I grew up in a religious household.
From what I hear, my experience was almost the antithesis of what people imply by the term “religious upbringing.” In meeting for worship and Sunday School, I learned to be non-hierarchical, responsible for my own spirituality, and to question materialism and overconsumption. As a small child, I learned about slavery and colonial imperialism. When I was twelve or thirteen, my meeting’s youth group had no problem with me espousing agnostic or humanistic interpretations of our faith. In short, I was raised a Quaker.
As a kid, this meant that we had a place to stay on our travels with a kind of Green Book variation called The Traveling Friend. We lived with refugees, went to marches, and hosted peace activists (and our phone was certainly tapped).
As we think about distributed systems that have stood the test of time, the Quakers might be a good case study. Since 1650, Friends, as the members are known to one another, have sustained a practice that historically eschewed the idea that any one person was “closer to god” or could interpret faith for others. There are no priests or pastors in traditional Quaker meetings, just congregants. Traditional Quakers are pacifists and against state-sanctioned violence. From its earliest inception, the idea of gender equality has been a part of the religion. Quakers were abolitionists and civil war activists.
Don’t get me wrong. There are many contradictions, problematic actions, and splinter branches of Quakerism that are interwoven with the memes of dominant culture. But it’s still instructive to see that for centuries there has been a large, distributed group of Quaker communities who have been able to make collaborative practices work.
Unlike many forms of Christianity, traditional Quakerism doesn’t rely on a convening metaphor of a family with a paternal leader. Instead, it’s naturally more collective in nature.
Some of the components of this that inform how I see good community working:
- The Meeting for Worship spaces are held in silence. It’s quiet until people are moved by the Spirit to share. Anyone can speak. Typically, silence predominates.
- Decision-making is based on consensus or “spiritual unity.” All members are invited to voluntarily participate.
- Meetings can be volunteer-run, though the meetings may choose to pay people to steward, coordinate, or to perform services such as building maintenance.
- Action emerges through committees acting with trust of the greater meeting.
- Quakers share a belief that every human is equal and worthy in the eyes of God.
- There’s no religious doctrine – while Quakerism’s practices are rooted in the principles of early Christianity (such as love thy neighbour and thou shalt not kill) each individual is free to hold whatever beliefs they choose. It’s possible to be a Jewish or Buddhist Quaker, for example.
- Quakers are called to find the light within, and to engage in their own spiritual journey to find spiritual connection.
- Large organizations of Quakers and meetings convene to collectively sense-make but do not hold any dominion over or impose authority on individual meetings.
- Depending on norms, collective beliefs, and practices, individual meetings are typically in groups of “yearly meetings” with a number of other meetings, and there can be many of these yearly meetings in a geographic region.
- The practice is personal and individual. It’s also inherently non-evangelical; no one is going out preaching the Word.
Since I haven’t been a practicing Quaker for most of my adult life (though I did return for a spell to Vancouver’s meeting in the wake of 9/11), I am not sure of the general state of health of the faith. Because it’s the opposite of an evangelic religion, in a day and age where broadcast and persuasion is the norm, I wonder if the long-skewing-older meetings I’ve attended have dwindled. My parents attend a meeting that has done many things to welcome young families, and that too is an example of how to focus on what needs to be available to be welcoming rather than ‘let’s try and get new people to care and then figure out how to include them.”
Can we all be Friends? That’s not really viable. But if we consider these elements in how we create the containers for our collective process, we might just be on the path to friendship.