It’s been a few years since I attended a whole Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), and even longer since I’ve shared some BYM reflections. It was definitely the right decision to be there. The long weekend was full of hugs from old friends, making new connections, and hearing how my teaching and writing has made a difference. On the Saturday I had a teary moment in the dinner queue, reflecting on how, after more than 20 years as a Quaker, I was surrounded by people who know so many versions of me. I experienced BYM as a big family reunion, and an affirmation that I belong.
One of the themes of the Yearly Meeting was living together in our theological diversity. On the Saturday morning, we watched a video emphasising the joy and excitement of being a community of diverse belief. This prompted me to give vocal ministry, speaking of the pain that comes with pluralism, and of my being famished for a shared theological language. Some of our most treasured words, symbols and formulations cannot be translated into other theological frameworks without being diminished in some way.
My ministry arose, in part, from my own pain, the isolation I’ve often felt as a Christian Quaker in a pluralist community. I remember the Local Meeting elder who told me “Quakers don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead!” I remember the universalist Quaker who casually said “the cross is such a parochial symbol” and the Friend who thought nothing of rubbishing my belief in the Trinity. I remember Friends who’ve called for Quakers to eject the word worship because, apparently, that’s not what Quakers do. Many times I’ve heard Friends describe things as “too Christian,” feeling that what they want is less of me.
This trickle of, at best disinterest, at worst hostility to my treasured Christian vocabulary has, at times, led me to feel incomprehensible to my fellow Quakers. I’ve learned to tread carefully when giving ministry, hedging my words with caveats in the hope that this will help non-Christian Friends receive what I’m called to say. This can sometimes mean I don’t use the language I really want to use. So I was astonished to hear many examples of vocal ministry using Christian and Biblical language during Yearly Meeting sessions. Many Friends I spoke to were sensing an increasingly confident Christian voice emerging within the Yearly Meeting.
It’s hard to know what to make of this. One swallow doesn’t make a summer. One Yearly Meeting with a lot of Christian language doesn’t necessarily mark a sea change in the theology of the Society. We have reason to be cautious of jumping to any big conclusions. Recently, a lot of Christians have gotten excited about a “quiet revival,” thinking there is increased church attendance among Gen Z, only to find out later that the data on this was flawed. This Yearly Meeting may be just a fluke, or may represent the type of Friends who attend Yearly Meeting, rather than the majority of Friends who don’t. I also wonder what percentage of the ministry was actually Christian in tone. In a group that’s not used to hearing lots of Christian ministry, how much Christian language needs to be used before Friends experience this as a majority position?
At the same time, I can imagine that, as society continues to secularise, there may well be more people coming to Quakers who don’t have much Christian baggage, and therefore may be more open to the treasures of the Christian tradition.
But regardless of the actual statistics, many Friends seemed to experience a shift towards more Christian expressions of ministry, reacting to this in both positive and negative ways. For myself, this was a positive thing. The flow of Christian expression filled me with joy. I felt more at home amongst Friends than I’ve done in a long time. I even found myself questioning my own approach to ministry. In a pluralist community, have I learned to censor myself, holding part of myself back?
However, the pain of diversity was still present. On the final morning, a Friend gave ministry about how challenging they’d found the Yearly Meeting. The prevalence of Christian language made them, a universalist, feel excluded and distressed. As much as we say that our diversity is our strength, it comes with a pain that we can’t seem to dispel.
I had a complex reaction to this ministry. It initially prompted a defensive impulse. I experienced the Friend’s distress as an accusation. In feeling at home, I was being “too Christian” again. I thought, “I have this sense of home so rarely, can’t I just enjoy it for one weekend?” The pain of my own experience of isolation was speaking in me. Of course, the distressed Friend wasn’t accusing me. They were ministering from a place of honesty and vulnerability. I’m glad they did. I’m thankful they made their pain visible to the rest of the Yearly Meeting, as hard as that might have been. Their pain is not something we can ignore.
One phrase the Friend used was “I don’t think we’ve got the balance quiet right.” I think this idea of balance is worth exploring. There’s much to like about balance. Balance can be about fairness and equality. When applied to vocal ministry, the idea of balance seems to suggest that Christian expression is ok in moderation, as long as it is balanced with enough non-Christian language. The problem is that we have no way of engineering such a balance. Quakers believe in the “free ministry,” that the Spirit can speak through whomever the Spirit chooses. We get the ministry we get, and if most of the ministry comes to us in Christian language then we need to make sense of that.
Also, I think we need to face the failure of the promises of universalism. In some senses I’m a universalist. I believe there’s much to learn from people of other faiths, and that God is as present in them as in me. I don’t believe in coercing people into my religion, or that I have all the answers. However, the promise of universalism, at least when it was articulated in the 1980s and 1990s, was that universalism is the answer to being a community of theological difference. Universalism, in claiming that truth is to be found in all religions and that no religion contains all the truth, was presented as the umbrella under which all specific religious traditions could rest. In Quaker faith & practice, universalism is described as “by definition inclusivist” (27.04).
But we now need to admit this isn’t true. Universalism is not an overarching framework under which we can all gather. Instead, universalism is but one faith position among many. Universalism is not inherently more inclusive than Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. Universalism has often been offered as a means to resolve conflict between religions, but it’s just another religious position in the mix. Universalism only includes universalists.
If expressions of Christianity are still being experienced as inherently exclusionary, then we still haven’t resolved the question of how to live in unity as a theologically diverse community. Over the weekend, Alex Wildwood asked me if the work he and Tim Peat Ashworth championed in the 1990s and early 2000s was still needed. Alex and Tim produced a book arising from their work called Rooted in Christianity, Open to New Light (2009). In it they describe how to live with “the whole banana.” This banana was actually mentioned in ministry at Yearly Meeting, but it’s an odd phrase for the uninitiated. The banana is intended to represent the gamut of theological diversity within Quakers in Britain, the hope that we can live with all of it. It seems to me that this work is still very much needed.
As much as I feel hurt by some Friends’ anti-Christian sentiments, I know how much harm Christians can do. If there really is a growing, confident Christian voice within the Yearly Meeting, and even if there isn’t, how can we help Friends heal from the trauma of Christian abuse? In a world of Christo-fascism, how can Christian Friends share a life-giving vision of Christianity that is not experienced as exclusionary by non-Christian Friends?
Maybe the pain will never go away. If so, how do we live with it? I wonder if the pain of our diversity is like the thorn in Paul’s flesh, a pain he interpreted as a necessity for keeping him humble (2 Corinthians 12.7-9). It seems to me that, as much as our diversity might be a strength, it’s also a weakness. But maybe it’s a weakness that serves to keep us dependent on God’s grace. A big part of grace is forgiveness. Maybe living as a theological diverse community requires a constant flow of forgiveness, a constant extending of grace to one another. Can we forgive Friends for all the ways we are unable to enter each other’s theological worlds, excluding each other even with our joy and feelings of belonging?
[Cover image photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash]
Jolly Quaker 
Thank you Mark. This was my first time at BYM and, like for you, it was largely faith affirming (though I am now shopping for noise reduction headphones in order to survive the corridors in future!) The word running through the event for me was ‘tension’, as in with a thread or tight rope. It needs just the right amount in order for us to move forward. 🙏
Thanks Alison 🙂
Thanks for this, Mark. I would call myself a nontheist Quaker who feels ambivalent themselves about using Christian language, but actively enjoys hearing it in a Quaker context and would feel it to be a loss if it ended. (Something that makes me a little anxious about the forthcoming revision of Advices & Queries and the rest of Quaker Faith & Practice.)
As you point out, true theological diversity would mean Christian Friends being able to welcome and benefit from ministry expressed in non-Christian terms, and non-Christian Friends being able to welcome and benefit from ministry expressed in Christian terms. But I’m inclined to go further and say we would still need to recognise that Quakerism is ultimately “rooted in Christianity” and that to cease to be so would mean we had been uprooted: rarely a healthy position to be in. It’s questionable how much a Quakerism wholly without Christianity would still be Quakerism.
Thanks Jae, I agree. Christianity will always be something all Quakers have to reckon with and reconcile themselves to.
Great blog Mark. I was also at Yearly Meeting and was glad to hear talk of Jesus, prayer, and more Christian language generally. It spoke to me deeply.
When I was still new to Quakers about eight years ago, I shared that I had an interest in Christianity and in the Quaker expression of it at my local meeting. An elder told me that we’d moved away from all that, and that it was a good thing, a sign of progression. He said I was young and naive (at 28 at the time!). I very much felt talked down to. It sounds like you and I have had some similar experiences.
Sitting with ministry like some of what was shared at Yearly Meeting must be really very challenging for people who experienced the falling away of Christian language as a liberation. Who believed the movement of history was away from that part of the tradition. For me, it’s a core part of the appeal of Quaker faith, but I have definitely censored myself in the past in Quaker spaces, just in case the words hurt someone. I don’t think that’s helpful to anyone and I’m trying to be more courageous.
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next. I have hope that we can hold everyone gently as we find our way and be open to the healing we all need.
Thanks for reading Jenny, and for your thoughtful comments.
Thank you, Mark. Your final paragraph in particular feels important for me (us?) to sit with.
Thanks Fred. And thanks for EVERYTHING you did over YM.
❤️