I propose a little amendment to the modern Quaker testimonies. I think it’s time for a moratorium of the word “community” and the phrases “faith community” and “community of faith.” Through overuse, we Friends have stretched this phrase past its elasticity point and it’s snapped. It’s become a meaningless, abstract term used to disguise the fact that we’ve become afraid to articulate a shared faith. A recent yearly meeting newsletter used the word “community” 27 times but the word “God” only seven: what does it mean when a religious body stops talking about God?
The “testimony of community” recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was the centerpiece of the new-and-improved testimonies Howard Brinton unveiled back in the 1950s in his Friends for 300 Years (as far as I know no one elevated it to a testimony before him). Born into a well-known Quaker family, he married into an even more well-known family. From the cradle Howard and his wife Anna were Quaker aristocracy. As they traveled the geographic and theological spectrum of Friends, their pedigree earned them welcome and recognition everywhere they went. Perhaps not surprisingly, Howard grew up to think that the only important criteria for membership in a Quaker meeting is one’s comfort level with the other members. “The test of membership is not a particular kind of religious experience, nor acceptance of any particular religious, social or economic creed,” but instead one’s “compatibility with the meeting community.” ( Friends for 300 Years page 127).
So what is “compatibility”? It often boils down to being the right “kind” of Quaker, with the right sort of behavior and values. At most Quaker meetings, it means being exceedingly polite, white, upper-middle class, politically liberal, well-educated, quiet in conversation, and devoid of strong opinions about anything involving the meeting. Quakers are a homogenous bunch and it’s not coincidence: for many of us, it’s become a place to find people who think like us.
But the desire to fit in creates its own insecurity issues. I was in a small “breakout” group at a meeting retreat a few years ago where six of us shared our feelings about the meeting. Most of these Friends had been members for years, yet every single one of them confided that they didn’t think they really belonged. They were too loud, too colorful, too ethnic, maybe simply too too for Friends. They all judged themselves against some image of the ideal Quaker – perhaps the ghost of Howard Brinton. We rein ourselves in, stop ourselves from saying too much.
This phenomenon has almost completely ended the sort of prophetic ministry once common to Friends, whereby a minister would challenge Friends to renew their faith and clean up their act. Today, as one person recently wrote, modern Quakers often act as if avoidance of controversy is at the center of our religion. That makes sense if “compatibility” is our test for membership and “community” our only stated goal. While Friends love to claim the great eighteenth century minister John Woolman, he would most likely get a cold shoulder in most Quaker meetinghouses today. His religious motivation and language, coupled with his sometimes eccentric public witness and his overt call to religious reform would make him very incompatible indeed. Sometimes we need to name the ways we aren’t following the Light: for Friends, Christ is not just comforter, but judger and condemner as well. Heavy stuff, perhaps, but necessary. And near-impossible when a comfy and non-challenging community is our primary mission.
Don’t get me wrong. I like community. I like much of the non-religious culture of Friends: the potlucks, the do-it-yourself approach to music and learning, our curiousity about other religious traditions. And I like the openness and tolerance that is the hallmark of modern liberalism in general and liberal Quakerism in particular. I’m glad we’re Queer friendly and glad we don’t get off on tangents like who marries who (the far bigger issue is the sorry state of our meetings’ oversight of marriages, but that’s for another time). And for all my ribbing of Howard Brinton, I agree with him that we should be careful of theological litmus tests for membership. I understand where he was coming from. All that said, community for its own sake can’t be the glue that holds a religious body together.
So my Testimony Against “Community” is not a rejection of the idea of community, but rather a call to put it into context. “Community” is not the goal of the Religious Society of Friends. Obedience to God is. We build our institutions to help us gather as a great people who together can discern the will of God and follow it through whatever hardships the world throws our way.
Plenty of people know this. Last week I asked the author of one of the articles in the yearly meeting newsletter why he had used “community” twice but “God” not at all. He said he personally substitutes “body of Christ” everytime he writes or reads “community.” That’s fine, but how are we going to pass on Quaker faith if we’re always using lowest-common-denominator language?
We’re such a literate people but we go surprisingly mute when we’re asked to share our religious understandings. We need to stop being afraid to talk with one another, honestly and with the language we use. I’ve seen Friends go out of their way to use language from other traditions, especially Catholic or Buddhist, to state a basic Quaker value. I fear that we’ve dumbed down our own tradition so much that we’ve forgotten that it has the robustness to speak to our twenty-first century conditions.
Related Essays
I talk about what a bold Quaker community of faith might look like and why we need one in my essay on the “Emergent Church Movement” I talk about our fear of meeting unity in “We’re all Ranters Now.”
I have been pondering lately the Sisyphean task of clerking Meeting for Business – bear with me, there’s a connection here.
Our little town has been confronted with the rise to some prominence of a Christian Reconstructionist minister, who has written some pamphlets arguing that ante-bellum slavery was a good deal, that it was an inestimable benefit to Native Americans to be subjected to genocide, that democracy is anti-Christian, that women are congenitally incapable of leadership, that gays ought to be stoned in our downtown plaza, and that he ought to become the Priest-King of our town.
Our Meeting determined (slowly, painfully) that we ought to write a letter to the Editor of our local paper sharing the testimonies of Friends, as a witness. But we were stymied. Friends variously felt that we ought not to do anything that might seem like a criticism (didn’t Quakers visit Hitler in a spirit of love?); that we shouldn’t get involved in anything controversial, and even that we couldn’t say we opposed slavery unless we included the slavery of animals and plants (!).
As we threshed and re-threshed, it seemed clear to me that we are deeply hindered by our own historic and traditional practices. Not that the practices are at fault, but that we are out-of-joint with our tradition.
Since Friends don’t make a practice of studying and sharing our history, attenders and even some members don’t have a context to draw on. They substitute a feeling of “community,” which is really a compatibility of style, for a connection to a vital past full of extremism, glorious martyrdom, extraordinary service, uncomfortably plain speaking, and transformation.
Without a shared unity in the Spirit, what Quakers call good gospel order becomes almost impossible. Our consensus is founded in something outside and greater than ourselves, and unless we are in union in that Holy Spirit, we are simply agreeing to what feels comfortable to us. Likewise, we have no reason to stand aside or to record our objections – we just go on fighting for our own position, until our wearied, nearly bludgeoned Clerk gives up. And thus we find ourselves in Meeting for Business for three hours without reaching any decision at all.
I know it’s not just our little Meeting, which I love dearly, that struggles with these challenges. But I think the only remedy is to return in some way to a clearer notion of what brings the Quaker community together: the indwelling Spirit of God, speaking in each of us, calling us to simplicity, integrity, justice, peace, and equality, through the grace of the Word.
Now, Martin, if you’d just get to work on that for me!
Melynda
This is a sad commentary both for the content with which I largely agree and for what is not there, a discussion of community. Many of us live our individual lives with our many networks and attend a meeting. Quaker community is not really possible in this context. Were that the hedge were a bit or considerably higher in well chosen areas. I sat in an M&C meeting, and as pastoral concerns were discussed, I was aghast at how little most members knew of those they thought might need pastoral care. Having folks over for dinner, going to Quaker retreats or YM together, planning a workshop together, caring for each other’s children – these things not only build community but are community. You want to have well ordered concern for marriages and other relationships? Then knowing them would help a lot. I mean really knowing them, having labored with them, disagreed with them, laughed together, or even watched the Cubs together. We can buy from our Quaker farmer CSA, do work days together, have a meeting for worship with attention to our elderly member’s weeds in her yard (with pizza after), and on and on. Community is something we do or not. We tend too often to be more reflections of our larger culture than we are a reflection of Quaker community. We are more individualistic than communal, unless we are intentional about it.
a Wobbly Quaker
I just read the book “Is Your Church on Life Support?” and chapter 8 goes on and on about the importance of visiting. Between visiting long-absent people, visiting new people, and and getting all 8 of the people who were left in that church on board with being really welcoming (the rule in that church was, you have to shake hands with 10 people every Sunday, that way people don’t just clump up with a friend or two and ignore the new and new-ish people), the church grew from 8 to 40 people.
I agree and am saddened by anemic visions of comfy, homogenous Quaker community that leaves many (perhaps even the majority) feeling like outsiders and that keep Meetings organized around friendly socializing at the expense of deep life in God and formation in our tradition. I am worried about the dynamic of communities that stagnate prophetic ministry, or worse, marginalize and scapegoat out of self-protection and perpetuate dominant cultural values instead of the Gospel that liberates us from the tools of oppression.
But community has also been my source of redemption, the way that God has really ministered to me, and the “refiner’s fire” that has helped to expose my own weaknesses and strengths and help me to learn and integrate both God’s love for me and the way of obedience in the Quaker tradition, and basically almost everything else i know that is of any use. What’s more, from what I can tell this seems to be true for most people. Most people meet God through others, and from what I can tell our theology seems to be most directly informed by our experiences with community. When we are known and loved in community, we feel that God loves us. And in this context, we become rooted in who God really is, not our own psychological fantasies of God.
Where else are we to learn or develop this shared religious understanding except together? How else are we to encounter Christ’s conviction of us if not with trusted others who we know will speak the truth to us? How else are we to escape the individualism that is killing this society and literally the entire planet if not by forging deep connections and communities that have the weight to handle real stuff? And where does that weight come from? I think it comes from love and trust, which is what people are going for when they talk about nice comfy community stuff, but I think you are right that folk are going about it in the wrong way.
I hear your heart and I agree we need to do away with weak models of community, but I believe that community has always been central to the Christian life, and Quakers have lived that and drawn our life from it since before Howard Brinton came up with his thin definition of such.
Just my two cents.