation can happen. My Meeting was very generous in sharing spiritual experiences with me; I found it an extraordinary experience and I still go back to get more of it.
When you talk to people about how they built their relationship with Quakerism there’s an interrelated web of a few things, in my experience. There’s the practice; the values; the history around the practice and the values; and then there’s personal contact with Friends. Everybody’s balance of those is different…
The practice was a big part of it for me. The Meeting for Worship was a big deal. What you’ve called values I would talk about as whether your faith makes any difference to your life. What I saw in the Quaker Meeting was that what people said they believed in and how they acted in the world were connected. Being a Quaker was not about an hour on a Sunday morning; it was about all week, and the hour on Sunday fed it and sustained it and supported it. In my Meeting there were people who had been involved with the Friends Ambulance Unit and the Friends Relief Service, people who had been at Greenham Common, people who had done voluntary service overseas, and also people doing much more humdrum things at home like living with a house full of people who were there because they needed somewhere to live. There was a spiritual generosity about that which was very clearly linked to their Quaker experience. They were very clear that they weren’t doing it because they were Quakers, but that being a Quaker meant you had to do this sort of thing.
There’s a solid peace element to all that, and an internationalist theme too. We’re about the same age; as we became adults the Berlin Wall came down, the European Union was expanding – there was a lot of optimism around.
It was an exciting time. Before that we’d grown up under the threat of a cold war and nuclear midnight. Then there had been the Aids pandemic. This felt like a time when people could make a difference to things, and there were opportunities for political engagement and campaigning. When I landed in Manchester as a student, Quakers there were holding a vigil for the first gulf war. That sense of being a community of people who were going to stand and bear witness and try to change something was really powerful. It was exciting. Being a Quaker was an exciting thing to be – still is.
As a bright kid there must have been an intellectual component to some of this.
There was. I don’t think I went back to early Quaker writing at that point though. I did look at Christian faith and practice, as it was, and wrestled with the language of it. I enjoyed it when Quaker faith & practice came along and had a broader theological range. But I was more interested in talking to people and hearing about their experiences. I remember testing and teasing stuff out, trying to work out what I thought about things. With hindsight I was wrong about almost everything, but that’s kind of how it goes being a young person.
One of the questions readers want to ask you is the inevitable one about whether or not you believe in God. Of course we start with ‘What do we mean by God?’ or even before that, but perhaps one way into talking about it might be to ask how you’ve changed, or where has the Spirit been taking you since then?
I would say I’m quite a rational person. I’m conscious when I’m sitting in Meeting that my tendency is to rationalise things and approach it all very logically. But I can hear Geoffrey Durham ringing in my ear. He was giving a talk once and complaining about a person who had risen in Meeting to say ‘I was thinking about…’. He’d reminded them that ‘It’s not called Meeting for thinking’. There’s something in that about getting beyond logical thought into experience. But I suppose the thing that’s changed is that I’ve now come to an accommodation with the word ‘God’, which as a young person I didn’t find at all helpful. I didn’t know what people meant by it. I had a whole set of assumptions about what it might mean from Sunday School, but none of that seemed to be anything to do with what I thought it was about now. So for a long time I just didn’t use the word and didn’t really get into the question of what I believed in. But I knew that in Meeting for Worship I could have a powerful experience and I’ve since become very comfortable with using the word God as a tool to help talk about that experience. That’s partly because it allows me to have conversations with other people who use the word, and to try to tease out whether what I experience is the same or different. But it’s also partly because if every time you talk about it you have to say ‘God or whatever you call it’, to use Rhiannon Grant’s phrase, you can end up with a sentence that’s so set about with caveats that you can’t get your point across. So I feel like ‘God’ is as good a shorthand as any for what I experience. Whether that’s what anybody else means by it I have no way of knowing because their language and their choice of words is different from mine.
Would you consider it a guiding influence?
When I went to the world conference of Friends in Kenya in 2012, which was one of the experiences that has definitely changed how I look at things, I really had to work hard to understand Kenyan Quakers – and Quakers from other parts of the world, for that matter – when they talked about God, because it was a long way from what I meant, or from what other Quakers I talked to in the UK meant. There was a powerful sense that God was a kind of accompanying force that walked alongside them through life, and protected them. Having spent time there I can see why that experience was so vital. That’s not been my experience of God, but I don’t think that makes it invalid. Maybe we get the God we need. My experience of God is a much more internal thing – a sense that if we can be really disciplined and clear away enough of the white noise of life, we can reach a place where we can be guided by something. I don’t worry about whether that’s human-made, or external, or an internal teacher. None of those metaphors particularly matter, but I know that there are some practices which can open me to that guidance. Advices & queries talks about the promptings of love and truth in your hearts and recognising them as the leadings of God. Whatever the ‘God’ is in that, the promptings of love and truth definitely come. That’s enough for me really, I don’t worry about the rest of it. I don’t find that labelling helps. What helps is the experience of that deep diving we do in Meeting for Worship. When that works – and my experience has been that it doesn’t work every week – you can have that edge-of-the-seat experience where you come out of the Meeting thinking ‘Wow what happened there?’, or that you’ve been led in a particular direction, or that you’ve found yourself morally committed to something that you weren’t before you went in. It is an experience of change and transformation. Transformation is another of those words that people use a lot. Some people experience it like a kind of lightning bolt but mine has been of something slower and more gradual.
These promptings… we call them personal promptings but they’re communally arrived at…
My experience is that we get them better when we do it together, yes. What we’re talking about here, really, is discernment. We exercise discernment all the time, every choice we make, and we’re not always very conscious of that. When we become conscious of it and make a discerned choice, rather than something where we’ve just reacted, then that can take us in interesting places. That’s more than just being considered about something. It’s about saying ‘How do I connect this with those promptings?’. There’s something very important about the collective testing of our discernment. We’re not twenty people in a room meditating together at the same time in the same place, we’re twenty people reaching for that same sense of guidance. If I sit at home on my own – during the pandemic my Meeting worshipped ‘together but at home’ – it’s still a powerful experience but it’s not the same.
My book of the year was On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, about how to resist populism. He talks about creating a space where truth-tellers can exist. His take on it is that you need to make sure that that space doesn’t become a place where you can deceive yourself…
Yes, I think we’ve all got to be really careful about the get-out clause of ‘I’m doing this because God told me to’. Having said we can reach a place where we can be prompted, our ability to understand those promptings well is pretty limited. When we look at things like clearness processes that Friends use, that’s a recognition of that. It’s to say, well, OK, I can try to discern a way forward on my own, but there are times when my vision is so clouded that bringing in other people (whose vision is also clouded but possibly in slightly different ways) helps us to reach a better view of what early Quakers would have called the will of God, or God’s glory. Over the last four or five years we’ve been talking a lot about diversity and inclusion and one of the things I think we miss in the Quaker community is that real diversity of viewpoint. We’ve become quite a homogeneous group and I think that’s partly because we’ve ended up with a set of concerns – a bit of a kind of checklist of testimonies – which imply that only certain types of people can be a Quaker. I’m fundamentally convinced that that’s not how it ought to be. Anybody can experience the promptings of love and truth in their hearts. Quaker practice is one of the ways that can happen, and that experience of guidance can come to anybody. So it bothers me enormously that there are people who are excluded, deliberately or not, from our community. The flip side bothers me equally: our community is so much less rich because that happens, and therefore our collective discernment is worse; our ability to see the will of God is worse; acting on those promptings makes less difference in the world than it could do. We often talk about diversity because we know it’s the right thing to do, whereas I think we have to come at it from a deep sense of loss. We are incomplete as a Quaker community because there are people who are not here, and who are not made to feel welcome among us. We have to live that loss and think about how we make good on that: how do we repair our relationship with those people?
I’ve seen some Friends say that there are people around the world whose experience of the divine is much more embodied than ours, and that Quakerism doesn’t suit everybody. I even remember reading an old newspaper that said the Welsh were too exuberant in singing, too emotional for Quakerism, which obviously I reject! Should the Quaker way be for everyone?
I don’t think it should. But people who need it in their life should be able to have it, and if we create structures, practices or communities which don’t permit that – and encourage that, and invite people in – then we’re not living what we say we live. Also, why shouldn’t Quakers sing? I know lots of Quakers who love singing. I have sung in Meeting – it was terrifying. I wasn’t expecting to have to but I ended up singing ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’, which was very surprising to me and everybody else. If you look at Quakers around the world, they sing, they dance, they do all sorts of things that British Quakers don’t think of as Quaker. There’s always a balance to be struck between saying ‘Here we are, this is what we do, if you want to do these things come and join us’ and the more radical form of welcome which says ‘Here we are, come and join us, you’ll change who we are.’ If you go too far in either of those directions you end up with either something that becomes so dilute it’s meaningless, and there’s nothing binding you together, or with something so strict and rigid that nobody wants to be part of it. Quakers have done both those things at different stages in their history. So I’m hesitant of drawing boundaries around what it means to be a Quaker. We have to work that out together at any given point. But if people start to tell us that they don’t feel welcome, which is what people have been doing in the last few years, then we have to ask ourselves some pretty tough questions. It’s all very well saying we’re an anti-racist church, or we’re welcoming of gender non-conforming people, or you don’t have to be middle-class and degree-educated, but if people’s experiences are that we don’t regard you as belonging if that’s not the case then we’re not living up to our own values.
I sometimes bump into people who don’t seem to trust my Quakerism because they didn’t know me when I was six months old…
Yet the large majority of British Quakers are not – for want of a better word – birthright Friends. They’re not even people who grew up in Quaker households, and they’re not people who live in Quaker households now. So one of the things we don’t manage to do is to examine what that means for us as a community, and adapt. There are bits of the tradition that are implicit rather than explained and embraced, and perhaps checked for up-to-dateness, and there are things about our practices and how our communities run which are not very accessible to people who are the only Quaker in their household. Yet there’s a loyalty to ways we’ve always done things which I find almost inexplicable. Why does Meeting for Worship have to be at half past ten on a Sunday morning? It’s really inconvenient for almost everybody. A pandemic has blown the lid off some of these things because people have had to do things differently. It’s allowing people to say, ‘Oh, maybe you can worship anytime. Maybe you can fit it around the rest of life rather than having to make the rest of life fit around it.’ I think that’s quite exciting.
It looks like there’s a big conversation coming about the right balance of online and in-person gathering. But can we go back to promptings and how that pertains to leadership? You became a teacher straight out of university. How much of that was a prompting?
I was a the third generation of teachers in my family so I suspect it was a bit inevitable. But I don’t know how consciously I would have thought about whether I was a Quaker teacher or a teacher who happened to be a Quaker. There were certainly experiences when I was teaching – which I did for nearly sixteen years – which tested my values. What kind of school did I want to work at? My school’s values and Quaker values weren’t badly aligned: it was quite a radical comprehensive up in the northwest and there were people there who were very committed to equal access to education. When I turned up as a young Quaker it felt like I would fit in. But I still ended up with questions like ‘Do I really want to insist on being called “Sir”?’. On one level you think, maybe I can’t insist on that, but if you don’t you’re undermining the covenant between your colleagues and the body of students. You can’t be the one who comes in and breaks up the deal that everyone’s struck. Schools work because the teachers and the students have established that covenant. Then there’s the uniform – I taught at schools with and without – and you had all that enforcement pettiness that goes on. But I found to my surprise that I preferred working in a school with a uniform because you had some clear expectations. You had reasons for then having conversations with some of the young people about whether they were up for conforming with expectations of a community or not. I also remember writing to the head and saying I wanted to be allocated alternative duties on activities day because the class I was responsible for were going to go to the army barracks. Fortunately I had a head who was very understanding.
I worked for the Olympic News Service during the London 2012 Olympics and I remember people saying that if someone applied to be a volunteer and they were a teacher, snap them up because teachers are very flexible – they’ll have a decent standard of education and can turn their hand to anything. But it also seemed to me that they were useful because they understood shepherding. That does seem like preparation for the kind of leadership required among Friends.
It’s a really useful skill set, and I use it every day. Shepherding’s an interesting word for it. For me teaching was always about relationships. It was about the quality of the relationship you had with the people you were working with. Teachers are experienced at managing a very large number of relationships at the same time, and of not managing every relationship in the same way – you can teach one child one way and another child another way and get to the same place. In the course of the working week I had a working relationship with probably something like 300 people. That’s tiring and emotionally intense, but the role I now have with Quakers also involves managing a lot of relationships and being sensitive to the needs of different people. You’re watching how people are responding to you as individuals, and you’re also thinking about how people are responding as a group. I used to joke with people that when we were at the restaurant at Friends House I would always find myself sitting in a corner so I could see the room. I hate sitting with my back to the room. Ask any teacher and they’ll say the same thing. Even in a public space you instinctively want to kind of hold the room somehow.
How do you go from being a teacher to being recording clerk?
As well as teaching I’d done quite a bit of youth work with Quakers, with some training from BYM staff, so I was interested in helping young people develop and think about the world – to try to interpret it and understand it and navigate it and think about how they related to it. I’d also had various management responsibilities at my school. Alongside all of that I’d done lots of Quaker stuff like committee service and volunteering. I’d found I did a lot of clerking of things – it was a gift I had to frame a process and help people to reach unity through some kind of process, and then record what that unity was. I think I’m a good clerk and it was an important part of my Quaker experience. So when BYM was looking for a recording clerk all those things came together. I was really helped by Advice 27, which is the one about living adventurously, but the next line says ‘When choices arise, do you take the way that offers the fullest opportunity for the use of your gifts in the service of God and the community? Let your life speak’. That pushed me to put my name forward. When I was preparing for it I talked a lot about how I saw Quakers having something to offer in the twenty-first century which nobody else seemed to be offering, and that there was potential for renewal and growth and for something quite exciting to happen. For the first several years I was in post I went around talking about Quakers going ‘Whoosh’ because it seemed to me that Friends needed emboldening, to see that what they had to offer was worth offering. I still think that what we have to offer is both the kind of spiritual experience we’ve been discussing and the opportunity to translate that into action in the world. I felt that balance should be more important in the lives of Quakers and that we needed to open up that experience to a wider community.
Readers remembered the whoosh too, and some of them seem to have imagined a direct relationship between whoosh and numerical growth. Did you?
It wasn’t not about that, but you can have quantitative growth, numerical growth and also qualitative growth. You can be better at being a Quaker community and you can be a bigger Quaker community. Both those things matter. I also think you can be a more active Quaker community – a more exciting and engaged Quaker community – and the whoosh was about all of that. It was a hook on which to hang a set of discussions about who Quakers wanted to be and how we were going to get there. A lot of what has happened in the ten years I’ve been recording clerk has been building on that. Meetings had a whole set of intractable difficulties at local level that they needed help with, in order to release Quaker energy to grow spiritually, to grow in our witness, to grow in our community. That led to us thinking about local development workers, who can help with some of that legwork – help us to strip away the things that don’t matter, focus on the things that do, and make sure we do them well. We are still in the early stages of that – the pandemic may or may not have set us back – but if we just think about growing as opening the door and welcoming lots of people, but the experience you give them is rubbish, that’s just more dissatisfied people. Equally, if you go off and do something very exciting but you don’t think about how to include people, you can’t bring about as much change as you want. If people feel welcome, that is an indicator that all sorts of other things are right about the community.
Would it be fair to say that local development workers have been a personal project for you – your idea? Can you talk about how all that works within the communal discernment we talked about earlier?
All ideas come from somewhere, right? I don’t know whether it was my idea or not but I was there at the beginning of that idea. It went through a very long period of testing, which feels to me like what should happen with ideas that are going to lead to big changes. We have a nominations process or a recruitment process and people are put there because they have a particular way of seeing things, or an ability to synthesise things and reach conclusions. Part of my job is to look at a situation and to say what the right solution is. Friends have appointed me because I have some gifts in that area. So I don’t think I should be embarrassed about being the source of suggestions. I do think I have to be cautious about insisting on something when the testing process perhaps pushes us in a different direction. I can think of lots of things – including local development work – where that testing process has changed quite a lot about what I thought. What the local development workers have ended up doing is not the same as what I imagined ten years ago. It’s not completely different either, but we did a lot of research, with a three-and-a-half-year pilot, and evaluated all of that, and then we’ve gone through quite a lot of learning as we’ve rolled it out. The work that happens now is definitely a better fit. We can be suspicious of ideas that come from one place or another place but you still need people who will put their head above the parapet and say things and have bold ideas. If you look at Quaker work over the last 350 years there’ have always been people who were leaders. Some of them have been liked, some of them have been trusted, some of them haven’t but achieved change anyway. Some of them have been a damned nuisance and have kept popping up at Yearly Meeting saying the thing nobody wanted to hear. Leadership comes in all sorts of different forms but it would be disingenuous of us to say we don’t need it.
When I worked at BYM people would call in from the benches and some were clearly sniffy about the centralised nature of Friends House. It did seem like something needed to happen.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few months – partly because we’ve been thinking about what simpler structures might look like – is that the Society of Friends wants to be, needs to be, simultaneously a movement and an organisation. Movements are great things: they’re exciting, they’re very fluid, they’re dynamic, they’re fast moving, they’re often very inclusive. They’re engaging and energising and people want to be part of something that has that kind of turbulence. There’s a passage in Quaker faith & practice about being at the water’s edge where there’s sun and sea and sand all mixed together [20.06]. For some of us it feels like the right place to be. We look back at early Quakers and we see lots of that – the Valiant Sixty and so on. But you can also look back at early Friends and see the emergence of an organisation. Passages from Fox’s journal recognise that in order to be cohesive as a movement there needed to be some structures; there needed to be monthly and quarterly Meetings; there needed to be a group of people who were in effect the leadership. Those things are in tension with one another because organisations – which are also important, and some people want to be belong to them – have structure. They have a degree of rigidity; they have policies and practices and procedures; but they also have stability, resources and assets. Those kinds of things are important for survival and the Quaker movement would not now exist if it hadn’t quite early on had an organisation associated with it. But those things have always been in tension because there have always been people who’ve wanted to be very grassroots-led and impulsive, and there have also been the people who’ve said ‘Hold on, we’re Quakers, we don’t do it like this. We need to minute this decision in this place at this time in this way’. And that tussle continues, as it did at Yearly Meeting this year with people questioning the role of trustees. But it’s a necessary tension, and a really creative one. One of the reasons I’m a Quaker is that we hold those two things together. You’ve got that excitement of being part of this fluid, dynamic, ever-changing thing, and you’ve got the security of the organisation that kind of holds it, frames it and supports it. I would love us to get to a point where instead of seeing that as a battle of wills, we find ways to make those different kinds of energy work together. If you look at other movements from the seventeenth century they’ve all gone, or ossified, and on a good day we haven’t. We’re still here and we’ve still got some of that sense of shift. Sometimes the discussion about it gets aggressive and I don’t think it needs to.
When that conversation about trustees happened it felt like people had been begging for it to happen somewhere, even if it erupted at the wrong point.
Well, some people. There are lots of Quakers who aren’t very interested in it as an issue, and who roll their eyes at it. There are also people who are very sensible about it and don’t necessarily speak up, because they feel like their position has been represented. So you tend to hear from the voices which want to pull in one direction or the other, rather than the people who are happy with a bit of ambiguity. Coming back to where we started, to be a Quaker is to believe in it being OK for us to believe different things. The majority of Friends are comfortable saying: ‘I’ll put in my two penn’orth in if it feels important but basically there are some people who seem to know what they’re doing and I’ll let them get on with it.’ Then there are people at the extremes who we hear a lot about. That creates a lot of heat but not necessarily a lot of light.
The nature of what people feel they can say is interesting to me. We got hundreds of letters about changing the name of the William Penn room at Friends House, but in Yearly Meeting in session there wasn’t a single word about it. It made me wonder: were people put off from talking about it because they felt out of step? Or was their initial concern pretty superficial? Or was it that when they got in the presence of other Friends they realised it wasn’t a thing to pursue?
It’s really interesting that you had hundreds and I had three. I don’t know how many of those hundreds had actually gone to their Meeting and said ‘Help me test this: is it just me or did we miss something here?’. We have to be wary of ending up with people feeling they can’t voice things at Meetings, but we also have to be wary of forgetting that decisions like that are reached collectively. We live in a very individualistic age, where people feel like their voice needs to carry. But we lose something really essential from Quaker discipline if we overindulge that. How do you make sure that, when we make decisions that need lots of voices, we actually do hear those? If decisions can be – or should be, or need to be – taken by smaller groups, how do we ensure that process is trusted, where people understand that it’s a discerned position rather than a bunch of people who somehow seized the initiative? My experience is that trustees Meetings are routinely one of the most gathered Meetings for Worship I go to. Maybe we need to talk more about that because the fact that it’s a closed group means people can’t see it and therefore there’s a kind of instinctive mistrust. Sometimes we ask ourselves the wrong question about decisions that we weren’t part of.
Next week: more on structures, resources, and the future of the Society.
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