In 2008, one of our former ministers, Dan Kasztelan, wrote a booklet entitled Living with the Body of Christ: A Field Guide to Quaker Process. To share this valuable information about how Friends make decisions during monthly meeting, sections of this booklet are being posted via the online Traveling Friend. This is the first installment of an eight-part series. You can read the entire booklet, complete with recommendations for further reading and end notes, by clicking here.
Monthly Meeting for Business consists of several purposes interwoven with each other. The most obvious purpose is gathering together to discern what the work of the Meeting is and how it should be done. The Meeting's work varies over time, naturally. In recent years, Cincinnati Friends has considered how to support an individual's leading toward mission work; whether and how to alter the appearance of the meeting room for the sake of improving its acoustics; and what value to place on the risk of climbing a ladder on top of a table on top of a pew in order to change light bulbs in the meeting room.
In all its business, Monthly Meeting considers how to attend to the life of the Meeting community, both physically and spiritually—and sometimes how to attend and care for the world beyond the Meeting.
What Happens and How Does it Work?
When you attend Monthly Meeting for the first time and sit down in one of the chairs set up in a circle in the Grueninger Room, you will find that the presiding clerk has prepared an agenda for the day's meeting. The agenda includes business which occurs regularly, such as the treasurer's report and business from committees, continuation of any business yet undecided, and a place for new business, which is where members or attenders might raise special concerns.
The clerk will begin the meeting with a period of centering silence, and then proceed through the agenda. You might discover that the conversation over each item is not the unstructured discussion you were expecting. For one thing, a person who wants to speak raises a hand or nods at the clerk, and asks for the clerk's attention by saying, "Clerk, please." The request seems odd and formal, but it serves to remind us that we are not trying to persuade each other to one course of action or another, and we certainly aren't trying to argue a point—we are placing ideas before the community in order to listen for the resonance of God within them. That's why we don't address each other directly, but address the entire community through the clerk. We leave a period of silence between statements—so we have a chance to listen to them. We don't argue points; if we feel differently than the previous speaker, we let there be an appropriate silence before we speak our own feeling or experience, without rebutting the other. We try hard not to speak more than once to a question unless we have factual information to convey that others don't have (as when the treasurer presents the monthly financial report).
When the clerk perceives that the discussion is all beginning to go in the same direction, she or he will try to formulate a minute that states the "sense of the meeting"—the action or feeling we have apparently come to agree upon. Something like, "I think I hear us saying that we want to go ahead with the bid from Jones & Smith to repair the sewer line," or "It sounds like we agree that we want to let the yearly meeting know about our concern for safety at the yearly meeting camp. Do we approve of sending a letter with these concerns to the camp committee?" If the response is "approve" or "agree" and the nodding of heads, the minute is approved. Sometimes the minute is read back to the group to make sure the sense of the meeting is adequately expressed. Sometimes the Meeting tinkers with wording before final approval. Then the next item of business is discussed.
Beyond the Basics: Listening, Weighty Friends, Standing Aside, and Life in the Body
So Monthly Meeting, at its simplest, is about making community decisions. The manner in which we make our decisions adds a second, deeper level of purpose to Monthly Meeting. The truism about Quaker decision-making is that, because we don't do anything until we all agree, we don't vote. Or, as the old joke says:
"How many Quakers does it take to change a light bulb?”
“All of them."
We use the phrase "sense of the meeting" to indicate unity, but with experience we learn that unity and unanimity are not the same. (More on this complexity later).
As we search for the one decision in which we can all be united, we discover that the deeper purpose of Monthly Meeting is to practice listening. Ideally, we listen—outwardly and inwardly—not for the best idea, but for where we feel God's leading. In practice, that means each one of us is forced to listen in at least three different locations.
I, for instance, one individual, am pressed to listen for the murmuring of the still small voice which I recognize as God's, whether I find it outside the window conveyed by birdsong, or rising in my heart as prayer that speaks through me. I'm pressed to listen to other individuals, to hear what is important to each one in the matter we are discussing—and to how God may be speaking through their voices. And I’m pressed to listen to and examine my own voice, in order to discern the difference between the opinions of my heart and mind, and the voice of the Inward Teacher.
Even when we discuss matters in which I can reasonably imagine God’s interest—like what kind of program we want to create for our Young Friends, for instance, or whether we want to become involved in some ministry within Cincinnati—even then it can be difficult to listen in all of these locations (to God's voice purely, to God's voice expressed in the community, to the individuals beside me, and to my own thoughts). It's even more difficult to listen in all those locations on matters which I want to think are mundane: questions of carpeting and tile, or snow removal, or gutters and drains. But the truth is that there are no mundane questions. Because, for one thing, human relationships and interactions are involved in every question we consider. And, for another thing, while there are certainly half a dozen different methods we could use to figure out the best way of fixing a drainage problem, we’re here in Monthly Meeting because we've chosen to use the method of listening for God's direction.
I tend to feel—I think we all feel—a great deal of pressure to give up the idea of listening for God's direction when it comes to questions of carpet and drainage. We don't want to waste anybody's time, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, and deep down, I think there's always a little bit of doubt about whether waiting for the Spirit to lead us is actually going to work. So instead of waiting, we want to rush ahead, we want to use our minds and our reason. And we end up making logical, rational decisions, but not always Spirit-led decisions.
There are worse things that could happen. We could wind up making decisions that were neither Spirit-led nor rational. Rational isn't bad. But it isn't necessarily where life moves for us, either. By life I mean Life, that which has God moving in it.
In fact, we don't prepare for Monthly Meeting in any reasonable way because what we really want to understand about any decision is where the Life is in it. Michael Birkel writes that if he discovers that he's come to Monthly Meeting with his mind made up on some course of action, he uses the opening worship of Monthly Meeting to "unmake up" his mind so that he's able, in the discernment process, to encounter God on God's terms.
We trust our committees, also, to go through a process of Spirit-led discernment, so that the recommendations they bring to the larger group are already seasoned, and the movement of Life as they saw it will be made clear.
When a committee asks Monthly Meeting for guidance, or two committees have followed a discernment process to conflicting decisions, or an individual raises a leading or concern in Monthly Meeting, then the listening process can become more complex. We may feel as though we need more information, as though we don't have enough material knowledge to catch God's outline. Those are the times when what we call Quaker process becomes synonymous with "exercise in patience." When Quakers don't know enough—factually or spiritually—to make a decision, we wait. We ask for the business to be held over to the next meeting. We ask someone to bring more information. We ask for more time in which to listen. Waiting isn't a decision only the clerk can make. Any one of us can make the request that we wait a while longer.
When we do wait, we often move into yet another dimension of Monthly Meeting, which is the practice of community when we are not in unity. Of all the purposes of Monthly Meeting, this may be the most profound. Even on a question of carpet, we can find ourselves stretched and growing in our capacity to be the body of Christ.
The body of Christ is the shorthand term that Paul uses, in many of his epistles, to describe what a Christ community should be:
The body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? . . . As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." (1 Corinthians 12)
At its best (and it can be this even when we are most divided), Meeting for Business is both the practice and the reality of being the body of Christ, and a profound experience of the communion of Christ. In fact, Meeting for Business is the most radical form of communion of which I am aware. The decision-making process of Meeting for Business is based upon the faith that, because we are the body of Christ, the foot and the ear and the rib and the appendix and the elbow and the molars, all of these belong to the body, all of them have a contribution to make, any one of them might best hear the leading of God in the process of discernment.
"If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?" That's what's at stake when we go over to the Grueninger Room and sit down and talk about the budget, or about refinishing the pews, or about inviting the people of Cincinnati to our meetinghouse to hear a lecture on peace.
When we talk about these things, mundane as they may sometimes seem, it's not what we talk about but how we talk that defines us as Christians. Do we remember that we are one body? That's what our business is ultimately about—remembering that we are one body. We establish our faith in the conviction that the Spirit is able to lead us to the place where God would have us, provided we are willing and responsive. And so we are as far out on the edge in testing our life in the body as any Christians I know. Our Quaker process says to us, "the ear and the toe are equally deserving of respect." When we live up to that ideal, when we live that, we are living the communion of Christ.
Although, as our own bodies teach us, life in the body isn't always comfortable. We go hiking, for instance, and while the senses revel in the grandeur of creation, the feet and the back ache and groan. We indulge the love our tongue has for chocolate, and our teeth get cavities. Sometimes the stomach aches, sometimes the throat hurts. Sometimes we think too much. That's life in the body: not always comfortable.
Sometimes Meeting for Business is that way. The ribs are happy and the spine is grumpy and the feet are ready to leave the room. It could be that this happens more frequently when we slip and start looking for good ideas instead of God's direction, or when we allow our ideas and our identities to get tangled up together. For whatever reason, there isn't a Meeting in existence which hasn't had to figure out how to deal with sheer human stubbornness and an occasional bout of truly principled discord.
A while back I came across a passage in Thomas Hamm's book, The Quakers in America, which is bracingly enlightening about how Friends actually maneuver through the discord of life in the body, respecting the ear and the toe without becoming paralyzed by their conflict. (We try to avoid paralysis and stalemate on account of the insight expressed in one of our queries on stewardship: "Do we recognize that we speak through our inaction as well as our action?”)
One of the virtues of Hamm's book is that he doesn't write about the theories of Quakerism—about how Friends describe themselves—he writes about Friends as they can be observed. So when writes about the business process, he doesn’t describe the way we think it ought to work, but the way it works in practice. Friends are fond of saying that any one person can stand in the way of agreement, or unity, so it was startling to me to read this passage from Hamm’s work:
Friends do not make decisions through voting, as they do not believe that the will of the majority is always the will of God. Instead, objections from a principled minority can be enough to stop action until the meeting finds unity to proceed in some way. ... While Friends believe that any speaking to a matter should come only from a clear conviction that the Spirit is leading the speaker, they recognize that human nature often asserts itself and a clerk may be faced with diametrically opposed views on an issue. One way that Friends have traditionally dealt with such differences is to acknowledge that Friends are usually at different levels of spiritual maturity. A clerk will judge individual comments by their "weight," (by) whether they manifest signs of a divine leading and a good spirit.
I was startled to read that passage, so at odds with conventional Quaker wisdom, but the more I pondered it the more I realized the truth it contained. In my experience, it has been true that not any minority can keep business from moving forward. In practice, it's the principled minority that counts. The reality of Quaker business is that some voices do carry more weight than other voices. We do our best to listen, with equal respect to both the ear and the toe. But it's possible that the toe will be more persuasive to us about where discernment lies. What makes the difference?
Well, certainly the characteristics that Hamm identifies: signs of a divine leading and a good spirit. The voices that carry weight with me in Meeting for Business are those whom I trust to be able to tell the difference between their own impulses and the nudges of God. They are also the voices of the persons whom I know will not pout or stomp off in a huff if things don’t go their way. A good spirit—the ability to confess that others may have more Light, that one might be mistaken, the willingness to stand aside when unity is flowing the other direction—these are signs which convince me that a voice deserves my attention. If there comes a time when one with a good spirit is not able to stand aside, the standing aside in the past will be a reason that his or her position bears more weight with me now.
I think what I'm saying, paradoxically, is that someone else's ability to listen plays a large part in my decision about whether or not they bear listening to, whether their discernment carries much weight with me.
I also tend to hearken to those who possess the fruit of the Spirit. In Galatians, Paul identifies the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In Colossians he speaks of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness.
Paul's use of the idea of self-control seems especially pertinent to hard decisions in Monthly Meeting. To me, self-control extends beyond the ability to keep one's emotions proportionate to circumstances. When I don't find God's direction within me, and the individuals around me are holding up directional arrows which point in opposite directions, I am more likely to be persuaded by the messenger who shows evidence of self-knowledge, of self-reflection. I want to know that the person to whom I am listening has some practice differentiating between her or his own voice, the voice of the gathered community, and the still small voice that may be God's.
I also find that I am much better able to listen to those who possess some of the other fruits of the Spirit. I am more likely to let myself be influenced by a man, woman, or child who is loving, who is kind, who speaks with compassion and humility. Someone who isn't able to recognize or respond to my own humanity is not someone I am likely to listen to very attentively.
It follows that if I would like others to listen to my words, I would do well to remember what it takes for me to listen well to another: I would do well to be loving, to be kind, to speak with compassion and humility, and never to forget the very humanity of the one to whom I speak.
It would be possible to understand the phrase "sense of the meeting" without referring to the multiply-layered purposes of Monthly Meeting. We could simply accept that Friends don't vote because we are not trying to figure out either the best course of action, the most reasonable course of action, or the course of action which has the most support—we are trying to discern, even in questions of carpet and lighting, where God is leading us. But in my experience, it's only when I remind myself of the multiple purposes of doing business in this complex way that I actually treasure the differences between Quaker process and Robert's Rules of Order, or any other worldly method for business. It's only when I accept that the purpose of Monthly Meeting is really the practice and the reality of the body of Christ that I begin to have the patience for what it means to make decisions without voting.
As we gather in our meetings for business to understand where God is leading us, what we attempt often seems to me so difficult I wonder whether there's any point trying to achieve it. But the times when we do achieve what we attempt—when answers come to us clearly by the Spirit's influence and not by our own will—confirm for me that the process by which we do our business is at least as important to our discipleship, and sometimes more so, than the questions we are given to answer. Listening is our first and most fundamental task—the work we are given to do is, literally, the afterthought of listening.
