 November/December 1999 (XXXVII 5) |
hould Philadelphia Yearly Meeting devote an entire session to determining "a single, overarching (or undergirding) priority for its work in the world," as was proposed in the last PYM News?
Should, as was also suggested, this body define "one task, one kind of work" as its principal business for "three to five years"?
And is PYM's lack of unified focus on one such "overarching" priority at the root of whatever spiritual and institutional malaise may now afflict it?
My answer to each of these questions is No.
Such an effort at prioritizing does not seem like a good idea. In fact, it leaves me both puzzled and a bit worried. My problems with it are both theological and practical.
Theologically, the proposal is puzzling because it is by no means clear to me that God wants a group like PYM to have a single priority. After all, our Meetings, like our personalities, are all varied; we have different gifts, are in widely varying circumstances, and are drawn to a wide range of concerns.
It has been ever thus, and why not? The world in which we are called to live and bear our witness has always been a complicated, diverse place; that's how God made it.
Similarly, the biblical accounts of the early Christian church don't present the reader with any single overarching priority in its yeasty, often tumultuous growth. Only at the most abstract level, that of being called to love one another, is there a premium on unity; and even there, the historical evidence is mixed indeed.
I unite with that imperative, though, and would hope PYM could indeed be unified, "in the things which are eternal." But the biblical record is clear that "there are varieties of gifts, but one spirit," and hence the members of even the most loving community can expect to be drawn to differing forms of action and witness.
Thus when I imagine what PYM might look like in its most Spirit-filled and faithful condition, I cannot help but still see in it some Friends drawn mightily to work for peace, while others labor for prison reform, and still others devote themselves to prayer, Quaker education, outreach, or the arts, among many other concerns.
Amid this variety, who would be qualified to say to all but one group of them, "Stop what you are doing, and instead let us all do what these others are doing; for that is our overarching priority for the next three to five years"?
Maintaining respect for the mysteriousness of our callings, and the One who calls, is something Quakerism does reasonably well in my experience, even though this typically makes for more or less organizational untidiness.
By contrast, when I have seen religious groups "unified," it has not taken much digging to uncover voices that are stifled, concerns suppressed, process overridden or undermined, and refugees forced out because the wind of the spirit blew for them in a different, "non-priority" direction. We need look no further than the history of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for a plethora of such cautionary tales; we don't need any more.
I understand that our condition can make a manager's life stressful. But I don't know a way around it within what I have learned of authentic Christian or Quaker experience.
So yes, by all means let the Yearly Meeting seek to be "of one heart and one mind" in love and mutual forbearance. If we are to have one "overarching priority" for three years or three hundred, let it be that. And in business sessions, may we set our priorities as clearly and efficiently as we can, given our light.
But as we do so, I would hope we could not only become reconciled to the multiplicity and diversity of these priorities, but even rejoice in them. Whatever our problems and shortcomings, the diversity of our leadings in God's teeming, multi-faceted world is not their root, nor their principal symptom.
Chuck Fager
State College Meeting (PA)
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM