How do we really welcome people into Quaker communities? What is the process by which someone moves from newly arrived – whether as a visitor or enquirer, or in childhood – to fully involved and able not just to participate in what the community are already doing but to have a say in what should change and suggest new activities or approaches? At one level, this is something I’ve been concerned with my whole life, especially as I have been on that path (and up and down it, and a bit sideways, and trying to find the way…) over a long period of time. At another level, this is something which I started to think about seriously when Windy Cooler invited me to give a keynote lecture last year on Deep Hospitality.
These kinds of questions are often addressed through the structure of membership, but a yes/no in/out approach – although deeply appealing in the way it should give clear answers – doesn’t always reflect the complex reality of a situation in which our position can change in multiple directions, gradually or quickly, and in relation to other people who are also moving. In order to try and explore some of these complexities in a way which is relatively intuitive, I started to use the metaphor of a household. If everyone in my Quaker community lived together, how would we be related?
This image gives space to imagine some of the difficult positions we can find ourselves in, which aren’t adequately described by the member/attender/enquirer categories. For example, I periodically meet people who are deeply embedded in the Quaker community and offering huge amounts of trusted and valuable service, but feel like outsiders because they are not in line with what they perceive to be the dominant theological position: we might think about people who are connected to but anxious about their position in a family, a beloved but distant cousin or one person’s new partner who may or may not become a step-parent. They might be very heavily involved but reluctant to become members – and sometimes unwilling or feeling unsafe to explain why, especially if spiritual experience and theological topics are rarely or never discussed in the meeting. (If you’re curious, this happens to people with a wide range of different (a)theologies, and everyone I’ve met so far in this situation does fit in when the whole diversity of Quaker theology is taken into account.)
To develop this line of thinking about welcome and community further, I’ve been doing some more writing and talking, and I’m getting ready to do some teaching. The lecture has become a Pendle Hill Pamphlet (#487), which will be published in June and you can preorder now. I wrote an article for Friends Journal which expands these ideas in a different direction and talked about that article with Peterson Toscano on the Quakers Today podcast. I’m also delighted that I’ll be working with Windy Cooler again to offer a Woodbrooke course exploring these questions this September: Friend, Guest, or Family?
If you imagine your Quaker community all living together as a household, where do you fit into it? Comfortably settled? Not allowed into some rooms? Getting ready to refurbish the bathroom?
Rhiannon Grant 