Okay — so there are folks who come to meeting for reasons that are very different from yours or mine, who want very different things out of the meeting than you want, or I. Is that a good thing, or a bad one?
I ask this question because I’ve been hearing a bunch of talk among East Coast Friends recently, concerning the scandal of Thomas Jeavons.
Jeavons, the former general secretary of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (meaning, he was the head of the salaried staff of that body), went and complained to the major Philadelphia newspaper, the Inquirer, about the fact that the Friends in the yearly meeting wouldn’t do what he wanted them to. The meeting, Jeavons said, is “dysfunctional”.
According to the Inquirer’s news article, Jeavons had two specific complaints. First, he came up with a plan for building church membership, and the yearly meeting wouldn’t go for it, even though it was concerned about its declining numbers. “‘The attitude was, Are you going to tell us how to run our coffee hour?’ Jeavons recalled.”
Second, Jeavons appointed a task force to figure out how the historic Arch Street meetinghouse could become more self-sufficient, perhaps by becoming a conference center and/or catering to the tourist trade. But when he presented the results of the task force’s deliberations to the yearly meeting, people were upset and accused him of holding secret meetings and violating Quaker process, and his proposals were rejected.
“You find yourself second-guessed and undercut any time you say, ‘This is what we should do, and now I’m going to move ahead,’” Jeavons complained.
The East Coast Friends I’ve been listening to are, of course, feeling divided about this. They express some sympathy with Jeavons’s frustration, having, all of them, been there themselves. (I’ve been there, too!)
Quite a number of them agreed with Jeavons that Friends in the Philadelphia region do a poor job of working together. Some told of Friends who are in the habit of constantly objecting to other people’s proposals, rather than helping to get the work done. One East Coast ex-Friend whom I respect told of how he’d seen Quakers at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting heckling the speakers from the floor and trying to prevent them from being heard. He found it incredible that Friends would descend to such a level — and so do I.
On the other hand, few of the East Coast Friends I’ve been listening to share Jeavons’s judgment that the yearly meeting as a whole is “dysfunctional”. And many suggest that Jeavons’s own weak interpersonal skills may also have been a part of the problem.
One letter-writer, responding to the Inquirer’s article on-line, said, “I never saw [Jeavons] make an effort to understand where Friends were and to help them move from that starting place.” Another observed dryly that “a few moments of reflection on the number of [Jeavon’s pronouncements] that contain ‘I’ statements may reveal the root of the concern.”
Reading such comments, my eye turned back to that place in the original article where Jeavons said that he had told the yearly meeting, “This is what we should do, and now I’m going to move ahead.” Ouch. I wish he hadn’t said that. I’d be hard pressed to think of any seasoned Friend I know who would not have problems with declarations like that coming from a yearly meeting officer.
This reminds me a bit of a story that I once read, about a traditional Friends meeting in the 19th century, some of whose young members were caught up in the revival movement. A young Friend there would get up in meeting for worship, week after week, and harangue the silent assembly about their need to accept Christ into their lives. No one ever responded to him in any way. Finally, one quiet Sunday morning, the young Friend burst out in frustration, “What am I to do with you all?” And an old woman answered levelly from another part of the room: “John, we own none but Christ master in this assembly.”
As an observant magpie, I suspect that a lot of the problem is due to the factor I wrote about in my last posting — the fact that people come in through the meetinghouse door for at least four different reasons, and that our Society needs, and so will always attract, people with all four kinds of motives. Sometimes we forget this, and grow impatient with those whose motives for coming are different from our own. I think that is what was happening here.
It seems to me that Jeavons is an example of the third type of Friend I described: a cause-driven (or purpose- or task-driven) type. As such, he fell victim, after years of frustration, to his desire to lash out at those who obstructed his cause, his purpose, and his task.
And his critics, like the old woman in the story I just told, fall victim to an answering anger. They themselves are the second type of Friend I described — community-driven, so that they want all decisions made by the community. Or they are the first type — convincement-driven, so that they want all decisions made by convincement. And so they are angered by people like him, or like the young revivalist preacher, who don’t seem willing to wait on either community or convincement.
We have to remember that we need all four types of Friends in our Society. And while all four types may need reining in from time to time, they also all need to be allowed to keep faith with the particular goods, the particular faces of God, that drew them in through the meetinghouse door to begin with.
If my understanding is correct, the question here is not, which side is right, Jeavons’s or his critics? The question is, how do I — as a Friend who comes through the door for reason X — relate to those who come for reasons W, Y, and Z?