Quaker Business Method and Rational Decision-Making

This is a long post, exploring issues in detail, and I would encourage those interested in the topic to read the whole thing. However, a summary is provided at the end of the post, covering both arguments and advice, and should you wish, you can skip to it.

Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive in
the application of Quaker Business Method.

As Quakers, we try to make our decisions using Quaker Business Method – a subject on which I have written a lot, albeit no basic introduction, but please check out the Quaker Business Method tag on this blog for more of my writing on the subject. This is a method, also known as discernment (or more specifically group discernment, as one can engage in discernment entirely alone) whereby we do not set aside our rational mind entirely; we prepare by trying to understand the subject as much as possible, and try to be aware of all the rational factors involved, as well as spiritual ones. We do, however, make the decision in silent waiting, led by spoken ministry (when meeting in such a way that that is possible), so as to make the decision under the guidance of the Divine.

As such, many would say we can’t always (or possibly ever) give clear reasons for decisions. Sometimes the ministry is such that we can see how the various factors were balanced, and we can give an ex post facto rational explanation. Sometimes it’s just “the ministry led us this way, and well, that’s the decision”.

The Limits of Quaker Universalism

I am, as regular readers will no doubt realise, a proponent of Quaker Universalism – the idea that a person’s underlying theology can take a wide range of forms, and still be a Quaker. This is not, however, a matter of ‘anything goes’. It can’t be.

For starters, it’s never a matter of “believe what you want”; it can only be “believe what you believe”. But while that is the most common error in talking about Quaker Universalism – often derisively – it is not the most fundamental limit. No, that most fundamental limit comes from the essence of Quaker practices.

Everything about how Quakers do things, especially in the Liberal part of our Religious Society, but not uniquely to it, is based on the idea of direct revelation – the idea that God, the Spirit, or whatever-you-call-it, can tell us things, give us guidance. Burning bushes are rare, but a still small voice is accessible to all. A personal theology, whether it involves a theistic God or not, must allow for this, or Meeting for Worship makes no sense. It is the usual centre of our spiritual life and the foundation for all other key Quaker practices and liturgy (yes, in practice we have liturgy, but that’s a matter for another day), and it is fundamentally based on the idea that we are prompted by something to speak, and that something is capable of doing something different from our ordinary, every day personal mind.

Quakers and Practical Action

I have a very strong feeling about this, as strong as that when I am called to minister. I reflected and tested it, however, and it was clear to me that it is actually simply a strong feeling of my own. Nonetheless, like other deliberate writing on this blog, it’s something I want to share – something I feel is of value to share among Friends, and to be public about to any non-Quaker audience who happens upon my blog for whatever reason.

We Quakers can talk a good talk. But when it comes to practical action, we often seem to struggle. Oh, when we do take practical action we can be very good at it (and we can be ineffective – no-one is effective all the time), but actually taking the step of trying to take practical action seems to be difficult for us. I cannot count the times, in Meetings for Worship for Business, that I have been frustrated – we have a clear leading that something needs to be done, but ministry on what to do or how to do it is sparse, and often, to speak plainly, wishy-washy. Where it does occur, it is often in such a minority that, quite understandably, the clerks do not feel able to see it as the sense of the Meeting and include it in the minute.

What About When You Don't Hope So?

Sceptical Cat isn't sure you read the sense of the meeting aright.

As I discussed in some detail in an earlier post, the tradition – at least among British Friends – when a clerk offers a minute during a business session is to indicate assent/consent by saying “I hope so” (often elided to just “hope so”). But what about when you cannot do so? What do Friends do in that situation, and what should they do?

This is an interesting question to look at, because both the theory and the practice vary between communities of Friends, and have varied over time, somewhat separately from one another. I shan’t attempt to summarise everything done everywhere, nor identify when or where a practice was or is common, but I will try and give an overview of different approaches – and my opinion of them. First, however, we must consider the different sorts of disagreement.

The Sanctity of Discernment?

A bench in the Meeting House at Scattergood Friends School,
Iowa. Photo by David Morris, used under CC-BY 2.0 license.

Discernment, the process of making decisions or otherwise being guided by the Spirit (usually through the Quaker Business Method), is extremely important to Quakers. It is probably the most significant practical application of faith among liberal Friends – our faith that we will be guided, our faith that we have faithfully discerned that guidance. In both a practical and emotional sense, it is one of the most fundamental cornerstones of our faith tradition.

It is also, though we may hate to admit it, a source of difficulty. For if a decision or statement, a determination or a course of action, is based on divine guidance, who can gainsay it?

Yet is something, once discerned, settled for all time? Plainly not, or the history of our Religious Society could not be as it is. And indeed, two Meetings might be approaching the same question at the same time, be in very similar traditions, even be part of the same Yearly Meeting – or even some closer association, such as Local Meetings in the same Area Meeting, in the organisational structure of Britain Yearly Meeting, or Monthly Meetings in the same Quarter as some other Yearly Meetings arrange things. They might be close neighbours in close accord on many things, both faithfully follow our business method regarding the same question, and reach different conclusions. How can this not call into question our faith – our trust in this process, in the guidance of the Spirit – indeed, call it into question at its very foundations?

Membership, Convincement & Belonging

There are many ways of belonging to the Quaker family. There are those who are part of our community without identifying with our faith, fellow-travellers who participate in some, even all of our activities but do not consider themselves Quakers. There are those of fervent religious belief in the spirit of the early Friends. There are those who call themselves Quakers but deny the religious nature of the experience, or who recognise it as religious but are still patiently waiting for a direct experience of the Divine that they recognise. There is, of course, the division between member and attender, and other terms we throw around – newcomer and enquirer being quite popular ones.

We don't seem to have a coherent view, however, of these different dimensions of belonging, of being part of the Quaker community, of being a Quaker. In this post, I will be exploring some elements of this “belonging space”, to borrow mathematical terminology.

Revision: Hopes and Fears

Well, the time is almost here. Again.

Britain Yearly Meeting, taking place this coming weekend, has managed to draw a little press attention, both specialist and general (paywall), regarding the question of whether to revise our Book of Discipline. So I thought I'd take another little look at the whole matter.

Firstly, both of the linked pieces put an unreasonable focus on specific elements of change that Friends think might happen in a revision process. One focuses on environmental matters and gender & sexuality; the other focuses on the suggestion that we might remove “God” (or, they acknowledge, maybe just reduce the use of the term). These are all things that will be live issues if the revision goes ahead, to be sure, but they miss the key point of revision.

Quaker Business Method and Secular Contexts

The Quaker Business Method, at least as practised in my experience in Britain, is – when done right – an inherently religious method with religious beliefs underpinning it. There can be some variety in the precise nature of those beliefs, as I explored in my Quaker Business Method and Theological Diversity series, but they have fundamental compatibilities in their implication for the practice of business method.

Yet Friends have, from time to time, wondered about the applicability of our methods, with suitable adjustments, in secular contexts. Small borrowings have been used successfully, but the method as a whole is difficult to square with secular expectations or to maintain without that religious underpinning. Indeed, there are many Friends who utterly reject any possibility that it could ever work. This is, perhaps, related to the rejection by some Friends – in my experience the same ones, but I do not know if that can be generalised – of non-theistic understandings of business method, even those of “mystical” non-theists.

Why Quakers Say "Hope So"

When Pandora opened the box,
Elpis - hope - remained within.

One of the things that people often learn about Quakers, when they learn a few disjointed and poorly explained bits and bobs, is that we “don't vote”. Aside from clearing up the confusion in terms of public elections, this is something that takes some explaining. I remember when I was grilling the first Quaker I met, who didn't seem given to in-depth explanations at the time, she explained that people said “hope so” if they agreed with what was proposed. I asked what they said if they didn't agree, and she clearly couldn't see a way to answer without a deeper explanation. All these years later, now I understand what a difficult position that was, for a Friend who doesn't want to launch into a long and detailed exposition of how Quakers make collective decisions.

Still, “hope so” is an important part of the Quaker liturgy (in Britain, at least), and part of the way our use of language makes it hard for newcomers to understand what's going on. I've written before that we should question such jargon, but saying “hope so” in response to the clerk offering a minute isn't just jargon. It isn't a Quaker code. It is a very meaningful use of language – though that may not be obvious to those new to our way of doing things.

In this post, I will be exploring the Quaker Business Method with specific reference to how a decision is concluded, and a minute agreed. What does it mean when the clerks offer a minute? Why is our traditional response “hope so”, rather than “yes”, when asked if the minute is acceptable? It's not a simple matter, even assuming a basic familiarity with Quaker practices and processes.

Business Method & Theological Diversity - Mystical Nontheism

This is the fourth and, at least for now, final post in the series Quaker Business Method and Theological Diversity. If you haven't already, you will get the most out of this post if you read the opening post in the series. That post will also include links to all other posts in the series as they are posted. Reading the second and third posts as well would be an advantage, but it's the opening post that's important, as it sets the context.

I am not a strict materialist. While my experiences of the Divine lead to me conclude that it does not have those characteristics I describe as theistic – personality, however far removed from our own, identity, being willing and able to act directly in the world as we know it – there's certainly something, though I regard it as entirely impersonal. A force of nature, albeit a force for good, rather than a godly figure.

The best description I have ever come up with for this conception of the Divine came as written ministry, and I have never been able to put it better through deliberate action. As such, while it is available as its own post on this blog, I reproduce it here:

Improving Business: Small Changes for Big Impacts

Small steps can take you a long way.

A lot of people think the way we do Quaker decision-making, our application of the Quaker Business Method, could be significantly improved. Or, at least, the way one or more Meetings they are involved in do it could be improved.

But we don't need to tear things up and start again, or introduce significant, novel variations in order to improve the way we do business. There are small changes we can make that, when applied in the right circumstances, can make a huge difference. This post will explore some of these, with explanations as to the purpose and advantage you can expect to see. It's likely that some Meetings will already be doing some of these – Quaker Business Method is not the well-defined, definitive set of practices we tend to think – but there are certainly many that don't.

Business Method & Theological Diversity - The Conceptionless Conception

This is the third post in the series Quaker Business Method and Theological Diversity. If you haven't already, you will get the most out of this post if you read the opening post in the series. That post will also include links to all other posts in the series as they are posted. Reading the second post as well would be an advantage, but it's the opening post that's important, as it sets the context.

For some Friends, questions about the nature or identity of the Divine are unimportant. At best, they are somewhat interesting diversions, something to jaw over, maybe stimulating some interesting thought; at worst, they are a source of needless division and disagreement – or even, possibly, a deliberate effort to sow discord among Friends.

This does not mean any disregard for the Divine, of course. It would be hard to be any sort of faithful Quaker without a keen regard for the leadings of the Spirit. However, these Friends often consider such questions unresolvable, sometimes even seeing contention over them as simply projections of the egos of those involved.

Business Method & Theological Diversity - Strict Materialism

This is the second post in the series Quaker Business Method and Theological Diversity. If you haven't already, you will get the most out of this post if you read the opening post in the series. That post will also include links to all other posts in the series as they are posted.

Having started with the traditional view, it seems appropriate to turn to a conception that seems to be absolutely diametrically opposed to that traditional view, and one that seems to be very much in people's minds when they are worried about the impact of non-theism in our Meetings. It is a position that, in line with my understanding of philosophical terminology (which might be a little off, not being a philosopher), I term “strict materialism”.

Materialism describes schools of thought that hold that matter is the fundamental stuff of reality, and everything else – including mental processes and cognition – are purely results of interactions among material things. I use the term strict materialism to refer to those materialists who most strongly and sceptically reject anything that even smells like a non-material effect, in the absence of strong evidence and a clear explanation. They accept rationally explained, reproducible effects like radio transmissions and the internet, but reject ideas like mind-to-mind contact or other parapsychic phenomena, or such things as spirits and gods.

Quaker Business Method and Theological Diversity

Swarthmoor Hall was a major centre in the early years of
Quakers as an organised movement.

In its origin, the idea behind the Quaker Business Method was very simple, if audacious – that by waiting in silence, with minds turned to both the problem at hand and to God, we could come to know God's will, that we might act based on it. Audacious or not, and whatever uncertainty anyone might express as to whether we truly acted based on divine guidance, we know from experience that it works. It may not work perfectly, and goodness knows not quickly, but done faithfully, it works – and has significant advantages over voting or consensus decision-making.

But we aren't in the early days of the Religious Society of Friends now. Across the liberal wing of the world family of Friends, and in parts of the conservative and pastoral sections as well, conventional Christianity, or any belief in a theistic God, is not a given. Some of those Friends who hold to a conventional, theistic view of God feel uncomfortable undertaking this solemn, religious exercise alongside those who openly do not believe in such a God. This is a situation that will need to be resolved, one way or another, in Britain Yearly Meeting – and I imagine there are similar situations in other liberal Yearly Meetings.

Liberal Quakerism as a "Self Religion"?

Shall we align our chakras with healing
crystals? The Quaker Way isn't just another
New Age mishmash.

One thing I have seen said, from time to time about liberal Quakerism is that it has become a “self religion”. Usually, this is said by way of criticism, often (but not always) by fairly traditionalist Friends. In this post, I'll be taking a look at what this term means, and the extent to which liberal Quakerism – as I've experienced it – fits that definition, and some thoughts on the extent to which it should.

The term itself is not used entirely consistently. It is widely used in a derogatory way towards “new age” spirituality, even identified with such things, and is also used by the less vociferous critics of Scientology to describe that faith. However, the underlying and original meaning appears to be religions or spiritual paths that aim for the development of the self, with specific reference to new age and other paths that developed in the 70s and 80s. A characteristic that is often derided in these faiths in extreme individualism, the ability to cherry-pick from a range of traditions in your attempt to perfect yourself – though reports rather suggest this is rather less true of Scientology, which is generally considered a self religion. Thus, I tend to feel that the main defining quality of a self religion is the goal of self-perfection – whether the faith says this leads to apotheosis, results after death, or a better life here and now. However, the implications of pick-and-choose are probably very important in the allegation that liberal Quakerism has become a self religion, so that must also be borne in mind.

So, here's the first question: does Quakerism aim for the perfection of the self? If so, how, and to what end?

Improving Business: Looking Beyond Quaker Methods

When making tough decisions, Meetings should consider a wide
range of tools to support their efforts.

Quakers have a wonderful and rich history and some brilliant methods for decision making; as my earlier posts in this series have started to reveal, these go beyond the “classic” Quaker Business Method, with variations and supporting strategies to be used around the discernment itself. However, sometimes we don't need to reach for Quaker things to handle decision-making in the best way. In this post, I will be exploring some secular strategies for both decision-making and support of decision-making, and situations in which they can be helpful as adjuncts to specifically Quaker practices.

I am aware, from previous conversations with various Friends over recent years, that some react with something approaching horror or scandal at suggestions such as these. On the other hand, there are also Friends who agree with the idea, having actually used such approaches successfully, and others who haven't tried them but as optimistically curious about the possibilities, as ways of breaking through situations which Quaker processes tend to be fairly bad at handling. I am sure all three groups will be among those reading this blog, and please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments section below, or elsewhere on the internet.

Trusting the Discernment of Others

You are responsible for your decisions, even where they are
confirming the decision of others.

Trusting the discernment of other Friends does not mean accepting it without question. Where a matter comes before you that has already been considered by another group, in Quaker discernment, due regard must be given to the fact that they have attempted to follow the guidance of the Divine – but you must also give the Divine the opportunity to guide you. Where a committee recommendation, or a nomination, comes before you, do not assume that the discernment of the committee is the last word. Give enough space and time for ministry to arise and be tested before accepting such matters, as it may be that the Spirit did move those who met on the matter already to make their proposal or their nomination – but the Spirit will not move you to accept it. Sometimes the fact of the proposal or nomination reaching your Meeting is what the promptings of the Divine have led to, and that is sufficient.

Written December 2017

Your Ideas Wanted for New Post Series

As those who have signed up to my Patreon will be aware, I've been working for a little while on a longer piece, that will be published as a series of posts, looking at different approaches to the Divine and to Quaker business method. This builds on the ideas I presented at Woodbrooke earlier this year, looking at discernment in the context of a religious society that enjoys a wide diversity of beliefs.

In that presentation, I talked about the idea of conceptions of the Divine, along similar lines to those in my post on the subject of such conceptions (which rather drew on the work I did for the Woodbrooke presentation), talked about how they relate to different conceptions of what is going on in a Quaker business meeting, and laid out the traditional (theistic) view of business. I then followed this up with my own non-theist conception, and I was very gratified to see that people could largely accept that, while they could not be considered equivalent, not “the same thing in different terms”, they were compatible.

Understanding and Trusting Quaker Nominations

Nominations is one of the more mysterious, and in my experience often mistrusted, processes in the world of Quakers. A relatively small number of Friends go into a room, and comes out with a list of who should be fulfilling which role in their Meeting. They pounce on unsuspecting Friends, or possibly just send them an email, letting them know that the committee has discerned their name for some terrifying, or just unexpected, role, demanding to know whether the Friend is willing and able to take on that role.

Well, that's a bit of a caricature, but I'm sure most experienced Friends recognise that image of nominations. It's also likely that a fair proportion of experienced Friends have served on a nominations committee or other nominating group at some point, though not everyone ever does – quite rightly, as not everyone really has the requisite gifts, just like not everyone is suited to being a treasurer or clerk, or elder.

There are all sorts of variations in nominations practice, some of which are necessary, or at least logical and reasonable, adaptations to circumstance. Some are innovations that are in keeping with the essential principles of Quaker nominations, and some are, frankly, compromises of those principles in the name of expediency. In this post I will explore what I consider to be the essential principles of Quaker nominations, both spiritual and practical, and how they can be implemented in such a way that it maximises the trust that Friends not on the nominating committee can have in the process.

Improving Business: Small Group Discernment

Quaker decision-making, in the sense of collective discernment, is one of the most consistent elements of Quaker practice among the worldwide family of Friends. Waiting on the Spirit for guidance and taking decisions based on the leadings that that Spirit brings out of silence is an amazing expression of faith, of trust in the process and in whatever-it-is that you believe gives us those leadings.

However, there are variations in the practice, related to different communities and traditions, or to do with the circumstances of the discernment. One major factor for this is the size of the group. If you're dealing with a group from around a dozen to several dozen, it's all much of a muchness – the basic principles and common expectations work in most such cases, like leaving silence between contributions, the structure of business items, and the clear expectation that each Friend minister at most once. However, with much larger groups, or with smaller groups, things can't easily work in exactly the same way. In those cases, you need to vary practices and expectations slightly, while maintaining the principles that underlie them.

In this post, I will be sharing some of my thoughts, largely based on experience, on small group discernment. This is especially useful for committees, when they are taking decisions by discernment rather than discussion (I tend to think a lot of committee work can be more effectively conducted by discussion, though by no means all of it – but that is a subject for a future post). However, it's also relevant to smaller Meetings, who may simply not get more than half a dozen or so people at a business meeting – and for whom the burden of expectations of the usual conventions of Quaker Business Method may become a barrier to effective working.