So Isaac Smith is back with the third installment of his growing series, “Difference Between a Gathered Meeting and a Focused Meeting” and this time he’s referencing two writers on Quaker matters, Michael J. Sheeran and yours truly.
In my previous posts, the distinction between gathered and focused meetings seemed connected to one’s religious outlook, and thus related to the divide between Christ-centered and universalist Quakers that has bedeviled our faith for centuries. But as Sheeran and Kelley argue, the more fundamental divide in the liberal branch of Quakerism is between those who seek contact with the divine and those who don’t.
My post is, as Smith puts it, “nearly fifteen years old,” which is about the length of a social generation. I’m not sure if I’m in a good position to pontificate about what has and hasn’t changed. Much of my Quaker work is with interesting outliers, either one-or-one or as part of a loose tribe of Friends who passionately care about Quakerism and are willing to go into the weeds to understand it. I have very little recent experience with committees on local levels.
One useful concept that I’ve picked up in the last fifteen years is that of “functional atheism.” This bypasses a group’s self-stated understandings of faith to look at how its decision-making process actually works. An organization that is functionally atheist might be full of very devout people who together still decide actions in a completely secular way. I would guess this has become even more the norm among the acronymic soup of national Quaker organizations in the last fifteen years. In that time a lot of bright ideas have come and gone which flashed briefly with the fuel of donor money but which didn’t create a self-sustaining momentum to keep them going long term. Thinking more strategically about what people are seeking in their spiritual lives might have helped those cast seeds land on more fertile grounds.
The Difference Between a Gathered Meeting and a Focused Meeting (3)
Bonus: the 14-year-old comments on my piece include some gentle whining about Friends Journal between myself and a regular reader at the time. Now that I’m its senior editor I’m sure there remains plenty to grumble about.
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