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.