When I look around, there is still so much hurt that needs to be processed. There are still real differences in philosophy about how to build community. Some see how much needs to radically change so that those who have been marginalized can truly be safe and have agency, and so want to go slowly to build it correctly. Some see the damage having no community can bring, and want to do what they can to build something as safely as possible. I hate that these differences are still causing damage to our relationships and our communities. I don’t have a solution.

I appreciate the way he tries to understand the flip sides of community and institutionalism; perhaps schism could be seen as the moment they can no longer be negotiated. As pastor of one of the “most institutional of institutional churches for 15 years,” he was in the center of the centrifugal forces that tore apart both Northwest Yearly Meeting as a whole and indivisible Friends churches within it. From a distance of 3000 miles and 150 years of diverging Quaker history, I’m not in a position to say whether things could have gone differently or whether individuals always acted in their best ways but I can appreciate that it there must have been a lot of impossible choices and no-good answers as polarization gave way to disintegration.

Risking Community