Sharing groups
Keith Wedmore writes about the essence of faith
Sharing groups are good experiences. The men’s sharing group I attended at Pendle Hill for a year was wonderful. But should a sharing group claim to be a religion?
Early followers of what was to become the Religious Society of Friends originally thought of themselves as the Society of Friends of Jesus. In many parts of the world I see a drift away from this – from being friends or followers of Jesus. As the drift continues the danger, surely, increases of our turning into a mass of sharing groups. Is this what we really want? Would George Fox or Robert Barclay tolerate what is going on now?
According to one study of Friends in Britain Yearly Meeting around 30% of Quakers had views that were non-theistic, agnostic, or atheist. Another study of British Quakers found that of the 727 members of the Religious Society of Friends who completed the survey, 75.1 per cent said that they consider themselves to be Christian; 17.6 per cent did not consider themselves Christian; and 7.3 per cent of the members either did not answer or circled both answers. A further twenty-two per cent of Quakers did not consider themselves to be Christian, but felt that they fulfilled a definition of being a Christian in that they said that they devoutly followed the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. 86.9 per cent said that they believed in God.
I have trouble with this confusion. Whose side are we on? How can we call something a Meeting for Worship if we are not actually worshipping, not worshipping God and, indeed, not worshipping anything in particular?
The decline in the authority of the elders, or in the US the Ministry and Oversight committees, could be expected to lead to ambiguity not much short of chaos. It has. For instance, I used to attend San Francisco Meeting. It is a big Meeting and not in want of impressive members. Its business meetings in 1980 were so acrid that I felt that had they been in the Roman Catholic Church any visitation from the Vatican would have suppressed the congregation. By 2014 the infection had spread. Friends had for many months no clerk and no assistant clerk and no clerk of Ministry and Oversight. Nominations brought forward no names. Difficulties could not be resolved. They were floundering.
In the West of America, Friends’ ‘Churches’ form California Yearly Meeting. Theologically, they take a more Foxite view. Those churches usually have a pastor, a church, a programmed service, including expected, not spontaneous, music and hymns. They have structure. I am not saying that that structure is necessary to Christianity. What is necessary is Belief. Nor should we just dispense with discipline. The Society over the last fifty to 100 years has declined in discipline, each decline nourishing the next, so that it is no longer true that all Friends are followers of Jesus. Meetings are becoming – no doubt good and useful – sharing groups.
I am, myself, guilty in this. For many years in Pacific Yearly Meeting I was clerk of nominations of Yearly Meeting, or of College Park Quarterly Meeting, or of the Monthly Meeting I belonged to, or all three at once. But there can be no ‘holier than thou’ here. We several times nominated folks who were self-proclaimed atheists or were thought, from what they said, to be so. This was done despite protests from one or two older and wiser Friends. Allow me a moment of regret. I was part of the process I object to.
What is necessary, I now realise, is Belief.
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