These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
Fostering Community: Queries
What helps our Meeting build trust of one another?
How do we get to know one another in community?
How do we make time in our lives for our faith community?
How does conflict enrich the life of our community?
Fostering Community: Advices
Meetings can consciously cultivate fellowship and community.
The Meeting is enriched when all members and
attenders participate actively. The working of the Spirit in our lives
is expressed through prophetic ministry, pastoral caring for
each other, and the example provided by lives lived in the Light.
As we worship, work, and laugh together, we forge bonds of
trust, understanding and communication.
When need arises to
address contentious issues, they then may be addressed openly
and honestly. Conflict thus experienced can also build trust
and intimacy. When resolution is not immediate, the Meeting
can make room for different expressions of continuing revelation,
while persisting in earnest search for unity. The larger
Quaker community has many resources that can help meetings
address internal conflict. Convictions that might divide or disrupt
a Meeting can, through God's grace, help to make it creative
and strong.
Fostering Community: Voices
The life of a religious society consists in something more
than the body of principles it professes and the outer garments
of organization which it wears. These things have their own
importance: they embody the society to the world, and protect
it from the chance and change of circumstances; but the springs
of life lie deeper, and often escape recognition. They are to be
found in the vital union of the members of the society with God
and with one another, a union which allows the free flowing
through the society of a spiritual life which is its strength.
William Charles Braithwaite, 1905
The community thrives and is nourishing to its members
not because its members are special people _ on the contrary,
they are very ordinary human beings _ but because God is active
in their lives, helping them rise above their personal standards
and ideals to live together in a special way that blesses each
other and the larger community in which they live. The ability of
Friends to be in community with one another is a testimony to
the continuing and redeeming presence of the Holy Spirit in
their individual lives and in the community's midst, giving the
grace and love to enable them to live with and love one another in
the midst of all the problems, trials, and misunderstandings
that humans create for one another when they try to be a community.
Lloyd Lee Wilson, 1993
How can I participate in a fairer distribution of resources
unless I live in a community which makes it possible to consume
less? How can I learn accountability unless I live in a community
where my acts and their consequences are visible to all? How can
I learn to share power unless I live in a community where
hierarchy is unnatural? How can I take the risks which right action
demands unless I belong to a community which gives support? How can
I learn the sanctity of each life unless I live in a community
where we can be persons, not roles, to one another?
Parker Palmer, 1977
It is not easy to find community and fellowship in the
modern world. Many Friends view relationships within the local
Meeting as similar to partial relationships established with people
met regularly at work, at play, and in the neighborhood. It is
perhaps too much to expect that we all will make the Meeting central to
our lives. But unless the Meeting fellowship can be made to
speak to something deep in our lives, our Society falls short of
fulfilling the true spiritual needs of its members.
BYM Faith & Practice, 1988
The core of the Quaker tradition is a way of inward
seeking which leads to outward acts of integrity and service. Friends
are most in the Spirit when they stand at the crossing point of
the inward and the outward life. And that is the intersection at
which we find community. Community is a place where the
connections felt in the heart make themselves known in bonds between
people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep
opening up our hearts.
Parker Palmer, 1977
The Society of Friends can make its greatest contribution
to community by continuing to be a religious society - I mean,
by centering on the practice of a corporate worship which
opens itself to continuing revelation. Again, community is simply
too difficult to be sustained by our social impulses. It can be
sustained only as we return time and again to the religious experience
of the unity of all life.
Parker J. Palmer, 1977
We may let God work when we yield to the reknitting of
the worshiping community itself as the members are drawn nearer
to the center and to each other. The community that has no
such common experience to gather it into an inward fellowship
as children of a single loving Father, has not yet experienced
the deepest fellowship of all.
Douglas Steere, 1940
Our belief in the universality of the Inner Light requires us
to "walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God
in everyone" as George Fox urged. No human being is
excluded from our sense of community, for we are led by our faith to
view human beings as children of God rather than as stereotypes
of cultures, nations, or ideologies. It is individual people with whom
fellowship must be established, and each Friend must seek in
the quiet of worship the personal strength to work at the
establishment of community.
BYM Faith & Practice, 1988
It is a remarkable fact that Friends for three hundred
years have taken neither the path of religious authoritarianism nor
the path of spiritual privatism. Instead, Friends have always
accepted both the possibility of individual truth and the obligation
of corporately testing that truth.
Parker Palmer, 1977
I believe that much could be accomplished by
carefully planned intervisitation. There are highly gifted persons in a
few meetings, who ought to circulate much more than is now
the case. Their absence occasionally from their own meeting
would throw the sense of responsibility on other members of it,
which would have a wholesome effect, and they would bring fresh
life and inspiration where they visited.
Rufus M. Jones, 1941
Friends who restrict their experience of the Society to
their local Meeting are missing rich experiences of fellowship in
the wider community. Quarterly, Half-yearly and Yearly
Meetings as well as larger gatherings provide opportunities for Friends
of all ages to broaden their experience of the Society and the
circle of their spiritually-based friendships.
BYM Faith & Practice, 1988
These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
|
