The value of fuzziness
John Lampen reflects on the importance of patience, openness and divine guidance
‘There came a time when we realised we were saying: “When we go…” rather than “If we go…” The decision had made itself. Doubt and uncertainty gave way to anticipation, exhilaration, gratitude. We were going to South Africa. We didn’t have a clue about what our life there would be like. We didn’t know how long we would stay or what we would do. Way had opened; we had no doubt that it would continue to do so. We had felt a leading, had spent time discerning the rightness of it and had acted on it.’
Avis Crowe and Dyckman Vermilye:
The Ministry of Presence: Without Agenda in South Africa
From 1971 to 1977 Will Warren, an English Quaker in his seventies, lived in Derry/Londonderry. Like Avis Crowe and Dyckman Vermilye, he had felt a call to go there. He had an aim but no clear objectives. He told my wife and me: ‘I only knew one thing, that I had been sent to listen, to listen to people on both sides; and maybe, one day, to help them to listen to one another.’
When we lived in the city, later, young men told us how Will’s influence on them as children had prevented them joining an armed group. People who had been intimidated recalled how he would sit in the house all day to answer the menacing phone calls instead of them. His advice to the police helped them to relate better to the community. He argued with the paramilitaries against knee-cappings; and eventually he brokered an agreement between the two sides that there would be no sectarian killings in the city. None of these achievements could have been foreseen.
Leadings of the Spirit
There are essential components in this kind of ministry: attention to the leadings of the Spirit; a clear aim but fuzzy objectives; gaining the trust of strangers; having time and space to listen to them and respond to unexpected opportunities and events; and, often, financial support from people who are not setting goals but expressing their faith in the person acting under concern. I experienced this myself when I was ‘liberated for service’ in Northern Ireland without agenda by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
This way of working may be unfamiliar among Friends today, but it comes from a rich Quaker tradition, stretching back to George Fox, John Woolman, Stephen Grellet, William Allen and Isaac Sharpe. It was sometimes taken to extremes. John Ormerod Greenwood describes in Quaker Encounters: Vines on the Mountains how in the eighteenth century:
No special choice of personnel, no different attitude, and certainly no training or preparation, marked those Friends who travelled “beyond seas”. The considerations which might influence a modern committee: special interest in a country, knowledge of its language, history, customs or traditions, imagination or adaptability – all these were irrelevant. The Lord chooses his instruments in his own way, often appointing the humble and meek… “Way opened” in a remarkable manner for those who “followed their guide”; [witness] the ease with which they entered palaces, prisons, or other places where they wished to go.
We would not wish to return to this pattern for Quaker work in the world today, but I hope we won’t turn our backs on it entirely. In the recent Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) report to Meeting for Sufferings, Charlotte Seymour-Smith said: ‘The emphasis will be on the need for more clarity in setting objectives.’ I would like to suggest that there is also a case to be made, occasionally, for more fuzziness in setting objectives.
Measureable objectives?
Brian Phillips wrote in Endeavours to Mend: Perspectives on British Quaker Work in the World Today of:
…an over-reliance on managerialism – the reduction of sometimes very tentative work to a set of “measurable objectives” or “verifiable end results”. Anyone who has worked for a large international NGO in the past decade will know how this contemporary fashion can undermine or even eliminate certain kinds of projects that by their nature cannot be crammed into inappropriate, rigidly time-bound frameworks… Any approach to peace-building or conflict transformation that assigns value to a project or piece of work solely on the basis of some sort of predetermined “success criteria” displays little understanding of the often very delicate nature of such an enterprise.
I feel sure Brian would endorse the approach of our QPSW Conciliation Group, responding sensitively to changes in a volatile and complex situation abroad over many years. I will offer examples of work whose objectives were unclear in advance. In 1991 war erupted as Yugoslavia fell apart. Anne Bennett’s new book To Trust a Spark: Living Links with COmmunity Peacebuilders in Former Yugoslavia – a Quaker Initiative tells how QPSW felt at first that they were already over-extended elsewhere, but British Quakers insisted on our responding to the crisis.
So, Friends made contact with the emerging peace groups in the region, small sums of money were given to them and eventually volunteers were placed in some reconstruction projects. Only in 1997 were Quaker staff members first appointed in Sarajevo, arranging trainings and support for local activists. Ten years after the war began QPSW at last agreed to their requests for a Quaker-led programme, Dealing with the Past, which was expected to last at least five years. Three local people were appointed as Quaker representatives in three separate countries, and each of them developed their programme in different ways. It would have been impossible to set them detailed objectives with indicators of success. Anne Bennett suggests that if current QPSW policies had been in place when the project was being considered, ‘it possibly would not have gone forward, or in a more modest format’. Yet her book is a tribute to what our work achieved.
Friends of mine in Uganda decided in 1998 to address the problem of landmines in the Rwenzori Mountains following an insurgency. We had a broad aim – to do whatever we could to alleviate the problems they caused. Our specific objectives were modest: to support amputees, educate villagers and their children about the risks, and map the location of all known explosions in the hopes of expert mines clearance one day. There was no way we could have foreseen the opportunities which arose, the allies we found and the steps we took, which contributed significantly to the whole of Uganda being declared ‘landmine-free’ in 2012.
There should be space in Quaker forward planning to embrace the unexpected. I am not arguing against well prepared and detailed programmes that address a specific need and are carefully crafted to ensure a maximum return on the money invested in them. But I hope that Friends who want to address the problems of the world will not forget that our forbears often proceeded in a different way, putting more faith in the guidance of the Holy Spirit than in human expertise and wisdom.
In pages attached to the end of his Journal (and omitted from some modern editions), John Woolman wrote: ‘I have gone forward not as one travelling in a road cast up and well prepared, but as a man walking through a miry place, in which are stones here and there safe to step on, but so situated that one step being taken, time is necessary to see where to step next.’
The Ministry of Presence: Without Agenda in South Africa by Avis Crowe and Dyckman W. Vermilye, Pendle Hill Pamphlet. ISBN: 9780875742939. $7.
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