Belonging: The Community or the Institution (12/37)

Something really interesting has been happening with membership. 

In the past ten years, a number of Quaker groups have tried to figure out how to adjust their membership structures to include Friends who, for one reason or another, feel themselves to be Quakers but don’t feel themselves to be part of a specific monthly meeting near them. New York Yearly Meeting, for example, has established an at-large membership in the yearly meeting. The New Association of Friends allows for individual membership from afar, and so does Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative), though for slightly different reasons and with very different guidelines. There are other yearly meetings, and some monthly meetings, with similar membership pathways.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, online worship became far more common than it had been before. This led to some additional membership complications. Some Friends began worshiping regularly with meetings that were geographically far away. In some cases, it was a matter of returning to a meeting with which they had worshipped many years before. In other cases, it was more about finally being able to join a meeting that felt more theologically or culturally familiar than any meeting close by. What has happened with these Friends’ memberships has varied greatly.

More complicated still is the development of worship communities that are not meetings nor under the care of any meeting but that now feel like the primary Quaker affiliation for some Friends, such as online worship connected with a Quaker retreat center (of which there are several). These worship communities officially cannot hold membership at all, and some Friends are wondering why not.

Questions about the relevance of membership go back decades. There are Friends who believe we shouldn’t have any such concept. Others don’t object to the existence of membership, but they feel it’s unimportant or simply something they’d prefer not to pursue. Many Quaker meetings disregard or deemphasize rules about how non-member attenders are allowed to participate in the meeting, and others have explicitly decided to overturn such rules. On the other hand, there are Friends’ meetings that are very strict about membership. In a few rare cases, non-members aren’t even permitted to speak in business meetings. 

Many Friends have membership in meetings that they haven’t attended for many years. In some cases, that’s for emotional reasons. In others, it’s just about not bothering with a formal transfer or leaving Quakerism entirely without formally telling anybody. This isn’t just an annoyance in our paperwork. For some meetings, having dozens of distant, out-of-touch members is a genuine hardship because the yearly meeting still functions by apportionment—a system that used to be dominant among Quakers in which financial contributions to the yearly meeting were determined by the number of members in each monthly meeting. A lot of yearly meetings have moved away from that system, but some haven’t, and some local meetings pay hundreds or thousands of dollars each year on behalf of Friends they never see.

Membership means a lot of different things, both according to various yearly meeting’s books of discipline and according to individual Friends’ beliefs. We have no agreement about what is necessary to become a member (if anything) nor what the formal procedure might be nor what obligations and privileges come with membership. It was an institutional stop-gap measure from the beginning, dating back to a time when we needed formal membership records because so many Friends were being thrown in prison and so many Friends’ children needed care and we were having a hard time keeping track of everybody. But like most institutional procedures, the purpose it serves today is not perfectly aligned with its original purpose. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t serving a purpose. It just means that purpose isn’t terribly clear.

I’m thinking back to what Friends have said about sacraments, specifically baptism, which early Friends absolutely believed in. They just said it was an internal, spiritual conversion and not an external ceremony involving water. I’ve wondered whether we could say that membership is an external recognition of an existing truth, the same way that recording is an external recognition of an existing truth—is membership simply the practice of our writing down a recognition of spiritual baptism? I think it only works if we believe that spiritual baptism—which we might also call “being convinced”—necessarily includes God committing us to a covenant community. Because membership, as we’ve practiced it historically, has a lot to do with mutual responsibility and care. And Quaker theology does imply that a Quaker path requires community.

I can imagine a lot of Friends skimming over that last paragraph, wondering why obscure historical theological connections would even be relevant to membership today. The thing is, most groups of Friends don’t have an agreed-upon modern theology of membership, so the historical roots are all we have to draw on…unless we’re willing to engage seriously in corporate discernment on the meaning of membership, which would take a lot of energy and time.

Membership for individuals, it seems to me, can only be one of three things. It might be an external recognition of an existing truth, an affirmation that a person belongs and is one of us. Or if might be a ritual that, in the doing, causes a person belong and be one of us. Or it might be a matter of paperwork that is relevant only for statistical purposes.

I experienced membership as the second of these possibilities: a ritual that, in the doing, caused me to belong and be one of the Friends of Fifteenth Street Monthly Meeting. From my point of view, there was a transition in belonging=ness that happened when the meeting minuted my acceptance. It was even worded that way: “accept into membership.” I could not have detailed, in the moment, to what exactly I was committing because no one had had that conversation with me. But I did see the minuting as a two-sided agreement that transformed my relationship with the community. And I wanted that very much, partly because my upbringing had taught me to value rituals of belonging, and so I was looking for one.

Trouble is, that’s not in keeping with Friends’ theology more generally. We don’t believe in the necessity of performative rituals in order to enact spiritual truths. And I probably could have accepted that, if it had been explained to me. I probably could have understood that membership was a recognition of a pre-existing spiritual reality. I already belonged. We were just naming it.

If we go with that definition—membership as recognition of a preexisting spiritual truth—then we can probably eliminate a lot of our recent institutional angst. There’s been so much worry about which groups can hold membership, and how can a person be a member in a worship group, and can a Friend be a member directly of a yearly meeting, and what are the implications of these different possibilities? We fret and we fuss. How can we possibly make sure everybody is cared for if we change our institutional definitions of membership?

But if membership is a recognition of a preexisting spiritual truth, then we need not worry about a lot of these things. A Friend requesting membership in a non-traditional structural way is doing so because they are recognizing a pre-existing relationship of mutual responsibility and care. God already did it. We don’t have to figure out how to do it.

The natural result of looking at membership this way is that membership can be issued by any group, held in any group as a recognition of the existing spiritual relationships, and released at such time as the God-given relationship of mutual responsibility and care within that group ends. Sometimes people move on in their spiritual path, or they simply become part of another community. Under this definition of membership, it would seem that membership would automatically move on with them. I feel like this simplifies the matter considerably.

It’s also possible that membership is a form without Life and needs to be laid down. The original historical necessity certainly isn’t relevant anymore, and the statistical purposes could probably be served by counting heads at worship. Could we name and claim covenant spiritual relationships without official membership? I suspect we could, and truth told, in most cases, membership is not used and explained as a recognition of covenant spiritual relationship anyway.

A lot of the work done about membership lately, especially by young adults, has been about helping Friends in general understand that the institutional practices need to change to reflect what God is doing in our communities. Spiritual belonging simply isn’t happening exclusively in multi-decade relationships within geographically local communities, but our institutional patterns continue to assume that it is. 

What’s the best way for Quaker institutions to support and nurture what God is doing with belonging in our covenant communities? It’s a bigger question than rewriting paragraph three of the membership section of Faith and Practice, and ultimately, I suspect that’s more appropriate than trying to tweak our existing structures. We haven’t tweaked the way life is lived and relationships are maintained in the 21^st century. We have radically redefined it. An equally radical redefinition of membership is probably the only way to reflect what God is doing now.