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Friday 31 October 2014

Cycles of Renewal

Looking around at the condition of the Quaker movement in Britain, it is tempting to grow nostalgic about the profounder spirituality of a previous age. I want to encourage us to resist this temptation. We should not aim at a return to the Quaker forms of the past. Instead, we need a more disciplined attention to the practices that can help us to be faithful to the Spirit in our contemporary world.

By concentrating on the lives of 'great Quakers' of the past, we can easily overlook the fact that Friends such as John Woolman, Elizabeth Fry or Rufus Jones were not at all typical of the wider Quaker movement of their time. For most of our history, Friends have been largely what we are today – spiritually tepid and deeply compromised by our accommodation to the surrounding culture.

The life-cycle of every religious movement begins in a blaze of inspiration, which is quickly smothered by a growth of authoritarianism and bureaucracy. Most of these groups rapidly burn themselves out in a puff of disillusionment, but a few manage to renew themselves, sometimes in very different forms and contexts. Those religious movements that do survive tend to go through cycles of short-lived spiritual vitality followed by much longer periods of decline. The longest-lived religious traditions, such as Catholicism, Judaism and Zen Buddhism, have been through this cycle of decline and renewal several times over many centuries.

There are good reasons why long-lived religious movements need to be continually renewed. Once the first generation of charismatic leadership is lost, their original followers often fall out with each other, and turn to legalism and hierarchy to enforce their authority. This happened very early in the history of the Christian church (see Galatians 2: 11-14). It was also a feature of the growing authoritarianism of 18th century Quaker culture, which soon began to insist on rigid rules of dress, speech and behaviour. Margaret Fox (née Fell) was already protesting this trend in 1700, just nine years after George Fox's death.

'We are now coming into that which Christ cried woe against, minding altogether outward things, neglecting the inward work of Almighty God in our hearts, if we can but frame according to outward prescriptions and orders, and deny eating and drinking with our neighbours, in so much that poor Friends is mangled in their minds, that they know not what to do, for one Friend says one way, and another another, but Christ Jesus saith, that we must take no thought what we shall eat, or what we shall drink, or what we shall put on, but bids us consider the lilies how they grow, in more royalty than Solomon. But contrary to this, we must look at no colours, nor make anything that is changeable colours as the hills are, nor sell them, nor wear them: but we must be all in one dress and one colour: this is a silly poor Gospel.'

Processes such as this quickly tend to extinguish the enthusiasm of a religious community. As formal structures and bureaucracies develop, members' energy is increasingly drawn into perpetuating the organisation, rather than serving the original spiritual mission of the community. The organisation's culture and structures soon become closely geared to the interests of its most influential members. These structures eventually push increasing numbers of spiritually seeking members to the edges of the community, or even out of it altogether.

Once a religious organisation is in this condition, it is usually very difficult to get out of it. The existing way of doing things approximates to the preferences of a core of regular members, and any newcomers who are looking for something very different are quickly selected out. Bureaucratic structures constantly acquire new committees and functions, which hoover up an increasing share of members' time and energy, sapping the potential for disciplined spiritual practice and courageous testimony.

This is very much the situation I see in large parts of Britain Yearly Meeting. As a Friend in one struggling meeting asked Paul Parker after his talk on 'vibrant meetings', 'We already have too much to do. Are we supposed to be vibrant now as well?' We currently have an organisational culture and structures that suit a dwindling group of members in many scattered, mostly very tiny meetings. A wider group of attenders come to meeting semi-regularly to re-charge their batteries on a Sunday morning, but are deterred from getting more involved by the onerous demands of administration or the absence of real spiritual vitality. Most of the newcomers who occasionally turn up to try a Quaker meeting on Sunday never come back, or attend for only a short time before drifting off to look for something more spiritually nourishing. Yet we rarely ask ourselves what it is that might be missing from our worship and our community.

In large part, British Quakers are asleep; but we are stirring. A growing number of voices are asking whether the way we have come to 'do Quakerism' over the last few decades really serves the needs of our communities or the leadings of the Spirit. Many meetings have confronted their settled opposition to 'proselytising', and started to actively encourage new attenders to our meetings. Some Friends are even starting to question the hardened liberal dogmas that have outlawed the teaching of Quaker spirituality and the ministry of leadership in our communities.

These fitful stirrings have not yet reached a critical threshold of awakening. We may be at a crucial point in our story as British Quakers. Will we toss and turn, only to roll over and go back to sleep? or will we come awake at last, while we still have enough energy and hope to renew our Society and ourselves, to realise the unique possibilities of a renewed Quaker Way for our times?

We have been here before. In the 1860s, when Quakers were in danger of dying out from the loss of members due to rigid enforcement of prohibitions against 'marrying out', we threw away the rule book and embraced engagement with a wider religious and social world. At the very end of the 19th century the 'Quaker Renaissance' movement of John Wilhelm Rowntree, Rufus Jones and Edward Grubb introduced the era of liberal Quakerism. This renewed form of the Quaker Way unleashed a new wave of spiritual vigour and social engagement. It also contributed to the heroic achievements of Friends during the 20th century; from conscientous objection, to the Kinderstransport, famine relief and anti-war movements. We need a new kind of 'Quaker Renaissance' today.

Many other religious communities have been in the same place before us. Most have slid gradually but inevitably into irrelevance and historical obscurity – such as the Muggletonians (yes really), Familists and many others. A few have managed to wake up and renew themselves before it was too late, leading to a new flowering of creative spirituality and social transformation. In her 1993 James Backhouse lecture for Australia Yearly Meeting, Ursula Jane O'Shea drew on the analysis of Catholic religious orders which had successfully renewed themselves (sometimes several times over), to identify the characteristics of successful spiritual renewal. She argues that the renewal of a religious community cannot be achieved purely by reforming structures (although new, more well-adapted structures will result from a renewed community). Neither can renewal be achieved solely by a small group of leaders. Instead, a profound change of community direction depends upon the re-awakening of a willingness and desire for relationship with the divine. For us as Quakers, she argues that:

'Healing spiritual malaise within a group and initiating revival cannot be accomplished by office-holders or weighty Friends. It must be the committed task of a large section of the community, if not all of it. Transformation of a group can begin nowhere else but within each person. Willingness in many members to begin the hard work of inward transformation, without waiting for others to go first, may be the test of a community's desire and capacity to be revitalised...

Renewal of the Society waits for the choice of each Friend: Am I willing to risk the disturbing, transfiguring presence of the Spirit in my life? To obey it? To expect 'the Cross' and dark days as I discover and nurture who I am before God? When we choose to live the spiritual life the Quaker Way, these are the experiences we are committing ourselves to, whatever words we put upon them. If significant numbers of us are not interested in, or willing to live by these experiences, the hoped-for renewal of our meetings cannot occur. But if our collective spiritual power gathers strength it will infect other Friends and newcomers. Ministry will become more grounded in the Spirit and individuals will be inspired by the Spirit to serve our meetings as nurturers, prophets and conservers.'


I welcome your insights into the possibilities of Quaker renewal in Britain. For those who use Facebook, there is also a new group to explore these questions and share suggestions and resources for 'waking up' at Quaker Renewal UK - please join and invite your Friends.

There will also be a weekend on Quaker renewal at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in July 2015, following on from Ben Pink Dandelion's Swarthmore Lecture. More information and bookings here

10 comments:

  1. I can't speak to the state of British Friends since I have almost no experience of British Quakerism, but it sounds very similar to much of North American Quakerism. One thing I've often recommended to Friends deeply steeped in Quakerism is that they take some time off from the Society of Friends and try to experience at least one fairly healthy other church for sufficient time to begin to understand how it functions.

    In my personal experience, I found this very illuminating. It gives an external perspective, which is very different from an internal perspective. It helps illuminate some of both the strengths and weaknesses in the Quaker community, and may open your eyes to different ways of achieving what Quakers are seeking to achieve. I'm convinced that a real renewal will need a combination of external and internal perspectives.

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  2. Good post Craig. I love that lecture too. The spiritual choice presented is the heart of things for me. ("Renewal of the Society waits for the choice of each Friend: Am I willing to risk the disturbing, transfiguring presence of the Spirit in my life? To obey it? To expect 'the Cross' and dark days as I discover and nurture who I am before God?") I am not certain whether it is worth expecting renewal amongst Friends, but what I am confident of is that God's power is my hope.

    What I know I can do is nurture my thirst for the transforming power of the One who brings Good News for the poor, and who gives the strength to do what we must and to bear the trials of our attempts to live out God's love in a social world that is addicted to oil, violence, and exploitation, and in the grip of energy descent and climate change. I am not a good Quaker, I can barely manage to attend Meeting, but I am on a path of learning to centre my life around that Living Presence in whom I trust, and to whom I look for the way through this predicament, to teach me how to love.

    I trust that the necessary transformation is to be found from consistent attention to God, dependence on that guidance, and living out the traditional Quaker theology of waiting on that Teacher, and that in time I will be drawn together with others who share the thirst for the Living Water. I think unless I am willing to make the choice and make it my top priority to encounter God and be transformed myself, I am not going to be able to share the experience of earlier generations of Friends in finding myslef drawn together with others who are also living this Way.

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    1. Hi Alice, yes for each of us it is our own wholehearted desire to be guided by the Spirit of God that is most essential. I don't think we can expect a spiritual renewal among Quakers, but I believe that it is right to hope for it - because I am sure that it is part of God's purposes for us to become more fully alive and faithful, individually and as a people.
      In Friendship, Craig

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  3. "Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow." -- Isaiah 1:16-17.

    Friends live in a world where an amazing number of human beings live under a sheet of plastic and earn two dollars a day or less. We kind of push to the side how we collectively use these people to make our clothing and bananas. Also, within our meetings some people who need jobs don't have jobs and others have lousy jobs. Perhaps we need to be sorry. Our spirit guides may ask us to not be part of this inequality, to actually take some action, and that realization may seem painful to us because it moves us beyond where we want to go.

    Our spirit guides may ask us to be uncomfortable that we're making most of the earth's species extinct, and sooner than we know. We take personal actions that burn carbon, but much more to the point, we're educated and sometimes we don't take daily actions with our hands, with our brains and with our entire beings to push the fossil fuel industry into museums. Instead we work our career jobs and we're tired by Friday, for the rest of our lives. We may experience regrets later in our lives that we didn't do much about climate change when it was smaller, and that we didn't act as a community. Sometimes personally recycling cans and sealing cracks isn't enough.

    We may also be uncomfortable with our personal participation in holding one billion civilian hostages in a nuclear standoff. We didn't choose to be part of the Defcon 5 cabal, but we're in it somehow and we're quietist about the situation.

    Friends have a long history of being personally uncomfortable with injustice, then organizing. Early Christianity was a fusion of nonviolent organizing and spiritual experiences including healing, prayer and miracles, meditation and talking with God. The early Quaker movement was no different.

    I think we should understand that what we call Quakerism right now -- staid meetings, a quietist majority of Friends interested only in strictly limited spiritual experiences such as happens during a group worship, cookies afterward -- can be transformed. However, to do the job right will stretch all of us quite a bit.

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    1. Thanks for this Paul. I hope that you are right, that 'what we call Quakerism right now' can be transformed to become agents of prophetic transformation. I agree that this is what the world urgently needs.

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  4. Great piece Craig. Is there some way that those of us who don't use facebook to be involved?

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    1. Thanks Jeff, the best online resource for Quaker renewal is at quakerquaker.org - although stuff there is mostly from the USA rather than Britain. The most important place for conversations about spiritual renewal, though, is in our local meetings and other gatherings of Friends around the country. This is hopefully something that all of us can be involved in.
      In Friendship,
      Craig

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  5. Excellent post, Craig, really. I've taken the liberty of quoting you, and drawing some of my own conclusions, over on Silent Assemblies. Thank you so much for this - not least for the link to Ursula Jane O'Shea's prophetic Backhouse Lecture.

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    1. Hi Mike, thanks - I've appreciated your post, and have shared it with the Quaker Renewal group already.

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  6. I have recently found my way as a Quaker Pacifist. While all the time I felt the word implied victimization or a form of masochism. Today I find my pacifism is what I find in the light of my own spirit. For years I have been dwelling on concerns of dependency that have ingested and absorbed my whole heart. As many know Quakers can be very possessive or even possessing in their relationship to kin, I have found my convictions in the solitude of my own peace. Whereas once that was a place of complete darkness and confusion, I am starting to find a balance between resting and awakening, and have grown in conviction as a pacifist that even such affairs which permeate my family may not need my mending, and with my best intent in reaching a higher good and a higher purpose, responding and reacting only serve to deter me from my general well being, and ought to be left alone due to the panic, anxiety and stress of believing I was made to act or need to act, but don't have the means or reason to do so.

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"When words are strange or disturbing to you, try to sense where they come from and what has nourished the lives of others. Listen patiently and seek the truth which other people's opinions may contain for you. Avoid hurtful criticism and provocative language. Do not allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue. Think it possible that you may be mistaken."
(From Quaker Advices and Queries 17)