Liberal Quaker Theology and Tradition, a Basic Outline

I originally wrote this outline in 2020 as an orientation tool for the staff of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a regional association of Quakers on the east coast of the United States. Other members of the staff helped me revise it, most notably Melinda Wenner-Bradley and George Schaefer.

A Basic Outline of Liberal Quaker Theology and Tradition

There are other branches of Quakerism that embrace different strands of theology and tradition. “Liberal” Quaker theology and tradition refer to strands embraced generally by branches of Quakerism represented in the United States and Canada that are associated with the Friends General Conference and with Britain Yearly Meeting in the United Kingdom.

The Theology

1. Everybody's got something inside – what some might call their center, or that of God within, or the inner light – that knows what's right and what makes a good life. 

2. It takes hard work, discipline really, to stay in touch with your center. 

3. Everybody's different so everybody's discipline, aka spiritual practice, takes different forms. Maybe it's prayer or meditation. Maybe it's exercise. It can be whatever, as long as it cultivates continual connection with the center. 

4. Everybody needs support from others who they love to maintain their spiritual practice, and thus their connection to their center, and thus in touch with what is right and what makes a good life. Practicing in the context of relationship and community is essential to the Quaker Way.

5. The longer we practice individually and together, the more profound our insights will be into what is right, and the more meaningful life becomes. 

6. Eventually, the insights will move us to action; what some call witness, ministry, and/or testimony. 

7. Overtime, we develop a tradition containing basically a set of tips about what others have learned works and doesn't work in doing numbers 1 through 6. But this tradition, this faith and practice, is secondary and not nearly the point. 

8. Everybody should avoid becoming attached to the tradition, it's just a helpful guide, not a definitive direction.

The Tradition

Communal Spiritual Practice

Communal spiritual practice is a key aspect of Quaker spiritual formation. Examples of communal spiritual practices are: worship, clearness committees, worship sharing, addressing our business together in worship, collective movement and exercise like yoga or tai chi, reading tarot together, reading sacred texts like the Bible together, workshops, Godly Play and Faith & Play stories, children’s meeting, group meditation, and spiritual support and accountability groups. We need spaces for communal spiritual practice to teach one another and organically find the right spiritual teacher(s) for each of us. Our tradition tells us that different spiritual teachers emerge at different times in life for different people, and this should be honored. Quakers call these teachers “ministers” and “elders” and there should be many of them in any community. It is why we don’t usually have just one pastor, priest or minister to lead our community in our spiritual formation. Communal spiritual practice also reinforces individual spiritual practice by creating space in which it can take place with others. It is easier to remain motivated in a discipline knowing others are doing the same with you now and into the future.

Individual Spiritual Practice

Quakers have found that individual spiritual practice helps to maintain a connection to the divine center of our beings. Prayer is the traditional type of individual spiritual practice. Of late, many other practices have emerged, from meditation to exercise. Establishing a regular practice that involves focusing the mind and settling into one’s center is fundamental to the Quaker tradition. It is an expression of the foundational notion that there is that of God in everyone and that everyone has access to God’s love and wisdom through this “godliness or goodness” within them.

Relationship Work and Pastoral Care

Pastoral care is relationship work. It is emotional labor, spiritual attention & care, facilitating effective communication in conflict, helping individuals in community find common ground, and reminding each other of our tenderness and affection for one another. Through relationship work, we are able to return again and again to the joy of being together in community. In modern times, other terms like mutual accountability, conflict transformation, and truth and reconciliation have emerged in the landscape of relationship work. We need relationship work to maintain the connection and sense of love required for individual and communal spiritual practice to achieve what it is meant to do. We also need to ensure everyone takes responsibility for this work, not just people with a particular gender identity or committee assignment. In the past, relationship work was a task reserved largely for women and in the spheres of "meetings for suffering" or care for children and their religious education. Now, relationship work and pastoral care are the responsibility of elders in the community, who provide this ministry as curators of our tradition. Elders also pass our tradition on to successor generations, who then weave the condition of their own time into the fabric of tradition.

Worship

Worship is integral to Quaker traditions. Worship brings together individual spiritual practice, communal spiritual practice, and relationship work. In overlapping ways, we worship to reinforce our individual connection to the divine and our spiritual practices that support this. Our worship is a form of communal spiritual practice, seeking teachers and inspiration. We worship to find solidarity and unity. Sometimes in the context of Quaker worship, we experience a “gathered meeting” or a “covered meeting.” These are phrases used to describe a profound sense of connection to others gathered that transcends our own subjectivity and helps us to achieve a shared sense of identity and belonging. In these moments, the solidarity or unity we experience helps remind us of the tenderness and affection we feel for one another and the presence of Spirit/God binding us as one. In this vulnerability, we are capable of great transformation and spiritual growth. Achieving this requires the discipline of listening to and joining with others in the context of the whole. Therefore, in the liberal tradition, no one person is permanently in charge of the worship experience. There is no pastor, priest, or minister (hired or volunteer) to lead the entire worship experience. This is a responsibility that is shared by many in the community.

Faith and Practice, and yearly meetings

Quakers traditionally have collected commonly held beliefs, practices, and other agreed upon ways of being with each other in a book of discipline called the Faith and Practice book. Per our decentralized nature, there are several Faith and Practice books, written by different regional associations of Quakers. Most regional associations are called yearly meetings, and the Friends General Conference is an umbrella organization for all of the liberal yearly meetings in the United States and Canada.

Discernment, Witness, Ministry and Testimony

Within a posture of openness, tenderness, and vulnerability, insights emerge that tend to be transformative. Quakers employ discernment, which is the name for a general process whereby we sift through different spiritual advice and teachings, responding to how we are being moved in the midst of transformational spiritual experiences. Usually discernment is about accessing inner knowledge, guided by others and our own engagement with the divine and often in the context of worship. Overtime, our beliefs and practices change in what Quakers call, “continuing revelation.” Spiritual truth and interpretation of spiritual texts may be revealed in new ways; they are not static. Especially within the liberal tradition, Quaker discernment has yielded an overarching approach to living in the world while not being of the world. It has given Quakers a sense of wanting to see justice, fairness, equity, and peace for all in society, often acting against the prevailing cultural norms to achieve these aims. We call these acts “witness.” The teachings that undergird these acts are often called testimonies or ministry. They amount to a series of beliefs or values, but they have profound and dynamic spiritual underpinnings that are informed by the whole of the tradition. It would be reductionist merely to refer to them as values or beliefs. However, they are sometimes called “Quaker values” especially in more inter-faith contexts, as in Friends Schools, Quaker Colleges, or other organizations that were founded by Quakers but are no longer wholly constituted by Quakers. It is with some trepidation that I mention “the SPICES” here, as this is the most egregious version of the said reductionism. But since the SPICES are still mentioned frequently in the larger Quaker discourse, I should mention them, too. SPICES stand for particular testimonies or ministry that have prevailed over the years: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equity/equality, and stewardship/sustainability.

Resilience, Resistance & Movement

Quakers have existed at times under acute political pressure from the broader society. Quakers have been pivotal participants in movements for social change. Liberal Quakers, especially, have achieved insights through spiritual practice that reveal the unitary nature of all things including humanity, which lead us to act accordingly. We have ancestral resources upon which we sometimes draw to persist with resilience. We have other resources to draw on to resist, and still others to help move society toward ever greater justice, fairness, and peace.

However, Quakers were founded by white British people in the 1660's, and from its beginnings has maintained roots within the white racist heteropatriarchal capitalist and colonial systems the undergird our society(ies). Quaker organizations have helped perpetuate harm and genocide against indigenous people, formerly enslaved people, Queer people, and many others at the same time as they have supported movements such as abolitionism, civil rights, the Black Panthers, Queer liberation movements and The Movement for Black Lives. Liberal Quakers hold this "both/and" and are at various stages of actively committing or re-committing to intersectional anti-racism.

Ministers, Elders and the People We Pay (Staff)

Historically, a minister has meant various things for Quakers. As described above, today ministers are people who feel a special, spiritual calling to teach the community about something or bring some other gift to light. Usually, ministers are recognized as such by their Quaker community. In the community, a group of people with a concern for being in close relationship with this ministry, what Friends describe as eldership, meet with the minister regularly in spiritual support groups and/or faithfulness groups to ensure that their ministry has what it needs to thrive and continues to be a grounded and relevant spiritual calling. Those with a call to the role of eldership, whom we call elders, too, have a long, fraught

history. Today “elder” is the general term used to describe those in the meeting, as mentioned, who support relationship work and pastoral care and who help curate the tradition. Also, increasingly, liberal Quaker communities have had the practice of hiring people (often called staff) to help carry out the daily logistical needs of the community as well as to support the relationship work in community. As society changes, and we become ever more under the weight of equity and inclusion, it has become increasingly important to provide adequate compensation to those we ask to take on large tasks for the community, however this may manifest, when it is needed. This is consistent with previous iterations of the Quaker tradition, as in “released” ministry, though it takes a different form in the post-post-modern age.

Quaker community is a covenant community, which means that becoming part of it commits one to engage in mutual spiritual accountability. We are responsible for nurturing, supporting and empowering ministry as it arises in ourselves and in others.

Authority and Decision Making

Liberal Quakers embrace structures of hierarchy that use forms of power that are co-creative in their search do discern the authority of the group. We call this power-with (rather than power-over). For example, we do not designate one type of spiritual teacher—what other traditions call priests, rabbis, ministers, etc. We have many types of and sources for spiritual teachings. Therefore, power and authority can be very diffuse in Quaker community. Yet, we have come to see that power requires explicit delimitation and formalization through discernment if it is to operate equitably within our communities.

Quakers over the years have developed a complex set of norms and practices surrounding how we make decisions and designate authority and responsibility in our community. Many of these norms and practices need renewal and revision in the face of critiques regarding diversity, equity and inclusion in our communities (or lack thereof). We usually refer to this set of practices and norms as Friends Decision Making Process or discerning a, “Sense of the Meeting,” -- a process that seeks to understand how the group is being led on an action. Note, specifically, that there is no such thing as, “Quaker Process,” as a fixed and static idea. While Quaker Process has become a term of art for some, it indicates different things at different times to different groups of Quakers. It is wiser to speak about a specific Quaker tradition, Faith and Practice, or decision-making process.

Within the liberal tradition, our theology is determined by the discernment we conduct as a whole community. In the traditional jargon, this is called “corporate” discernment. It has been typically envisaged to refer to moments wherein we are all sitting in a room at a specific time and physical place waiting for God to speak through the collective. In the post-modern age corporate discernment could also be taken to mean a “through line” of truth or several truths emerging in the context of discourse taking place in many physical and virtual contexts over a period of time. The period of time could refer to several days during a yearly meeting’s annual sessions, yet it could also refer to a series of years when the whole community is wrestling with a specific set of concerns in many different ways and venues. Regardless, our corporate discernment relies upon our tradition because this is the contribution to our corporate discernment that we have received from those who came before us. In other words, our ancestors may participate in our corporate discernment through our tradition.