That of God in Our Polity

Rejecting the Temptations of Limited Grace

I have worked with a range of Friends, Evangelical Friends and Unprogrammed Friends alike. The common belief I find among them is that there is that of God in everyone. Each group experiences this sense of God in each person differently and emphasizes different values from the belief.

Unprogrammed Friends are more likely to emphasize the radical inclusivity of that of God in all people. This perspective often emphasizes that none of us individually has a complete experience of God; in fact, each of us individually experiences only a small part of God’s love. Therefore it is necessary for us to come together across all sorts of boundaries—class, race, gender, etc.—to have a full sense of God’s call to us. While the inclusive element speaks to the Evangelical side as well, greater emphasis is placed on the living presence of God.

I am particularly interested in how our focus as Quakers on that of God in all people affects our polity. Among early Friends, polity was hardly a factor. One was Quaker if one had experienced the Inward Teacher and was trying to live into the lessons of the Light. Monthly meetings and yearly meetings were introduced later to give structure and support to the increasing number and geographic range of Friends. (Some would say they were established to assert control over this ever-increasing range of Friends.) But even before the introduction of these structures, it was clear that Friends would have a polity that stretched out into the wider world.

The early Friends arose out of numerous groups in the Puritan movement in England. Many of these groups settled into more rigid forms of polity structures, adhering to early forms of what became the Congregationalist polity.

The Congregationalist polity states in essence that each church or meeting has what it needs in itself to fulfill the work of God. This strict emphasis on each church having what it needs in itself stems from another theological belief, the concept of Limited Election. Limited Election essentially states that God saves only certain people and that much of the human race lives and dies outside of the grace of God. Within the concept of Limited Election, it follows that as long as every member of a church could be verified to have experienced God’s grace (something early Puritan churches were quite concerned with discerning), the church might have everyone in their area that God had saved and that therefore had a part to play in God’s work. The conception of Limited Election obviously sits in tension with the idea of that of God in all people.

What would it mean to take seriously that of God in everyone as a polity principle and not simply as a statement of individual dignity? It would mean cultivating forms of communal life that refuse the logic of separation. We live in divided times. It is difficult to discern that of God in all people and very easy to decide that people with whom we disagree either lack that of God or are certainly refusing to live into that of God in them.

I believe the wider division in world culture has infected Quaker culture. All sides of the theological spectrum of Quakerism have reverted to different forms of Congregationalism and, in effect, accepted the conception of Limited Election. There is an essential truth in our inability to truly experience God without the full participation of all of God’s people—and that means everyone. In this sense, no congregation can really ever have everything it needs. The health of a group of Friends depends on our ability to foster more people along the path of expanding God’s movements in their lives.

The range of parachurch organizations in the Quakersphere obviously testifies to our belief that global interconnection is a necessary corollary of our theology. These bodies—service committees, educational institutions, ecumenical coalitions, mission boards—have been our way of acknowledging that no single meeting can embody the fullness of God’s work. They are, in their best moments, practical expressions of the conviction that the Spirit moves across boundaries and that we cannot, in faithfulness, remain closed in upon ourselves.

Yet the segmentation of the wider culture is mirrored in Quaker culture. The past 15 years have seen formal yearly meeting splits across pastoral Friends, and the rest of Friends are segmented into the broadly politically progressive Unprogrammed world and the broadly politically conservative sphere of Evangelical Friends in the United States.

Within this grander division, I have observed an informal drift toward more Congregationalist views. Divisions make us less likely to move beyond the spheres where we are comfortable. For many Friends, the space they are most comfortable is their monthly meeting. The monthly meeting can become a space where like-minded people gather to reassure one another that they are in the right, rather than cultivating a space where we work in the Spirit of God to support each other in living transformatively.

What would it mean to take seriously that of God in everyone as a polity principle and not simply as a statement of individual dignity? It would mean cultivating forms of communal life that refuse the logic of separation. It would mean finding ways to connect across our divides, not only in political dialogue but in structures that require us to bear one another’s burdens, discern together, and be accountable to the Light we find in each other.

To insist that each meeting or each yearly meeting is sufficient to itself is to betray our own theological root. Early Friends rejected creeds, and in their place, they practiced a shared discipline. They created webs of care, traveling in the ministry, writing epistles, corresponding across oceans, precisely because they knew that truth is larger than any one gathering. They created elders to encourage people in their attempts to deepen their connections to God’s spirit in their lives.

Examples of this wider vision still exist among Friends today. In Kenya, the largest body of Friends in the world, connections between schools, yearly meetings, and international partners have produced a witness to peace building that no single meeting could carry alone. In Latin America, Evangelical Friends have partnered with global organizations to build community health initiatives. Among a range of Friends in North America, collaboration through Friends Committee on National Legislation has lifted a Quaker voice into national politics that could never have been achieved by a single yearly meeting.

These cooperative ventures show that our polity, when stretched beyond self-sufficiency, bears fruit. Yet they also show where our divisions narrow our vision. How often do Unprogrammed and Programmed Friends labor side by side? How often do yearly meetings that disagree about sexuality or biblical authority still seek one another’s Light in other areas? Too often, we retreat into silos, believing that we already have all we need.

If meetings exist only to comfort us, they will not sustain us. They certainly will not make us models of an entirely different way of living from secular culture. If meetings exist to sharpen us—to open us to the Inward Light as it is revealed through others, including those we would rather not hear—then they can still be places of transformation. This is what makes the testimony of “that of God in all people” radical: not that it makes us gentle but that it insists we cannot ignore or exclude those who unsettle us.

We live in a time when walls are going up everywhere—between nations, between political parties, between neighbors. If Quakers are to have anything distinctive to say, it is that God cannot be contained by our walls. Our polity itself should reflect this. Monthly and yearly meetings are gifts, but they are not complete in themselves. They are provisional resting places in the larger body of Christ, which includes those far outside our comfort zones.

When we choose connection over isolation, we testify to our belief that no one is outside the reach of God’s love. When we risk becoming accountable to Friends whose convictions unsettle us, we testify that the Spirit is greater than our ideologies. When we stretch our polity across differences, we live into the truth that there is that of God in everyone.

The question of what we believe cannot be answered by a creed, but it can be answered by practice. If our practice is one of separation, then our belief—whether we admit it or not—is that God is partial, that grace is limited, that we need only our own. If our practice is one of connection, then our belief is that the Light is universal, that revelation is ongoing, that God is alive in every heart.

We began by refusing creeds. Our witness in this season must be to refuse our silos and our walls, not by abandoning our meetings but by insisting that they are porous, interconnected, accountable, and unfinished. In doing so, we may yet rediscover the radical core of our faith: that God is here, in all, and waiting to be known among us.