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Friends United Meeting |
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April 2000
Group Discernment
By Bruce Bishop
"And Quakers do group discernment through a process known as a 'clearness committee.'" So began one of the more interesting lectures I attended recently as part of a certification program for Spiritual Directors. Five of us Quakers sat in a sea of Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. It was a bemusing experience to hear our tradition shared from an outsider's perspective.
Where it went beyond amusing and became a bit surreal is when someone said: "Wouldn't it be great to run a church that way?!" Their laughter at the absurdity of such a thought died away to wistful dreaminess, while the Quakers in the crowed eyed each other knowingly.
Yet, the more I considered the elements of group spiritual direction, the more I was challenged as to whether or not we really reach the "sense of the meeting" or if we merely work for compromise. Gaining the sense of the meeting, or group spiritual direction, means corporately uncovering what God is calling us to, whether we are comfortable with it or not. Compromise tends to find the best solution with which we can all be comfortable. Group spiritual direction relies on really listening to one another, allowing individuals to discern the movement of God below the surface of their words, their preferences, their agendas.
What does it mean for a community, a church, to conduct business via group spiritual direction? It means that instead of skipping stones across the surface of the water, we take the time to let them sink. Most business meetings are so intent upon achieving the decision, or on presenting or avoiding a personal agenda, that our collective spirit skips across the surface of The Spirit, only occasionally stirring the waters and getting wet. But when a group decides that they will be content only with the leading of the Spirit, it requires them to sink below the surface, to settle for a time on the sandy bottom and to be completely encompassed in the presence of the Living Christ. The Church is the Body of Christ, and Jesus Christ didn't "do business." He moved and acted out of his times of prayer.
We often struggle to differentiate between God's voice and our own. A group that listens well can receive our thoughts and our emotions and assist us to sift them for the presence of God. Perhaps that's a vital part of the process that we have lost as we have moved away from the regular practice of "threshing meetings." It was at such meetings where people could come together and without the pressure to make a decision, share their thoughts and questions and opinions, gain information regarding the facts of the situation, and get a sense of where other people were coming from. Time was then spent over the course of the week, carefully holding this awareness in a prayerful attentiveness to the fullness of the issues involved.
Besides listening well, and reflecting back thoughts and emotions, a community can best discern God's voice by knowing each other well. Language is tricky. We believe it communicates clearly, but the world and experience of the speaker colors the words with one underlying meaning, while the world and experience of each listener colors them with potentially different values. Communicating clearly requires us to know one another well, to have spent time together, to have become familiar with the world of the speaker, so that the meaning of their words are communicated more clearly.
This isn't a manifesto for doing everything slower! In fact, I think more of our decisions should be made in small groups where people can get to know one another, share their lives and spend time worshipping together...all of which will inform their decision-making process and help them discern God's desire for them. This might mean that full church business meetings will have to trust some of these smaller groups. Perhaps such trust will allow community business meetings to have time for the listening, sifting, weighing, and prayerful silence that is necessary for group spiritual discernment. Gaining God's sense of the meeting is more arduous than working for compromise…and less comfortable for us personally. But it allows us to truly function as Christ within our communities.
Bruce Bishop is field secretarty for leadership development in Northwest Yearly Meeting.
Send your comments : QuakerLife@FUM.org.
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