Thought for the Week: Is there an elephant in the house?
Bob Lovett reflects on the process of discernment
This year Yearly Meeting Gathering will explore ‘What it means to be a Quaker today’. In preparation for this event, many of us will have been reviewing our own personal understandings. I am a Quaker for many reasons, not least of which is the way we carry out our discernments and conduct our business.
But events earlier this year have caused me to reflect on that discernment process. February’s Meeting for Sufferings accepted a policy document setting out principles and governance for those who speak on behalf of Quakers in Britain. At the heart of that policy is a concern to protect the reputation of the Religious Society of Friends by setting in place safeguarding procedures and restrictions on statements made in the public domain. At the same Meeting the decision of the Hospitality Board to market the Large Meeting House as ‘The Light’, when its refurbishment is complete, was upheld. Friends were reminded of our 2013 Yearly Meeting minute on Trust in Trusteeship, ‘We all belong to the same worshipping community, we are all working together and it’s the same spirit that leads us’.
Now, if our process of discernment is one through which the truth is revealed collectively and reflectively or prayerfully by the Spirit or by God, and if it is the same Spirit which leads us in any of our Meetings for Worship, can there be a ‘hierarchy of discernment’? And where does the principle of testing sit in our discernment procedures? Discernment is not concerned with numbers or majorities. So, is a discernment reached by two or three Friends at a Local Meeting, or forty Friends at an Area Meeting, any less valid than one made by seventy Friends at a Meeting for Sufferings, seventeen trustees, or several hundred Friends at Yearly Meeting? And if we are not trusting in the leadings of the Spirit, what exactly is it that we are trusting in?
Is the Truth revealed in our discernments an absolute truth? Or is it a truth at that time, for example, one which may be subject to review with changes in experience, knowledge, understanding or spiritual leading over time? If it is the latter, when is it appropriate to engage in such a review, and who is open to initiate it? I am reminded of the exhortation to us in Advices & queries 17 to ‘think it possible that you may be mistaken’. Is it possible for us to think that a discernment may be mistaken, no matter how that may have come to pass? Or do we, on the basis that it is Spirit led, continue to live with it even in the face of evidence to the contrary?
I understand that historically, when the Society was numerically much larger (though with a possibly smaller field of engagement) decision making, while still Spirit led through a process of discernment, was more dynamic and less encumbered by protocol. Membership then was much more narrowly defined than today and, while we extol the strength that it bestows, diversity brings with it its own difficulties. A question asked by the Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations in its draft report to Yearly Meeting is: Given the very broad and increasing diversity within the Religious Society of Friends in Britain, do Friends still regard themselves as part of a church?
Just asking these questions makes me feel both naive and something of a heretic. It’s as though I’m missing some fundamental piece of understanding in the ways of Quakers. But, we have a commitment to the truth, and I would hate it if I felt that we were becoming just another organisation, making organisational decisions by normal organisational means whilst pretending to be something otherwise.
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