Conflict in meeting and the role of heartbreak and testing

A few weeks ago a newslet­ter brought writ­ten reports about the lat­est round of con­flict at a local meet­ing that’s been fight­ing for the past 180 years or so. As my wife and I read through it we were a bit under­whelmed by the accounts of the newest con­flict res­o­lu­tion attempts. The medi­a­tors seemed more wor­ried about alien­at­ing a few long-term dis­rup­tive char­ac­ters than about pre­serv­ing the spir­i­tual vital­ity of the meet­ing. It’s a phe­nom­ena I’ve seen in a lot of Quaker meetings.

Call it the FDR Prin­ci­ple after Franklin D Roo­sevelt, who sup­pos­edly defended his sup­port of one of Nicaragua’s most bru­tal dic­ta­tors by say­ing “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Even casual his­to­ri­ans of Latin Amer­i­can his­tory will know this only led to fifty years of wars with rever­ber­a­tions across the world with the Iran/Contra scan­dal. The FDR Prin­ci­ple didn’t make for good U.S. for­eign pol­icy and, if I may, I’d sug­gest it doesn’t make for good Quaker pol­icy either. Any dis­cus­sion board mod­er­a­tor or pop­u­lar blog­ger knows that to keep an online discussion’s integrity you need to know when to cut a dis­rup­tive trouble-maker off–politely and suc­cintly, but also firmly. If you don’t, the peo­ple there to actu­ally dis­cuss your issues–the peo­ple you want–will leave.

I didn’t know how to talk about this until a post called Con­flict in Meet­ing came through Live­jour­nal this past First Day. The poster, jan­drewm, wrote in part:

Yet my recog­ni­tion of all that doesn’t negate the painful feel­ings that arise when hos­til­ity enters the meet­ing room, when long-held grudges boil over and harsh words are spo­ken.  After a few months of reg­u­lar atten­dance at my meet­ing, I came close to aban­don­ing this “exper­i­ment” with Quak­erism because some Friends were so con­sis­tently ran­corous, divi­sive, dis­rup­tive.  I had to ask myself: “Do I need this neg­a­tiv­ity in my life right now?”

I com­mented about the need to take the tes­ti­monies seri­ously:

I’ve been in that sit­u­a­tion. A lot of Friends aren’t very good at putting their foot down on fla­grantly dis­rup­tive behav­ior. I wish I could buy the “it even­tu­ally sorts out” argu­ment but it often doesn’t. I’ve seen meet­ings where all the sane peo­ple are dri­ven out, leav­ing the dis­rup­tive folks and arm­chair ther­a­pists. It’s a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship, per­haps, but doesn’t make for a healthy spir­i­tual com­mu­nity.

The unpop­u­lar solu­tion is for us to take our tes­ti­monies seri­ously. And I mean those more spe­cific tes­ti­monies buried deep in copies in Faith & Prac­tice that act as a kind of col­lec­tive wis­dom for Quaker com­mu­nity life. Tes­ti­monies against detrac­tion and for rightly ordered deci­sion mak­ing, etc. If someone’s actions tear apart the meet­ing they should be coun­seled; if they con­tinue to dis­rupt then their decision-making input should be dis­re­garded. This is the real effect of the old much-maligned Quaker process of dis­own­ing (which allowed con­tin­ued atten­dance at wor­ship and life in the com­mu­nity but stopped busi­ness par­tic­i­pa­tion). Lim­it­ing input like this makes sense to me.

The trou­ble that if your meet­ing is in this kind of spi­ral there might not be much you can do by your­self. Peo­ple take some sort of weird com­fort in these pre­dictable fights and if you start talk­ing tes­ti­monies you might become very unpop­u­lar very quickly. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in the bick­er­ing isn’t help­ful (of course) and just eats away your own self. Dis­tanc­ing your­self for a time might be help­ful. Get­ting involved in other Quaker venues. It’s a shame. Monthly meet­ing is sup­posed to be the cen­ter of our Quaker spir­i­tual life. But some­times it can’t be. I try to draw lessons from these cir­cum­stances. I cer­tainly under­stand the value and need for the Quaker tes­ti­monies bet­ter sim­ply because I’ve seen the prob­lems meet­ings face when they haven’t. But that doesn’t make it any eas­ier for you.

But all of this begs an awk­ward ques­tion: are we really build­ing Christ’s king­dom by drop­ping out? It’s an age-old ten­sion between purity and par­tic­i­pa­tion at all costs. Tim­o­thy asked a sim­i­lar ques­tion of me in a com­ment to my last post. Before we answer, we should rec­og­nize that there are indeed many peo­ple who have “aban­doned” their “Quaker exper­i­ment” because we’re not liv­ing up to our own ideals.

Maybe I’m more aware of this drop-out class than oth­ers. It some­times seems like an email cor­re­spon­dence with the “Quaker Ranter” has become the last step on the way out the door. But I also get mes­sages from seek­ers newly con­vinced of Quaker prin­ci­ples but unable to con­nect locally because of the diver­gent prac­tices or juve­nile behav­ior of their local Friends meet­ing or church. A typ­i­cal email last week asked me why the plain Quak­ers weren’t evan­gel­i­cal and why evan­gel­i­cal Quak­ers weren’t con­ser­v­a­tive and asked ”Is there a place in the quak­ers for a Plain Dress­ing, Bible Thump­ing,
Gospel Preach­ing, Evan­gel­i­cal, Con­ser­v­a­tive, Spirit Led, Charis­matic
fam­ily?” (Any­one want to sug­gest their local meet­ing?)

We should be more wor­ried about the peo­ple of integrity we’re los­ing than about the grumpy trouble-makers embed­ded in some of our meet­ings. If some­one is con­sis­tently dis­rup­tive, is clearly break­ing spe­cific Quaker tes­ti­monies we’ve lumped under com­mu­nity and intergrity, and stub­bornly immune to any coun­cil then read them out of busi­ness meet­ing. If the peo­ple you want in your meet­ing are leav­ing because of the peo­ple you really don’t want, then it’s time to do some­thing. Our Quaker tool­box pro­vides us tool for that action–ways to define, name and address the issues. Our tra­di­tion gives us access to hun­dreds of years of expe­ri­ence, both mis­takes and suc­cesses, and can be a more use­ful guide than con­tem­po­rary pop psy­chol­ogy or plain old head-burying.

Not all meet­ings have these prob­lems. But enough do that we’re los­ing peo­ple. And the dynam­ics get more acute when there’s a vision­ary project on the table and/or some­one younger is at the cen­ter of them. While our meet­ings sort out their issues, the inter­net is pro­vid­ing one type of sup­port lifeline.

Blog­ger jan­drewm was able to seek advice and con­so­la­tion on Live­jour­nal. Some of the folks I spoke about in the 2003 “Lost Quaker Gen­er­a­tion” series of posts are now lurk­ing away on my Face­book friends list. Maybe we can stop the full depar­ture of some of these Friends. They can drop back but still be involved, still engag­ing their local meet­ing. They can be read­ing and dis­cussing tes­ti­monies (“detrac­tion” is a won­der­ful place to start) so they can spot and explain behav­ior. We can use the web to coor­di­nate work­shops, online dis­cus­sions, local meet-ups, new work­ship groups, etc., but even email from a Friend thou­sands of miles away can help give us clar­ity and strength.

I think (I hope) we’re help­ing to forge a group of Friends with a clear under­stand­ing of the work to be done and the tech­niques of Quaker dis­cern­ment. It’s no won­der that Quaker bod­ies some­times fail to live up to their ideals: the jour­nals of  olde tyme Quaker min­is­ters are full of dis­ap­point­ing sto­ries and Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion is rich with tales of the road­blocks the Tempter puts up in our path. How can we learn to  cen­ter in the Lord when our meet­ings become too polit­i­cal or disfunctional (I think I should start look­ing harder at Anabap­tist non-resistance the­ory). This is the work, Friends, and it’s always been the work. Through what­ever comes we need to trust that any test­ing and heart­break has a pur­pose, that the Lord is using us through all, and that any suf­fer­ing will be pro­duc­tive to His pur­pose if we can keep low and lis­ten­ing for follow-up instructions.