We Live Worship

Spiritual Nurturing in Quaker Intentional Communities

Communal relationships nurture Friends’ spiritual growth and offer a context in which to live out Quaker testimonies. When Quakers think of community ties, Friends from one’s meeting often come to mind first. Friends meetings, churches, and worship groups offer opportunities to form deep interpersonal ties. Friends living in intentional communities find additional chances to forge relationships that stretch them spiritually and enable them to use Quakerly methods of conflict resolution.

In intentional communities, Quakers and non-Friends live together using Quaker practices for decision making and conflict resolution. An intentional community is one in which people, most of whom are not in the same family, live together on a shared property for a common purpose or in service to the same values. Members of intentional communities share financial responsibilities and labor together on property maintenance and other chores.

Intentional communities vary in the length of time they have existed, as well as in how closely they are affiliated with Quakerism. Friends Journal talked with current and former residents of intentional communities with Quaker connections in the United States, Britain, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Residents discussed how they related to others with whom they lived, the history of their communities, and the spiritual benefits of communal living.

“There’s so much gift and opportunity in the small moments we share together,” said Jen Newman, executive director of Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston, Massachusetts.

Beacon Hill Friends House was established in 1957 in Boston as a place for people to meet, worship, and learn, Newman explained. When the community was founded, it was intended for students and mentors who lived there for two-year stints.

In a residential community, people have the chance to interact and care for each other every day, Newman explained. Each resident has dish-crew duty once a week. Inhabitants learn to collaborate and understand each other’s styles of interacting while washing the dishes. Washing the dishes together helps residents discern how to work together on larger issues, such as political advocacy.

Members of the Celo Community in the Western mountains of North Carolina get together for mutual aid, social events, and work projects that allow people to experience the joy of helping, according to resident Gib Barrus. Monthly work projects include the clearing of invasive species from the forest and making sure emergency vehicles have clear access to the community. Members have recently collaborated to repair the house of a resident couple expecting a baby.

Two times a week, the 20 residents of Beacon Hill Friends House participate in house meetings, which employ silence and Quaker business practices. Many people who live in the house are not Quaker, according to Newman. All residents benefit from increasing their self-knowledge and listening to their inner wisdom. At regularly held community meetings, each speaker takes one to two minutes to talk about themselves, work, spirituality, and family. If one housemate is grieving, for example, the community can support the person on their emotional journey. Some community members offer support by sharing activities with the grieving person; others care for the person experiencing loss by listening deeply to their accounts of their emotional reactions.

Craig Jensen of the South of Monadnock Community in Rindge, New Hampshire, says its members’ lives are intertwined, so when they hold community meetings, it does not take them long to reach a level of psychological and spiritual depth.

“We live worship,” Jensen said.

Jensen and his wife, Megan, met while working for the Meeting School in Rindge. Staff members at the Quaker residential school did various jobs, including teaching and farm work. After the school closed in 2011, developers wanted to put houses on the land.

“We felt sort of a joyful responsibility to make something else happen,” Jensen said.

Farming is lonely work and can lead to an isolated lifestyle, Jensen explained. Forming a community centered around the farm helped alleviate some of the isolation.

In addition to regular decision-making meetings, residents of some Quaker-based intentional communities support each other through clearness committees. Fellows in Quaker Voluntary Service (QVS), a program that offers nine-and-a-half-month service opportunities for young adults who live in intentional communities in four U.S. cities (Boston, Massachusetts; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Portland, Oregon), frequently request the help of clearness committees, according to Rachael Carter, local coordinator at QVS Philadelphia.

“Fellows are often seeking to discern what their right next step is,” Carter said.

Clearness committees are groups chosen by an individual to help with decision making by listening deeply. Fellows participating in peer clearness committees do not have strong opinions but help guide the person seeking clearness to the answers that are already inside them, according to Carter. Fellows practice listening and asking open-ended questions. Participating in a clearness committee is a spiritually deepening experience, Carter explained, as committee members ask questions for the benefit of the person seeking clearness.

At the beginning of every service year, fellows participate in a workshop to practice serving on a clearness committee, according to Rachel (Woody) Logan-Wood, QVS’s Portland city coordinator and alumni coordinator. On QVS days, which are periodic days set aside for community building, fellows also practice participating in peer clearness activities.

Living in an intentional community means residents can’t allow themselves to avoid conflict, according to South of Monadnock’s Jensen. If residents are in conflict, one member of the community acts as a facilitator, and each conflict participant chooses a support person. They hold a 90-minute session that involves asking reflective questions and using reflective listening. The conflict parties and facilitators schedule additional sessions as needed. The conflict parties report to the larger community about what they learned from the process and what support they need to find a peaceful way forward in their relationships.

Members of other communities expressed similar views. Conflict resolution among QVS fellows involves having each party express their feelings and try to understand the other parties’ viewpoints. The process aims to build mutual understanding and to help the participants in the conflict generate a path forward that preserves relationships.

QVS staff attempts to resolve group-wide conflicts using a circle process where participants sit in a circle and engage in structured dialogue. In one case Logan-Wood facilitated a circle meeting to resolve a conflict among two fellows who were in a dispute with another four members of the household. It involved two weeks of conversation and two circle processes but was eventually resolved. Logan-Wood described the resolution effort as “exhausting and rewarding.”

A circle process can be challenging but offers good opportunities to influence and shift conflicts, according to Carter. Drawing on Indigenous conflict-resolution practices, circle processes allow each person time to speak uninterrupted, sometimes aided by an object they hold to indicate it is their turn to talk.

Interacting with household members with varied perspectives enables QVS fellows to develop their conflict-resolution skills. Fellows receive training in how to resolve disputes, including practice in slowing down conversations and identifying conflict engagement styles, according to Carter. Fellows also learn about defensiveness and nonviolent communication.

QVS staff members encourage housemates to employ gentle reminders, step outside of their experiences of anger and frustration, and promote autonomy and accountability. Logan-Wood noted that meaningful apologies require change and action. She explained that QVS fellows learn to see conflict as something people engage in when they care about their relationships and about each other.

“If I don’t have conflict with someone, that means that relationship isn’t worth my time,” said Logan-Wood.

Members have various reasons for joining intentional communities, and the spiritual benefits they gain from doing so vary as well. Many members join Beacon Hill Friends House when they are going through life transitions and want to experience living communally. Some examples of transitions residents have gone through include retirement, divorce, coming out of pandemic-induced isolation, entering graduate school, or starting a new job in Boston. Some residents have long lived communally and want to continue doing so.

The late Arthur Ernest Morgan, a Quaker with ties to conscientious objectors, came up with the idea to start the Celo Community during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to resident Gib Barrus. Morgan was a socialist, a civil engineer who worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), as well as president of Antioch College in Ohio, according to Barrus. Morgan was appointed by Roosevelt in 1933 to be one of the leaders of the TVA. He built villages to house workers who were building dams for the Authority. Having stable and uplifting housing was good for employees’ morale, according to Barrus.

Morgan sought to develop an alternative economic model in response to the Great Depression. He was familiar with the Appalachian region and sent his son there to find a suitable place to start a community, according to Barrus. The community was founded with a concept but did not initially have a group of people. Morgan thought a community would form organically, but this did not happen among the locals, as he had hoped. Local residents had suspicions of the community’s ties to socialism. Only one household that was already in Appalachia joined the community, according to Barrus.

The community struggled for the first 20 years of its existence. Finally, it coalesced after World War II as the families of men who had been conscientious objectors settled there. They had been unsure of whether they would be accepted into the workforce because of their antiwar convictions and were looking for a place to live where they could sustain themselves economically. The conscientious objectors had worked in the Civilian Public Service corps and were accustomed to the sense of community they had established with other laborers, according to Barrus. The first group of conscientious objectors to settle in the community arrived between 1945 and 1956. Barrus’s father was a conscientious objector who had worked with American Friends Service Committee to reconstruct Italy after World War II. Barrus’s father and mother were looking for a close community with people who had similar values, so they moved to the Celo Community from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Resident Anne Maren-Hogan previously lived in West Virginia far from a Quaker meeting. Once she moved to the community, she enjoyed being able to walk to meeting. Maren-Hogan and her husband initially joined because they sought an experiential learning format for their then middle-school-aged son, and living at the community enabled him to attend such a school nearby.

Andrew Greaves and his wife, Sarah, are two of the founding members of the Quaker Community Bamford in the Peak District in central-northern England. The couple had previously worked in bush schools in Kenya where they observed strong extended-family relationships.

Greaves had worked in geriatric hospitals and felt sorrow over younger generations in the United Kingdom ignoring elderly people. The couple saw an intentional community as a means to have their children develop intergenerational relationships with a variety of grownups.

“I was keen on our children learning that there are multiple ways of being an adult,” Greaves said.

Quaker Community Bamford was started with 20 people in 1988. Three family groups and a number of single people purchased 12 acres of land on which stood an English country house constructed in 1900. The community disbanded in 2023 after 35 years.

The Whanganui Quaker Settlement in Aotearoa/New Zealand will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary next year, according to Christine England, a resident of the settlement. The settlement started after a Friends school across the road from the current location closed down. A conversation at the yearly meeting level led to forming an educational place for Quakers, which included mostly retired people, according to England.

Residents of the Whanganui Quaker Settlement hold meeting for worship in a quiet room on site every day except Sunday, when they attend a local meeting in town, England explained. Three to six people attend daily meeting for worship.

“Sitting quietly creates a harmony for people who share that experience,” England said.

Through weekly business meetings and shared meals, settlement residents develop resilience and understand the value of contributing to something larger than themselves, according to England. Forgiveness is also a moral strength that is developed by participating in the community.

“It’s like being married to 25, 30 people,” said England.

Quaker-affiliated intentional communities offer residents opportunities to grow spiritually and morally. The moral strengths residents develop include integrity and authenticity because it is impossible to hide themselves from other residents even if they are inclined to do so, according to Jensen of the South of Monadnock Community.

QVS fellows grow through relationships with spiritual nurturers: older Quakers who are paired individually with QVS fellows to meet regularly. Spiritual nurturers draw on their own vibrant faith lives to support fellows and share excitement about their spiritual journeys, Carter explained. Spiritual nurturers understand having been young and also go through an orientation to familiarize themselves with how fellows experience their year of service.

When Carter was a QVS fellow, they transferred from one site placement to another and leaned heavily on their spiritual nurturer for support and help with discernment. While changing site placements, Carter felt stressed and insecure. The spiritual nurturer asked Carter questions to help Carter see the situation more clearly and avoid escaping.

“My spiritual nurturer was so supportive and present and saw transition as an opportunity to talk about grief for the previous placement,” Carter said.

Spiritual and moral development in intentional communities can in turn lead current and former residents to compassionate action in the larger world. Some of the long-term activities Greaves has embraced as a result of his time in the Bamford Quaker Community include writing to a prisoner on death row, working as a high school teacher, and serving as a mediator with the Alternatives to Violence Project.

“The peace testimony was lived out in ways that were of permanent benefit to me,” Greaves said.