From Steven Davison:

This trans­fer­ence of blame, hurt, and anger to the meet­ing calls for a spe­cial kind of pas­toral care that we don’t seem to do very well or even talk about much. I am not at all clear about what’s called for myself, but I grieve for the peo­ple I know who have been hurt in this way and also for the meet­ings in which this pain and ten­sion lives as a shad­ow on the fellowship.

He has some good obser­va­tions here, like this one: “Friends also have a per­verse ten­den­cy some­times to min­is­ter to the per­pe­tra­tor in a fraught sit­u­a­tion, rather than the vic­tim.” This is cer­tain­ly a phe­nom­e­non. I remem­ber a meet­ing sit­u­a­tion some years back in which every­one at the meet­ing pri­vate­ly agreed that a cer­tain mem­ber was being mean-spirited in their char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of oth­er mem­bers but didn’t say any­thing even as peo­ple start­ed leav­ing the meeting.

He talks about ear­ly Friends’ use of the con­cept of gospel order, but admits that “modern-day Friends hard­ly even know it exists.” I’ve seen a rel­a­tive­ly tra­di­tion­al­ist meet­ing fail a fair­ly straight-forward test of gospel order. Why would we pass up an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help a recal­ci­trant mem­ber find some inner heal? Do we secret­ly think that peo­ple can’t change?

Hurt by the Meet­ing | Through the Flam­ing Sword