"...The Authority of Our Meetings is in the Power of God"

Authority And Power

George Fox’s message was as simple as it was radical. When all outward authorities had proven untrustworthy, and his hopes in all men were gone, he heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,” and his heart leapt up in recognition of this truth. [Nickalls, John L., ed., The Journal of George Fox (London: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 11.]  We can know God directly, by experience, “experimentally,” because, as the Gospel of John tells us, the Light is placed in us as a birthright, a capacity and potentiality. In his years of wandering before receiving this pentecostal “opening,” Fox had a series of what might he called preparatory openings. First, reflecting on claims that people make to be believers, he had it opened to him that no one is truly a believer who has not passed from death to life. Belief is not a matter of opinions held but of a life so utterly transformed that it is like dying and being reborn.

Second, he perceived that something more and other than university training was needed to “qualify” one as a minister of Christ. Third, he was shown that God does not dwell in buildings made with hands, but that the church is the people of God. These “openings,” so concerned with what believers, ministers and the church are not, serve primarily to subvert traditional notions of authority. They helped shape subsequent Quaker polity and Quaker attitudes toward the authority of their leaders and how they expect ministry to be expressed.

After Fox learned that Christ could speak to his condition, he endured even greater temptations and inward sufferings:

… the Lord showed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without were within, in the hearts and minds of wicked people . … And I cried to the Lord, saying, ‘Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?’ And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. [Fox, Journal, 19.]

 To speak to all conditions, one must know all those conditions inwardly, as one’s own temptations and desires. This is another kind of “experimental knowledge,” important both for itself, as well as for preparing Fox to understand the limitations of personal experience as an authority.

In 1652, in a debate between Fox and number of priests at Swarthmoor Hall,

… one of them burst out into a passion and said he could speak his experiences as well as I; but I told him experience was one thing but to go with a message and a word from the Lord as the prophets had and did, and as I had done to them, this was another thing. [Fox, Journal, 23.]

Direct experience is not enough; it must be tested for its truth-bearing value and, if found trustworthy, lived. Only then is experience authoritative. “They that could speak some experiences of Christ and God, but lived not in the life, these were they that led the world after them, who got the form of godliness, but denied the power….”[Fox, Journal, 30.]  Not even Scripture, in itself has authority. Before it can speak to us, we must learn how to read it “in that Light and Spirit which was before Scripture was given forth, and which led the holy men of God to give them forth. . . .”[Fox, Journal, 33.]

For Fox, the Light is the dominant image to describe how God works in us, but he frequently uses other images, among them the Seed, the Power, the Life, Christ Within, that of God in everyone, the Inward Teacher. John Punshon comments: “Perhaps the most important feature of the light metaphor is that light is the medium of discernment. The God of light is not a God who tells, but a God who shows.” [Punshon, John, Testimony and Tradition, Swarthmore Lecture 1990 (London: Friends Home Service Committee, 1990), 69.] Christ Jesus, who spoke to Fox’s condition, can speak to the condition of every person; Fox’s ministry, therefore, is to testify that “Christ has come to teach His people Himself” In turning his hearers to their Inward Teacher he will turn them away from the world’s religions “…that they might know the pure religion, and might visit the fatherless, the widows and the strangers, and keep themselves from the spots of the world.” [Fox, Journal, 35. Fox regularly cites the General Epistle of James, 1:27, to define pure religion.]

Answering That of God in Everyone

“There is that of God in everyone” is probably the phrase most beloved of twentieth-century liberal Quakers for encapsulating what they understand to be the basic Quaker teaching. [Jones, T. Canby, ed., The Power of the Lord Is Over All: The pastoral Letters of George Fox (Richmond: Friends United Press, 1989). In his preface, vi, Jones notes that the phrase “occurs five times in the whole of the Nickalls edition of Fox’s Journal. According to Lewis Benson it occurs only one hundred three additional times in the rest of Fox’s published writings. By contrast ‘Light’ or ‘Light of Christ’ occurs one hundred-twenty-four times in the Nickalls Journal…. ‘The Power of the Lord’ is . . . George Fox’s most frequently used phrase in the Journal.”] For that reason, as well as for the richness of the phrase itself, it deserves to be examined in its original context. The well-known Epistle of 1656 to Friends in the Ministry, in which Fox exhorts Friends to be patterns and examples, in order to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone . . .” begins thus:

In the power of life and wisdom, and dread of the Lord God of life, and heaven, and earth, dwell, that in the wisdom of God over all ye may be preserved, and be a terror to all the adversaries of God, and a dread, answering that of God in them, spreading the Truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, the covenant of light and peace with God. [Fox, Journal, 263.]

Answering that of God does not express the gentle, warm assertion that, way down deep, people are all basically good, a view that is so congenial to many modern liberal Quakers. Such a reading would be inconceivable to Fox and his Quaker contemporaries, who understood themselves to be fighting the Lamb’s War against God’s adversaries. [Barbour, Hugh, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 33-71. See also Barbour and Frost, The Quakers, 33.] An Epistle of 1659 suggests something of the nature of the Lamb’s War:

All Friends, be obedient to the Power of God . . . for you have authority from the Power of God, which comprehends all the powers of darkness, to answer the Witness of God in everyone and to trample upon the power of darkness and its authority…. [Jones, The Power of the Lord is Over All, 141 (Epistle 185, 1659).]

Answering that of God in God’s adversaries meant being a terror and dread to them, reaching “to the principle of God in [them] which [they have] transgressed,” and addressing the witness within them which would confound them, show them their internal conflicts and throw them into confusion. In this same Epistle, Fox speaks of ministering to “the spirit that is transgressed and in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one; whereby with the same spirit people must be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits, and do service to Him and have unity with Him, with the Scriptures and one with another.” Christ is within us as a suffering captive until we know our condition and hear the witness in us addressed or “answered.”

Organizing and Institutionalizing

Winifred M. White calls organization “perhaps just another name for effective fellowship.” [White, Winifred M., Six Weeks Meeting 1671-1971: Three Hundred Years of Quaker Responsibility (London: Religious Society of Friends,1971), 2.] It is difficult to hold a fellowship together under the pressures of prolonged legally sanctioned persecution — the Conventicle Acts, oath requirements, judgments of praemunire which deprived people of all their property — and resulted in physical beatings, breaking up of meetings, wholesale arrests and long imprisonments. This persecution deprived the movement of its leaders for long stretches of time and even resulted in deaths of some leaders. Under those conditions, the Quaker fellowship had to address two kinds of governance problems, which, under headings from James 1:27, we might broadly outline as: 1) visiting the widows and orphans in their affliction, 2) keeping from the spots of the world.

The first injunction included caring for the families of prisoners and captives, apprenticing young people, relieving the poor, supporting ministers and their families, publishing the truth, lobbying parliament and other leaders, and maintaining and protecting property owned by the Society. To protect families before Quaker marriages were legally recognized, careful procedures had to be devised to regulate and document marriages, inheritances and wills under the care of the meeting. Money had to be raised for these purposes, and needs and “sufferings” had to be accurately recorded and publicized. All these activities, as well as encouraging and exhorting one another through epistles and visits, setting up simple arrangements for calling people together for worship and maintenance of the “joint and visible fellowship” which Robert Barclay praises so highly in his Apology [Freiday, Dean, ed., Barclays Apology in Modern English (Philadelphia: Friends Book Store, 1967), Proposition 11, Worship, 243.], are all aspects of witnessing: sufferings for and testimonies to the Truth. From the late 1640’s till perhaps the mid-1660’s, these had to be the first priorities of the Quaker movement, and it is of them that Arnold Lloyd speaks when he says “the evolution of Quaker church government can best be understood in terms of the communication of advice and help in solving practical problems.” [Lloyd, Arnold, Quaker Social History: 1669-1738 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1950), 1.] 

The second set of issues, “keeping from the spots of the world,” concerns keeping the spiritual discipline of the fellowship. Corporate responsibility arose from the need of local groups of Friends to correct “ranters” and “disorderly walkers,” individuals whose immoral behavior brought scandal to the fellowship. It signifies much that the early Society of Friends had procedures for “disowning” or repudiating the inappropriate behavior of those who claimed to be Quakers well before it had formal canons of membership. The great crises of “disorderly walking” began with James Naylor in 1656 and continued with the schism of John Perrot, 1661-1665.

In 1656, Naylor, the most charismatic early Quaker leader after Fox, “ran out into imaginations,” and rode into Bristol reenacting Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, as his followers threw garments before him and chanted “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Israel.” For his actions, Naylor was tried before the Puritan House of Commons, convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to be whipped, pilloried and branded, to have a hole bored through his tongue with a red-hot instrument, and to be imprisoned. The turmoil Naylor and his followers caused, including both the increase in persecution and the internal divisions over how to discern true leadings from God, brought “… a vivid sense of the vulnerability of the Quaker community to individual excess” and threatened to destroy the whole Quaker movement. [Sheeran, Michael J., Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Religious Society of Friends (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, 1983), 10.]

Immediately after the Naylor incident, Fox traveled extensively, trying to draw Quakers back together, beginning the system of monthly meetings which would not be fully realized for at least another decade, and, through quarterly meetings, general meetings and later yearly meetings, “initiating a regular, if minimal, superstructure above the level of the local units.” [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, p.13.] Michael J. Sheeran places the first Quaker meetings for business as early as 1649-1652, taking his evidence from a 1689 letter of George Fox:

The first Monthly Meeting was on this wise — though we did meet concerning the poor, and to see that all walked according to the Truth, before we were called Quakers…. [i.e., sometime after 1648] In 1653, in Cumberland many of the Elders came to me at Swarthmore in Lancashire, and desired that they might have a Monthly Meeting, to look after the poor, and to see that all walked according to Truth, &c.; and they had a meeting settled there for the same purpose. [Barclay, Abram R., ed., Letters, &c., of Early Friends… (London: Harvey and Darton, 1841), 312.]

When Fox first met the Seeker groups in Westmoreland and East and West Riding in 1652, they were already meeting at regular intervals to attend to the same kinds of business. In 1653, a general epistle from William Dewsbury urged that meetings should choose as overseers of the fellowship “one or two Friends who are most grown in the power and life, in the pure discerning of the Truth.” An epistle sent out in Fox’s name offered recommendations for keeping good order in business meetings. Sheeran emphasizes that these were suggestions offered “to groups that were autonomous and self-governing.” [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 10. Sheeran’s documentation is important here. He cites Abram R. Barclay, Letters of Early Friends, 311, for Fox’s letter, and notes, “The term ‘monthly meeting’. . . may be loose usage here as the tradition of meeting monthly for business sessions may not have emerged in many districts before Fox’s 1654 campaign.” ]

Needs for National Organization

Two events in 1660-1661 point up the lack of structures through which the developing national fellowship could authoritatively represent and speak for itself. With the Restoration of 1660, followed by the Fifth Monarchy Uprising against the King in January, 1661, Quakers were once more brutally suppressed and thousands were imprisoned. They needed to distinguish themselves sharply from the Fifth Monarchy Men. That crisis produced the document, still cited as the foundational expression of the Quaker Peace Testimony, written by twelve prominent Friends “in behalf of the whole body of the Elect People of God who are called Quakers.” As Sheeran points out, these twelve Friends “took it upon themselves to declare that pacifism was a central Quaker tenet.” There was no way that they could legitimately or authoritatively speak for all those local, autonomous communities, since the communities had never delegated authority to a central body, nor was there any mechanism by which the local meetings could have decided whether to do so.

Their action opened the door for Friends to metamorphose from a sect of locally sovereign communities to a church with central polity. This transition involved a substitution of central for local divine guidance. [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 14-15.]

The problems presented by John Perrot had less to do with his personal idiosyncrasies and extravagances — which were many — than with his governing principle that every individual Friend should act according to his or her own leadings, “… even if one’s leadings are exactly the opposite of the agreement of Friends.” Until the Naylor crisis, it had been accepted that the infallible Spirit could be infallibly understood by individuals, but in the light of his catastrophic failure to discern his true leading, the doctrine could not remain unchallenged. How the community and the individual were to discern the Spirit together was still in process of being worked out theologically and practically, and Perrot was asserting radical individualism. “The Lord in me [is] more worthy of audience and obedience than the voyce of any messenger to me….”

The test case has more significance than it would first appear, for Perrot had received the leading, “by express commandment of the Lord God of heaven,” that he should not remove his hat when anyone prayed aloud in meeting for worship. He thus repeated the behavior of both James Naylor and his supporters, who kept their hats on when Fox prayed in meeting, and also of the Ranters, who kept their hats on during prayer as a mark of their freedom. [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 16-17.]

Perrot also argued that meetings for worship should occur only when members of the community felt moved to worship together, rather than at regularly-scheduled times. One effect of this would be that Friends could lessen or avoid the “sufferings for righteousness’ sake” which were part of their testimony to the world. His position also corresponded to the Ranter doctrine that inward renewal freed one from needing to live an outwardly moral life. Perrot’s movement attracted and kept many adherents, both because his theology gave personal leadings more authority than group leadings and because it allowed external conformity with governmental religious decrees. [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 17-19.]

Discerning the Spirit

The 1661 statement asserting the Quaker Peace Testimony raises the question who, if anyone, may speak authoritatively for the whole Quaker fellowship. John Perrot’s schism raises the question how, when the group is divided or an individual disagrees with the group, the true voice of the Spirit is to be discerned. Together they present the interwoven issues of how to discern when the Spirit has spoken, for the Spirit is the ultimate authority. In 1666, writing for eleven prominent elders and ministers, Richard Farnsworth asserted a clear doctrine to answer Perrot:

if any differences arise in the church…. the church, with the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, have power, without the assent of such at dissent from their doctrines and practices, to hear and determine the same…. [italics added]

Individual leadings must be subject to the group’s shared insight, and where there is disagreement over leadings, those who are most seasoned and “ancient” in the faith, the elders of the fellowship, will speak with the fullest authority. As with the declaration of the Peace Testimony, Sheeran points out, this epistle, which becomes authoritative, does not emerge from any delegated authority to speak for the Society. [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 20.]

Tests of Leadings

Hugh Barbour describes four major tests which Friends came to apply to leadings: moral purity, patience, the self-consistency of the Spirit, and bringing people into unity. Moral purity would be demonstrated by “not fleeing the cross,” obeying calls which were difficult, humiliating, contrary to self-will and sent simply as tests of obedience. [Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, 119-120.] In No Cross, No Crown, William Penn writes, “There is a lawful self and unlawful self, and both must be denied… There is no room for instruction where lawful self is lord and not servant.” [Brinton, Anna Cox, ed., “William Penn’s No Cross No Crown,” in Quaker Classics in Brief (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1978), 9-10.] Patience is a sound test of a leading because “self-will is impatient of tests.” The test of self-consistency, which Barclay addresses so fully (see below), not only tests a leading against scriptural and historical analogues but also examines the consistency with which an individual keeps faith with his or her leadings. The test of unity is also called the test of the fruits of the Spirit, and starts from the premise that a sound leading to action will enrich the spiritual life of the whole worshiping community. Such a leading increases concord and has the possibility of increasing “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23) The four tests were applied together, not in any mechanical fashion, but as a means for a community to discern the dynamic of a particular individual or group leading. [Discussions of tests of leading are to be found in Beyond Majority Rule, pp. 24-30, where Sheeran identifies the further tests of scripture, silence, and unadorned speech, and in Paul A. Lacey, Leading and Being Led, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 264 (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1985).]

Gospel Order

In 1667, Fox’s Journal tells us,

… I was moved of the Lord God to set up and establish five Monthly Meetings of men and women in the city of London, besides the Women’s Meeting and the Quarterly Meeting, to admonish and exhort, such as walked disorderly or carelessly, and not according to Truth, and to take care of God’s glory.

He is further led to establish such meetings “in all the nation, and write to other nations, where I came not, to do the same.” [Fox, Journal, 511.] Here he returns to and completes work which had been underway for more than a decade, the establishment of both the monthly meeting and quarterly and yearly meeting structures according to a comprehensive vision of what he calls “Gospel Order.” Lewis Benson defines Gospel Order as

the order that God gives his people when they gather to experience the living presence of Christ in their midst and to be governed and ordered by him. George Fox did not invent gospel order any more than he invented the gospel. [Benson, Lewis, “The People of God and Gospel Order” in Charles F. Thomas, ed., The Church in Quaker Thought and Practice (Philadelphia and Plainfield: Friends World Committee, Section of the Americas, 1979), 20]

Sheeran calls Fox’s work “a two-fold institutionalization of charisma.” First, there is “substituting communal charismatic decision for individual charismatic decision,” by giving ultimate authority to the Spirit’s voice as discerned in the worshiping community. Second, there is the establishment of quarterly and yearly meetings whose “very regularity and efficiency soon raised them to a predominant position.” [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 21.] Richard T. Vann comments that this church organization “… for the first time gave some Quakers institutional power over others. The introduction of such power was bound to change the character of Quakerism.” [Vann, Richard T., The Social Development of English Quakerism 1655-1755 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 102.]

As Sandra L. Cronk understands Fox’s use of the term, Gospel Order describes a covenantal relationship with God, a new order with “personal, communal (ecclesiastical), societal and even cosmic dimensions.” [Cronk, Sandra L., Gospel Order: A Quaker Understanding of Faithful Church Community, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 297 (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1991), 4-5.] It governs “… the inward life of worship and discernment, the interior functioning of the church-community (and the Quaker home which, in some ways, is seen as a smaller version of the meeting community), and the social testimonies of Friends.” [Cronk, Gospel Order, 9-11.] Faithful living, the practice of mutual accountability and careful discernment in the corporate life of the meeting, and prophetic witness to the larger society are parts of one intertwined whole.

… Keep your Meetings solid and sober. Let the authority of your Men’s and Women’s Meetings be in the Power of God. For every heir of the Power has right to that authority and in it keep the King of Kings’ and Lord of Lords’ Peace in his Church…. And the least member in the Church has an office and is serviceable. And every member has need one of another. [Jones, The Power of the Lord Is Over All, Epistle 264 (1669), 254-255.]

It is striking how often, in this early period, crises threatening the death of the Quaker movement produce not merely defensive reactions but bold new affirmations and initiatives grounded in the Spirit. Fox’s great Epistle of 1656, exhorting Friends to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one,” comes immediately after the Naylor incident and a prolonged and difficult imprisonment for Fox. The Declaration of the Peace Testimony in 1661 emerges from the great danger of the Fifth Monarchy Uprising. Out of the turmoil of division and schism comes not merely an assertion of greater control but the announcement of a new beginning. In setting up all monthly meetings as separate men’s and women’s meetings, Fox goes far beyond consolidating a movement to recover from setbacks, or establishing conservative measures for social control; instead, he pushes the Society to a new conception of its calling.

Particularly significant is his argument for the authority of women in the church. As he conceives it, Gospel Order recovers the patterns before the Fall:

For man and woman were helps-meet in the image of God, in the Righteousness and Holiness, in the Dominion before they fell…. But in the restoration of Christ, into the image of God, and his Righteousness and Holiness again, in that they are helps-meet, man and woman, as they were in before the Fall. [Jones, The Power of the Lord Is Over All, Epistle 291,(1672) 286.]

Women were disciples, elders, teachers, exhorters, expounders or instructors, and prophetesses in the primitive church:

Deborah was a judge. Miriam and Huldah were prophetesses… Mary Magdalen and the other Mary, were the first preachers of Christ’s resurrection to the Disciples…. Daughters shall prophesy as well as sons. [Jones, The Power of the Lord Is Over All, 286.]

This new conception of Gospel Order, particularly regarding the authority of the women’s meetings, created yet another schism, after 1673, led by two of the Valiant Sixty, John Wilkinson and John Story, who called for a return to individual freedom and local autonomy. In 1676, ministers in their Yearly Meeting affirmed that “the Power of God is the authority of the men’s and women’s meetings and of all the other meetings.” Individual Friends’ leadings, when they contradicted the decision of the meeting, were not to be followed. [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 31.]

The Meeting for Business

Recalling in 1662 the beginnings of the Men’s Meeting in London years earlier, Edward Burrough provides the locus classicus for a description of the Quaker decision-making method:

… Being orderly come together, not to spend time with needless, unnecessary and fruitless discourses; but to proceed in the wisdom of God, in such things as may upon occasion be moved amongst you,… to hear and consider, and if possible to determine the same injustice and truth,– not in the way of the world,… by hot contests, by seeking to outspeak and over-reach one another in discourse,… not deciding affairs by the greater vote, or the number of men,… [but] in the wisdom, love and fellowship of God, in gravity, patience, meekness, in unity and accord, submitting one to another in lowliness of heart, and in the Holy Spirit of truth and righteousness, all things to be carried on…. [a]nd to determine of things by a general mutual accord, in assenting together as one man in the spirit of truth and equity, and by the authority thereof…. [Letters &c. of Early Friends, 304-305]

Since the procedures recommended here appear to have a paradisal innocence which would unfit them for settling deep divisions within a meeting, it is important to note the three strong safeguards Burrough proposes for maintaining the meeting’s integrity. First, there is a test of membership:

… the meeting do consist of just and righteous men, all believing in the Truth, and walking in the same, — men of sound principles and judgment in the truth of Christ…. The meeting, is not limited to a number of persons, but freedom for all Friends in Truth (none excepted) as they are moved to come for the service of Truth….

But Burrough specifies that if anyone “out of the Truth and… contrary to the faith of Christ professed and practiced by Friends, come to the meeting, such are not members thereof but are excluded from having their advice and judgment taken in matters of Truth….” (italics added) From the earliest days, criteria for participation in business meetings were more stringent than for attending meeting for worship. [Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism, 105.]

Second, if there should be difficulty in arriving at unity in a decision, “then on such occasions the judgment [should] be suspended.” This is familiar modern practice, but the reason Burrough suggests for delaying a decision is noteworthy:

… till more Friends that are anciently grown in the Truth have the understanding of the matter…. For the proper work and service of the meeting is, for the well ordering of the affairs of the Truth in outward things, among the body of Friends; and that a general concord and assent may be among the ancients of them, for the government of the whole…. (italics added) [Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism, 305-306.]

In short, Burroughs sets this truly radical procedure for decision-making by seeking unity in what is later called “the sense of the meeting” in a context which carefully limits those who may participate (despite his “none excluded”) and which accords greater “weight” to the judgment of those most senior in experience, the “ancients” or elders. Finally, he specifies that the procedure prescribed in Matthew 18 be used when two individual Friends fall into strife, according to which the meeting intervenes only in careful steps, putting the burden on those at issue to work things out together with the help of persons appointed by the meeting. All these provisions anticipate the more formal structures which become the norm, and which Robert Barclay provides systematic theological argument to support in The Anarchy of the Ranters in 1667, where Barbour and Roberts credit him with presenting

… a Spirit-led consensus based upon the model given in the thirteenth chapter of Acts [which]…. [I]n the end… enhances the authority of the Friends group over any individual; but within the group it gave Fox and other pioneer Quaker leaders institutional rather than charismatic authority.” (italics added) [Barbour, Hugh and Roberts, Arthur O., ed., Early Quaker Writings 1650-1700 (Grand Rapids: William B.Eerdmans, Publishers, 1973), 463-464.]

The Authority of the Believing Fellowship

Barclay frames the problem clearly:

Some are so great pretenders to inward motions and revelations of the Spirit, that there are no extravagencies so wild which they will not cloak with it, and so much are they for everyone’s following their own mind, as can admit of no Christian fellowship and community, nor of that good order and discipline, which the Church of Christ never has [been] nor can be without. [Barbour and Roberts. Early Quaker Writings, 517.]

For Barclay, the believing fellowship is always of primary importance, and therefore the witness of the living group, as well as the historical witness of its spiritual ancestors, the primitive Christian Church, has great authority. We are persuaded to believe the doctrines and principles we do on two counts: because they are the truths of God, which the Spirit of God in our hearts has constrained our understandings to obey; and because “… we are greatly confirmed, strengthened, and comforted in the joint testimony of our brethren the apostles and disciples of Christ…” who had revelations from the same Spirit and “… have left upon the record the same truths….” Here Barclay stresses one of the tests of leadings, the consistency of the Spirit of God, which the Declaration of 1661 had earlier enunciated: “… the spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it….” [Fox, Journal, 399.] One can be more confirmed that one has been led to an action by the Spirit if finding it “in itself good and useful,” one also finds that “upon the like occasions Christ commanded it, the apostles and primitive Christians practiced and recommended it.” [Barbour and Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 526.]

He appeals for authority to the “ancient apostles and primitive Christians,” who practiced order and government in the Church, “and this was not an encroachment upon Christian liberty, nor contradictory to their being inwardly led.” Since the Lord has once again gathered a people together, for His witness and for mutual support, by sending ministers to teach them, it follows that He will also provide means for care and oversight of the fellowship. “… The Lord… hath and doth raise up members of his body, to whom He gives a discerning, and power, and authority to instruct, reprove, yea, and command in some cases.” [Barbour and Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 525.] Barclay offers it as a kind of rule of thumb for discernment that God will most dependably use those He has previously used, to communicate His Will.

The Institution of Elders

For most of its history, Quaker church government, the steadiness of worship and the coherence of the spiritual life, the practice of the testimonies and the order of the business meeting, have depended heavily on the work of the meeting elders. Sandra L. Cronk describes the elder as “the caretaker of the living tradition which gave shape to Gospel Order.” Elders developed separate ministry to oversee the communal practice of spiritual formation. Elders “had oversight over worship, the spiritual life of the meeting, the daily life of the meeting-community, and the practice of accountability.” They rarely spoke in meeting for worship; instead, their gift was an “attitude of deep listening” which helped the meeting center. “The select meetings of ministers and elders (the forerunners of the contemporary committees of ministry and counsel or ministry and oversight) were schools of the Spirit.” [Cronk, Gospel Order, 32-33, 42] Of their modern counterparts Roger C. Wilson says

They are responsible for maintaining a system, in which in the living waiting of all the ‘leadings of the Spirit’ may find expression through an unconstrained range of human agents…. It is their business to see that the channels run free, to encourage the flow of living water from a wide variety of springs, not to be a pumping station themselves. [Wilson, Authority, Leadership, and Concern, 58.]

Barclay’s critics have blamed him for giving too much ex officio authority to the “ancients” and elders of the church, (though it is clear from Burrough’s letter that Barclay is working from already-established patterns) but Sheeran points out that Barclay, in fact, carefully insists that “infallibility was the property of the Spirit, not of men.” [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 32.] 

The only proper judge of controversies in the Church is the Spirit of God, and the power of deciding lies in it, as having the only unerring, infallible and certain judgment… , which infallibility is not necessarily annexed to any persons, person, or places whatsoever, by virtue of any office, place or station any one may have, or have had in the body of Christ. [Barbour and Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 539.]

In practice, however, as authority came to be associated with “weight,” those gatherings of Friends “which were blessed with the presence of the largest number of ministers and elders,” typically quarterly and yearly meetings, came to exercise greater decision-making authority. [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 32.] Douglas Gwyn faults the emphasis on “ancient Friends” as the beginning of “gerontocratic authority,” [Gwyn, Douglas, The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1995), 268.] and William Frost, comments that, although, when Barclay was writing, those through whom God would communicate his will, and who had gathered and nourished the true church, were George Fox, the “first publishers of truth,” William Penn, Thomas Ellwood and Isaac Penington. Later this authority would pass to “weighty Friends” the ministers and elders. “This practice opened up the possibility of the devout exercising oligarchical control, the beginnings of which had helped to precipitate the Wilkinson-Story schism in the 1670s and which came to prevail in the eighteenth century.”[Frost, William J., The Quaker Family in Colonial America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 51.] These are real dangers, which become more significant in themselves in the Quietist Period and in some of the long-term outcomes of the Hicksite-Orthodox Separations of 1827.

[A note on the word “ancient” seems in order. Winifred M. White tells us that the Two Weeks Meeting, the oldest meeting for discipline in London, was established around 1656, only four years after the traditional date of origin of the Religious Society of Friends, for “the ancientist men Friends.” In 1671, George Fox created the Six Weeks Meeting, to advise Friends in case of difficulty, composed of eighty-four “grave and ancient Friends” [forty-nine men and thirty-five women], “ancient in the faith rather than in years,” for their average age was only thirty-five. “Ancient” seems to be used in two of the senses listed in the Oxford English Dictionary: “of early origin or formation,” in which case it can indicate priority – George Fox the Younger is so-called because he came to Truth later than the other George Fox, though chronologically he was older. Or, in the other sense, “ancient” is a title of dignity, an “elder.” The term “ancient Friends” already had currency in 1662, when the movement was still young and no leader is very old in years. The full and oppressive power of gerontocracy comes in the eighteenth century.]

Leadership and System

Roger C. Wilson reminds us:

As William Charles Braithwaite points out, historically, the Society has lived through a variety of conditions. ‘The early Friends believed in leaders, but not a system: the Friends of the second period in leaders and in a system; the Friends of a later period were content to have a system without leaders; but the Separationists [Wilkinson and Story] believed neither in leaders nor a system’ [Wilson, Authority, Leadership and Concern, 57. Wilson quotes from Braithwaite’s Swarthmore Lecture, Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1909) 72.]

Wilson comments that the first condition can be defended as genius, but the third and fourth point the way to death. Thus far, this essay has focused on events of approximately the first twenty-five years of Quaker history, the formative period for Quaker faith and practice as they took shape under the leadings of the Spirit and in response to the pressures of context. What follows must be a much more cursory examination of the next two hundred years, in order to give a hearing to some differing views of contemporary Quakers on the sources of authority and power.

One way of seeing Quaker history on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the eighteenth century is as an attempt to keep order by ever more rigorous application of the system of governance. Compilations or “extracts” from minutes, epistles and Advices began to take on the form of Books of Discipline. In 1704 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved a compilation “relating to good Order and Discipline.” London Yearly Meeting approved its first Discipline in 1737. By the end of the century all Yearly Meetings in America had published their Disciplines. At present, though the rule-book power of these Disciplines has diminished or disappeared, they are still regularly revised and re-published under such titles as Faith and Practice, Church Government or The Book of Discipline. [Barbour and Roberts, The Quakers, 108.]

From the American Revolution through the Separations of the early nineteenth century, the Society saw itself in danger from the world, worldly success and worldliness. In the old quip, Quakers had come to do good and were doing very well indeed. The Peace Testimony came under assault in the American Revolution. The size of the Society shrank alarmingly as it purified itself by disowning members for the smallest of offenses. The testimonies on oaths and plain dress received added emphasis as “hedges” to protect Quakers’ status as “a peculiar people.” Quaker schools, which were more and more shaped to provide “select,” or exclusive, and “hedged” or “guarded education,” reflected the more general siege mentality. Doctrine, especially with regard to the authority of scripture and tradition, was more rigidly defined. “In 1801, London Yearly Meeting in essence had pronounced that Friends believed in the Trinity, in the inerrancy of Scripture, and in the importance of doctrinal orthodoxy.” [Barbour and Roberts, The Quakers, 170.]

Then, in the 1820s, came the most substantial split in Quaker history, the Separation between the Gurneyites and the Hicksites, with the further division between Gurneyites and Wilburites. Quakers were increasingly divided along theological lines, the Evangelicals finding new energy in their connection with theological and social movements in other Christian churches, the Hicksites being both more mystical, reform-minded and traditionalist. H. Larry Ingle says bluntly “… The question was one of authority.” [Ingle, H. Larry, Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 248.]

… The champions of the new order, the Orthodox, exercised power in the Society and savored the prestige it brought them…. At the most fundamental level the conflict was over who in the Society would decide the disputed questions: who would exercise power and moral authority…. In defending their time-hallowed principles these [Hicksite] traditional Quakers emphasized the value of local autonomy in the face of the centralizing tendencies of their evangelical opponents, stressed the mystical and inward rather than the formal and outward, and insisted on the right of individual interpretation of doctrine. [Ingle, H. Larry, Quakers in Conflict, xiv]

Quakers in the nineteenth century could subtract, but they had trouble adding; they knew how to divide but could not multiply. In Victorian England, G.M. Young says “The 4,000 Quaker families were a body, almost a race, apart.” [Young, G. M., Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 65.] Barbour and Frost tell us:

By 1900 the Philadelphia Orthodox numbered only 4,600, about one-third the size of the Hicksites, and were concentrated in urban areas where they resembled more an extended family or clan rather than a denomination. [Barbour and Roberts, The Quakers, 129.]

In the United States, Quakerism underwent another change with the development of the pastoral system of hired ministers to preach and conduct religious services, as in the free church tradition. Pastoral Friends now comprise a large majority of Quakers in the world, as a result of vigorous missionary work initiated by pastoral and evangelical Friends from the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, all branches of Quakerism seemed on the verge of extinction. Instead, the Society changed:

Ever so slowly, and most begrudgingly, Friends learned to live with, respect, and even love individuals within their Meetings with whom they had profound differences. Such tolerance of diversity brought the birth of modern Quakerism. [Barbour and Roberts, The Quakers, 182.]

Modern Liberal Quakerism

Modern liberal Quakerism, with a new openness to science, to education, to Higher Criticism of the Bible, to service to those in need, and to renewal based on the understanding of continuing revelation of the Spirit, has an important beginning at the Manchester (England) conference in 1895. Barbour and Frost identify four sources of Quaker liberalism:

the traditions of Friends, an American religious heritage originating in New England transcendentalism, European intellectual developments, and a creative response to the challenges presented by developments in science and history.

It begins in the academy, they argue, and is propagated by educators “who wanted to train their pupils in a way that would preserve faith without repudiating science.” Liberalism, like evangelicalism “originated outside the Society of Friends… and could be adopted because its tenets were compatible with existing Quaker emphases.” [Barbour and Roberts, The Quakers, 221-223.] And like evangelicalism, liberalism energized the Society even among those who, resisting it, clarified their own beliefs in the process. New institutions came into being, among them Woodbrooke College in England and Pendle Hill in the United States, associations of Yearly Meetings such as the Five Years Meeting (now Friends United Meeting) and Friends General Conference, the Evangelical Friends Alliance, the Friends World Committee for Consultation, and, initially in response to the First World War, the American Friends Service Committee and Friends Service Council.

John Punshon identifies four primary sources of authority — scripture, tradition, reason and continuing revelation — which “are kept in balance in a different fashion in different quarters, and there are serious differences of principle among Friends.” [Punshon, John, Patterns of Change: The Quaker Experience and The Challenge of the Contemporary World. The Johnson Lecture (Richmond: Friends United Meeting, 1987), 14.] Without doubt, in the twentieth century the greatest challenges to traditional understandings of authority and power among Quakers have come from the most liberal meetings — historically unprogrammed, largely Hicksite in origin, urban and college-town in location, largely composed of “convinced” Friends who have been drawn to membership by the social activist aspects of Quakerism and, perhaps, by their sense of alienation from other church traditions.

H. Larry Ingle says that the Hicksite traditionalists who opposed Orthodox Gurneyite Quakerism helped feed discontent with established authority, and in doing so

… ushered deep into the heart of Quakerism a modern principle that would gradually crowd out the traditional idea that in the bond of truth unity could be found. The Hicksite principle… put little stress on unity or authority. Instead it allowed freer range to individualism and encouraged each Friend to interpret faith and practice in the light of each one’s unique experiences.

Ingle quotes Lewis Benson, who says the Hicksites drew the kind of Quaker who sees the Society as “primarily a refuge for those who want freedom to follow their own individual bent in an atmosphere that is mildly religious and fiercely tolerant.” [Ingle, Quakers in Conflict, 248-249. Ingle cites Benson from Catholic Quakerism: A Vision for All Men (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1968), 2.] Speaking primarily of British Quakerism, where liberalism transformed the Gurneyite tradition, John Punshon describes a similar pattern of development. Many are attracted to the Society of Friends by our historic testimonies, in which they “find an echo in themselves.” A high percentage of them work in the caring or helping professions, as would also be true in the United States, and their education, Punshon argues, has been focused on the social sciences, where the emphasis would be on personality and its “characteristic activities, notably learning, and the process of social development.” [Punshon, Testimony and Tradition, 40-41.] He describes two consequences which follow from these circumstances: contemporary liberal Quakerism tends to become “…a needs-centred movement with an essentially harmonizing and reinforcing role in the lives of its members,” and like a supermarket where each Quaker may pick and choose what configurations Quakerism will take.

Thus the activist may have one shopping list, the contemplative another. Supermarket Quakerism can dispense with the idea that the testimonies are each part of a greater whole from which they derive their cogency…. [Punshon, Testimony and Tradition, 23, 42.]

Gospel Order or Quaker Process?

In John Punshon’s analysis, for more theologically conservative Friends and evangelical Friends, the presenting issues of authority would cluster around scripture and tradition, and would have to do with the power and authority of those who interpret them. Among theologically liberal Friends (who account for no more than one-quarter of the Religious Society of Friends worldwide), reason and continuing revelation are the greater sources of authority, though “continuing revelation” tends to be loosely defined to refer to the radical authority of passionate inner conviction. Often it appears to be unrelated to, or even ignorant of, Quaker tradition, its Christian roots, or scripture’s meaning in 350 years of Quaker witness.

Contemporary discussions of authority and power among liberal Quakers tend to focus on two elements: testimonies as personal social action and consensus decision-making on the model of participatory democracy, which is often called “Quaker process.” In considering how authority and power are now being assessed, an examination of concepts of “Quaker process” in relation to concepts of “Gospel Order” is instructive.

Gray Cox’s Bearing Witness: Quaker Process and a Culture of Peace is a very careful explication of what many Friends now would understand as their peculiar contribution to the world. He argues that Quakerism is a mutation on the Christian phylum and has “a mutant ethic based on a mutant conception of rationality” which provides “the seeds for a new culture — a culture of peace.” The Quaker ethic is a process meant to be practiced, rather than a theory or a set of dogmas; it is open-ended in ways that lead to “openings,” it is “an activity born of commitment and concern,… rooted in a coherent set of ideas about the nature of meaning and truth, and… a living discipline.” The commitments and concerns are best understood, he says, in “historic testimonies and queries that address us as specific individuals and communities.” [Cox, Gray, Bearing Witness: Quaker Process and a Culture of Peace, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 262 (Wallingford: Pendle Hill, 1985) 3-4.]

For Cox, Quaker attitudes are rooted in four beliefs about “truth, meaning, reason and the self.” Quakers “view truth as something that happens,… It is constructed or cultivated.” “… Meaning is communal. Mind is a social activity; meaning is something we do together and share jointly.” “… Feeling and reason are viewed as continuous with one another.” “…The self is inherently social and transitional, becoming. People are aspects of communal process.” The self is not merely social, however, “For at the heart of the community in which we participate is a spirit — a spirit which grows out of each of us and yet grows into each of us.”

Cox describes the process which he takes to be the Quaker ethic as involving five “stages or aspects” — steps in a process or levels of activity in a single moment: “quieting impulses, addressing concerns, gathering consensus, finding clearness, and bearing witness.” [Cox, Bearing Witness, 4-6.]

Certainly Cox wants to ground all these five stages in a worshipful search for “openings or “leadings,” but what he envisions seems very different from what traditional Quaker language would call “waiting on the Lord.” The implicit goal of the process as Cox describes it is action; quieting impulses is to prepare us for “addressing concerns,” or “being addressed by an issue and by the concerns of our community.” Addressing, or being addressed by, concerns will eventuate in a “leading” which must then be clarified by “seeking consensus.” Coming to an understanding of God’s will for a meeting has historically been called finding “the sense of the meeting,” but especially in the past thirty years, largely under the influence of social movements for participatory democracy, “consensus” and “sense of the meeting” have come to be used interchangeably. Cox describes “gathering consensus” as “exploring different angles on an issue,” others speak to the issue, “filling in perspectives with fact and insight.” The aim of gathering consensus “is to explore concerns and the reality we live amidst and seek until we find a view that does justice to the complexity of reality and rightness.” “In the Quaker tradition, consensus is viewed as a practice of communal discernment that yields not only agreement but truth — a truth grounded in something beyond us.” There is “no overarching principle” or “master principle” for adjudicating differences; “the trick is just to keep them in dialogue until a genuine consensus is reached….” Cox identifies this with answering God in others and drawing on “the Creator in ourselves.” [Cox, Bearing Witness, 10-11.]

“Finding clearness” is a moment of resolve, not a subjective preference but “a truth known by direct revelation.” He offers four indicators for when genuine clearness has been reached: a sense of openness, of wholeness, of unanimity, and of presence. “When experience achieves these features, we sustain a kind of inclusive focus in our activity.” Such clearness can impel activity. [Cox, Bearing Witness, 12-14.]

When Gray Cox turns his attention to how this “Quaker process” can contain the seeds for a culture of peace, he finds significant support from social scientists who, emphasizing that humans are participants in a social process, “advocate a participatory method for social science.” “In effect,” he argues, “such a critical participatory method amounts to social science as a gathering of consensus that yields clearness acknowledged by the community.” Social activists, feminists, community organizers, conflict mediators and peacemakers “are practicing… and seeking to institutionalize… participatory methods for understanding and transforming social order.” They “offer seeds of peace much like the Quaker process.” [Cox, Bearing Witness, 22, 26-28.]

Gray Cox’s exceptionally careful and coherent argument for the nature and efficacy of “Quaker process” makes it useful for pointing up some key ways it differs from “Gospel Order.” First, the chief authority for the process would seem to be that it embodies social wisdom, methods rooted in human beings’ political and social natures and their capacity for rational behavior. Certainly it is rooted in values: a non-instrumental model of human activity, a cultivation model, leading to peace and social justice. It is practical for solving problems and can be described in intellectual, rational and secular language without apparent loss.

Second, if Gospel Order grows from a covenant with God, Quaker Process seems to rest on progressive political convictions and knowledge of social sciences. Quaker Process makes no necessary connection between Quaker testimonies and the “intertwining of the inward, communal and social Witness aspects of our lives as Quakers” fused into an integrated whole, described and identified as the vision of Gospel Order by Sandra L. Cronk. The traditional tests to discern true leadings would not seem to carry any particular weight in the process.

Third, “process” avoids addressing key issues of “order.” It is philosophically anti-hierarchical. Participatory democracy rests on a conviction that equality makes “weighty” or “seasoned” leadership inappropriate. Leadership itself becomes suspect, especially when it gives authority to “elders” or “overseers.” Whereas, at earlier times, Quakers could embrace both a system and leaders, “Quaker process” seems uneasy with any form of leadership except that of a clerk who, as servant of the meeting, tries to gather and express “consensus.” Within those limits, Sheeran tells us, a clerk “is entrusted with an unusual amount of authority.” [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 97.]

Fourth, unanimity is a strong value in participatory democracy; unity in the Spirit is central to Gospel Order. Obedience to the Spirit is not the same thing as arriving at a mutually satisfactory decision. Sheeran argues that “the real cleavage among Friends is between those who experience the gathered or covered condition [in a meeting for worship or business] and those who do not.” [Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule, 87.]“The sense of the meeting” really is something different from “consensus,” though the two terms are frequently used interchangeably by Quakers who emphasize the process.

About the Author 

Paul A. Lacey was born in Philadelphia in 1934. He is married to Margaret Smith Lacey and they have three adult children. He joined Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1953, having first met Quakers through weekend workcamps. He has been active in civil liberties, civil rights, peace and East-West concerns with Friends, but his profession is teaching literature. He is the author of The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent America Poetry (Fortress Press, 1972). He is Professor of English Literature Emeritus from Earlham College where he has also served as Provost and Acting President and as Faculty Consultant on Teaching and Learning. From 1979-82 he was consultant and director of a program of Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowships, sponsored by Lilly Endowment, Inc., at a number of major American universities. In 1983 he edited Revitalizing Teaching Through Faculty Development (Jossey-Bass) and has published a number of articles on teaching, literary criticism, and faculty development. His book, Growing Into Goodness: Essays on Quaker Education, was published by Pendle Hill in 1999. At present, Paul serves as literary executor for Denise Levertov, Anglo-American poet and social activist. He has recently edited Denise Levertov: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002). He is also serving as the Clerk of the Board of the American Friends Service Committee.

© 2003 by Pendle Hill (used here with permission of the publisher)

We wish to thank Jim Rose for his scan of this pamphlet, Janaki Spickard Keeler (PH Pamphlet Editor & Coordinator), and Frances Kreimer (PH Director of Education) for assistance in making this pamphlet available to a wide audience via this library.