On Clearness Committees for Membership

A note to my readers:

I’ve been away from this blog for quite some time while I focused on other writing. But I’m back. I still may not post as often as I used to because I’m still really engaged with these other projects, but I have a little more time these days and I do expect to post every few days or so. Thanks to those of you who have continued to check in now and then.   ~ Steven

 

Now, on membership:

Some of the articles in the April issue of Friends Journal on membership got me thinking again about the central role that the faith and especially the practice of membership play in driving and directing the trends of change in the Quaker tradition. As a community we are whom we admit into membership and we become what these Friends want from their religious life. (Of course, this is true only so far as most of our members come to us through convincement rather than by being born to us through ‘birthright.’ And we also should acknowledge the significant contributions of our attenders in this regard, who often make up a sizable portion of our meetings and often stay attenders for a long time rather than applying for membership. As a result, they end up becoming ersatz members, reflecting and reinforcing the fact that we have become very unclear (and apparently unattractive) about what membership means, what it offers and what it entails—we have given them no good reason to become members.)

Over time the influx of new Friends has brought to us many of the trends and issues that preoccupy our attention. Christ-centered versus universalist, confessional faith versus a faith defined as seeking, nontheism, Quaker ‘paganism’ and forms of women’s spirituality, abortion and other gender issues, concerns about homosexuality, same sex marriage and sexuality in general, intolerance of each other’s beliefs, the apparent dilution of spiritual vitality in many of our meetings—all these have their roots to some degree in the minds and emotions and expectations of the people we have admitted to membership.

My own experience serves as a good example. When I first joined Friends, I applied to a meeting in which I already had very close friends and they were very happy to have me. My clearness committee was anything but perfunctory, however; we all took the process very seriously, and I came with baggage that really needed to be dealt with. I was hostile to Christianity and the Bible (though I had been a zealous member of my Lutheran church as a youth and dove with relish into Bible study during confirmation class) and I told my committee so. They saw this as no impediment and soon I was a member.

Soon I was harassing Friends who brought us Christian and biblical vocal ministry. I objected to Bible lessons in First-day School. I expressed my hostility. No one eldered me. Years passed. Then I went to Pendle Hill intending to begin research for a book on earth stewardship that involved intense Bible study. This study rekindled my love for the Bible and, in short time, this renewed enthusiasm overwhelmed my hostility. I’ve never stopped studying scripture since and have been writing two books that amount to biblical eco-theology. I still am not a Christian by any of the definitions that I use, but I have learned respect for my tradition. So my meeting got lucky—I changed on my own.

But I might not have. I could have continued to hurt people and damage our fellowship. I could have continued to quench the spirit in other Friends and damage my meeting’s worship. I could have continued to reinforce the liberal shift away from our traditional Christian and biblical roots. This troubles me.

The doorway to all this damage and all the trends I’ve mentioned is the clearness process for membership and the attitudes and the expectations we bring to it. Because of my own experience, I have felt for some time a call to a ministry focused on recovering our traditions and on taking greater responsibility for the direction our movement is taking. That means taking a close look at how we approach membership.

Here’s what I think my clearness committee should have done in my case: Accept my application, certainly. I am not talking about excluding people by applying some kind of creed. But I wish they had probed my woundedness enough to anticipate more clearly my possible behavior and its consequences. Then, most importantly, I wish they had asked (really, I mean required) that I labor with them to overcome my negativity. I wish that they had reminded me that my behavior affects real people and put me on notice that the meeting would protect its fellowship and its worship—that I would be held accountable for my behavior. I would like to believe that I would have snapped to right then and there if they had made this request/demand.

Here’s the crux—the cross, really—of what I’m saying: I am proposing that our meetings consider membership as a commitment to covenant, a mutually binding agreement, an agreement in which, as applicants, one of the things we are asking for is help with our spiritual development through both nurture and loving correction if we “step through the traces”; a willingness to actively engage each other in the sacred work of discipleship, by which I mean the individual and corporate discipline that leads to greater faithfulness. For its part, the meeting would promise to nurture each member’s spiritual life and to lovingly but confidently labor with members when they threaten either the meeting’s worship or its fellowship. For this kind of eldering is, truly, a form of spiritual nurture.

Most meetings will resist this. ‘Discipline’ is a four-letter word among us now. Many of us have found our home here as refugees fleeing hurtful intrusion into our lives by a religious institution. The last thing such Friends want is similar intrusion from their meeting. Our liberality, our self-identification as a “do it yourself religion,” our desire to be nice, our position as a haven for these refugees, all these cultural traits make Quaker meetings very reluctant to build a meaningful culture of eldership. And our desire to welcome good people into our (dwindling) fold makes us loathe to do anything in the membership process that might scare applicants off. I would have welcomed this kind of engagement myself; I have always felt covenant was essential to my spiritual life. But, yes, some applicants would be scared off and many others would become wary; and rightfully so.

So we should at least probe our applicants deeply enough to find out what they want from us in terms of spiritual nurture, including eldering—how far are they willing to let us go? Just raising the question will be useful. Meanwhile, meetings need to examine themselves to see whether they are clear to provide such nurture and eldering. Clearness for membership is a two way process of discernment: are we clear to accept the applicant as a member, and are we clear as a meeting that we can answer their spiritual needs? Very often, our applicants won’t really know what they want. If we are going to help them find out, then we need to know what we want as a meeting, and who we are.

If we do not clarify what we want from our members, if we do not consider the consequences of inattention and reticence in our clearness committees, then we relinquish any chance of discerning the future of our tradition, of furthering our tradition rather than gradually and thoughtlessly abandoning it over time. We relinquish any chance of choosing the course of our history and we thus relegate our fate to arbitrary forces that are mostly invisible to us until we reap the consequences. Bereft of a vital culture of eldership, such a rudderless ship will inevitably founder on the shoals of the world’s values.

Most important, by not asking for more from our members, we fail them in their search for spiritual fulfillment. Presumably, this is one of the reasons people join, that they believe the Quaker community will give them the environment they need to enrich their inner lives. They hope to find God among us, whatever that might mean to them. They join—and then we often leave them to their own resources after all.

Finally, as sociological studies of religious communities have repeatedly shown, asking more from your members actually attracts people and grows membership. A community that really knows what it is about shines like a light on a hill. A wishy-washy community with no clear definition or boundaries hopes that people will somehow find their way to its doors by their own perseverance in navigating the world’s spiritual labyrinths.

So this new approach to membership requires that our meetings search themselves more deeply to discern what, in fact, they are about. What do we have to offer new members besides opportunities to serve on committees, community with good people, and an hour a week of relatively peaceful silence and heartfelt sharing? How can we offer them experience of the Divine in ways that nurture their souls?

I am trying here to define the mission of a Quaker meeting and the meaning of Quaker membership. Our mission is to serve as God’s agents in furthering our members’ spiritual lives. Membership is entering that covenant, the mutual agreement that working together to nurture each other in the Spirit is what we are all about.

 

A Living Economic Testimony: Debt

I woke up yesterday morning thinking about debt, the linchpin of our current economic crisis, about the systematic assaults on the compassionate and indeed rational management of debt that began with the Reagan administration, and about what Jesus’ teachings and our other Quaker testimonies have to offer as places to start in articulating a living testimony on debt.

Amongst ourselves: contemporary and historical practice

Friends historically have urged each other to avoid debt when possible and, since credit is essential to business, to be very careful not to become overextended with the debt you must incur. They saw this as a breach of what we call today the testimony of integrity; then, they said it broke Jesus’ injunction to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay—that is, when you defaulted on your debts you were breaking your word. During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Friends kept a close watch on each other’s finances and disciplined those who defaulted on their debts. For a while, some meetings read people out of meeting for going bankrupt, especially in the 19^th century. Nevertheless, meetings sometimes also arranged bailouts, covering the outstanding debts of bankrupted members, especially when the creditors were not Friends, in order to do right by the creditors and to protect the Society’s reputation. It also was not too uncommon for meetings to refinance such a Friend, especially if their business had failed through no fault of their own.

Through the twentieth century, Friends assumed many of ‘the world’s’ practices, including attitudes toward debt, while banks extended more and more credit to the individual consuming household. Today, if the Quaker community reflects trends in the wider society, as it almost certainly does, then presumably, quite a few Friends are underwater with their mortgages and in trouble with their credit card debt. But how would we know? And what would we do about it if we did know? We no longer monitor each other’s finances and we do not step in with help when members get into financial trouble. Should we? I think so.

In fact, ideally, perhaps Quaker meetings could function like the Church of the Savior in Washington DC (and the early Christian church; see the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5) when it comes to finances: ask for a financial statement as part of the membership process and for a covenantal relationship with the meeting regarding money. This would go a long way toward solving our meetings’ problems with their own insolvency, though it would drive out some members and thus reduce income, as well. For its part, meetings could also establish relief funds, the way the Mormons do, and perhaps even ‘mandatory’ periodic social service to each other, also along the lines of Mormon practice, as a way to protect and to reboot a struggling household’s fortunes.

Of course this will never happen. It will never even come up. Despite the many sociological studies that show that demanding more of your believers actually grows a congregation, Friends will almost certainly see such a practice as invasive and coercive, never mind that we did it for almost 200 years. Nevertheless, I think we should do everything we can to encourage our members to tell us when they’re in trouble and to help to the degree that we can. As niggardly as Friends are towards contributions to our meetings and institutions, we often respond quite generously to direct appeals for specific and personalized causes. Perhaps the best way to build up a fund that could help struggling members is to run something akin to a capital drive to raise funds for a new meetinghouse or for major repairs to an existing one. Without such a fund and without a clear willingness on the part of the meeting to help, deeply indebted members are not likely to come forward.

During the persecutions, Friends managed to help each other out against terrible, sustained and concerted financial assault. Likewise, the early apostolic church was organized around care for the poor, vividly dramatized in Acts 2 and 4. Do we share such a fellowship today?

Is Quakerism in Decline?

Along with budget documents, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting released at this year’s annual sessions a sheet outlining membership statistics for the past twenty years. Declining membership is one of the factors driving PYM’s current financial crisis. I want to look at these figures in some detail in future posts, but for me they raise a bunch of questions I want to look at first:

• Is Quakerism in decline?
• What do we (what do I) mean by “decline”?
• What factors would we consider to be reliable indicators of decline?

Declining membership is the most obvious indicator and I think it’s worthwhile to try to understand its patterns and especially its causes. Hence the posts that will follow analyzing PYM’s data. But I would like to propose some other indicators and ask my readers to add theirs. I would also like to hear comments on these indicators from members of yearly meetings besides the two I have some knowledge of—PYM and New York Yearly Meeting: Are other yearly meetings in basically the same condition as these two East Coast yearly meetings? Are there noticeable differences between FGC and FUM and Conservative yearly meetings (also Britain Yearly Meeting) in their experience of these indicators? I would like to start a worldwide project of self-evaluation using roughly the same set of parameters to determine whether Quakerism is in decline and, if so, perhaps why.

My instincts tell me we are in decline in a number of ways, but going over PYM’s membership statistics made me wonder why I felt that way and whether there was real evidence for such a subjective feeling. Was it possible to get past personal anecdotal impressions to a more rigorous conclusion? So I’m hoping we can use the blogosphere to begin answering these questions.

Here’s my list of indicators:

1. Membership—what are the trends and patterns?
2. Financial support—what are the trends and patterns?
3. Gathered meetings—how many meetings are experiencing gathered meetings and how often? (I would leave the definition of ‘gathered meeting’ up to the meeting or the commentator, rather than try to define it myself for others.) I believe this is the most important indicator we have.
4. Seasoned Friends—how many monthly meetings have Friends whose knowledge of Quakerism is deep enough to teach it either in an adult RE program, or to recognize when the meeting is acting in ignorance of our traditions?
5. Quaker ministers—how many meetings have members whose work, either among Friends or in the world, has either been formally recorded or is generally recognized in the meeting and/or supported by the meeting in some way?

Got any more?

Membership

I started to respond to a post by Micah Bales on membership and it kept getting longer and longer, so I decided to move it to my blog. But I hope Friends will visit Micah’s blog, where he asks some great questions, and several Friends have thoughtfully responded.

I think membership is one of the key issues in Quakerism today. All the complaints we may have about our meetings come down to how we conduct our clearness process for membership, because each person we admit to membership helps to shape the culture of the meeting a little more, and each clearness process defines an initial set of assumptions about the boundaries between meeting and member.

Friends no longer think of membership as a ‘covenantal’ relationship in which they expect their fellow members and the meeting to get directly involved in their spiritual development in an active culture of eldership. They once did. So eldership and discipline, in both their positive and corrective applications, have become four letter words and the meeting has no leverage, no foundation to stand on when it’s needed. More importantly, though, by assuming a passive relationship between member and meeting the meeting has lost its first chance to be really helpful in its new member’s spiritual life: each will now wait until the other makes a move.

Friends tend to fear turning people away by asking for too much from people seeking membership, so they are lucky when they actually get something from them. Meanwhile, sociological studies of religious communities universally conclude that the communities that ask the most are the most vibrant and grow the most. Many people seeking religious community apparently want us to engage them, after all.

The steady shift away from liberal Quakerism’s traditional Christian and biblical identity and even occasional difficulties with hostility toward Christian or biblical vocal ministry and teaching in first day school, for instance, are a direct result of un-clearness about membership clearness. I am an anti-shining example myself. I told my committee that I was anti-Christian and a bit rabid and they took me in anyway (thank God). Sure enough, I started hassling Christians and blocked the Bible in first day school. We get a lot of refugees like me. My meeting got lucky; I woke up to my bad behavior on my own (after a few years and a few woundings of the innocent) and, though I still am not a Christian, and I still have my complaints about Christianity, I am now the guy who consistently insists that Quakers are a Christian community until we decide otherwise, that people like me are guests in the house of Christ and should act like guests, and I have become the local expert on the Bible. It turns out that this is one of my gifts.

Here’s what I think should have happened in my clearness committee: Okay, Steve, we welcome you, but we recognize that you come to us with some baggage, so we’re going to ask you two things: first, you have to be responsible with that anger and those ideas. We ask you not to hurt people with them. Second, we want to work with you to see if we can help you calm down. Will you be willing to work with us? (I would have said yes; just hearing someone say these things would have done a lot, in fact, to wake me up). Then great. Welcome. We’ll let you know soon who we would like you to meet with in what we call a clearness committee to hear about what your concerns are.

Thus, I believe clearness committees for membership should add the following to the tasks they set for themselves when they meet with applying attenders:

• They should actively seek to find out if the applicant is hostile to Christian and biblical tradition, to “God talk”, to the testimonies. If so, they should ask for permission to work with them about these issues, once they become members, and remind them of their responsibility for the openness of worship and the feelings of others. I am not talking about a theological litmus test; I am talking about taking responsibility for the spirit of worship and the care of the members that wounded people might threaten.
• They should ask how much the applicant is willing to allow the meeting to engage with them in their ministry, especially vocal ministry: ask them to read one of the good pamphlets about meeting for worship, at the very least. Try to find some way to open a two-way conversation about vocal ministry, mindful that most folks take a while to get over their original reticence about speaking in meeting, so you don’t want to scare them off, either. But they should know that you are available for support and encouragement.
• Membership clearness committees should begin the process of discerning the applicant’s potential gifts of the spirit: what do they bring to the meeting, what forms of involvement in the meeting would give them an outlet for these gifts, how can the meeting help them fulfill the urge we believe all people have to serve God? This could be done in a later meeting to a greater depth, but the clearness committee should at least make it clear that this is the primary thing the meeting has to offer them as members: help in fulfilling themselves spiritually.

Without that, it’s not clear why someone would want to become a member, and, as we all know, many people attend for years without joining. I think this is the answer to the question, what will change, what will I get out of being a member, besides being assigned to a committee? We will help you discover and develop and express the gifts you have been given. This is the great distinctive breakthrough of Quaker spirituality: that we know that everyone has gifts, everyone is/can be called to God’s service, that we offer weekly opportunities for using those gifts in meeting for worship, that, in almost no other religious community are all members (potential) ministers—and that few joys can compare with the fulfillment of those gifts in service. Membership embodies the formal agreement between member and meeting to work together on awakening and developing and using our spiritual gifts.

Of course, this assumes that the meeting has the resources to sustain a vital culture of eldership—seasoned Friends with the gift of eldership, who know our traditions of ministry, who can sense where someone’s gifts lie, what someone is interested in, and then suggest a book, or somehow guide them toward some form of exploration and expression that will bring their gifts to full fruit. It also assumes that committees for worship and ministry and/or pastoral care have the will to be proactive and ask members and attenders how they can help, and that they have the resources to be of help, once they have a member’s permission to get involved.

To further this role of the meeting as spiritual nurturer, I think we should add a new practice to our conduct of clearness committees for membership. I think we should automatically convene a second clearness committee for discernment of gifts, to be conducted some time after membership, to build on the momentum, to equip new members with whatever will help them contribute to meeting life, and to find out how the meeting can begin to contribute to their spiritual growth. Clearness for membership should open a door into mutual engagement in the life of the Spirit. Membership itself should eventually give more to the member than they could ever give to the meeting—the joy of spiritual awakening and fulfillment.

We can do the same for attenders, of course. In fact, this is the way to encourage membership. But the key difference, I suggest, is that the relationship between attender and meeting is, sort of by definition, passive. The meeting makes spiritual nurture available, of course. The attender takes it or leaves it. And the meeting waits for the attender to apply. But membership means the attender now wants the meeting to actively work with them on their journey. It is ‘covenantal’. The attender asks the meeting to be proactive, to get involved. It is an invitation to active mutual engagement, and it includes the invitation to discipline. We all get into spiritual trouble, sometimes; being a member means you know you won’t be left to out to dry. Someone has promised to help you get back on track, if they can. And all along, they will be helping you find the way God has in mind for you.