From Kei­th B on Red­dit:

Recent­ly I came across the Believe/Behave/Belong mod­el, which was new to me, as was the amount of hand-wringing about it in main­stream church​es​.In British Quak­er Meet­ings the pref­er­ence seems to be: belong, behave, and the belief will take care of itself.

In the U.S. Quak­er con­text, I’ve long attrib­uted the belong-first mod­el to the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Friends who bro­kered a peace between the fac­tions in East Coast Friends ¹and affect­ed a reunion with­in the most of the largest East Coast year­ly meet­ings, while also influ­enc­ing a West Coast Bean­ite move­ment that stressed agree­able­ness and prac­tice over theology.

Howard Brin­ton was one of the fig­ures who brought it alto­geth­er. He thought mem­ber­ship was a func­tion of feel­ing like you belonged in the com­mu­ni­ty, he more-or-less invent­ed the mod­ern tes­ti­monies (aka “SPICES”), and focused on Quak­er process as the glue that holds us togeth­er. It was a pow­er­ful refor­mu­la­tion that realigned and reded­i­cat­ed mod­ern lib­er­al Quakerism.

But focus­ing on belong­ing­ness does make it hard to state what we col­lec­tive­ly believe, as one can belong to a meet­ing while hold­ing spir­i­tu­al beliefs uncon­nect­ed to any his­tor­i­cal Quak­er beliefs. I think that’s why we rely so much on con­ver­sa­tions, like the ones we have on blogs and Reddit.

I recent­ly got into a bit of a Face­book ruf­fle over a region­al Quak­er body that put an AI chat­bot on its web­site (and then post­ed an arti­cle full of glar­ing fac­tu­al inac­cu­ra­cies, since delet­ed). It seems to me that AI cir­cum­vents the need to have per­son­al dis­cus­sions. I’d like to encour­age more Friends, and new Friends, and Quaker-curious seek­ers to talk and debate and syn­the­size and then talk, debate, and syn­the­size again. No one’s going to set­tle the answers. The belong-behave-belief mod­el only works if we keep active­ly ques­tion­ing one another.

Update: On Face­book, Melin­da Wen­ner Bradley says that she’s been shar­ing this Belong-Behave-Believe “great rever­sal” in out­reach work­shops and pre­sen­ta­tions and that the idea comes from Diana But­ler Bass’s Chris­tian­i­ty After Reli­gion (here’s a 2012 video of her pre­sent­ing on the book).

1. The fac­tions includ­ed Hick­site, Ortho­dox, Wilberite, Gur­neyite, and Pro­gres­sive Friends, all in dif­fer­ent mix­es in the dif­fer­ent geo­gra­phies, unrav­el­ing in a cas­cad­ing series of schisms that had start­ed in 1827.