Afterwords: coming towards the end

I’m now in my last week as an Eva Koch scholar. Over the weekend, the four Eva Koch scholars gave presentations to some local Friends and those who happened to be at Woodbrooke, outlining our findings and sharing some of our experience. Here are some of the headlines from mine – things which haven’t yet been covered in blog posts (see my afterwords tag to find them all). I’ve also included a few of the pictures I used in my presentation, all taken in Woodbrooke’s garden during my time here.

Afterwords has three main purposes: community building, improving ministry, and smoothing transitions. Unfortunately, these all have a flip side. Afterwords can help a meeting to flourish as a community by helping people to get to know one another better – especially in ‘the things which are eternal’. It can move a community beyond chatting about daily life and into a deeper sharing about experiences of worship and spiritual insight. However, it can also split the community: either physically, if the afterwords is held in such a way that not everyone participates or feels able to participate, or emotionally, especially if people in the meeting have very strong and opposed views about afterwords. Because people tend to really like or really dislike afterwords, with the middle ground sparsely populated,  the whole idea can be polarising.

Afterwords can improve ministry. This can be by encouraging people who are perhaps newer or shyer to speak in a space where there is less pressure to give ‘true ministry’. It can also be by moving contributions from those who need to speak often, or who need a more direct response than is acceptable during worship, into a space where that’s acceptable. (Whether this actually is seen as acceptable depends a lot on how the Friend concerned is characterised: there’s sympathy for cases where a mental health or emotional need is hinted at, but very little for cases where something is thought to be a hobby-horse or campaigning point.) On the other hand, afterwords can also confuse newcomers (how do you know what’s nearly ministry if you don’t have any idea what ministry is?) or encourage people to hold back from ministry, thinking that if they are at all unsure of their leading to speak they should wait until afterwords. Some people in the survey reported that having introduced afterwords, their meeting now has very little or no ministry during worship.

For some people, afterwords smooths over a transition from worship into the ordinary world. If notices seem like a jolt after the silence, afterwords – held in a spirit of worship, but with more relaxed rules on speaking – can feel like a gentle introduction.
Unfortunately, there are also (sometimes in the same meeting!) people who feel that moving into too many words is a rough road, and would find well-given notices and a cup of coffee provide a smoother transition. In a way, this finding is even less of a finding than the others – you can look to see whether community building is needed in your meeting and whether afterwords might help, and you can put in other ways of explaining and improving ministry, but you can’t do much else about the transition. However, I also think that this finding is more interesting than the others, because so little attention is usually paid to the spiritual experience of the ending of a meeting for worship. The advice on centring down is not paired with advice on ‘rising up’ – except in the activist sense – and yet the movement out of waiting worship is clearly important to people and deserves further attention.

How do we take what we have learned during meeting for worship out into the world? Can we find ways to clarify and consolidate what our Inward Teacher gives us while we are listening, and apply it to our whole lives? To answer these questions, I think we need to consider and review all our practices around the end of worship, including afterwords, but also how we give notices, how we use social time, and our mixed bag of current taboos about discussing and building on spoken ministry.

 

Afterwords: digging deeper

I didn’t feel ready to write this on Wednesday, when I was expecting to post, partly because the news about my new job dominated my attention for a few days. However, I would like to share some of the ideas I’m playing around with at the moment and ask you whether they ring true.

I’m looking at the relationship between afterwords and spoken ministry – in my survey, lots of people said that their form of afterwords was either meant to improve, or had a negative effect on, the spoken ministry in their meeting, and I’ve been trying to think about why this is.

Some of obviously depends on how you think about ministry in the first place. I might think about ministry as a particular way of speaking, with special rules, in which case afterwords has similar-but-slightly-different rules. I might think about ministry as a gift from God or something we channel from the depths we contact during worship, in which case afterwords might seem like a space for sharing small but potentially precious gifts, or a mockery which doesn’t acknowledge the specialness of this contact. I might think about ministry as something we learn to do, whatever else we think it is, and in that case I might ask: what does the use of afterwords teach about ministry?

Sometimes people talk about afterwords moving unwanted contributions out of ministry, by making another space in which they can be shared. Sometimes people talk about afterwords taking wanted contributions out of ministry, because having another space means that people have to be very sure about their leading before they speak during worship. These are obviously two sides of the same coin, and can both be happening at once in the same meeting! Other people talk about afterwords as a space in which people might gain confidence in speaking, and thus feel more about to give ministry during worship in the future. My impression is that this works for some people – where what is lacking is confidence about speaking to the whole group, or feeling that their contribution will be welcomed – but that it just muddies the water for other people, if they aren’t sure what will count as ministry.

A situation which is mentioned sometimes in the survey responses – and which I probably won’t have time to explore fully in this project, but would like to consider in the future – is how people can learn to give spoken ministry in situations where they don’t have experience of hearing it. In a 1988 book chapter on spoken ministry, Alan Davis says that although “like other forms of discourse, it [spoken ministry] must be learned” this is an open process: “anyone may speak, all may learn” (p134, ‘Talking in Silence’, in N. Coupland (ed.) Styles of Discourse). That’s certainly true in the Meetings for Worship he examine, where every meeting had at least four pieces of ministry during their hour of worship, and some had as many as seven. But I know meetings who go for weeks or months without hearing any spoken ministry at all, and several survey respondents told me that their meetings are often entirely silent. In that case, adding an afterword for ‘not quite ministry’ might be tempting, but it might not make sense, especially if many of those attending the meeting have no idea at all of what afterwords isn’t quite.

Have you got experience of any of the situations described here? Has afterwords supported you in giving spoken ministry, or does it encourage you to hold back from speaking during worship?

Afterwords: a labyrinth of ideas

I’m now at the stage in my research where I’ve read the survey data, everything else about afterwords I can find, and begun to look at related things – other patterns of change in the way Meeting for Worship is held, for example, and writing about worship and vocal ministry generally. It’s difficult to summarise where I’m at because I feel like I’m walking around in a maze: I decide to turn left, only to walk for ten minutes and find myself back at a point I passed half an hour ago. That being so, I thought I’d offer you, not a coherent account of anything, but sketches of some of the places where I’ve tied some string. If you recognise any of these spots, do let me know.

Afterwords isn’t the only thing about Meeting for Worship which has changed over the past century. Two examples of other changes which have interested me are the shift from just a pair of Elders shaking hands to everyone shaking hands, and the introduction of social time after meeting. Both of these changes must have come in slowly – there are reports of Friends who held out against them, and there remains some variety in the practices – but both could be related to one of the key purposes given for afterwords, namely community building. Shaking hands with each other gives a point of formal greeting between the end of worship – the Elders shaking hands – and the notices. For some meetings, afterword appears in this slot and is reported to help people get to know one another. Adding refreshments and thereby encouraging people to stay for social time, the classic tea and coffee, also gives people more time in the meeting house to get to know one another and encourages informal conversation. Again, for some meetings, afterwords can extend this process, giving an extra space for more or less formal sharing before or alongside the social time.

The way we talk about afterwords can reveal our ideas about other things, especially our views of Meeting for Worship. For example, lots of people told me in the survey that they thought that spoken contributions sometimes got misplaced one way or the other: either that things which weren’t really ‘true ministry’ got said during Meeting for Worship, where they didn’t belong, or that things which were ‘true ministry’ got said during afterwords, when they would have been better said in worship. At the very simple level, this reveals that the people answering my survey have a picture of the differences between ‘true ministry’ and ‘nearly ministry’ and ‘not ministry’ which goes beyond whether something is said in worship, afterwords, or elsewhere. At a more complex level, as people begin to describe these differences, they are revealing their ideas about true ministry and where it comes from – in others words, their theology.

Afterwords is part of a wider picture of the end of Meeting for Worship, and what people want is a smooth transition into the next thing. What that smooth transition actually looks like is another matter, but descriptions of problematic processes – the introduction of an unwanted afterword, or a lack of afterword before a disliked notices – tend to stress suddenness or a bump or jolt in ‘coming up from the depths’ of worship. On the other hand, when people like a process, they describe it in terms of an easy, smooth, unjolted transition – whether that’s from worship into social time without being bumped into a too-heady wordy space by afterwords, or from worship into afterwords with space to reflect on the experience of Meeting without being forced to make social chit-chat too soon. This doesn’t solve the problem of whether you should have afterwords, but it points towards some of the right questions to ask about why people like it or don’t.

Why collect demographic data?

I’ve now run two large online surveys of Quakers – one about threshing and one about afterwords – and on both occasions, questions about age, gender, and education raised protests. Since this information isn’t directly related to the topic of the survey, I can understand some objections about its irrelevance, but it is important in some ways and I’d like to take a little while to explore these questions, why I ask them, and what I do with the information.

Firstly, I’d like to dispel a possible misconception. I do not use this information to judge the answers to other questions. In fact, before I analyse the data I usually detach different parts of it: when I read a detailed answer about afterwords in a particular meeting, I am not at the same time looking to see how old this respondent is or whether they have a degree. Perhaps knowing this would help the Friend who refused to tell me about their educational background because “whether academic or not you can make a spiritual decision”. I completely agree. In fact, I’d really like my data to include more responses from people with less formal education – I realise that by choosing to take written responses I’ve excluded some people who struggle with reading and writing, but even at a quick glance my respondents are much more educated than the population as a whole.

This brings me to one of the things I do do with this information: compare it with the UK population as a whole. According to our census data, even in the best educated sector of the population (as of 2011, this was women aged 25-34), only around 42.6% of people had a university degree or higher qualification. Roughly 85% of the people who answered my survey had a university degree, or equivalent or higher qualification. They aren’t in that age band, either – 40% of my respondents are aged between 61 and 70 – although 68% of them gave their gender as ‘f’, ‘female’ or ‘woman’.

You might have noticed if you did the survey that I chose to take all this information in free-text boxes, where respondents could write anything they liked, rather than restricting people to clicking a button marked ‘m’ or one marked ‘f’. Setting out the question in this way enables people to give other answers – such as ‘cis male’, ‘gender fluid’ or other, more individual responses (one respondent simply gave a personal name, perhaps to say ‘my gender is completely specific to me’). Allowing this freedom of response is an important point of principle. I did regret sticking to this principle in the case of the question about membership, though – I’d intended to people to answer the question “Are you a member or an attender of a meeting in Britain Yearly Meeting?” with something like ‘member’ or ‘attender’ or perhaps ‘member of another yearly meeting’, but a number of people answered it with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, which didn’t provide enough information for me to do anything useful with it.

This, more specifically Quaker, information leads to the other thing I do with these answers: compare with other Quaker sources to see whether I have a sample which is representative of the whole. For example, I can compare my information about gender – about 68% women – with the tabular statement for Britain Yearly Meeting for 2015, where 62% of members and attenders across England, Wales and Scotland are women, and see that I’m only a little bit out. On the other hand, I can also look at my information about membership, where of those who gave clear answers and indicated that they were within Britain Yearly Meeting, 88% are in membership, and see that they’re significantly over-represented: in the tabular statement, only about 63% of the adults reported are in membership (the other 37% being attenders).

I can think of ways to explain this. For example, people who have been involved with Quakers for longer are more likely to be in membership, more likely to be on the email lists and Facebook pages where the survey link was shared, and more likely to feel confident reporting on their experience of afterwords. However, if I hadn’t collected this information, I wouldn’t know that there was anything I needed to explain.

There are many kinds of information which I haven’t collected, too. For example, standard equal opportunities monitoring forms in the UK at the moment would also ask about sexuality and ethnicity, both questions I chose to leave out. I didn’t leave them out because I think they don’t matter – my whiteness and queerness make as much difference to my experience of Meeting for Worship as my age and gender, which is to say, they are incredibly important in some ways and irrelevant in others. I did leave them out mainly because there are not as many high-quality sources with which to compare, and because when the numbers are low (for both alternative sexualities and minority ethnicities, we are looking at around 10% in many locations in the UK, although this various considerably depending on several factors) it would be easier to have a small change look important when it was actually just chance.

By collecting four data points – age, gender, education, and membership status – I hope to have some points of comparison and get a feel for how my sample is similar or different to other Quaker and national surveys, without asking people to fill in more questions than is reasonable.

Afterwords: Diving into the data

I’m now at Woodbrooke, set up in a study bedroom with a laptop and a mountain of data. The survey is now over (sorry, I know some people missed answering it – too late; you’ll see in this post that I’ve enough to be going on with!). I had a splendid response to my request for information about ‘afterwords’. I got 95 responses to the first part and 183 responses to the second part (mainly because some people did the second part twice).

Thank you all very much – every survey response is valuable to this kind of work.

Taken all together, I now have at least some information about approximately 334 Quaker meetings. Most of them are in Britain Yearly Meeting, but I also had responses covering at least eighteen other yearly meetings around the world. There are a few I couldn’t track down or for which I can’t identify a yearly meeting or other affiliation- if you happen to know about the meetings in East Harbor, Hong Kong, Kumasi, or San Louis Obispo, please get in touch.

There’s a lot of sorting answers to be done before I can begin to give detailed results. However, here are some early answers.

Around half the meetings are reported to have ‘afterwords’ or something like it. The form of this varies a lot, but it’s a recognisable pattern while being nowhere near universal. Some reports are from people who visited a meeting a while ago, so if afterwords is getting more common this might be an underestimate. However, people are probably more likely to fill in a survey about afterwords if their meeting has afterwords, so this might be an overestimate. Hopefully these factors balance each other out a bit!

Afterwords varies a lot. I knew this, but I didn’t know quite how much. Afterwords, or something like it, might appear in programmed or unprogrammed worship – or as a semi-programmed element at the end of either. In unprogrammed worship (which includes the vast majority of my responses), it can take place before the handshake (i.e. before the end of worship), after the handshake and before notices, or after notices and refreshments. It can last anywhere from a minute to an hour, although a first glance through the answers suggests that it averages between 5 and 15 minutes.

The aims of having afterwords vary. I sort of knew this, too, but the responses are making it clear that I’m going to have to think about it much more carefully. Possible purposes of afterwords I’ve thought of or heard about so far include: smoothing the transition from ‘Meeting for Worship’ to ‘not Meeting for Worship’, encouraging timid people in the meeting to speak up and perhaps move towards giving vocal ministry, allowing outspoken Friends a space in which to share their thoughts without forcing them into vocal ministry, helping people in the meeting to get to know one another better, and reinforcing the distinction between ordinary speech and vocal ministry by clarifying what is in the nearly-but-not-quite space.

Hopefully when I’ve coded the survey responses in more detail and done some follow-up work, I’ll be able to tell you whether the variation matters, which purposes are most important, and whether it actually works to achieve any of them.

Afterwords – an update

The response to my survey about ‘afterwords’ has already been incredible. The survey is still open (part 1 asks about all the Quaker meetings you have attended including ones which don’t use afterwords, and part 2 asks for details about a meeting who use afterword or something similar), and will stay open until I go to Woodbrooke in mid-July. I will then be analysing the results and exploring some examples in detail – many thanks to everyone who has offered their telephone number for this purpose!

At the moment, I’ve got at least some indication about the use or non-use of afterwords in more than 200 meetings worldwide. Some, of course, have more than one report, and these sometimes conflict – usually I think this is because people were there at different times and the practice has changed. Some people might have misremembered, though! A few interesting things have already emerged.

One is that some people are very puzzled about ‘afterwords’ or have very strong feelings for or against. Although this is skewed at the moment because people who seek me out to give their opinions are more likely to have strong feelings, I do get a clear picture that for some people this is a make-or-break issue, one which they would leave a meeting, or even Quakers entirely, over. Is afterwords like Marmite – love it or hate it? I’ll be actively looking for people who could go either way or feel neutral about it to see whether this is true, or just a first impression. If that describes you, I’d be very glad to have your survey response.

Some different names have been suggested. I already had ‘afterwords’, ‘afterthoughts’, ‘bridging time’ and ‘not quite ministry’, but it can also be called ‘reflections’, ‘the bridge’, ‘sharing time’, ‘joys and concerns’, or not given a name at all. A number of people report meetings where it’s simply introduced with a stock phrase and not named as such at all. This diversity in naming may reflect a diversity in practice – that’s something I’m hoping to check as I dig deeper into my results – and also makes it more difficult to talk about the practice. That could also be one reason why it isn’t much discussed in Quaker publications. Again, if your meeting uses a different name, please do add this to my survey responses!

Finally, although people are often not sure when ‘afterwords’ or something similar began in a meeting, most of the confident reports I have suggest it appeared in Britain Yearly Meeting in the 1990s or early 2000s. Reports from before that, from the mid-1980s, are all clustered in the USA at the moment, although I’ve also seen a suggestion that it was brought from South Africa. If you remember it being used in the UK before 1990, your survey response would be even more valuable!

Afterwords – survey open

Do you go to a Quaker Meeting? If you do, whether or not your meeting uses ‘afterwords’ or anything similar, I’d like to hear from you in my research survey. This is to provide material for the project described in my previous post about ‘afterwords’.

There are actually two surveys. The first one just asks a few questions about all the Quaker Meetings you’ve ever attended, and should be very quick to complete. The second one asks for more details about a specific Quaker Meeting and might take a bit longer – perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, depending how much you write. If you want to, you can fill it in more than once to describe different meetings you’ve attended.

‘Afterwords’ – my Eva Koch Scholarship project

This summer, I will be spending some time at Woodbrooke as one of the four Eva Koch scholars. My topic is ‘afterwords’. In this post, I’d like to say what my current thoughts are about this practice and how it’s used – during the project, I hope to keep blogging from time to time to document how my ideas change.

I take ‘afterwords’ to include a range of things Quakers might do between the end of Meeting for Worship (after the handshakes) and before the notices and/or refreshments (if there are any). I don’t know yet whether ‘news of Friends’ counts as afterwords, or a specialist kind of notices, so I’m inclined to include it for now and see if that makes sense when I have more information. There might be other doubtful cases like this – if you can think of one, please let me know.

‘Afterwords’ goes by a variety of names – I have also heard ‘bridging time’ and ‘not quite ministry’, and a brief survey of online mentions suggests that Meetings in the USA are more likely to call it ‘afterthoughts’. Some of these names point towards the things it might be expected to do: ‘not quite ministry’ suggests that some things which have arisen in the silence need to be spoken and shared, but don’t carry the full weight of vocal ministry. (Whatever we understand that weight to be – I think issues about vocal ministry itself will appear repeatedly in this work.) Similarly, ‘bridging time’ suggests that ‘afterwords’ provides a threshold space in which we are neither fully in meeting for worship, nor fully outside it. From this point of view, it might be interesting to compare ‘afterwords’ to ‘worship sharing’ and ‘creative listening’, also practices which are related to worship but with slightly different rules. I’d also like to compare ‘afterwords’ to threshing meetings, which can also be understood as providing a threshold space. (For more about that, see the report on threshing which Rachel Muers and I wrote last year.)

The term ‘afterwords’ is also sometimes used for a planned discussion or study session after Meeting, after notices and maybe in a different room. I’m interested in this use of the word, but I don’t think this practice is what I’m trying to find out about. Discussion sessions have their own rules and don’t usually occupy this boundary location between worship and not worship.

Not very much has been written about afterwords, at least not that I have found so far. Some meetings describe it briefly when they describe their worship – Tottenham, Abingdon, and Oxford are typical examples of this – and it’s mentioned in a couple of places in With a Tender Hand, the recent eldership and oversight resource book. On the other hand, it’s not mentioned at all in Quaker faith & practice, which suggests that it was not in use, or at least not widespread, in 1994.

As I start talking to people about this project, it becomes clear that some people are very much in favour, some against, and many more interested but not really sure. It’s often thought that introducing ‘afterwords’ might affect – probably improve – the quality of the vocal ministry, either by giving people who speak often, perhaps too often, another space in which to share, or by encouraging people who are less likely to speak to start (by giving a less pressured space in which to do so). I’m hoping my research will be able to show whether or not these things really do happen in the experience of meetings who try afterwords. I’m not expecting to form a straightforward opinion that afterwords are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, since I think it’ll probably vary by context and circumstances – but you never know, I might be swayed to one side or the other!

In my plan, the main part of my research will be a survey asking for report of people’s experiences with afterword. If you’re interested in that, do get in touch or watch this space, as I’ll be announcing it here when the survey opens.