Quaker Space or Quaker Way?

For some time now I've been trying to work out why my own approach to Quakers seems to be rather different to that of most people in our Meeting.

I think for many people the Quaker Meeting is primarily a 'safe space' - a place to be themselves, where they will be accepted for who they are, without expectations or demands. Members of a Quaker Meeting can bring to this space whatever spiritual traditions, images and experiences are helpful for them. There is no one version of 'Truth', so people are free to borrow from many different traditions and to change and grow in their thinking and believing without being criticised or excluded. There is a liberating acceptance of differences in lifestyle and sexuality, and no oppressive or patronising 'leaders' imposing their own rulings on acceptable belief and behaviour.

All of these aspects of the Quaker Meeting are important to me too, and they can be especially precious to people who have been hurt or excluded by traditional churches, or who have felt oppressed by rigid social expectations.

But for me there is something missing from this image. The Quaker Space is accepting because it is largely content-free - you can bring anything you like to it, but it has little to offer in itself. I didn't come to Quakers primarily because of what it isn't. I was attracted by the very definite character of the Quaker 'Way', as I encountered it in the lives and writings of early Friends such as George Fox, William Penn, Margaret Fell and John Woolman. Quakers of earlier generations were very clear about the content of their message - and could be very forthright in expressing it:

"For the people called Quakers, the foundation of all religious belief is this: God, through Christ, has placed a guide in each person to show them their duty and provided each with the ability to follow that guide. In every nation, race, and religion, there are those who follow this guide - these are the people of God - and those who live in disobedience to it and are not God's people regardless of what they say. This is the Friends' ancient, first, and unchanging principle. This is the testimony they have made and will continue to make to the whole world."

William Penn, 'Primitive Christianity Revived' (1696) in '21st Century Penn', trans. Paul Buckley

This 'Quaker Gospel' is not just another exclusive religious dogma. It makes the revolutionary claim that there are people of every religion who follow the inward guidance of God's Spirit, and others who do not. Becoming one of 'God's people' does not depend on having the 'correct' beliefs or belonging to the 'one true Church'. All that matters is listening to the guidance of God in the heart and being obedient to it. This is the essence of the original Quaker 'Way'.

A 'Way' is very different to a 'Space'. A Way is a path - it goes in a particular direction. Anyone may join it at any point in their journey, but it doesn't just go wherever you like. The Quaker Way makes some definite claims - that we can all experience the presence and guidance of God in our daily lives, and that this guidance will lead us to witness to the character of God in lives of integrity, simplicity, and peace-making.

A Way can also be challenging - it leads us out of our comfort zone into new territory. The Quaker Way claims that God has definite purposes for each of us, that they are often in conflict with our own superficial desires and anxieties, and that we may be called to live and act in ways that bring conflict, difficulty, struggle and even persecution.

The Quaker Way is perhaps less attractive to many than the Quaker Space because by making definite claims it seems to exclude those who can't or don't wish to accept them - people who find it impossible to believe in the kind of personal God who can have 'purposes' for us, or those whose primary way of understanding their spirituality is drawn from other religions or philosophies.

But paradoxically it may be that by losing sight of the content of the Quaker Way we actually become less inclusive in some important ways - particularly in our social and ethnic makeup. On a weekend for Elders & Overseers earlier this year, one Friend from our Meeting suggested that it is those faith groups that focus most clearly on their message that are able to attract people from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds. In contrast, because British Quakers tend not to highlight their message, what newcomers respond to is primarily the culture of the local Meeting, which is predominantly the culture of liberal, White, middle-class Englishness, rather than any distinctive Quaker message.

The danger of this is that it is self-perpetuating, as it is only the people who feel 'at home' with this narrow social group who stay long enough to discover what the Quaker Way is actually about. And in fact the Quaker Way does not appeal only to White, middle-class people. The majority of Quakers worldwide are African and South American, with very different cultural expressions of the Quaker way relevant to their social context and experience.

The Quaker Way of attentiveness to the guidance of the 'Inward Teacher' in the midst of daily life, and the communal discernment of God's purposes for our lives, has an appeal and a relevance far beyond the subculture of White, middle-class liberalism. Perhaps if we made our message and our practice more explicit we could benefit from the far wider experiences of those with other histories and cultures.

Is there a way that we can keep the benefits of the inclusive Quaker Space while becoming more explicit about the content of the Quaker Way?

Perhaps those of us who share a commitment to the Quaker Way could be more ready to explain, and above all to demonstrate, how attentiveness to the inward leading of God's Spirit leads us to reshape our lives and re-examine our priorities. At the same time we can accept that this understanding of the Quaker Way is now a minority view within British Quakers - just one strand among the great diversity of belief and practice in our Meetings. We can be willing to welcome all people, whatever their beliefs, to share with us in the accepting Quaker Space of the meeting for worship. We may no longer have a united Quaker 'testimony to the whole world', but we can offer a space for anyone to come and discover for themselves the Inward Guide that can lead them into a greater faithfulness to God's purposes. And we can perhaps make sure that those who join with us in worship still have the opportunity to hear the message of the Quaker Way.