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 fifth installment of an eight-part series. You can read the entire booklet, complete with recommendations for further reading and end notes, by clicking here.
In describing to newcomers the listening way in which Quakers do business, I often find myself saying that what we are listening for isn’t the best idea or the most logical path, but a leading toward the path God wants us to travel. It may sound as though what I’m saying is that God’s idea will never be a rational one, but that’s not really what I mean. This fictional case study may help clarify how the Spirit’s leading takes precedence over reason.
Let’s suppose that David and Katherine Hinshaw, life-long Friends who have been members for the past twenty years of Dinwiddie Monthly Meeting in the suburbs of Blue Hole, Iowa, die within a couple months of each other and, under the terms of their joint will and trust, leave the Meeting $100,000 on the condition that it be spent in its entirety within two years from the date it is disbursed, along with any income that the gift has earned in those years.
At the next Monthly Meeting, Dinwiddie Friends has a lot to talk about. They decide in short order to set up a Hinshaw Fund on their books. But as they try to decide how to use the fund, the conversation is nervous, unsettled. Eventually they muddle through to the understanding that they have to establish a process for making the decision before they can actually make the decision, and this is what they come up with: In a couple of weeks, a specially called Meeting for Business will gather to attend to this issue alone. As ideas, leadings, or concerns occur to Friends between now and then, they are urged to explain them on paper as far as the Guide has carried them. At the specially called Meeting for Business, the clerk will lead a brainstorming session in which those ideas—and others which occur in the course of the special meeting—will all be aired and recorded, and then the task of sorting the best and most viable will be turned over to an ad hoc committee on the Hinshaw Fund, which will be asked to give a report to Monthly Meeting the following month. The ad hoc committee will be composed of the presiding clerk of the Meeting, the clerk of Ministry and Counsel, the clerk of the Outreach Committee, the clerk of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee, the Clerk of the Trustees, and two members chosen from Monthly Meeting.
A few weeks after the specially called Meeting, when the ad hoc committee reports back to Monthly Meeting, they say that they have listened to all the various ideas, chosen some, combined others, and dropped some, to come up with four proposals for Monthly Meeting to choose among. To wit:
- Use the Hinshaw Fund to hire an architect and put a down payment on a lot in order to build a meetinghouse that Dinwiddie would own. Established in 1967 by faculty members at the College of Blue Hole, Dinwiddie Monthly Meeting has never met in its own building, but has always rented space from another church or a school. In 40 years, the location has changed six times, and frequently in Monthly Meeting and in several committees, discussion has revolved around whether the Meeting would attract more members to itself—and seekers to Friends’ faith—if the Meeting had the higher, more dependable profile that a building would offer.
- Many of the Friends who founded the Meeting are nearing or past retirement age. They have been looking with interest and envy toward some of the Quaker-owned or directed retirement/care communities back East. Even if the Hinshaw Fund couldn’t underwrite the entirety of a similar facility out here in Blue Hole, it could provide seed money for the development of a continuing care retirement community on Quaker principles, with ongoing ties to the Meeting.
- A number of Dinwiddie Friends moved to Blue Hole from further west during the Great Plains boom of the 2010s. Growing up in Evangelical Friends Churches which supported missions in Central America, South America, and Africa, they have always felt a vague unease about the lack of missions activity on the part of Dinwiddie Friends. They are excited by the growth of the Samburu and Turkana missions in Kenya, and think that the Hinshaw Fund could be used as seed money to establish the kind of physical plant for those missions that the Kenyan Friends have further east: a hospital and school.
- Use the Hinshaw Fund on behalf of Dinwiddie’s neighbors in Blue Hole and environs. Decide to give the entire fund away to families and community organizations who can make a case that they either need it, or could put it to good use. Set up a committee, open to any who are interested, which will gather applications and disburse $10,000 a month for the next ten months. Potential applicants could be families bankrupted by medical bills, schools in poor neighborhoods which want to expand their facilities, a small group of social workers who want to develop a new way for integrating ex-convicts back into the Blue Hole community, etc., etc. We’ll find the good works as we go along.
While logic and reason can help us carry out any of these proposals in the best way, the proposals themselves are so different from one another that we probably won’t use reason to decide between them. That’s what I mean when I say that when we search for sense of the meeting, we aren’t searching for the best idea or the most logical path. In lieu of using reason to decide among the proposals, we might fall back on a number of other instinctive methods for making decisions. These instinctive methods can certainly lead us to a decision, but not necessarily a faithful decision. Our instinctive methods might take one or more of several natural forms:
- Bert likes the give-away proposal best, and I tend to think like Bert thinks, so I’m leaning towards the give-away proposal also.
- I’ve always said it was a shame we don’t do more for missions than we do, and that was my idea that I submitted to the committee, and I’m sticking with it. I don’t care what anybody else says.
- The retirement home thing is Sarah’s idea; she’s been talking about it for a while, that the Meeting ought to do something, and if we don’t do this now, we know she’ll never shut up. I just can’t take five years of her harping on it, so let’s just throw her this bone and get it over with.
- I don’t know why, I just think the idea of just giving away all that money—some of it to people we don’t even know—is ridiculous.
When I say that we aren’t choosing “the best idea” or making a “rational” choice, it’s because often the very nature of what we’re deciding is an issue not easily resolved by reason. Not to mention the reality that ideas often become attached to personalities. Sometimes a Friend feels rejected personally when his or her idea is not approved. And sometimes I reject an idea because I don’t like the person who put the idea forward or the method they’ve used in putting the idea forward. I can’t see past the person to the idea on its own.
Quakerism proposes an alternative to this kind of instinctual decision-making, which is to listen for the leading and direction of the Inner Guide. At some points, that leading and direction will actually be reasonable—once Dinwiddie has chosen one of the above ideas, for instance, a great deal of reasoning will go into deciding how to carry the project forward: What are the architect’s qualifications? Which Quaker administrators could come talk with us about Quaker continuing care, and when do we want to schedule this talk, and who is going to make an airport run? In the Turkana/Samburu region, what village is most central to the majority of the population? Are there any ethnic conflicts that would prevent some of that population from having access to the village? And there are many more practical questions which will need to be answered. But the first questions of leading are listening questions, not reasoning questions.
