The theme for this weekend’s gathering of Willamette Quarterly Meeting (North Pacific YM) focused on “The Future of Friends.” One of the topics that surfaced along the way was membership, and so this seemed a timely reprint.

by Marjorie Sykes, Pacific Yearly Meeting (though living in India at the time)
March, 1975

A lot of people have been raising questions about the whole idea of “membership” in the Society of Friends, not only here in the U.S.A., but also in Britain and in India. And not only now, but for some time past. When I was asked to write for the Bulletin, I got out and re-read a paper I had written exactly twenty years ago, a paper which records the exercise of about twenty Friends (Indian, American, British) who came together in India to consider this subject “in a spirit of worship and of loving candour.” The wording of the record is my responsibility, but I believe it represents a genuine consensus:

“The religious fellowship of a Quaker Meeting for Worship is and should be open to anyone who seeks to share it. But when a person asks for membership a new factor enters in. The Society of Friends is not just a kind of religious club. It is a continuing organism, which was born of the union of the creative energy of prophetic religious insight with the spiritual environment of England in the seventeenth century. Like the physical organism it carries within itself the “genes” of its parenthood, and that parenthood is Christian.

” The origin of Quakerism in Christianity is undisputed historical fact, and it would be less than truthful to ignore or minimize it. This fact is not one of geographical accident but of spiritual kinship. We ought to expect inquirers to study the Gospel records and the treasures of the Johannean and Pauline epistles, not as an ‘authoritative scripture’ to be accepted, but as the story of a creative and healing power set free.”

Having said this we must also say, with equal clarity and force, that by a ‘Christian’ we mean simply one who seeks to learn from Jesus and to live by the same Spirit. We do not and we must not apply any ‘creedal’ test, and we do not ask for any ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the nature and power of Jesus; we gladly and humbly welcome the work of the Spirit far beyond the boundaries of historic Christianity.

“If an inquirer, having, considered these things, is satisfied that Friends have something which he needs, and desires to become one with the life of the Society, we should be prepared to accept him. We should not be content to offer any lesser alternative to those who desire to be fully identified with us. We must accept the responsibility of decision.”

That was written from the point of view of the Meeting. What about the “inquirer”? And what about those who say that we should return to the ways of the first Friends and have no formal membership roll at all, none of those categories or gradations of Quaker status which may create divisions where none should be?

The beginnings of an answer may perhaps be found in those words which Barbara Janoe used in a recent Bulletin in relation to human sexuality: respect, responsibility, and expectation, considered in their basic meanings. Many people are attracted to Friends because they find themselves respected, looked upon, in a way which seeks to understand rather than to judge. The first significant step towards fellowship is that the newcomer should show a similar respect, should look upon Friends with the active desire to understand, to study the roots of their belief and practice.

If, after this exercise of respect, the seeker desires to be fully identified with Friends, he/she needs to be willing to respond, to make a commitment, to pledge thought and time and talents to the service of the Meeting. This is responsibility. Along with responsibility comes expectation, the confident looking-out-for, waiting for, the Spirit that can enlighten and empower both the group and the individual member within and for the group. It is the quality of this expectation that gives the fellowship the extra dimension that is reflected in its name; we are not merely a Society of Friends, we are a Religious Society of Friends.

These demands are reciprocal. In a healthy Meeting each member respects, responds to, expects from the organic life of the whole body; the body also respects, responds to, and expects from the life each member contributes to the whole. Insofar as this experience is realized, the Meeting and its members come to know one another in depth, in the Eternal; their diversities tend not to division, but to a “dear unity,” whether there is a “membership roll” or not. Human beings being human, there will always be “joiners” and “non-joiners.” Perhaps we should relax, and let the form be shaped by the Life.

And perhaps all of us, seekers and finders, newcomers and old stagers, joiners and non-joiners, should constantly renew our own commitment to respect, to response, to expectation. “Seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”