Road blocks

Ian Beeson writes about road blocks to concerted action in the world: the limiting language of concerns and gifts

After three years of considering ‘What it means to be a Quaker today’, Britain Yearly Meeting has now just had the second of three sessions focused on ‘Living out our faith in the world’. How far are we getting in these long discernments?

Perhaps we shouldn’t expect to get anywhere in our successive Yearly Meetings; perhaps it is enough for us to gather, see one another’s faces and remind ourselves again who we are. It’s an expensive way of proceeding, though, and meanwhile the world continues to burn. Moreover, our numbers continue to decline (members and attenders down to a total of 23,067 at the end of 2015, down 794 on 2014). Can we save the world before there are too few of us to try?

At this year’s Yearly Meeting (YM) there was less time than last year to concentrate on the theme of living out our faith in the world, but in among all the other business there was consideration of ‘how we use our gifts, how we recognise, test and support concerns, and how we work with others’.

These three questions were set up in Documents in advance in the introductions to the agenda items: 8 (gifts), 24 (concerns) and 26 (movement building). Though there were signposts earlier in the Meeting, the main minutes from these discussions were agreed in the Monday morning session, in the form of a long minute 34, covering gifts and concerns, and a brief minute 35, introducing movement building as a theme for next YM (the gathering at Warwick in 2017).

Living out our faith

The preparation in Documents in advance and the subsequent structuring of discussion in YM itself rest on two key assumptions about how we can live out our faith in the world:

(a) that we need to recognise our own and other people’s Spirit-given gifts and to encourage one another to develop and exercise these gifts; and

(b) that we live out our faith, and use our gifts, in the world, according to how we are led by God, expressing our leading as a concern, for testing and support by our Meetings.

(a) and (b) do not seem particularly closely linked, in the sense that one must recognise or develop gifts before taking up a concern, or rely on gifts for following a concern through.

They do have in common, however, that they both come from God, and one might imagine that God could supply someone with the gifts needed to follow a particular leading, or direct a leading towards someone with the requisite gifts.

Working with others, or movement building, does not seem to require any further divine foundation, but involves more practical considerations of how to cooperate and find common cause with others.

Gifts and concerns

Trying to build a way of living out our faith in the world on a conceptual foundation of gifts and concerns seems limited and retrogressive, in these three ways:

 
• The reliance on God for both gifts and concerns cannot much appeal to the universalists and nontheists among us, let alone to people outside Quakers we might want to work with. Some people will be uncomfortable with claiming they have had a leading from God or have a gift from God, or with agreeing that someone else has. The language and practice of raising a concern will seem awkward to some and may fall into disuse.
 
• The slow failure of the circulatory system among Friends in Britain, whereby business is drawn upwards and downwards through the levels of the structure, will produce a gradual withering away of concerns in the life of the Society. Area Meetings are poorly attended and Meeting for Sufferings is reduced in size and confidence; both have their authority sapped by trustees and managers. Concerns occasionally still appear, but Meetings are more likely to pass them on than try to deal with them.
 
• The insistence (most clearly seen in the quotes included in the section on concern in Quaker faith & practice, by Roger Wilson (13.07, 1949) and William Charles Braithwaite (13.10, 1909)) that a concern must be seen as a gift or leading from God (and cannot merely be a strong desire) and that new truth only emerges with individuals (not with communities) simultaneously knocks out or downgrades any role for reason, analysis or argument, and discounts the possibility of codiscovery or collaborative enlightenment.

Embracing new methods

The combined effect of these three limitations is to make it relatively easy for Quakers to frame their actions in the world as personal callings or inspirations, and offer a mechanism for building a local support base. They make it less easy, however, for us to work together, across time and distance, using reason and argument as well as inspiration, to develop, implement and adjust a plan for concerted action in the world. This must be why we are having so much trouble currently trying to articulate our next ‘framework for action’ or to express, as Friends did during world war one, the ‘foundations of a true social order’.

Can we embrace new methods of investigation, discussion and cooperation that will give us some chance of intervening effectively in a complex and fast changing world, without sacrificing the essential core of our Quakerism? I believe so.

George Fox and the early Quakers saw that, though the world is beyond our full understanding, we are always able to tap into and draw from a more profound and more universal level of being. They developed from this insight our practice of ‘waiting in the Light’.

When we are waiting in the Light, beyond ego and with focused attention, we are still present to one another and could, in this state, do more to commune and act with one another. We could from there build new phases into our fundamental method of worship (and business) that would enable us to formulate and start to implement joint action. No peculiar language or practices are required, apart from a readiness to move when the Light pushes.

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‘Concern’ is a word which has tended to become debased by excessively common usage among Friends, so that too often it is used to cover merely a strong desire. The true ‘concern’ [emerges as] a gift from God, a leading of his spirit which may not be denied. Its sanction is not that on investigation it proves to be the intelligent thing to do – though it usually is; it is that the individual… knows, as a matter of inward experience, that there is something that the Lord would have done, however obscure the way, however uncertain the means to human observation. Often proposals for action are made which have every appearance of good sense, but as the meeting waits before God it becomes clear that the proposition falls short of ‘concern’.

Roger Wilson, 1949
Quaker faith & practice 13.07

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Comments

Unpopular as this point is, I do agree that trustees have sucked a lot of the life out of Area Meetings. I am new on Sufferings so can’t speak for how it was before. Some of it feels genuinely moved by the Spirit and the trustees report faithfully but their minutes, all that we have beforehand to consider, are opaque to the point of blankness.

By doreen.osborne@outlook.com on 1st July 2016 - 12:16

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