What Defines Us as Friends

“Our commitment to Quaker process isn’t primarily a commitment to efficiency. It’s a commitment to being the body of Christ, with all the discomfort that life in the body entails. When we fail in our process, we fail in our life as the body, because failure of the process inevitably means that one part of the body has been judged to mean less to the body than another part of the body.

While the reality is that some voices carry more weight than others, I don’t think that’s where our process usually breaks down. The process breaks down when something gets in the way of all the members of the body being able to speak in the midst of a community gathered for the purpose of listening to each other and discerning the common path to which God calls them all. One practice that obstructs that common listening is any kind of attempt to manipulate what happens in Monthly Meeting around the discussion of a particular idea. I’ve called this politicking. Another obstacle to our common listening is the urgency or fear which can lead a small group within the Meeting to make a decision that rightly belonged to the entire group. I’ve called this bad or broken process.

Either of these obstacles, or any of the others with which a Meeting might grapple, can result in a good decision arrived at by poor means. That’s why it’s important, during a Meeting conflict, for elders and members to try to sort out whether it’s the actual decision or the process by which a decision was made that’s caused the upset. The Meeting members who will try to bring about reconciliation will approach that task differently depending upon whether process or decision is the issue.

To reiterate: it’s not what we talk about but how we talk that defines us as Friends. That becomes especially clear when we realize how many of our conflicts are over the way we talked (or didn’t), not over the decisions we actually made. Did we remember that we are one body? That’s what our business is ultimately about—remembering that we are one body. Friends establish our faith on the conviction that the Spirit is able to lead us to the place where God would have us, provided we are willing and responsive.”

— Dan Kasztelan, 2021
Communications Director for Friends United Meeting