Risking Faithfulness

Quietism and Experimentation in Unquiet Times

If you’ve been around Friends long, it has become almost clichéd to comment about our need for revival, renewal, and revitalization. But it is one thing to comment; it’s another to make it happen. Can we even make it happen? Or is it something that happens to us, something to be waited for expectantly? 

Whatever your perspective is on that, revival is certainly in our DNA. Friends began as a movement of revitalization, and we have had our share of them over nearly 400 years. Some Friends revival moments have changed the course of history, while others remained small movements of localized faithfulness. Still others petered out, completely forgotten.

My friend and Quaker scholar C. Wess Daniels wrote a book in 2015 about such processes: A Convergent Model of Renewal: Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture. His perspective has informed my own as we have worked together to launch a new program, Quaker Connect, a project of Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC): Section of the Americas. In Quaker Connect, we walk Quaker meetings and churches through a process that we believe will open them to this kind of movement. We use a model of experimentation to do so. This model is quite different from the way many of our meetings and churches are accustomed to operating, and in that sense, it is challenging. 

However, it is not a replacement of the Friends tradition, and it is not a secular imposition but a model led by the Spirit and deeply rooted in Friends faith and practice, reinterpreted for the twenty-first century.

Renewal is in many ways an ordinary process. Each generation leaves its mark on the faith that it then passes on. Each subsequent generation has to go through a discernment process in deciding what within that faith has life in their present context and what things are holding it back and should be discarded.

This is a regular process of change that is a necessary part of staying healthy as institutions and movements. Just as our ecosystems require a constant process of death and new life to sustain themselves, so do faith communities. We keep the best parts—perhaps doing something new with them—and let the things that are obsolete pass away, nurturing the growth through their passing.

One can watch the cycles of Friends history go through phases of renewal. Through one continuous Spirit, the charismatic early Friends interpretation morphed into the reflective and scrupulous Quietist interpretation. Our tradition was once again energized by nineteenth-century tent revivals and missions. The twentieth century saw the founding of organizations like American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Quaker involvement in internationalism, Civil Rights, and antiwar movements.

While each of these phases contributed to reviving the Friends movement in various ways, today’s Friends have conflicting perspectives on how faithful they were in their approach. Some moments of our history remain powerful, defining and shaping us today, such as the movement for the abolition of slavery; others we would probably be fine with forgetting.

Photo by Paul Esch Laurent on Unsplash

Like revivals of the past, twenty-first-century Friends revivals will find our movements judged by future generations. If we are faithful, future generations will find that much of our work is rooted in the Eternal, in the Kingdom, even while the specifics may be responses to particular conditions. Our work will live on in this way, in communion with future Friends. The early Friends movement retains much of its power in this regard with us today. Its ideas still draw newcomers, and its writings continue to be shared in our meetings for worship, a living example that we are in an ongoing conversation with those first Friends.

On the other hand, if we lack faithfulness, we will leave future generations a mess to clean up. We can probably all think of at least a few examples of that as well, from legacies of shame that require reconciliation efforts centuries later, to the smaller missteps that nonetheless left marks on our meeting culture which we would rather do without. 

Early Friends were led to start our movement as a way to recover a wayward Christianity that they felt had taken too many wrong turns for it to be reformed from within the existing churches. But despite the inspiration of early Friends, it is the Quietist period that I think in many ways has most shaped the beliefs and practices that we cling to in our meetings and churches.

For the unfamiliar, Quietism was the second movement among Friends, arriving in the later seventeenth century, and characterizing the society for approximately the next century. It was a response to the intense state persecution that early Friends encountered as they challenged social norms and sacred religious ideology—persecution that got people killed and that threatened the survival of the Friends movement. Quietism was a turn inward, away from the charismatic speaking, evangelism, and radical social witness of the first generation of Friends. Individually, the focus shifted toward cautious contemplation. Collectively, Friends became insular and separatist. 

While some Quietist practices and beliefs are living, precious, and central to my understanding of Friends, I have also come to believe that many are ill-suited to twenty-first-century Quakerism: relics that keep us from moving in the direction we are called to today.

Among the things I love, Quietists proliferated the term and the practice of “Gospel order.” This is the concept that it is not enough to believe that there is that of God in everyone; we must also structure our relationships in ways that reflect the spiritual reality of our equality, that bring out that of God in one another, and that suppress the domination of one another. Quaker business practices are built on this. Our meetings confront the world with this alternative way of operating. Gospel order is a beautiful Quietist phrase that I think is ripe for revival.

John Woolman was an eighteenth-century Quietist, arguably the most widely known Friend. His teachings continue to minister to us today. The self-examination that characterized his ministry is classically Quietist, but he was exceptional in carrying it into the world. He scrupulously guarded his own heart against ego and hatred. He confronted those who were complicit in enslaving others with plain speech and loving regard and was quite often successful at disarming them and changing lives. He never saw his yearly meeting fully commit to abolition but was one of the Friends who was most influential in bringing it about.

The Quietist period was also marked by a withdrawal from wider society, a narrowing demographic of Friends, and a reduction in the lived experience of the Spirit among Friends. Over the course of a century, Friends went from being an energetic, socially diverse movement to becoming a narrower and more elitist society. As Quaker demographics narrowed, so did the energetic expressions of faith and prophetic challenges to the status quo that defined its early years and still move us today.

During the Quietist period, the focus of Friends moved away from the lived experience of convincement—which any person can experience—and toward the passing on of the faith to birthright Friends. There was a heavy-handed protection of those Friends to keep them within the society and away from intermarriage. The focus of ministry moved away from the building of the kingdom of God on earth and toward more inward and individual experiences. Essentially, the Quietists did everything that contemporary church revitalization wisdom tells you not to do. 

While we can never regain the specific flavor of the early Friends years, it is important to notice how we have been reinvigorated by changing social conditions in the past and can be inspired again. A revival is not a mere return to the comfortable, tested beliefs and practices of the past but a “remix,” part rediscovery and part reinvention. While we can’t totally manufacture these conditions, we can intentionally make space for and develop practices to cultivate them, but to do so may stretch us.

Human memory can be short. Once a practice has been established, it dies hard. Very often we are guilty of saying “but this is how Quakers do it!” sometimes even in regards to practices or beliefs that are only a few decades old. Almost 400 years into our movement, there is a lot of life and power to be found in our history, but there is also a lot of what contemporary Quaker author Jan Wood calls “barnacles” that we have collected and carried into this moment.

What happens when a new leading comes before your meeting? Friends today often dedicate significant time and energy to ensuring that nothing can go wrong; that every person is in agreement; that there is no possible drawback; and that the proposal is worded with grammatical savvy, eloquence, and every person’s concerns included. Established habits and practices often take precedence over new leadings and ideas, without a lot of regard to the Spirit’s guidance. Even approved leadings can feel like life has been sucked out of them through the process. 

I am not arguing for the wholesale adoption of every idea that comes before the meeting. We still need to be able to say no, to say not now, and to say not like that. Yet I think we also need models that will allow Friends to try things and see how they go, a place for the energy for the more restless and unquiet Friends who need the nurture of our meetings, and whose gifts we need.

It is bittersweet to let go of things that we’ve held sacred, even when we recognize they don’t presently serve us. It may be profoundly uncomfortable and tempt us to revert to the familiar, even when detrimental. And it may cause conflict, as we enter the treacherous waters of opening ourselves to Spirit’s leading without the security of our past identities. 

Revival is uncertain. When Spirit-led, it is something deeply truthful—more than traditional, more than trendy. We can be unfaithful when accommodating our wider culture’s norms and trends, and also we can be unfaithful when clinging fearfully and rigidly to the way we have done things before.

In the Quietist period, “experimentation” may not have been a very appealing word. Friends were exhausted from the previous generations’ bold experimentation and worn thin by the violence, prison sentences, and instability that came with it. Some of the earliest Quietists were those that had held children’s meeting for worship when their parents were imprisoned. Mistakes and missteps were dangerous under state persecution. Not only that, but  Friends theology at the time meant that mistakes were morally loaded: to be faithful meant not to make any.

From Quietism we got the model of discernment that is still most commonly used today: an indefinite period of contemplation followed by the possibility of action (maybe). While I think this can be a wonderful tool in some circumstances, I view it as just a tool. It is not the only way to discern nor the best way; it is not the only way Friends have done it. It was developed in a time when action was dangerous to our survival, and contemplation was used to stay safe.

I believe that faithfulness in the twenty-first century resembles a call to action more than a caution against it. We are faced with a world that moves at warp speed, a world actively dehumanizing and confronting us with clearly evident dangers, a world in which slow decision making can lead to a morally intolerable state of inaction.

At this time, a Quaker meeting that is stuck using Quietist practices may feel more like a Quaker bureaucracy. Many folks at the margins of Friends meetings see this and keep their distance from the business part. Many younger Friends are particularly attuned to this reality as their lifespans are predicted to exceed the earth’s capacity on its current course. They ask of us, is it even possible or desirable to discern at such a time? 

I believe that it is, but I also believe that faithfulness in this unquiet age will not often take the Quietist shape of indefinite waiting until we can arrive at certainty of God’s leading. 

For one thing, I think it is very hard in a secularized and technological world to experience that kind of certainty as previous generations did. For another, I think we now live in a time where we sometimes risk more by waiting than we do by taking a step.

I believe that discernment—listening and obeying Divine guidance—is still the core of Quaker practice, but I do think that in our time that might look less like waiting and more like developing a hypothesis of what God is leading us to do and then testing it through action. This needn’t be hurried or forced. It is still the pattern of listening and obedience but in a form that may feel quite unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and even frightening, as it has not been the habit in many of our meetings and churches. 

In the Quietist period, making mistakes or getting it wrong was something dangerous and morally loaded. Now we live in a time when there is much more space for experimentation, especially the kind of experimentation with positive potential. We should think on that potential at least as much as possible risks. In this time, we are called to make more space for leadings to grow and mature, so we use a model in Quaker Connect, which allows for discernment through experimentation in ministry. 

It begins with a hypothesis of what the Spirit is leading us to do, and it does not wait for certainty. The first version of a ministry is limited by time and does not have to be perfect; it is a stage of development that we expect to learn from. Like a scientific process, this method is a cyclical model of short bursts of action followed by contemplation and reflection on the actions taken. 

Our model is not the only way, nor is it the revival we are waiting for—that will come from the same Spirit that has breathed it in the past—but I believe that by incorporating action and experimentation into discernment, we will be making way for that Spirit to move in new ways in these times. I encourage Friends meetings and churches to consider trying models, such as can be found in Quaker Connect or to invent their own ways to allow for more experimentation, holding familiar structures a little more lightly. Experimentation is a proven strategy for bringing life to tired institutions. More and more, I see and believe that God desires our full-hearted engagement with the suffering of our world more than our avoidance of mistakes.

Revival is uncertain. When Spirit-led, it is something deeply truthful—more than traditional, more than trendy. We can be unfaithful when accommodating our wider culture’s norms and trends, and also we can be unfaithful when clinging fearfully and rigidly to the way we have done things before. Faithful experimentation offers a way forward in uncertainty.

I believe that as we make the stumbling missteps toward what we think (maybe) God is guiding us to do, we will find ourselves walking closer to the Spirit than when waiting inactively in the perceived safety of the meetinghouse. We will find that God can meet us there on the road, can correct our course, and offer forgiveness if we need it. We will also get the experience of the living Spirit that we have been longing for. Maybe even a revival.