Our ways are not the World’s ways, and we should have care to keep to our traditions.

The first part of that is a common enough saying among a lot of Christian groups, nonconformists more than others. The second is my own summary of what a lot of people seem to mean when they say it, or anything like it, in certain situations. And funnily enough, I cannot help but agree with it. It’s not simple, though. Consider…

Our ways are not the World’s ways, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for us to learn “out there”. We should have care to keep to our traditions and not let our inevitable interactions with the wider world contaminate the way we do things, as Quakers, that we not not drag worldly patterns in that disrupt Quaker patterns. Yet we have obligations to the wider world where we interact with it, and legal obligations that apply to us as much as others, and we cannot put our hands up and say “our ways are not the World’s ways” and expect it to mean we are let off. Health and safety, safeguarding, employers’ obligations, equality law – we have to live with these things, and really, they exist for good reasons and we shouldn’t push back against them. Where there’s a reason that a more Quakerly way of doing them will work better, more fittingly for us, then we should figure out what that Quaker way is. We cannot just say “well, we’ll do it our Quaker way” and then not do it at all.

Our ways are not the World’s ways, but our ways are not fixed and unchanging. I would bet that any Yearly Meeting that has existed for more than 20 years has had significant changes in its practices and structures over its life – and those that have existed anywhere near as long as Britain Yearly Meeting (formerly London Yearly Meeting) will be unrecognisable in detail, if not in principle. In large things and small things we have changed with conditions, with changes within and without our Religious Society.

Our ways are not the World’s ways, but many of us know that activities in the World can sometimes benefit from lessons we learn from Quaker ways. Do we really have such collective hubris that we think nothing can ever apply similarly in the other direction?

Our ways are not the World’s ways, but they are not perfect. They are even further from perfect when we think we have the final answer in how to do things – especially when we actually don’t know how to approach a situation at all. “We should do this in a Quaker way”, I have heard, but not always when anyone has the faintest idea what a Quaker way of doing it would look like.

Our ways are not the World’s ways, but we can be creative. We can learn, we can adapt and adopt. When confronted with new situations we can’t just fit the things we already do into them by jamming and squeezing and pushing. Best that we work out properly, with both reason and love, and with any luck the guidance of the Spirit, the new Quaker method to apply to the new problem. And best that we do that before we need to put them into practice, wherever possible.

Our ways are not the World’s ways, but we don’t always know what they are.

Written June 2019