Brent Bill is con­tin­u­ing his “Mod­est Pro­posal” series on Quaker “revi­tal­iza­tion” on his blog Holy Ordi­nary. Today’s install­ment (part seven) is great but I’m not sure where it leaves us. He starts by talk­ing about how some Quaker body’s books of dis­ci­plines (“Faith and Prac­tice”) are becom­ing more legal­is­tic as they pick up ideas from other reli­gious bod­ies. He then chal­lenges yearly meet­ings and other Friends bod­ies to a “seri­ous exam­i­na­tion of their pur­pose and pro­grams” in which they ask a series of ques­tions about their purpose.

I agree with a lot of his obser­va­tion. But at the same time I’m not sure what a seri­ous exam­i­na­tion would look like or would pro­duce. In recent years my own yearly meet­ing has devel­oped a kind of cir­ca­dian rhythm of con­stant reor­ga­ni­za­tion, tin­ker­ing with orga­ni­za­tional charts, leg­isla­tive processes design to speed up deci­sions, and chang­ing times and fre­quen­cies of events hop­ing to attract new peo­ple. And yet, as I wrote a few weeks ago, when I went to sit in on a meet­ing of the gov­ern­ing body, I was the third or fourth youngest per­son in a room of about 75 Friends. It was pretty much the same group of peo­ple who were doing it ten years and mul­ti­ple reforms ago, only now they are ten years older. We actu­ally ripped through busi­ness so we can spend an hour naval-gazing about the pur­pose of this par­tic­u­lar gov­ern­ing body and I can report it wasn’t the breath of fresh air that we might have hoped for.

A big part of the prob­lem is we’ve for­got­ten why we’re doing all this. We’ve split the faith from the practice–and I don’t mean Chris­t­ian vs non-Christian, but the whole kit-and-kaboodle that is the Quaker under­stand­ing of gospel order, a world view that is dis­tinct from that of other Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions. Lloyd Lee Wil­son calls it the “Quaker gestalt” in Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order. When a spir­i­tual tra­di­tion has an inter­nal con­sis­tency, and the process and the­ol­ogy rein­force each other. Archi­tec­ture and demeanor, cul­tural and busi­ness val­ues fit together. It’s never per­fect, of course, and main­tain­ing the con­sis­tency against new influ­ences and chang­ing cir­cum­stances is often the source of unnec­es­sary petty squab­bling. But even some­thing as innocu­ous as a meetinghouse’s bench arrange­ments can tell you a lot about a group’s the­ol­ogy and its bal­ance towards author­ity and individualism.

It’s our under­stand­ing of our faith and our con­cept of body-of-Christ com­mu­nity which under­girds our insti­tu­tional struc­tures. When we don’t have a good grasp of it, we do things merely because “we’re sup­posed to” and the process feels dry and spirit-less. We defend par­tic­u­lar insti­tu­tions as nec­es­sary because they’re cod­i­fied in our books of doc­trine and lose our abil­ity to pos­i­tively explain their exis­tence, at which point frus­trated mem­bers will call for their aban­don­ment as unnec­es­sary bag­gage from a bygone age.

As an exam­ple, about seven years ago my quar­terly meet­ing went through a naval-gazing process. I tried to be involved, as did my then-Quaker wife Julie. We asked a lot of big ques­tions but oth­ers on the vision­ing com­mit­tee just wanted to ask small ques­tions. When Julie and I asked about divine guid­ance at ses­sions, for exam­ple, one fel­low con­de­scend­ingly explained that if we spent all our time ask­ing what God wanted we’d never get any­thing done. We really didn’t know what to say to that, espe­cially as it seemed the con­sen­sus of oth­ers in the group. One thing they were com­plain­ing about was that it was always the same few peo­ple doing any­thing but after a few rounds of those meet­ings, we ran scream­ing away (my wife right out of the RSoF altogether).

Re-visioning isn’t just decon­struct­ing insti­tu­tions we don’t under­stand or tin­ker­ing with some new process to fix the old process that doesn’t work. If you’ve got a group of peo­ple actively lis­ten­ing to the guid­ance of the Inward Christ then any process or struc­ture prob­a­bly can be made to work (though some will facil­i­tate dis­cern­ment bet­ter). Our books of “Faith and Prac­tice” were never meant to be inerrant Bibles. At their core, they’re our “wiki” of best prac­tices for Quaker com­mu­nity discernment–tips earned through the suc­cesses and fail­ures of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. I think if we under­stand our spir­i­tual roots bet­ter we’ll find our musty old Quaker insti­tu­tions actu­ally still have impor­tant roles to play. But how do we get there? I like Brent’s ques­tions but I’m not sure you can just start with them. Any­one want to share sto­ries of spir­i­tual deep­en­ing in their meet­ings or faith com­mu­ni­ties and how that fed into a renewed appre­ci­a­tion of Quaker bod­ies and process?