One of the things I liked about my old Quaker job is that I occa­sion­ally had a moment in between all of the staff meet­ings (and meet­ings about staff meet­ings, and meet­ings about meet­ings about staff meet­ings, I kid you not) to take inter­est­ing calls and emails from Friends want­ing to talk about the state of Friends in their area: how to start a wor­ship group if no Friends existed, how to revi­tal­ize a local Meet­ing, how to work through some grow­ing pains or cul­tural con­flicts. I’ve thought about repli­cat­ing that on the blog, and halfway through respond­ing to one of tonight’s emails I real­ized I was prac­ti­cally writ­ing a blog post. So here it is. Please feel free to add your own responses to this Friend in the comments.

Dear Mar­tin
I have read that Meet­ings that are
silent for long peri­ods of time often wither away. But I can’t remem­ber where I
read that, or if the obser­va­tion has facts to back it up. Do you know of any
source where I can look this up?
Thanks,
CC

Dear CC,
I
can’t think of any spe­cific source for that obser­va­tion. It is
some­times used as an argu­ment against wait­ing wor­ship, a pre­lude to the
intro­duc­tion of some sort of pro­gram­ming. While it’s true that too much
silence can be a warn­ing sign, I sus­pect that Meet­ings that talk too
much are prob­a­bly also just as likely to wither away (at least to
Inward Christ that often seems to speak in whis­pers). I think the
deter­min­ing fac­tor is less deci­bel level but atten­tion to the work­ings
of the Holy Spirit.

One of the main roles of min­istry is to teach. Another is to remind
us to keep turn­ing to God. Another is to remind us that we live by
higher stan­dards than the default required by the sec­u­lar world in
which we live. If the Friends com­mu­nity is ful­fill­ing these func­tions
through some other chan­nel than min­istry in meet­ing for wor­ship then
the Meeting’s prob­a­bly healthy even if it is quiet.

Unfor­tu­nately there are plenty of Meet­ings are too silent on all
fronts. This means that the young and the new­com­ers will have a hard
time get­ting brought into the spir­i­tual life of Friends. Once upon a
time the Meet­ing annu­ally reviewed the state of its min­istry as part of
its queries to Quar­terly and Yearly Meet­ings, which gave neigh­bor­ing
Friends oppor­tu­ni­ties to pro­vide assis­tance, advise or even min­is­ters.
The prac­tice of writ­ten answers to queries have been dropped by most
Friends but the pos­si­bil­ity of appeal­ing to other Quaker bod­ies is
still a def­i­nite pos­si­bil­ity.
Your Friend, Martin