Quaker renewal: The meaning of membership
Craig Barnett continues his series on Quaker renewal
Over recent decades membership has become a contested issue for British Quakers. Some Friends object to the membership process on principle, such as a supposed conflict with our testimony to equality, or are uneasy about the process of ‘judging’ who is acceptable to become a member.
It has become common for people to attend Meetings for many years without any intention of applying for membership. In many Meetings it is difficult to find Friends to fulfil all of the responsibilities that require membership, leading to the growing practice of appointing attenders to these roles. This appears to further undermine the meaningfulness of distinguishing between members and attenders at all.
But perhaps it is the way we have practiced membership that has steadily eroded its meaning. Quaker faith & practice includes some quite clear statements about the core commitments involved in membership:
‘Membership is also a way of saying to the Meeting, and to the world, that you accept at least the fundamental elements of being a Quaker: the understanding of divine guidance, the manner of corporate worship and the ordering of the Meeting’s business, the practical expression of inward convictions and the equality of all before God.’ (11.01)
However, in many Area Meetings it is rare for these ‘fundamental elements of being a Quaker’ to be mentioned at any point in the membership process. Instead, there often appears to be little or no standard for membership at all, beyond the individual’s desire to join. The consequence over many years is that being a member no longer means that someone shares a commitment to any specifically Quaker understandings, testimony or practices.
Renewal of our Society’s spiritual roots in core Quaker practices calls for a reassessment of our membership process. For a religious society without a separate class of leaders, membership provides an opportunity for newcomers to make a deliberate act of commitment to the Quaker community and to assume a full share of responsibility for its governance. The membership process also offers a way to recognise and celebrate an inner transition from ‘seeker’ to ‘convinced’ Friend, and a commitment to upholding collective discernment, such as our corporate testimonies.
Our Meetings could renew the practice of membership by making use of the advice in Quaker faith & practice 11.08 to ‘nurture and support individuals of all ages so that they can develop a sense of belonging and an understanding of our shared beliefs, testimonies and spiritual discipline’. This could be done in an intentional and explicit way to encourage attenders to become more familiar with the core Quaker practices for worship, discernment and testimony. Quaker faith & practice also makes reference to the possibility of ‘special nurturing or supporting Friends’ who could accompany potential new members, both before and after the formal membership process, to offer supportive listening and sharing of experience.
The practicalities of setting up a more meaningful and helpful process for potential new members are straightforward enough. More fundamentally, however, they rely on shared discernment by the existing members of an Area Meeting about what the core commitments of Quaker membership should be. In many Meetings this is the real stumbling block to any improvement in membership practices. The current tendency is often to evade potential conflict by avoiding discussion about the requirements of membership, or immediately abandoning any attempts at change as soon as someone challenges them as ‘exclusive’.
We need to have a deeper conversation than this, one that is not afraid to question current assumptions, if we want to revive the meaning of membership and enable it to contribute to the spiritual renewal of our communities.
Comments
For many people - including many Quaker attenders - the need to maintain intellectual freedom, i.e. honesty, overrides any notion of ‘formal commitmnent via membership’.
Many Quaker attenders live their lives according to principles of equality etc ; some members, it has to be said, seek the comfort of membership because it allows them to live safely ‘according to the rules’ , and they may not always be sufficiently ‘Quaker at heart’.
By spider10 on 8th September 2016 - 10:53
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